Foot

plural Feet,
in verse, the smallest metrical unit of measurement. The prevailing kind and number of feet, revealed by scansion,
determines the metre of a poem. In classical (or quantitative) verse, a foot, or metron, is a combination of two or more
long and short syllables. A short syllable is known as an arsis, a long syllable as a thesis. There are 28 different feet in
classical verse, ranging from the pyrrhic (two short syllables) to the dispondee (four long syllables). The adaptation of
classical metrics to the strongly accented Germanic languages, such as English, does not provide an entirely reliable
standard of measurement. The terminology persists, however, a foot usually being defined as a group of one stressed
() and one or two unstressed () syllables. An exception is the spondee, which consists of two stressed syllables; in
English verse, this is usually two monosyllables, such as the phrase He who. The commonest feet in English verse are
the iamb, an unstressed followed by a stressed syllable, as in the word re| port; the trochee, a stressed followed by
an unstressed syllable, as in the word dai|ly; the anapest, two unstressed syllables followed by a stressed syllable, as
in ser|e| nade; and the dactyl, a stressed syllable followed by two unstressed syllables, as in mer|ri|ly.
If a single line of the poem contains only one foot, it is called monometer; two feet, dimeter; three feet, trimeter; four
feet, tetrameter; five feet, pentameter; six feet, hexameter; seven feet, heptameter; eight feet, octameter. More than
six, however, is rare. The metre of a poem (e.g., iambic pentameter, dactylic hexameter) is the kind plus the number of
feet in each line.

Metre
also spelled Meter,
in poetry, the rhythmic pattern of a poetic line. Various principles, based on the natural rhythms of language, have been
devised to organize poetic lines into rhythmic units. These have produced distinct kinds of versification, among which
the most common are quantitative, syllabic, accentual, and accentual-syllabic.
1. Quantitative verse, the metre of classical Greek and Latin poetry, measures quantity, or the length of time required
to pronounce syllables regardless of their stress. Various combinations of long and short syllables (the long syllables
being roughly equivalent to twice the duration of the short syllables) constitute the basic rhythmic units. Quantitative
verse has been adapted to modern languages but with limited success.
2. Syllabic verse, most common in languages that are not strongly accented, such as the Romance languages and
Japanese. It is based on a fixed number of syllables within a line, although the number of accents or stresses may be
varied. Thus, the classic metre of French poetry is the alexandrine, a line of 12 syllables with a medial caesura (a pause
occurring after the 6th syllable). The Japanese haiku is a poem of 17 syllables, composed in lines of 5/7/5 syllables
each.
3. Accentual verse, occurring in strongly stressed languages such as the Germanic. It counts only the number of
stresses or accented syllables within a line and allows a variable number of unaccented syllables. Old Norse and Old
English poetry is based on lines having a fixed number of strongly stressed syllables reinforced by alliteration.
Accentual metres are evident in much popular English verse and in nursery rhymes; i.e., One, two, Buck |le my
shoe . In the late 19th century, the English poet Gerard Manley Hopkins used it as the basis for his poetic innovation
sprung rhythm (q.v.).
4. Accentual-syllabic verse, the usual form of English poetry. It combines Romance syllable counting and Germanic
stress counting to produce lines of fixed numbers of alternating stressed and unstressed syllables. Thus, the most
common English metre, iambic pentameter, is a line of ten syllables or five iambic feet. Each iambic foot is composed of
an unstressed syllable followed by a stressed syllable.
Variations within any of these regular metres are not only permissible but inevitable and de sirable. The words a|gain
and for|lorn, for instance, may each constitute an iambic foot, but they are vastly different in quality. Even in the most
formal metrical designs, the quality, pitch, and force of certain sounds, along with the interplay of other poetic devices
such as assonance, consonance, alliteration, or rhyme may act to reinforce or obscure the basic metrical pattern.
The function of regular metre in poetry is complex. In its most primitive aspects, as in nursery rhymes or folk ballads, it
creates the physical pleasure that any simple rhythmic acts such as rocking, swaying, trotting, or foot tapping provide.
Used mimetically, it may be lulling, galloping, staccato, heavy and slow, or quick and light to match the content and
emotional tone of the poem. In more sophisticated poetry, regular metre is a subtle and flexible device, organically
integrated into the total poem through its sensitive interaction with the natural rhythms of speech and the meaning of
words. Although the late 19th century and early 20th century witnessed a widespread rebellion against the restrictions
of metrically regular poetry, the challenge of condensing an imaginative impulse into a formal framework still appeals to
poets. See also foot; scansion.

