Unlocking the Secret Pulse of Poetry: How Rhythm and Meter Transform Words into Magic
The words rhythm and meter are often used interchangeably, but their meanings are slightly different in the context of poetry. Perinne’s Sound and Sense (aff link) describes this difference clearly and simply: “rhythm is the flow of sound; meter is the patterns in the sounds.”
Scansion
In poetry, meter is determined by accented (stressed) and unaccented (unstressed) syllables. Silence (or pauses) also contributes to a poem’s meter. Scansion is the practice of marking up a poem to reveal its meter. Here is a traditional method of marking up a poem, using Edgar Allan Poe’s “Annabel Lee” as an example:
The character that looks like the bottom half of a circle is called a breve. The breve indicates unstressed syllables, and the slash indicates stressed syllables. You won’t find the breve on your keyboard, but it is available in Microsoft Word by using the Insert –> Symbol function.
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