Meter (poetry)

Metre (American spelling: meter) describes the regular linguistic sound patterns of verse. Scansion is the analysis of poetry's metrical and rhythmic patterns; prosody is sometimes used to describe poetic meter, and sometimes indicates the analysis of similar aspects of language in linguistics. Meter is part of many formal verse forms.

Spanish poetry

In Spanish poetry, meter is determined solely by the number of syllables in a line. Syllables in Spanish metrics are determined by consonant breaks, not word boundaries, so a single syllable may include multiple words. For example, the line De armas y hombres canto consists of 6 syllables: "De ar" "mas" "y hom" "bres" "can" "to."

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Some common meters in Spanish verse are:

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• Septenary: A line consisting of seven syllables, the sixth being always stressed.
• Octosyllable: A line consisting of eight syllables, the seventh always being stressed. This meter is commonly used in romances, narrative poems similar to English ballads.
• Hendecasyllable: A line consisting of eleven syllables; the sixth and the tenth or the fourth, the eighth and the tenth always being stressed. This meter plays a similar role to pentameter in English verse. It is commonly used in sonnets, among other things.
• Alexandrines: A line consisting of two heptasyllables.