Caesura
(Latin cutting off, )
also spelled cesura
in modern prosody, a pause within a poetic line that breaks the regularity of the metrical pattern. It is represented in

scansion by the sign . The caesura sometimes is used to emphasize the formal metrical construction of a line, but it
more often introduces the cadence of natural speech patterns and habits of phrasing into the metrical scheme. The
caesura may coincide with conventional punctuation marks, as in the following Shakespearean line, in which a strong
pause is demanded after each comma for rhetorical expression:
This blessed plot,this earth,this realm,
this England,
The caesura is not necessarily set off by punctuation, however, as in this line from John Keats:
Thou foster-child of silenceand slow time,
In Germanic and Old English alliterative poetry, the caesura was a formal device dividing each line centrally into two
half lines, as in this example from The Battle of Maldon:
Hige sceal e heardra,
hearte e cenre,
mod sceal e mare,
e ure mgen lytla
(Mind must be firmer,heart the morefierce,
Courage the greater,as our strengthdiminishes.)
In formal, Romance, and Neoclassical verse, the caesura occurs most frequently in the middle of the line (medial
caesura), but in modern verse its place is flexible; it may occur near the beginning of one line (an initial caesura) and
near the end of the next (terminal caesura). There may be several caesuras within a single line or none at all. Thus, it
has the effect of interposing the informal and irregular patterns of speech as a subtle counterpoint to the poem's
regular rhythm; it prevents metrical monotony and emphasizes the meaning of lines.
Types of caesura that are differentiated in modern prosody are the masculine caesura, a caesura that follows a stressed
or long syllable, and the feminine caesura, which follows an unstressed or short syllable. The feminine caesura is
further divided into the epic caesura and the lyric caesura. An epic caesura is a feminine caesura that follows an extra
unstressed syllable that has been inserted in accentual iambic metre. An epic caesura occurs in these lines from
Shakespeare's Macbeth: but how of Cawdor? / The Thane of Cawdor lives. The lyric caesura is a feminine caesura that
follows an unstressed syllable normally required by the metre. It can be seen in A.E. Houseman's they cease not
fighting / east and west.
In classical prosody, caesura refers to a word ending within a metrical foot, in contrast to diaeresis, in which the word
ending and the foot ending coincide. It is strictly a metrical element, not an element of expression.

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Rhyme
also spelled rime
the correspondence of two or more words with similar-sounding final syllables placed so as to echo one another. Rhyme
is used by poets and occasionally by prose writers to produce sounds appealing to the reader's senses and to unify and
establish a poem's stanzaic form. End rhyme (i.e., rhyme used at the end of a line to echo the end of another line) is
most common, but internal, interior, or leonine rhyme is frequently used as an occasional embellishment in a poem
e.g., William Shakespeare's Hark; hark! the lark at heaven's gate sings, or as part of the regular rhyme scheme:
And the silken sad uncertain rustling of eachpurple curtain
Thrilled mefilled me with fantastic terrorsnever felt before
So that now, to still the beating of my heart,I stood repeating:
Tis some visitor entreating entrance atmy chamber door.
(Edgar Allan Poe, The Raven)
There are three rhymes recognized by purists as true rhymes: masculine rhyme, in which the two words end with the
same vowelconsonant combination (stand / land), feminine rhyme (sometimes called double rhyme), in which two
syllables rhyme (profession / discretion), and trisyllabic rhyme, in which three syllables rhyme (patinate / latinate). The
too-regular effect of masculine rhyme is sometimes softened by using trailing rhyme, or semirhyme, in which one of the
two words trails an additional unstressed syllable behind it (trail / failure). Other types of rhyme include eye rhyme, in
which syllables are identical in spelling but are pronounced differently (cough / slough), and pararhyme, first used
systematically by the 20th-century poet Wilfred Owen, in which two syllables have different vowel sounds but identical
penultimate and final consonantal groupings (grand / grind). Feminine pararhyme has two forms, one in which both
vowel sounds differ, and one in which only one does (ran in / run on; blindness / blandness). Weakened, or unaccented,
rhyme occurs when the relevant syllable of the rhyming word is unstressed (bend / frightened). Because of the way in
which lack of stress affects the sound, a rhyme of this kind may often be regarded as consonance, which occurs when
the two words are similar only in having identical final consonants (best / least).

