Reading Poetry
Lesson 1 of 3 6 min +40 XP

Sound & Rhythm

Meter, rhyme, and stanzas.

What you'll learn

  • Understand sound & rhythm
  • Apply it to real examples
  • Check yourself with a quiz
The heartbeat in the line

Read a line of verse aloud and you feel a pulse — da-DUM, da-DUM. Poetry's music comes from that rhythm (meter), the chime of rhyme, and how lines group into stanzas.

The music of verse

Meter is the rhythmic pattern of stresses; rhyme matches end sounds; a stanza is a group of lines, like a paragraph.

Knowledge Check

+10 XP / correct

1. A stanza in a poem is like a…

2. Meter refers to a poem's…