Then Crapsey decided to make the criterion a stanza of five lines of accentual-syllabic verse, in which the lines comprise, in order, 1, 2, 3, 4, and 1 stresses and 2, 4, 6, 8, and 2 syllables.

This terminology was adopted in the description of accentual-syllabic verse in English, where it refers to a foot comprising an unstressed syllable followed by a stressed syllable ( as in a-bove ).

In accentual-syllabic verse an iamb is a foot that has the rhythmic pattern:

The foot is the basic metrical unit that generates a line of verse in most Western traditions of poetry, including English accentual-syllabic verse and the quantitative meter of classical ancient Greek and Latin poetry.

It is common in languages that are syllable-timed, such as Japanese or modern French or Finnish — as opposed to stress-timed languages such as English, in which accentual verse and accentual-syllabic verse are more common.

So the conventional patterns of accentual and accentual-syllabic English verse are perceived as regularly rhythmic, whereas to the listener, syllabic verse generally is not distinguishable from free verse.

As in accentual-syllabic verse, there is some flexibility in how one counts syllables.

Accentual verse continued in common use in all forms of Middle English poetry until the codification of accentual-syllabic verse in Elizabethan poetry, whereupon it largely disappeared from literary poetry for three hundred years, but remained very popular in folk poetry.

* While individual lines may have a regular syllabic structure, this is not kept constant over the poem – only the stress pattern is consistent – as otherwise the poem becomes accentual-syllabic verse.

They were adopted to describe the equivalent meters in English accentual-syllabic verse.

In quantitative meter ( such as the meter of classical verse ), it consists of three short syllables ; in accentual-syllabic verse ( such as formal English verse ), the tribrach consists of three unstressed syllables.

In English accentual-syllabic poetry, an amphibrach is a stressed syllable surrounded by two unstressed syllables.

An approach that has appealed to some choreographers is reminiscent of Charles Olson's statement of the process of projective verse: `` one perception must immediately and directly lead to a further perception ''.

It is difficult to say what Thompson expected would come of their relationship, which had begun so soon after his emotions had been stirred by Maggie Brien, but when Katie wrote on April 11, 1900, to tell him that she was to be married to the Rev. Godfrey Burr, the vicar of Rushall in Staffordshire, the news evidently helped to deepen his discouragement over the failure of his hopes for a new volume of verse.

Understanding, as he did, the difficulty of the art of poetry, and believing that the `` only technical criticism worth having in poetry is that of poets '', he felt obliged to insist upon his duty to be hard to please when it came to the review of a book of verse.

A verse familiar to all grammarians is the quatrain: `` I saw a man once beat his wife When on a drunken spree.

So far these remarks, like most criticisms of Hardy, have tacitly assumed that his poetry is all of a piece, one solid mass of verse expressing a sensibility at a single stage of development.

he further reasoned that frequent formulas in epic verse indicate oral composition, and assumed the slightly less likely corollary that oral epic is inclined towards the use of formulas.

Even though the bondage of his verse is not so great as the writing poet can manage, it is still great enough for him often to be seriously impeded unless he has aids to facilitate rapid composition.

The full version of the song from Melbourne Punch, the fourth verse of which is pasted onto the urn

A label containing a six line verse is pasted on the urn.

This is the fourth verse of a song-lyric published in Melbourne Punch on 1 February 1883:

According to the Dictionary of American Hymnology, " Amazing Grace " is John Newton's spiritual autobiography in verse.

Bruce Hindmarsh suggests that the secular popularity of " Amazing Grace " is due to the absence of any mention of God in the lyrics until the fourth verse ( by Excell's version, the fourth verse begins " When we've been there ten thousand years "), and that the song represents the ability of humanity to transform itself instead of a transformation taking place at the hands of God.

* Giuseppe Barzilai goes back for explanation to the first verse of the prayer attributed to Rabbi Nehunya ben HaKanah, the literal rendering of which is “ O, with thy mighty right hand deliver the unhappy ,” forming from the initial and final letters of the words the word Abrakd ( pronounced Abrakad ), with the meaning “ the host of the winged ones ,” i. e., angels.

