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The metre of most poetry of the Western world and elsewhere is based on patterns of syllables of particular types. The familiar type of metre in English-language poetry is called qualitative metre, with stressed syllables coming at regular intervals (e.g. in iambic pentameters, usually every even-numbered syllable).
Old English metre is the conventional name given to the poetic metre in which English language poetry was composed in the Anglo-Saxon period. The best-known example of poetry composed in this verse form is Beowulf , but the vast majority of Old English poetry belongs to the same tradition.
Dactylic hexameter (also known as heroic hexameter and the meter of epic) is a form of meter or rhythmic scheme frequently used in Ancient Greek and Latin poetry. The scheme of the hexameter is usually as follows (writing – for a long syllable, u for a short, and u u for a position that may be a long or two shorts):
Meter is measured in small groups of syllables called feet. "Iambic" indicates that the type of foot used is the iamb, which in English is composed of an unstressed syllable followed by a stressed syllable (as in a-BOVE). "Pentameter" indicates that each line has five metrical feet. Iambic pentameter is the most common meter in English poetry.
In poetry, a hendecasyllable (as an adjective, hendecasyllabic) is a line of eleven syllables.The term may refer to several different poetic meters, the older of which are quantitative and used chiefly in classical (Ancient Greek and Latin) poetry, and the newer of which are syllabic or accentual-syllabic and used in medieval and modern poetry.
Common metre or common measure [1] —abbreviated as C. M. or CM—is a poetic metre consisting of four lines that alternate between iambic tetrameter (four metrical feet per line) and iambic trimeter (three metrical feet per line), with each foot consisting of an unstressed syllable followed by a stressed syllable.
This makes the caesura arguably more important to the Old English verse than it was to Latin or Greek poetry. In Latin or Greek poetry, the caesura could be suppressed for effect in any line. In the alliterative verse that is shared by most of the oldest Germanic languages, the caesura is an ever-present and necessary part of the verse form itself.
Much lyric poetry depends on regular meter based either on syllable or on stress – two short syllables or one long syllable typically counting as equivalent – which is required for song lyrics in order to match lyrics with interchangeable tunes that followed a standard pattern of rhythm. Although much modern lyric poetry is no longer song ...