In poetry Poetry is a form of literary art in which language is used for its aesthetic and evocative qualities in addition to, or in lieu of, its apparent meaning. Poetry may be written independently, as discrete poems, or may occur in conjunction with other arts, as in poetic drama, hymns, lyrics, or prose poetry. It is published in dedicated magazines (, the meter (or metre) is the basic rhythmic structure Rhythm is a "movement marked by the regulated succession of strong and weak elements, or of opposite or different conditions." In other words, rhythm is simply the timing of the musical sounds and silences. While rhythm most commonly applies to sound, such as music and spoken language, it may also refer to visual presentation, as " of a verse A verse is formally a single line in a metrical composition, e.g. poetry. However, the word has come to represent any division or grouping of words in such a composition, which traditionally had been referred to as a stanza or lines in verse A line in poetry is a unit of language into which a poem is divided which operates on principles which are distinct from and not necessarily coincident with grammatical structures such as the sentence or clauses in sentences. Although the word for a single poetic line is verse, this term now tends to be used to signify poetic form more generally. Many traditional verse forms Poetry is a form of literary art in which language is used for its aesthetic and evocative qualities in addition to, or in lieu of, its apparent meaning. Poetry may be written independently, as discrete poems, or may occur in conjunction with other arts, as in poetic drama, hymns, lyrics, or prose poetry. Poetry is published in dedicated magazines prescribe a specific verse meter, or a certain set of meters alternating in a particular order. The study of metres and forms of versification is known as prosody. (Within linguistics Linguistics is the scientific study of natural language. Linguistics encompasses a number of sub-fields. An important topical division is between the study of language structure and the study of meaning (semantics and pragmatics). Grammar encompasses morphology (the formation and composition of words), syntax (the rules that determine how words, "Prosody In linguistics, prosody is the rhythm, stress, and intonation of speech. Prosody may reflect various features of the speaker or the utterance: the emotional state of a speaker; whether an utterance is a statement, a question, or a command; whether the speaker is being ironic or sarcastic; emphasis, contrast, and focus; or other elements of" is used in a more general sense that includes poetical meter but also the rhythmic aspects of prose Prose is the most typical form of language. The English word 'prose' is derived from the Latin prōsa, which literally translates as 'straight-forward.' While there are critical debates on the construction of prose, its simplicity and loosely defined structure has led to its adoption for the majority of spoken dialogue, factual discourse as well, whether formal or informal, which vary from language to language, and sometimes between poetic traditions.)

Feet

In most Western The Western world, also known as the West and the Occident , is a term that can have multiple meanings depending on its context (e.g., the time period, the region or social situation). Accordingly, the basic definition of what constitutes "the West" varies, expanding and contracting over time, in relation to various historical classical poetic traditions, the meter of a verse can be described as a sequence of feet In verse, many meters use a foot as the basic unit in their description of the underlying rhythm of a poem. Both the quantitative meter of classical poetry and the accentual-syllabic meter of most poetry in English use the foot as the fundamental building block. A foot consists of a certain number of syllables forming part of a line of verse. A, each foot being a specific sequence of syllable types — such as unstressed/stressed (the norm for English poetry) or long/short (as in most classical Latin Latin is an Italic language originally spoken in Latium and Ancient Rome. With the Roman conquest, Latin was spread to countries around the Mediterranean, including a large part of Europe. Romance languages such as Aragonese, Corsican, Catalan, French, Italian, Portuguese, Romanian, Sardinian, Spanish and others, are descended from Latin, while and Greek Greek , an independent branch of the Indo-European family of languages, is the language of the Greeks. Native to the southern Balkans, it has the longest documented history of any Indo-European language, spanning 34 centuries of written records. In its ancient form, it is the language of classical ancient Greek literature and the New Testament of poetry).

