What Is Metrical Poetry

Thu, 30 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

¶Assumed audience

Reading level: comfortable with prose; willing to read poems aloud and listen to them.
Background: has read The Line and the Break or otherwise understands the line as poetry’s basic unit.
Goal: hear what makes a poem metrical, recognize the major metrical systems, and understand what metrical poetry does that free verse does not.

¶A poem is metrical when its line keeps a bargain

A metrical poem is one whose lines have been counted in advance. Before the poet begins, a pattern has been chosen — a number of stresses, a number of syllables, a fixed alternation of stressed and unstressed — and each line is written to keep a near-bargain with that pattern. The reader, hearing the first few lines, learns the pattern. After that, every line lands either inside the pattern, just outside it, or against it, and each landing has expressive force.

Metrical-Poetry on emsenn.net

What Is Metrical Poetry

¶Assumed audience

¶A poem is metrical when its line keeps a bargain