Prosody is the study of the meter, rhyme, and intonation of a poem Rhyme and meter, although closely related, should be distinguished, the meter is the definitive pattern established for a verse (such as iambic pentameter), while the rhythm is the actual sound that results from a line of poetry. Thus the meter of a line may be described as being "iambic" but a full description of the rhythm would require noting where the language causes one to pause or accelerate and how the mater interacts of the language. Prosody also may be used more specifically to refer to the scanning of poetic lines to show meter.
Rhythm
The Methods for creating poetic rhythm vary across language and between poetic traditions. Languages are often described as having timing set primarily, syllables or moras, depending on how rhythm is established, though a language can be influenced by multiple approaches. Japanese is a mora-timed language. Syllable-timed language included Latin, Catalan, French, Leonese, Galician, and Spanish. English Russian and generally, German are stress-timed language. Varying intonation also effects how rhythm is perceived languages also can rely on either pitch, such as in Vedic or Ancient Greek, or tone Tonal languages include Chinese, Vietnamese Lithuanian, and most sub-Saharan languages
Metrical rhythm generally involves the precise arrangement of stresses or syllables into repeated patterns called feet within a line. In Modern English verse the pattern of stress primarily different feet, so rhythm based on a meter in Modern English is most often founded on the pattern of stressed and unstressed syllables (alone elided). In the classical languages, on the other hand, while the metrical units are similar, vowel length rather than stresses define the matter. Old English poetry used a metrical pattern involving the varied number of syllables but a fixed number of strong stresses in each line.
The chief device of Ancient Hebrew Biblical poetry including many of the psalms, was parallelism, a rhetorical structure in which successive lines reflected each other in grammatical structure, sound structure, notional content, or all three. Parallelism lent itself to antiphonal or call and response performance, which could also be reinforced by intonation. Thus, Biblical poetry relies much less on metrical feet to create rhythm but instead creates rhythm based on much larger sound units of lines, phrases and sentences. Some classical poetry forms such as Vespa of the Tamil language, had rigid grammars (to that they could be expressed as a context-free grammar) which ensured a rhythm. In Chinese poetry, tones, as well as stresses, create rhythm. Classical Chinese poetics identifies four tones: the level tone rising tone, departing tone and entering tone. Note that other classifications may have as many as eight tones for Chinese and six for Vietnamese.
The formal patterns of meter used in Modern English verse to create rhythm no longer dominate contemporary English Poetry. In the case of free verse, rhythm is often organized based on looser units of cadence rather than a regular meter. Robinson Jeffers, Marianne Moore, and William Carlos Williams are three notable poets who rejected the idea that regular accentual meter is critical to English Poetry. Jeffers experimented with sprung rhythm as an alternative to an accentual rhythm.
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