The most common meter in English poetry, the so-called iambic pentameter Iambic pentameter is a commonly used metrical line in traditional verse and verse drama. The term describes the particular rhythm that the words establish in that line. That rhythm is measured in small groups of syllables; these small groups of syllables are called "feet". The word "iambic" describes the type of foot that is, is a sequence of five iambic feet An iamb or iambus is a metrical foot used in various types of poetry. Originally the term referred to one of the feet of the quantitative meter of classical Greek prosody: a short syllable followed by a long syllable . This terminology was adopted in the description of accentual-syllabic verse in English, where it refers to a foot comprising an or iambs, each consisting of an unstressed syllable followed by a stressed one ("da-DUM") :

This approach to analyzing and classifying meters originates from ancient Greek Ancient Greek is the historical stage in the development of the Greek language spanning the Archaic , Classical (c. 5th–4th centuries BC), and Hellenistic (c. 3rd century BC – 6th century AD) periods of ancient Greece and the ancient world. It is predated in the 2nd millennium BC by Mycenaean Greek. Its Hellenistic phase is known as Koine (& tragedians and poets such as Homer Homer is a legendary ancient Greek epic poet, traditionally said to be the author of the epic poems the Iliad and the Odyssey. The ancient Greeks generally believed that Homer was an historical individual, but most scholars are skeptical: no reliable biographical information has been handed down from classical antiquity, and the poems themselves, Pindar Pindar (ca. 522–443 BC), was an Ancient Greek lyric poet. Of the canonical nine lyric poets of ancient Greece, Pindar is the one whose work is best preserved. Quintilian described him as "by far the greatest of the nine lyric poets, in virtue of his inspired magnificence, the beauty of his thoughts and figures, the rich exuberance of his, Hesiod Hesiod was a Greek oral poet generally thought by scholars to have been active around 700 BC. No date before 750 BC or later than 650 BC fits the evidence. Since at least Herodotus's time (Histories, 2.53), Hesiod and Homer have generally been considered the earliest Greek poets whose work has survived, and they are often paired. Scholars disagree, and Sappho Sappho was an Ancient Greek poet, born on the island of Lesbos. Later Greeks included her in the list of nine lyric poets. Her birth was sometime between 630 and 612 BC, and it is said that she died around 570 BC, but little is known for certain about her life. The bulk of her poetry, which was well-known and greatly admired throughout antiquity,.

Caesurae

Another component of a verse's meter are the caesurae In meter, caesura is a term to denote an audible pause that breaks up a line of verse. In most cases, caesura is indicated by punctuation marks which cause a pause in speech: a comma, a semicolon, a full stop, a dash, etc. Punctuation, however, is not necessary for a caesura to occur (literally, cuts), which are not pauses but compulsory word boundaries which occur after a particular syllabic position in every line of a poem. In Latin and Greek poetry, a caesura is a break within a foot caused by the end of a word. For example: odd lines have caesura after the 4-th syllable (daily, her, won'dring, mother) while the even lines are without a caesura:

Daily, daily, / sing to Mary,

Sing my soul, her praises due:

All her feasts, her / actions honor,

With the heart's devotion true.

Now in wond'ring / contemplation,

Be her majesty confessed;

Call her Mother / call her Virgin,

Happy Mother, Virgin blest.

Metric variations

Poems with a well-defined overall metric pattern often have a few lines that violate that pattern. A common variation is the inversion of a foot, which turns an iamb ("da-DUM") into a trochee A trochee or choree, choreus, is a metrical foot used in formal poetry consisting of a stressed syllable followed by an unstressed one. Trochee comes from the Greek τροχός, trokhós, wheel, and choree from χορός, khorós, dance; both convey the "rolling" rhythm of this metrical foot ("DUM-da"). Another common variation is a headless verse, which lacks the first syllable of the first foot. Yet a third variation is catalexis A catalectic line is a metrically incomplete line of verse, lacking a syllable at the end or ending with an incomplete foot. One form of catalexis is headlessness, where the unstressed syllable is dropped from the beginning of the line, where the end of a line is shortened by a foot, or two or part thereof - an example of this is at the end of each verse in Keats' 'La Belle Dame sans Merci':

