Prosody

Prosody is the study of how a poem's sound and movement are shaped by meter, rhythm, stress, pause, and sometimes rhyme and intonation. It looks at the pattern of accents and beats in a line and how those patterns affect the poem's voice, pace, and musical feel.

Writers and readers use prosody to describe why one poem sounds formal, songlike, broken, conversational, or tense.

Example

The WIND / blew COLD / through the TREES
and SET / the DRY / leaves FREE.

The strong and weak stresses give the lines a clear rhythmic pattern.
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Related Definitions

[n] the study of poetic meter and the art of versification
[n] the patterns of stress and intonation in a language
[n] a system of versification

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