Another form of near rhyme is assonance, in which only the vowel sounds are identical (grow / home). Assonance was
regularly used in French poetry until the 13th century, when end rhyme overtook it in importance. It continues to be
significant in the poetic technique of Romance languages but performs only a subsidiary function in English verse.
Many traditional poetic forms utilize set rhyme patternsfor example, the sonnet, villanelle, rondeau, ballade, chant
royal, triolet, canzone, and sestina. Rhyme seems to have developed in Western poetry as a combination of earlier
techniques of end consonance, end assonance, and alliteration. It is found only occasionally in classical Greek and Latin
poetry but more frequently in medieval religious Latin verse and in songs, especially those of the Roman Catholic
liturgy, from the 4th century. Although it has been periodically opposed by devotees of classical verse, it has never
fallen into complete disuse. Shakespeare interspersed rhymed couplets into the blank verse of his dramas; Milton
disapproved of rhyme, but Samuel Johnson favoured it. In the 20th century, although many advocates of free verse
ignored rhyme, other poets continued to introduce new and complicated rhyme schemes.

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Assonance

in prosody, repetition of stressed vowel sounds within words with different end consonants, as in the phrase quite like.
It is unlike rhyme, in which initial consonants differ but both vowel and end-consonant sounds are identical, as in the
phrase quite right. Many common phrases, such as mad as a hatter, free as a breeze, or high as a kite, owe their
appeal to assonance. As a poetic device, internal assonance is usually combined with alliteration (repetition of initial
consonant sounds) and consonance (repetition of end or medial consonant sounds) to enrich the texture of the poetic
line. Sometimes a single vowel sound is repeated, as in the opening line of Thomas Hood's Autumn:
I saw old Autumn in the misty morn

Sometimes two or more vowel sounds are repeated, as in the opening lines of Shelley's The Indian Serenade, which
creates a musical counterpoint with long i and long e sounds:
I arise from dreams of thee
In the first sweet sleep of night

Assonance at the end of a line, producing an impure, or off, rhyme, is found in La Chanson de Roland and most French
verses composed before the introduction of pure rhyme into French verse in the 12th century. It remains a feature of
Spanish and Portuguese poetry. In English verse, assonance is frequently found in the traditional ballads, where its use
may have been careless or unavoidable. The last verse of Sir Patrick Spens is an example:
Haf owre, haf owre to Aberdour,
It's fiftie fadom deip:
And thair lies guid Sir Patrick Spence,
Wi' the Scots lords at his feit.

Otherwise, it was rarely used in English as a deliberate technique until the late 19th and 20th centuries, when it was
discerned in the works of Gerard Manley Hopkins and Wilfred Owen. Their use of assonance instead of end rhyme was
often adopted by such poets as W.H. Auden, Stephen Spender, and Dylan Thomas.

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Consonance
the recurrence or repetition of identical or similar consonants; specifically the correspondence of end or intermediate
consonants unaccompanied by like correspondence of vowels at the end of two or more syllables, words, or other units
of composition.
As a poetic device, it is often combined with assonance (the repetition of stressed vowel sounds within words with
different end consonants) and alliteration (the repetition of initial consonant sounds). Consonance is also occasionally
used as an off-rhyme, but it is most commonly found as an internal sound effect, as in Shakespeare's song, The ousel
cock so black of hue, or The curfew tolls the knell of parting day, from Thomas Gray's Elegy Written in a Country

Church Yard.