'And on thy cheeks a fading rose (4 feet)

Fast withereth too' (2 feet)

Enumeration

In South Asian and Indian South Asia, also known as Southern Asia, is the southern region of the Asian continent, which comprises the sub-Himalayan countries and, for some authorities , also includes the adjoining countries on the west and the east. Topographically, it is dominated by the Indian Plate, which rises above sea level as the Indian subcontinent south of the traditions where syllabic scripts are used metric patterns are enumerated using two symbols, a breve A breve is a diacritical mark ˘, shaped like the bottom half of a circle. It looks similar to the caron (i.e. wedge or háček in Czech), but the caron has a sharp tip, whilst the breve is rounded. Compare Ǎ ǎ Ě ě Ǐ ǐ Ǒ ǒ Ǔ ǔ (caron) with Ă ă Ĕ ĕ Ĭ ĭ Ŏ ŏ Ŭ ŭ (breve) and a macron A macron, from the Greek μακρόv , meaning "long", is a diacritic placed above a vowel (and, more rarely, under or above a consonant). It was originally used to mark a long or heavy syllable in Græco-Roman metrics, but now marks a long vowel. In the International Phonetic Alphabet the macron is used to indicate mid tone; the sign (or 'υ' and '–'), to represent syllables of one time unit and two time units respectively. They are named 'Laghu' and 'Guru'. A meter is defined by specifying the count of time units for each line, number of lines, position of Laghu and Guru, and sequence of these symbols in each line.,

Meter in various languages

Sanskrit

Classical Sanskrit and Vedic Sanskrit use meters for most ancient treatises that are set to verse. Prominent Vedic meters include Gayatri, Ushnik, Anushtupa, Brhati, Pankti, Tristubh and Jagati. The basic meter for epic verse is the Sloka. Sanskrit meter is quantitative, similar in general principles to classical Greek and Latin meter. The Bhagavad Gita The Bhagavad Gita , also more simply known as Gita, is a sacred Hindu scripture, considered among the most important texts in the history of literature and philosophy. The Bhagavad Gita comprises roughly 700 verses, and is a part of the Mahabharata. The teacher of the Bhagavad Gita is Lord Krishna, who is revered by Hindus as a manifestation of is mainly written in anustupa (with some vasanta-tilaka sections) interspersed with some Tristubh. For example, when Krishna Krishna is a deity worshipped across many traditions in Hinduism in a variety of perspectives. While many Vaishnava groups recognize Krishna as an avatar of Vishnu, other traditions within Krishnaism consider him to be svayam bhagavan, or the Supreme Being reveals his divinity to Arjuna Arjuna or Arjun is one of the Pandavas, the heroes of the Hindu epic Mahābhārata. Arjuna, whose name means 'bright', 'shining', 'white' or 'silver' (cf. Latin argentum), was such a peerless archer that he is often referred to as Jishnu - the undefeatable. The third of the five Pandava brothers, Arjuna was one of the children borne by Kunti, the the meter changes to Tristubh. Tristubh is the most prevalent meter of the ancient Rigveda The Rigveda is an ancient Indian sacred collection of Vedic Sanskrit hymns. It is counted among the four canonical sacred texts (śruti) of Hinduism known as the Vedas. Some of its verses are still recited as Hindu prayers, at religious functions and other occasions, putting these among the world's oldest religious texts in continued use, accounting for roughly 40% of its verses.

