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In poetry, metre (Commonwealth spelling) or meter (American spelling; see spelling differences) is the basic rhythmic structure of a verse or lines in verse.Many traditional verse forms prescribe a specific verse metre, or a certain set of metres alternating in a particular order.
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.
Long metre (aka long measure): a poetic metre consisting of quatrains (4-line stanzas) in iambic tetrameter with the rhyme scheme ABAB. Persian metres; Quantitative meter: the dominant metrical system in which the rhythm depends on the length of time it takes to utter a line rather than on the number of stresses. Traditional Welsh
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.
An example of scansion over a quote from Alexander Pope. Scansion (/ ˈ s k æ n. ʃ ə n / SKAN-shən, rhymes with mansion; verb: to scan), or a system of scansion, is the method or practice of determining and (usually) graphically representing the metrical pattern of a line of verse.
In modern English poetry, it refers to a line consisting of four iambic feet. The word "tetrameter" simply means that there are four feet in the line; iambic tetrameter is a line comprising four iambs, defined by accent. The scheme is thus: x / x / x / x / (In this case, "x" is an unstressed syllable while "/" is a stressed syllable.)
The individual rhythmical patterns used in Greek and Latin poetry are also known as "metres" (US "meters"). Greek poetry developed first, starting as early as the 8th century BC with the epic poems of Homer and didactic poems of Hesiod, which were composed in the dactylic hexameter. A variety of other metres were used for lyric poetry and for ...
The foot is the basic repeating rhythmic unit that forms part of a line of verse in most Indo-European traditions of poetry, including English accentual-syllabic verse and the quantitative meter of classical ancient Greek and Latin poetry. The unit is composed of syllables, and is usually two, three, or four syllables in length.