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Alliteration
in prosody, the repetition of consonant sounds at the beginning of words or stressed syllables. Sometimes the repetition
of initial vowel sounds (head rhyme) is also referred to as alliteration. As a poetic device, it is often discussed with
assonance and consonance. In languages (such as Chinese) that emphasize tonality, the use of alliteration is rare or
absent.
Alliteration is found in many common phrases, such as pretty as a picture and dead as a doornail, and is a common
poetic device in almost all languages. In its simplest form, it reinforces one or two consonantal sounds, as in William
Shakespeare's line:
When I do count the clock that tells the time
(Sonnet XII)

A more complex pattern of alliteration is created when consonants both at the beginning of words and at the beginning
of stressed syllables within words are repeated, as in Percy Bysshe Shelley's line:
The City's voice itself is soft like Solitude's
(Stanzas Written inDejection Near Naples)

Though alliteration is now a subsidiary embellishment in both prose and poetry, it was a formal structural principle in
ancient Germanic verse. See alliterative verse. Compare assonance; consonance.

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eye rhyme
in poetry, an imperfect rhyme in which two words are spelled similarly but pronounced differently (such as move and love,
bough and though, come and home, and laughter and daughter). Some of these (such as flood and brood) are referred to
as historical rhymes because at one time they probably had the same pronunciation.

prosody
Elements of prosody
Meaning, pace, and sound
Scansion reveals the basic metrical pattern of the poem; it does not, however, tell everything about its prosody. The
metre combines with other elements, notably propositional sense or meaning, pace or tempo, and such sound effects
as alliteration, assonance, and rhyme. In the fifth line of Vertue, the reversed third foot occurring at angry brings
that word into particular prominence; the disturbance of the metre combines with semantic reinforcement to generate a
powerful surge of feeling. Thus, the metre here is expressive. The pace of the lines is controlled by the length of
number of syllables and feet, line 5 obviously takes longer to read or recite. The line contains more long vowel sounds:
Sweet rose, whose hue angrie and brave . . .
Vowel length is called quantity. In English verse, quantity cannot by itself form metre although a number of English
poets have experimented with quantitative verse. Generally speaking, quantity is a rhythmical but not a metrical
feature of English poetry; it can be felt but it cannot be precisely determined. The vowel sounds in Sweet rose may be
lengthened or shortened at will. No such options are available, however, with the stress patterns of words;
the word

cannot be read

.
Assonance takes into account the length and distribution of vowel sounds. A variety of vowel sounds can be noted in
this line:
Sweet day, so cool, so calm, so bright . . .
To borrow a term from music, the line modulates from ee, through a, oo, a, to i. Alliteration takes into account the
recurrence and distribution of consonants:
so cool, so calm . . .
Sweet spring . . .
Rhyme normally occurs at the ends of lines; Vertue reveals, however, a notable example of interior rhyme, or rhyme
within the line:

My musick shows ye have your closes . . .

Types of metre
Syllable-stress metres
It has been shown that the metre of Vertue is determined by a pattern of stressed and unstressed syllables arranged
into feet and that a precise number of feet determines the measure of the line. Such verse is called syllable-stress
verse (in some terminologies accentual-syllabic) and was the norm for English poetry from the beginning of the 16th
century to the end of the 19th century. A line of syllable-stress verse is made up of either two-syllable (disyllabic) or
three-syllable (trisyllabic) feet. The disyllabic feet are the iamb and the trochee (noted in the scansion of Vertue); the
trisyllabic feet are the dactyl () and anapest ().
Following are illustrations of the four principal feet found in English verse:

Some theorists also admit the spondaic foot () and pyrrhic foot () into their scansions; however, spondees and pyrrhics
occur only as substitutions for other feet, never as determinants of a metrical pattern:

It has been noted that four feet make up a line of tetrameter verse; a line consisting of one foot is called monometer, of
two dimeter, of three trimeter, of five pentameter, of six hexameter, and of seven heptameter. Lines containing more
than seven feet rarely occur in English poetry.
The following examples illustrate the principal varieties of syllable-stress metres and their scansions:

Lord Byron, The Destruction of Sennacherib(1815)

Syllable stress became more or less established in the poetry of Geoffrey Chaucer (c. 13401400). In the century that
intervened between Chaucer and the early Tudor poets, syllable-stress metres were either ignored or misconstrued. By
the end of the 16th century, however, the now-familiar iambic, trochaic, dactylic, and anapestic metres became the
traditional prosody for English verse.