Greek and Latin

The metrical "feet" in the classical languages were based on the length of time taken to pronounce each syllable, which were categorized according to their weight In linguistics, syllable weight is the concept that syllables pattern together according to the number and/or duration of segments in the rime. In classical poetry, both Greek and Latin, distinctions of syllable weight were fundamental to the meter of the line as either "long" syllables or "short" syllables (indicated as daa and duh below). These are also called "heavy" and "light" syllables, respectively, to distinguish from long and short vowels. The foot is often compared to a musical measure and the long and short syllables to whole notes and half notes. In English poetry, feet are determined by emphasis rather than length, with stressed and unstressed syllables serving the same function as long and short syllables in classical meter.

The basic unit in Greek and Latin prosody is a mora Mora is a unit of sound used in phonology that determines syllable weight (which in turn determines stress or timing) in some languages. As with many technical linguistics terms, the exact definition of mora varies. Perhaps the most succinct working definition was provided by the American linguist James D. McCawley in 1968: a mora is “Something, which is defined as a single short syllable. A long syllable is equivalent to two moras. A long syllable contains either a long vowel, a diphthong In phonology, a diphthong, pronounced /ˈdɪf.θɒŋ/ or /ˈdɪp.θɒŋ/, (from Greek δίφθογγος, diphthongos, literally "two sounds" or "two tones") refers to two adjacent vowel sounds occurring within the same syllable. In most dialects of English, the words eye, boy, and cow contain examples of diphthongs, or a short vowel followed by two or more consonants. Various rules of elision Elision is the omission of one or more sounds in a word or phrase, producing a result that is easier for the speaker to pronounce. Sometimes, sounds may be elided for euphonic effect sometimes prevent a grammatical syllable from making a full syllable, and certain other lengthening and shortening rules (such as correption In Latin and Greek poetry, correption is the shortening of a long vowel at the end of one word before a short vowel at the beginning of the next. Vowels next to each other in neighboring words are in hiatus) can create long or short syllables in contexts where one would expect the opposite.

The most important Classical meter is the dactylic hexameter Dactylic hexameter is a form of meter in poetry or a rhythmic scheme. It is traditionally associated with the quantitative meter of classical epic poetry in both Greek and Latin, and was consequently considered to be the Grand Style of classical poetry. The premier examples of its use are Homer's Iliad and Odyssey and Virgil's Aeneid, the meter of Homer and Virgil. This form uses verses of six feet. The first four feet are dactyls A dactyl is a type of foot in meter in poetry. In quantitative verse, such as Greek or Latin, a dactyl is a long syllable followed by two short syllables, as determined by syllable weight. In accentual verse, such as English, it is a stressed syllable followed by two unstressed syllables—the opposite is the anapaest (two unstressed followed by a (daa-duh-duh), but can be spondees In poetry, a spondee is a metrical foot consisting of two long syllables, as determined by syllable weight in classical meters, or two stressed syllables, as determined by stress in modern meters. This makes it unique in English verse as all other feet contain at least one unstressed syllable. The word comes from the Greek σπονδή, spondē, & (daa-daa). The fifth foot is almost always a dactyl. The sixth foot is either a spondee or a trochee A trochee or choree, choreus, is a metrical foot used in formal poetry consisting of a stressed syllable followed by an unstressed one. Trochee comes from the Greek τροχός, trokhós, wheel, and choree from χορός, khorós, dance; both convey the "rolling" rhythm of this metrical foot (daa-duh). The initial syllable of either foot is called the ictus, the basic "beat" of the verse. There is usually a caesura In meter, caesura is a term to denote an audible pause that breaks up a line of verse. In most cases, caesura is indicated by punctuation marks which cause a pause in speech: a comma, a semicolon, a full stop, a dash, etc. Punctuation, however, is not necessary for a caesura to occur after the ictus of the third foot. The opening line of the Æneid The Aeneid is a Latin epic poem written by Virgil in the late 1st century BC (29–19 BC) that tells the legendary story of Aeneas, a Trojan who traveled to Italy, where he became the ancestor of the Romans. It is composed of roughly 10,000 lines in dactylic hexameter. The first six of the poem's twelve books tell the story of Aeneas' wanderings is a typical line of dactylic hexameter:

