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Anapaest–A three-syllable metrical pattern in poetry in which two unstressed syllables are followed by a stressed syllable. Dactyl–A three-syllable metrical pattern in poetry in which a stressed syllable is followed by two unstressed syllables. Spondee–A beat in a poetic line that consists of two accented syllables. It is a poetic form ...
A metrical foot (aka poetic foot) is the basic repeating rhythmic unit that forms part of a line of verse in most Indo-European traditions of poetry.. In some metres (such as the iambic trimeter) the lines are divided into double feet, called metra (singular: metron).
The process of determining which syllables are long and which are short, and showing how the words of a poem match a metrical pattern, is known as scansion. The above line of Virgil is scanned as follows, where – represents a long syllable, and ᴗ a short one: – – | – ᴗ ᴗ | – – | – – | – ᴗ ᴗ | – –
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.
Caesurae can occur in later forms of verse, where they are usually optional. The so-called ballad meter, or the common meter of the hymnodists (see also hymn), is usually thought of as a line of iambic tetrameter followed by a line of trimeter, but it can also be considered a line of heptameter with a fixed caesura at the fourth foot.
The names of the metrical families come from the names of the cola or feet in use, such as iambic, trochaic, dactylic and anapaestic meters. Sometimes meter is named after the subject matter (as in epic or heroic meter), sometimes after the musical instrument that accompanied the poetry (such as lyric meter, accompanied by the lyre ), and ...
In every type of literature there is a metrical pattern that can be described as "basic" or even "national" [dubious – discuss]. The most famous and widely used line of verse in English prosody is the iambic pentameter, [7] while one of the most common of traditional lines in surviving classical Latin and Greek prosody was the hexameter. [8]
Below listed are the names given to the poetic feet by classical metrics. The feet are classified first by the number of syllables in the foot ( disyllables have two, trisyllables three, and tetrasyllables four) and secondarily by the pattern of vowel lengths (in classical languages) or syllable stresses (in English poetry) which they comprise.