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Types of metre
Quantitative metres
Quantitative metres determine the prosody of Greek and Latin verse. Renaissance theorists and critics initiated a
confused and complicated argument that tried to explain European poetry by the rules of Classical prosody and to draft
laws of quantity by which European verse might move in the hexameters of the ancient Roman poets Virgil or Horace.
Confusion was compounded because both poets and theorists used the traditional terminology of Greek and Latin
prosody to describe the elements of the already existing syllable-stress metres; iambic, trochaic, dactylic, and
anapestic originally named the strictly quantitative feet of Greek and Latin poetry. Poets themselves adapted the
metres and stanzas of Classical poetry to their own languages; whereas it is not possible here to trace the history of
Classical metres in European poetry, it is instructive to analyze some attempts to make English and German syllables
move to Greek and Latin music. Because neither English nor German has fixed rules of quantity, the poets were forced
to revise the formal schemes of the Classical paradigms in accordance with the phonetic structure of their own
language.
A metrical paradigm much used by both Greek and Latin poets was the so-called Sapphic stanza. It consisted of three
quantitative lines that scanned
------,
followed by a shorter line, called an Adonic, - - - .
Sapphics by the 19th-century English poet Algernon Charles Swinburne shows the Sapphic metre and stanza in
English:
The same metre and stanza in German are found in Sapphische Ode, by the 19th-century poet Hans Schmidt, which
was beautifully set to music by Johannes Brahms (Opus 94, No. 4):
Quantitative metres originated in Greek, a language in which the parts of speech appear in a variety of inflected forms
(i.e., changes of form to indicate distinctions in case, tense, mood, number, voice, and others). Complicated metrical
patterns and long, slow-paced lines developed because the language was hospitable to polysyllabic metrical feet and to
the alternation of the longer vowels characterizing the root syllables and the shorter vowels characterizing the inflected
case-endings. The Classical metres can be more successfully adapted to German than to English because English lost
most of its inflected forms in the 15th century, while German is still a highly inflected language. Thus Swinburne's
Sapphics does not move as gracefully, as naturally as Schmidt's. A number of German poets, notably Goethe and
Friedrich Hlderlin, both of the early 19th century, made highly successful use of the Classical metres. English poets,
however, have never been able to make English syllables move in the ancient metres with any degree of comfort or
with any sense of vital rhythmic force.
The American poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow adapted the Classical hexameter for his Evangeline (1847):

In Virgil's Aeneid, Longfellow's Classical model, the opening line scans:

The rules determining length of syllable in Classical Greek and Latin poetry are numerous and complicated; they were
established by precise grammatical and phonetic conventions. No such rules and conventions obtain in English; Robert
Bridges, the British poet laureate and an authority on prosody, remarked in his Poetical Works (1912) that the difficulty
of adapting English syllables to the Greek rules is very great, and even deterrent. Longfellow's hexameter is in reality
a syllable-stress line of five dactyls and a final trochee; syllabic quantity plays no part in determining the metre.