Armă vĭ | rumquĕ că | nō, Troi | ae quī | prīmŭs ăb | ōrīs

("I sing of arms and the man, who first from the shores of Troy. . . ")

In this example, the first and second feet are dactyls; their first syllables, "Ar" and "rum" respectively, contain short vowels, but count as long because the vowels are both followed by two consonants. The third and fourth feet are spondees, the first of which is divided by the main caesura In meter, caesura is a term to denote an audible pause that breaks up a line of verse. In most cases, caesura is indicated by punctuation marks which cause a pause in speech: a comma, a semicolon, a full stop, a dash, etc. Punctuation, however, is not necessary for a caesura to occur of the verse. The fifth foot is a dactyl, as is nearly always the case. The final foot is a spondee.

The dactylic hexameter was imitated in English by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow Henry Wadsworth Longfellow was an American educator and poet whose works include "Paul Revere's Ride", The Song of Hiawatha, and "Evangeline". He was also the first American to translate Dante Alighieri's The Divine Comedy and was one of the five Fireside Poets in his poem Evangeline Evangeline, A Tale of Acadie is a poem published in 1847 by the American poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. The poem follows an Acadian girl named Evangeline and her search for her lost love Gabriel, set during the time of the Expulsion of the Acadians. The work was written in dactylic hexameter reminiscent of Greek and Latin classics, though:

This is the forest primeval. The murmuring pines and the hemlocks,

Bearded with moss, and in garments green, indistinct in the twilight,

Stand like Druids of old, with voices sad and prophetic,

Stand like harpers hoar, with beards that rest on their bosoms.

Also important in Greek and Latin poetry is the dactylic pentameter Dactylic pentameter is a form of meter in poetry. It is normally found in the second line of the classical Latin or Greek elegiac couplet, following the first line of dactylic hexameter. This was a line of verse, made up of two equal parts, each of which contains two dactyls followed by a long syllable, which counts as a half foot. In this way, the number of feet amounts to five in total. Spondees can take the place of the dactyls in the first half, but never in the second. The long syllable at the close of the first half of the verse always ends a word, giving rise to a caesura In meter, caesura is a term to denote an audible pause that breaks up a line of verse. In most cases, caesura is indicated by punctuation marks which cause a pause in speech: a comma, a semicolon, a full stop, a dash, etc. Punctuation, however, is not necessary for a caesura to occur.

Dactylic pentameter is never used in isolation. Rather, a line of dactylic pentameter follows a line of dactylic hexameter in the elegiac In literature, an elegy is a mournful, melancholic or plaintive poem, especially a funeral song or a lament for the dead distich A couplet is a pair of lines of meter in poetry. It usually consists of two lines that rhyme and have the same meter. While traditionally couplets rhyme, not all do. A poem may use white space to mark out couplets if they do not rhyme. Couplets with a meter of iambic pentameter are called heroic couplets. The Poetic epigram is also in the couplet or elegiac couplet Elegiac couplets are a poetic form used by Greek lyric poets for a variety of themes usually of smaller scale than those of epic poetry. The ancient Romans frequently used elegiac couplets in love poetry, as in Ovid's Amores. As with heroic couplets, the couplets are usually self-contained and express a complete idea, a form of verse that was used for the composition of elegies and other tragic Tragedy is a form of art based on human suffering that offers its audience pleasure. While most cultures have developed forms that provoke this paradoxical response, tragedy refers to a specific tradition of drama that has played a unique and important role historically in the self-definition of Western civilization. That tradition has been and solemn verse in the Greek and Latin world, as well as love poetry that was sometimes light and cheerful. An example from Ovid's Tristia:

Vergĭlĭ | um vī | dī tan | tum, nĕc ă | māră Tĭ | bullō

Tempŭs ă | mīcĭtĭ | ae || fātă dĕ | dērĕ mĕ | ae.

