Metre (poetry)

The alliterative metre of the old Germanic poetry of languages such as Old Norse and Old English was radically different, but was still based on stress patterns.

Some classical languages, in contrast, used a different scheme known as quantitative metre, where patterns were based on syllable weight rather than stress.

A number of other ancient languages also used quantitative metre, such as Sanskrit, Persian, Old Church Slavonic and Classical Arabic (but not Biblical Hebrew).

In most English verse, the metre can be considered as a sort of back beat, against which natural speech rhythms vary expressively.

[8] Blank verse in the English language is most famously represented in the plays of William Shakespeare and the great works of Milton, though Tennyson (Ulysses, The Princess) and Wordsworth (The Prelude) also make notable use of it.

A rhymed pair of lines of iambic pentameter make a heroic couplet,[9] a verse form which was used so often in the 18th century that it is now used mostly for humorous effect (although see Pale Fire for a non-trivial case).

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.

An example from Ovid's Tristia: The Greeks and Romans also used a number of lyric metres, which were typically used for shorter poems than elegiacs or hexameter.

The traditional Arabic practice for writing out a poem's metre is to use a concatenation of various derivations of the verbal root F-ʿ-L (فعل).

Thus, the following hemistich قفا نبك من ذكرى حبيبٍ ومنزلِ Would be traditionally scanned as: فعولن مفاعيلن فعولن مفاعلن That is, Romanized and with traditional Western scansion: Al-Kʰalīl b. ˀAḫmad al-Farāhīdī's contribution to the study of Arabic prosody is undeniably significant: he was the first scholar to subject Arabic poetry to a meticulous, painstaking metrical analysis.

Unfortunately, he fell short of producing a coherent theory; instead, he was content to merely gather, classify, and categorize the primary data—a first step which, though insufficient, represents no mean accomplishment.

Therefore, al-Kʰalīl has left a formulation of utmost complexity and difficulty which requires immense effort to master; even the accomplished scholar cannot utilize and apply it with ease and total confidence.

It is in this fashion that [various] authors dealt with the subject under discussion over a period of eleven centuries: none of them attempted to introduce a new approach or to simplify the rules.

Is it not time for a new, simple presentation which avoids contrivance, displays close affinity to [the art of] poetry, and perhaps renders the science of prosody palatable as well as manageable?” In the 20th and the 21st centuries, numerous scholars have endeavored to supplement al-Kʰalīl's contribution.

This has led to serious confusion among prosodists, both ancient and modern, as to the true source and nature of the Persian metres, the most obvious error being the assumption that they were copied from Arabic.

[12] Persian poetry is quantitative, and the metrical patterns are made of long and short syllables, much as in Classical Greek, Latin and Arabic.

Han Dynasty poetry tended towards the variable line-length forms of the folk ballads and the Music Bureau yuefu.

The unstressed syllables were relatively unimportant, but the caesurae (breaks between the half-lines) played a major role in Old English poetry.

The German philologist Eduard Sievers (died 1932) identified five different patterns of half-line in Anglo-Saxon alliterative poetry.

Spanish poetry uses poetic licenses, unique to Romance languages, to change the number of syllables by manipulating mainly the vowels in the line.

There are many types of licenses, used either to add or subtract syllables, that may be applied when needed after taking in consideration the poetic rules of the last word.

The following example is by Faruk Nafiz Çamlıbel (died 1973), one of the most devoted users of traditional Turkish metre: Derinden derine ırmaklar ağlar, Uzaktan uzağa çoban çeşmesi.

The most commonly used verses are: There is a continuing tradition of strict metre poetry in the Welsh language that can be traced back to at least the sixth century.

[23] Early 19th-century poet Dániel Berzsenyi's poetry has been rendered into English faithfully to his original metre in some translations, namely by Peter Zollman,[24] Adam Makkai, and others.

[25] 20th-century poets such as Mihály Babits, Árpád Tóth, Miklós Radnóti, Attila József,[26] and Ágnes Nemes Nagy wrote poetry in metre.

That the texts of the Ancient Near East (Sumerian, Egyptian or Semitic) should not exhibit metre is surprising, and may be partly due to the nature of Bronze Age writing.

[citation needed] There were, in fact, attempts to reconstruct metrical qualities of the poetic portions of the Hebrew Bible, e.g. by Gustav Bickell[34] or Julius Ley,[35] but they remained inconclusive[36] (see Biblical poetry).

Early Iron Age metrical poetry is found in the Iranian Avesta and in the Greek works attributed to Homer and Hesiod.

Renaissance and Early Modern poetry in Europe is characterized by a return to templates of Classical Antiquity, a tradition begun by Petrarca's generation and continued into the time of Shakespeare and Milton.

Even the syllabic pattern of this poem does not remain perfectly consistent: Williams tried to form poetry whose subject matter was centered on the lives of common people.