rhythm and metre

Everyday speech in the English language is marked by varied, irregular rhythm.  

Traditional poetry in English, on the other hand, delights in creating regular patterns of stressed and unstressed syllables, giving what we might call regular metre.  

The most common form of regular metre in traditional English poetry is the ‘iambic pentameter’, a line composed of ten syllables, five stressed and five unstressed.  Iambic metre starts on an unstressed syllable.  

For example:

One day I stepped outside and heard a sound

Metre can be understood as an underlying pattern of stressed and unstressed syllables created by the poet.

Rhythm can be understood as the way we would read such a line to maximise its meaning - this will usually be more varied than any underlying metre.

Much recent poetry written in English tends to avoid the regular metrical patterns which delighted the poets of the past.  

As with rhyme, regular metre was often seen as too artificial a feature to impose on the English language, and one which was seen to compromise the expressive power of the language.  After all, in everyday speech in English we don’t speak in metrically regular lines: instead, irregular metre allows us to emphasise what we want to communicate.

Your comments on rhythm and metre, as with all other technical commentary, should focus on the effects of how the poet has chosen to write.  

Free verse can often have a power and spontaneity echoing that of ‘real life’, often helping the poet to convey their ideas with authenticity.

Verse featuring metre can often have a formal dignity, an intrinsically ‘poetic’ quality that can create status and memorability in relation to what is being said, a kind of elevating factor.

There are many forms of metre which can be used by poets writing in English.  

Iambic pentameter (an example of it above) is the most common, but there are others.  For example the ‘triple’ metre of the dactyl:

   Into the morning I stepped out delightfully

   Smelling the flowers and the trees on the air

Here, in respect of this couplet, you might want to explore how a joyful light-heartedness is created through the use of a triple metre.