("I saw only Vergil, greedy Fate gave Tibullus no time for me.")

The Greeks and Romans also used a number of lyric meters, which were typically used for shorter poems than elegiacs or hexameter. In Aeolic verse, one important line was called the hendecasyllabic, a line of eleven syllables. This meter was used most often in the Sapphic stanza, named after the Greek poet Sappho, who wrote many of her poems in the form. A hendecasyllabic is a line with a never-varying structure: two trochees, followed by a dactyl, then two more trochees. In the Sapphic stanza, three hendecasyllabics are followed by an "Adonic" line, made up of a dactyl and a trochee. This is the form of Catullus 51 (itself an homage to Sappho 31):

Illĕ | mī pār | essĕ dĕ | ō vĭ | dētŭr;

illĕ, | sī fās | est, sŭpĕ | rārĕ | dīvōs,

quī sĕ | dēns ad | versŭs ĭ | dentĭ | dem tē

spectăt ĕt | audĭt

("He seems to me to be like a god; if it is permitted, he seems above the gods, he who sitting across from you gazes at you and listens to you.")

The Sapphic stanza was imitated in English by Algernon Charles Swinburne in a poem he simply called Sapphics:

Saw the white implacable Aphrodite,

Saw the hair unbound and the feet unsandalled

Shine as fire of sunset on western waters;

Saw the reluctant...

Classical Arabic

The metrical system of Classical Arabic poetry, like those of classical Greek and Latin, is based on the weight of syllables classified as either "long" or "short".

A short syllable contains a short vowel with no following consonants. For example, the word kataba, which syllabifies as ka-ta-ba, contains three short vowels. A long syllable contains either a long vowel, or a short vowel followed by a consonant as is the case in the word maktūbun which syllabifies as mak-tū-bun. These are the only syllable types possible in Arabic phonology which, by and large, does not allow a syllable to end in more than one consonant or a consonant to occur in the same syllable after a long vowel. In other words, with very few exceptions, syllables of the type -āk- or -akr- are not found in classical Arabic.

Each verse consists of a certain number of metrical feet (tafā`īl or ajzā') and a certain combination of possible feet constitutes a meter (baħr.)

The traditional Arabic practice for writing out a poem's meter is to use a concatenation of various derivations of the verbal root F-`-L ( فعل). Thus, the following hemistich

qifā nabki min dhikrā ħabībin wamanzilī

Would be traditionally scanned as

Fa`ūlun mafā`īlun fa`ūlun mafā`ilun

Which, according to the system more current in the west, can be represented as:

u-- u--- u-- u-u-

The Arabic Meters

Classical Arabic has sixteen established meters. Though each of them allows for a certain amount of variation, their basic patterns are as follows, using "-" for a long syllable, "u" for a short one, "x" for a syllable that can be long or short and "o" for a position that can either contain one long or two shorts:

The Ṭawīl (الطويل):

u-x u-x- u-x u-u-

The Madīd (المديد):

xu-- xu- xu-

The Basīṭ (البسيط):

x-u- xu- x-u- uu-

The Kāmil (الكامل):

o-u- o-u- o-u-

The Wāfir (الوافر):

u-o- u-o- u--

The Hajaz (الهجز):

u--x u--x

The Rajaz (الرجز):

x-u- x-u- x-u-

The Ramal (الرمل):

xu-- xu-- xu-

The Sarī` (السريع):

xxu- xxu- -u-

The Munsariħ (المنسرح):

x-u- -x-u -uu-

The Khafīf (الخفيف):

xu-- x-u- xu--

The Muḍāri` (المضارع):

u-x x-u--

The Muqtaḍib (المقتضب):

xu- u- uu-

The Mujtathth (المجتث):

x-u- xu--

The Mutadārik (المتدارك):

o- o- o- o- (Here, each "o" can also be "xu")

The Mutaqārib (المتقارب):

u-x u-x u-x u-

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