Poetry Warning: You are not logged in. Your IP address will be publicly visible if you make any edits. If you log in or create an account, your edits will be attributed to your username, along with other benefits.Anti-spam check. Do not fill this in! ====Metrical patterns==== {{Main|Meter (poetry)}} [[File:Lewis Carroll - Henry Holiday - Hunting of the Snark - Plate 6.jpg|thumb|upright|[[Lewis Carroll]]'s ''[[The Hunting of the Snark]]'' (1876) is mainly in [[anapestic tetrameter]].]] Different traditions and genres of poetry tend to use different meters, ranging from the Shakespearean [[iambic pentameter]] and the Homeric [[dactylic hexameter]] to the [[anapestic tetrameter]] used in many nursery rhymes. However, a number of variations to the established meter are common, both to provide emphasis or attention to a given foot or line and to avoid boring repetition. For example, the stress in a foot may be inverted, a [[caesura]] (or pause) may be added (sometimes in place of a foot or stress), or the final foot in a line may be given a [[Meter (poetry)|feminine ending]] to soften it or be replaced by a [[spondee]] to emphasize it and create a hard stop. Some patterns (such as iambic pentameter) tend to be fairly regular, while other patterns, such as dactylic hexameter, tend to be highly irregular.<ref>{{Harvnb|Fussell|1965|pp=36–71}}</ref> Regularity can vary between language. In addition, different patterns often develop distinctively in different languages, so that, for example, [[iambic tetrameter]] in Russian will generally reflect a regularity in the use of accents to reinforce the meter, which does not occur, or occurs to a much lesser extent, in English.<ref>{{Cite book |last=Nabokov |first=Vladimir |url=https://archive.org/details/notesonprosodyon0000nabo/page/46 |title=Notes on Prosody |publisher=Bollingen Foundation |year=1964 |isbn=978-0-691-01760-0 |pages=[https://archive.org/details/notesonprosodyon0000nabo/page/46 46–47]}}</ref> [[File:Kiprensky Pushkin.jpg|thumb|upright|[[Alexander Pushkin]]]] Some common metrical patterns, with notable examples of poets and poems who use them, include: * [[Iambic pentameter]] ([[John Milton]], ''[[Paradise Lost]]''; [[William Shakespeare]], ''[[Shakespeare's Sonnets|Sonnets]]'')<ref>{{Harvnb|Adams|1997|p=206}}</ref> * [[Dactylic hexameter]] (Homer, ''[[Iliad]]''; [[Virgil]], ''[[Aeneid]]'')<ref>{{Harvnb|Adams|1997|p=63}}</ref> * [[Iambic tetrameter]] ([[Andrew Marvell]], "[[To His Coy Mistress]]"; [[Alexander Pushkin]], ''[[Eugene Onegin]]''; [[Robert Frost]], ''[[Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening]]'')<ref name="tetra">{{Cite web |url=http://www.tetrameter.com |title=What is Tetrameter? |publisher=tetrameter.com |access-date=10 December 2011}}</ref> * [[Trochaic octameter]] ([[Edgar Allan Poe]], "[[The Raven]]")<ref>{{Harvnb|Adams|1997|p=60}}</ref> * [[Trochaic tetrameter]] ([[Henry Wadsworth Longfellow]], ''[[The Song of Hiawatha]]''; the Finnish national epic, ''[[Kalevala|The Kalevala]]'', is also in trochaic tetrameter, the natural rhythm of Finnish and Estonian) * {{lang|fr|[[Alexandrin]]}} ([[Jean Racine]], ''[[Phèdre]]'')<ref>{{Cite book |last1=James |first1=E. D. |url=https://archive.org/details/racinephdre00jame |title=Racine: Phèdre |last2=Jondorf |first2=G. |publisher=Cambridge University Press |year=1994 |isbn=978-0-521-39721-6 |pages=[https://archive.org/details/racinephdre00jame/page/32 32–34] |url-access=registration}}</ref> Summary: Please note that all contributions to Christianpedia may be edited, altered, or removed by other contributors. If you do not want your writing to be edited mercilessly, then do not submit it here. You are also promising us that you wrote this yourself, or copied it from a public domain or similar free resource (see Christianpedia:Copyrights for details). Do not submit copyrighted work without permission! Cancel Editing help (opens in new window) Discuss this page