Rhythm

Rhythm is the regular alternation of commensurate linguistic units (stressed and unstressed syllables, pauses, intonational segments) that produces the sense of ordered movement of poetic speech in time. Rhythm is deeper and more primary than metre: metre is an ideal scheme, while rhythm is its living, variable embodiment in a particular poem with all its deviations (pyrrhics, spondees, enjambments). It is precisely the tension between the metrical scheme and the actual rhythm that gives verse its expressiveness. Rhythm belongs to prose as well (rhythmic prose) and to free verse, where it rests not on metre but on syntactic and intonational parallelism, as in Whitman or in Ukrainian free verse.