Rhythm is literally normal rhythm, as one of the ocean waves or the pulse of man. It's found in all the arts, but in music, dancing and poetry particularly. Those three were mostly together in ancient Greece-which the poet Pindar (522-443 B.c.) called the "land of lovely dancing" Music accompanied the singers, and poems recited or sung.
Poets partially use rhythm for the pleasure it can offer but also because it can contribute to a poem's sense or mood. John Milton (16o8-74) wrote a rhythm like this in his homosexual poem "L'Allegro":
Come, and trip it as ye go
On the light fantastic toe!
But he gave his mournful elegy "Lycidas" long lines and a slower movement, like this :
But, O the heavy change, now thou art gone,
Now thou art gone, and never must return!
Most poetry was composed in "fixed" rhythms, called meter (or "measure"), before the modern developments in poetic technique* began. This is, each line poem of a written in a given meter follows more or less the same pattern structure as every other line. A metric line can be divided into units called feet, each of which has a different number of syllables, organized in a particular order.
Ancient Greek and Latin poetry are determined by the length of the syllables (i.e., according to the time needed for pronouncing them). In French and many other Romance languages, the number of syllables in a line decides the poetry meter. Yet English and German poetry came to be measured by stressed or accented syllables. The foot called an iamb in Greek poetry composed of one short syllable preceded by verse, which came to be counted according to a long one. Yet an English or German iamb is a foot with an unstressed syllable (like the term "delight") accompanied by a stressed one.
Other forms of feet are the trochee (a stressed syllable followed by an unstressed one, such as "wónder"); the anapaest (two unstressed syllables followed by a stressed one, such as "introdúce"); and the dactyl (one stressed syllable followed by two unstressed ones, such as "térrible").
There are various kinds of meters named according to the number of feet inside a single line. Much of Greek and Latin poetry was composed in lines of hexameters, each six feet long. In later European poetry, the meters include the pentameter (five feet) and the tetrameter (four feet). Such meters are written in iambic feet quite often; for example, here is an "iambic pentameter" line taken from John Keats ' "The Eve of Saint Agnes" (1795-1821):
She dánced alóng with vágue regárdless éyes.
Despite the regularity of the meter, the lines of a metric poem are never precisely the same. Poets have various ways to bring variation to the flow in order to maintain the attention of the listener. Often two or three kinds of feet are used in the same formation. "Desert Places," by the contemporary American poet Robert Frost (1874-1963), starts with two lines of strikingly varying feet:
Snow falling and night falling jast, oh, fast
In a field I looked into going past,..
Or, instead of ending each line with the end of a phrase or sentence, the poet can use "run-on" lines, as Tennyson did in his "In Memoriam" :
O yet we trust that somehow good
Will be the final goal of ill.
Or he can vary the placing of the caesura (which is a break or pause in either the grammar or the sound of most lines of regular poetry) as William Wordsworth (1770-1850) does in these lines:
The world is too much with us;/late and soon,
Getting and spending,/we lay waste our powers;
With these techniques, poets avoid monotony without losing the pleasure and effect of their rhythms.
To measure verse rhythms, students of poetry often use symbols shown below. The curve indicates an unaccented syllable; straight line, an accented one. (In classical Greek and Latin verse, these signs mark "short" or "long" syllables.) Syllable groups-like bars of music*- repeat themselves throughout a line. Groups or "feet"-that occur most often include the
(1) iamb
(2) trochee
(3) sponde
(4) dactyl.
(5) Each line contains six feet; such hexameters were common in Greek and Latin verse. Note that short and long marks do not indicate stress but show relative time lengths required to pronounce each syllable.
In his Metamorphoses, Ovid (43 B.C.-about A.D.17) used hexameters to tell of exiled Daedalus's longing for home (6). Trochees and spondes vary basic dactylic meter. Greek poetry (7) is similar, as in the epitaph for Spartan dead at Thermopylae by Simonides of Ceos (6th-5th century B.C.) Double vertical lines mark a caesura or pause. An important element in French verse is a number of syllables; in most poetry since the 1500s, 12-syllable alexandrines have been used. An example is from Nicolas Boileau's The Poetic Art, 1674 (8). German and English verse is measured by stress. Pentameter lines from Goethe's Ilmenau (9) each contain five iambs.
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