These verses retain the older quantitative markers using long and short syllables at the ends of hemistichs, instead of stressed and unstressed.
Due to variations in line length, hemistichs, obligatory stress positions, and other factors among verse traditions, and because each language provides words with different rhythmic characteristics, this basic metrical template is realized with great variety.
Humans can perceive the number of members in a small set without actually counting them or mentally breaking them into subsets, with the upper limit of this ability estimated between 5 and 9 units.
[3] Therefore, it is no surprise that syllabic hemistichs tend to be very short (typically 4 to 8 syllables), and to be grouped and separated from their neighbors by markers like stress, word boundaries, and rhyme.
Historically, English syllabics have not evolved over time from native practice, but rather are the inventions of literate poets, primarily in the 20th century.
"[4] In English, the difficulty of perceiving even brief isosyllabic lines as rhythmically equivalent is aggravated by the inordinate power of stressed syllables.
[4] Dylan Thomas's "In my craft or sullen art" is an example of syllabic verse in English: it has seven syllables in each line (except the last), but no consistent stress pattern.
In my craft or sullen art Exercised in the still night When only the moon rages And the lovers lie abed With all their griefs in their arms, I labour by singing light Not for ambition or bread Or the strut and trade of charms On the ivory stages But for the common wages Of their most secret heart.
Syllabic poetry can also take a stanzaic form, as in Marianne Moore's poem "No Swan So Fine", in which the corresponding lines of each stanza have the same number of syllables.
No swan, with swart blind look askance and gondoliering legs, so fine as the chintz china one with fawn- brown eyes and toothed gold collar on to show whose bird it was.
Lodged in the Louis Fifteenth Candelabrum-tree of cockscomb- tinted buttons, dahlias, sea urchins, and everlastings, it perches on the branching foam of polished sculptured flowers—at ease and tall.
Only 2 lines in each stanza are rhymed: these are emphasized for the reader by indentation, but hidden from the listener by radical enjambment ("fawn- / brown" and "coxcomb- / tinted").