This verse is also featured in William Billing's popular Sacred Harp song " David's Lamentation ", first published in 1778.

Alcaeus ( Alkaios, ) of Mytilene ( c. 620 – 6th century BC ), Greek lyric poet from Lesbos Island who is credited with inventing the Alcaic verse.

In one of these the writing is prose, in the other a combination of prose and alliterating verse.

The latter manuscript was severely damaged in the 18th and 19th centuries, and the authorship of the verse has been much disputed ; but likely it also is by Alfred.

An example of ancient aesthetics in Greece through poetry is Plato's quote: " For the authors of those great poems which we admire, do not attain to excellence through the rules of any art ; but they utter their beautiful melodies of verse in a state of inspiration, and, as it were, possessed by a spirit not their own.

A number of Roman Catholic writers connect this verse with the Woman of the Apocalypse in, which immediately follows, and argue that the Blessed Virgin Mary is the " Ark of the New Covenant.

In syllabic verse, such as that used in French literature, an alexandrine is a line of twelve syllables.

" Pretty Little Picture " is frequently dropped from productions of the show, and one verse of " I'm Calm " is also frequently trimmed.

Usually, only the second and fourth line of a quatrain are rhymed ( in the scheme a, b, c, b ), which has been taken to suggest that, originally, ballads consisted of couplets ( two lines ) of rhymed verse, each of 14 syllables.

One final, amusing example that comments on the importance Roman poets placed on their verse rules comes from the Ars Poetica of Horace, line 263:

The line, which lacks a proper caesura, is translated " Not every critic sees an inharmonious verse.

The rhopalic verse of Ausonius is a good example ; besides following the standard hexameter pattern, each word in the line is one syllable longer than the previous, e. g.:

During the early 20th century, the rhymed epigram couplet form developed into a fixed verse image form, with an integral title as the third line.

Adelaide Crapsey codified the couplet form into a two line rhymed verse of ten syllables per line with her image couplet poem On Seeing Weather-Beaten Trees, first published in 1915.

Most free verse, for example, self-evidently continues to observe a convention of the poetic line in some sense, at least in written representations, though retaining a potential degree of linkage, however nebulous, with more traditional forms.

However, in fandangos and fandango-derived styles, fourths and sixths can often be found, especially at the beginning of each line of verse.

The metre is often denoted by a row of figures besides the name of the tune, such as " 87. 87. 87 ", which would inform the reader that each verse has six lines, and that the first line has eight syllables, the second has seven, the third line eight, etc.

The hendecasyllable is a line of eleven syllables, used in Ancient Greek and Latin quantitative verse as well as in medieval and modern European poetry.

Hexameter is a metrical line of verse consisting of six feet.

A single verse is not poetry unless it is a one-verse poem ; and even the finest line draws its life from its context.

In place of using feet, alliterative verse of old Germanic languages such as Old English and Old Norse divided each line into two half-lines.

For example, in the verse below, each odd line has a caesura ( shown by a slash /) after the fourth syllable ( daily, her, won ' dring, mother ) while each even line is without a caesura:

Yet a third variation is catalexis, where the end of a line is shortened by a foot, or two or part thereof-an example of this is at the end of each verse in Keats ' ' La Belle Dame sans Merci ':

In poetry, a monometer is a line of verse with just one metrical foot, exemplified by this portion of Robert Herrick's " Upon His Departure Hence ":

Meter is the definitive pattern established for a verse ( such as iambic pentameter ), while rhythm is the actual sound that results from a line of poetry.

Vladimir Nabokov noted that overlaid on top of the regular pattern of stressed and unstressed syllables in a line of verse was a separate pattern of accents resulting from the natural pitch of the spoken words, and suggested that the term " scud " be used to distinguish an unaccented stress from an accented stress.