Listen to the lecture that goes along with these pages.

As you'll hear, rhythm, often called meter, is at the heart of poetry.

In English there are five patterns of rhythm that are commonly used in poetry. We're only going to worry about iambic.

The iambic rhythm is based on sets of two syllables. The first is unstressed and the second is stressed.

We mark it like this to show which syllable is stressed:

An iambic line has a whole string of words with every second syllable stressed. Here is an illustration:

We identify the number of stresses per line:

Iambic trimeter (3 stresses):

Alternating iambic tetratmeter (4 stresses/line) and trimeter:

Iambic pentameter (5 stresses/line):

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Of course, poetry is all about playing with language, so many poets choose not to follow a strict rhythm at all, and mix their rhythms. Many modern poets don't even use obvious rhythms, but if you listen carefully, you'll often hear some kind of underlying beat.