THE HEART OF POETRY.

The deployment of rhythm and

meter, rhyme schemes, rhetorical
figures and other sound devices is
just a important in the writing of
poetry as the use of imagery,
metaphor and the other kinds of
tropes, since poetry shares a lot of
characteristics with music.
Rhythm is an
inherent or
essential quality of
life and the natural
world.
Rhythm is an
inherent or
essential quality of
life and the natural
world.
the repeating recurrence of
birth, growth, and death in
the life of a family or clan;
the ups and downs
transpiring within the
duration of a year;
the alternating occurrence of joy
and sorrow, hope and despair,
anger and forgiveness, frustration
and fulfillment, doubt and
certainty, solitude and soliditary,
sickness and health, plenitude
and poverty; and the constant
throbbing of the heart.
Nature, too, has its own rhythmic
patterns: in the west, the changing
of the seasons from spring to
summer to autumn to winter, in the
Orient, the the dry and wet
seasons; as well as the staccato
sound of falling rain, a rushing
river, the ebb and flow of the sea,
among others.
In poetry, rhythm refers
to the variation or
alternation of strong and
weak (stressed and
unstressed) syllables or
elements in the flow of
speech.
The term “rhythm” is
a derivative of the
Greek word rhythmos
which means
“measured motion.”
 In most poetry written
before the twentieth
century, rhythm was
often expressed in
regular, metrical forms;
in prose and in free verse.
In poetry, meter is defined
as the regular recurrence or
repetition of rhythmic
patterns, or the rhythm
established by the consistent
occurrence of similar units of
sounds.
There are four
basic types of
meters or rhythmic
patterns:
(1) quantitative or
classical meter, in
which the rhythm is
produced by recurring
patterns of long and
short syllables;
(2) accentual or sprung rhythm,
in which the rhythmic pattern is
established by the presence of a
syllable marked by a strong stress
or accent regardless of the
number of unstressed or
unaccented syllables surrounding
the stressed or accented syllable;
(3) syllabic, in which the
rhythmic pattern is
created by the fixed
number of syllable in a
line even if the occurrence
of the accent may vary;
4) accentual-syllabic, in which the
rhythmic pattern is formed both by
the fixed or nearly fixed number of
accents and syllables per line. In
poetry written in English, the fixed
poetic forms, like the sonnet and the
villanelle, deploy the accentual-
syllabic meter.
The foot is the basic rhythmic
unit within the line of poetry. In
English accentual-syllabic
verse, there are six commonly
used metrical feet: (1) iambic,
(2) trochaic, (3) anapestic, (4)
dactyli, (5) spondaic, and (6)
pyrrhic.
 Iambic pattern
1 unstressed syllable followed by
1 stressed syllable.(-/)
EXAMPLE:
repose-(re-POSE)
belief-(beLIEF)
Complete-(comPLETE)
 Trochaic pattern
1 stressed syllable followed
by 1 unstressed syllable.
EXAMPLE:
garland-(GAR-lang)
speaking-(SPEAK-ing)
value-(VAL-ue)
 Anapestic pattern
2 unstressed syllables followed
by 1 stressed syllable.
EXAMPLE:
Interupt (in-ter-rupt)
Unbridged contradict engineer
Masquerade, Galilee
 Dactylic pattern
1 stressed syllable followed by
2 unstressed syllables.
EXAMPLE:
Happiness (HAP-pi-ness)
Galloping (GAL-lop-ing)
Fortunate, Saturday,
murmuring
 Spondaic pattern
All syllables have equal
stressed
EXAMPLE:
Heartbreak
Out, out...”
“pen-knife,” “heartburn”
 Pyrrhic pattern
Combination of 2 unstressed
sllables.
EXAMPLE:
“dada”
 Combination of Poetic Feet
One foot per line: monometer
Two foot per line: dimeter
Three foot per line: trimester
Four foot per line: tetrameter
Five foot per line: pentameter
Six foot per line: hexameter
 1 unstressed +
stressed
 Answer:
Iambic Dimeter
 1 unstressed + 1
stressed
 Answer:
Iambic Trimeter
Scan the following common
English words below and
determine their respective metrical
feet. Write “iamb” if the word is
iambic, “trochee” if the word is
trochaic, “anapest” if the word is
anapestic, “dactyl” if the word is
dactylic or “spondee” if the word
is spondaic.
1. understand _____________________________
2. heartbreak _____________________________
3. roses _____________________________
4. inspire _____________________________
5. mannequin _____________________________
6. childhood _____________________________
7. planet _____________________________
8. contradict _____________________________
9. buffalo _____________________________
10. behold _____________________________
Write a poem with rhyme
and meter. (4 lines and 2
stanza)
The topic is about your
favorite person.