Literary Devices and Themes in American Literature and Drama Practice Test

Meter names the regular arrangement of stressed and unstressed syllables that gives a poem its rhythm. This pattern is the poem’s rhythm in action, the beat you feel when reading aloud. For example, iambic meter shifts between an unstressed syllable followed by a stressed one, often repeating across a line, producing a steady cadence. This focus on patterning of sound distinguishes meter from other features: end rhyme is about rhyming sounds at line endings, rhyme scheme tracks that rhyming pattern across lines, and a stanza is simply a grouped block of lines. So the term that best describes the rhythmic, patterned flow of stressed versus unstressed syllables is meter.