Prosodic style

The analysis of prosodic style begins with recognizing the metrical form the poet uses. Is he writing syllable-stress,
strong-stress, syllabic, or quantitative metre? Or is he using a nonmetrical prosody? Again, some theorists would not
allow that poetry can be written without metre; the examples of Whitman and many 20th-century innovators, however,
have convinced most modern critics that a nonmetrical prosody is not a contradiction in terms but an obvious feature of
modern poetry. Metre has not disappeared as an important element of prosody; indeed, some of the greatest poets of
the modern periodWilliam Butler Yeats, T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Wallace Stevensrevealed themselves as masters of
the traditional metres. They also experimented with newer prosodies based on prose cadences, on expansions of the
blank-verse line, and revivals of old formssuch as strong-stress and ballad metres. Also noteworthy are the visual
prosodies fostered by the poets of the Imagist movement and by such experimenters as E.E. Cummings. Cummings
revived the practice of certain 17th-century poets (notably George Herbert) of shaping the poem by typographic
arrangements.
The prosodic practice of poets has varied enormously with the historical period, the poetic genre, and the poet's
individual style. In English poetry, for example, during the Old English period (to 1100), the strong-stress metres
carried both lyric and narrative verse. In the Middle English period (from c. 1100 to c. 1500), stanzaic forms developed
for both lyric and narrative verse. The influence of French syllable counting pushed the older stress lines into newer
rhythms; Chaucer developed for The Canterbury Tales a line of 10 syllables with alternating accent and regular end
rhymean ancestor of the heroic couplet. The period of the English Renaissance (from c. 1500 to 1660) marks the
fixing of syllable-stress metre as normative for English poetry. Iambic metre carried three major prosodic forms: the
sonnet, the rhyming couplet, and blank verse. The sonnet was the most important of the fixed stanzaic forms. The
iambic pentameter rhyming couplet (later known as the heroic couplet) was used by Christopher Marlowe for his
narrative poem Hero and Leander (1598); by John Donne in the early 17th century for his satires, his elegies, and his
longer meditative poems. Blank verse (unrhymed iambic pentameter), first introduced into English in a translation by
Henry Howard, earl of Surrey, published in 1557, became the metrical norm for Elizabethan drama. The period of the
Renaissance also saw the refinement of a host of lyric and song forms; the rapid development of English music during
the second half of the 16th century had a salutary effect on the expressive capabilities of poetic rhythms.

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Prosody
in modern criticism, the study of all the elements of language that contribute toward acoustic and rhythmic effects,
chiefly in poetry but also in prose. The term derived from an ancient Greek word that originally meant a song
accompanied by music or the particular tone or accent given to an individual syllable. Greek and Latin literary critics
generally regarded prosody as part of grammar; it concerned itself with the rules determining the length or shortness
of a syllable, with syllabic quantity, and with how the various combinations of short and long syllables formed the
metres (i.e., the rhythmic patterns) of Greek and Latin poetry. Prosody was the study of metre and its uses in lyric,
epic, and dramatic verse. In sophisticated modern criticism, however, the scope of prosodic study has been expanded
until it now concerns itself with what the 20th-century poet Ezra Pound called the articulation of the total sound of a
poem.
Prose as well as verse reveals the use of rhythm and sound effects; however, critics do not speak of the prosody of
prose but of prose rhythm. The English critic George Saintsbury wrote A History of English Prosody from the Twelfth
Century to the Present (3 vol., 190610), which treats English poetry from its origins to the end of the 19th century;
but he dealt with prose rhythm in an entirely separate work, A History of English Prose Rhythm (1912). Many prosodic
elements such as the rhythmic repetition of consonants (alliteration) or of vowel sounds (assonance) occur in prose;
the repetition of syntactical and grammatical patterns also generates rhythmic effect. Traditional rhetoric, the study of
how words work, dealt with acoustic and rhythmic techniques in Classical oratory and literary prose. But although
prosody and rhetoric intersected, rhetoric dealt more exactly with verbal meaning than with verbal surface. Rhetoric
dealt with grammatical and syntactical manipulations and with figures of speech; it categorized the kinds of metaphor.
Modern critics, especially those who practice the New Criticism, might be considered rhetoricians in their detailed
concern with such devices as irony, paradox, and ambiguity.
This article considers prosody chiefly in terms of the English languagethe only language that all of the readers of this
article may be assumed to know. Some examples are given in other languages to illustrate particular points about the
development of prosody in those languages; because these examples are pertinent only for their rhythm and sound,
and not at all for their meaning, no translations are given.

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Stress
in phonetics, intensity given to a syllable of speech by special effort in utterance, resulting in relative loudness. This
emphasis in pronunciation may be merely phonetic (i.e., noticeable to the listener, but not meaningful), as it is in French,
where it occurs regularly at the end of a word or phrase; or it may serve to distinguish meanings, as in English, in which,
for example, stress differentiates the noun from the verb in the word permit.