/ strong
A strongly stressed or emphasized syllable.
Stress ↗× weak
An unstressed or relatively weak syllable. Stress can shift with phrasing, meaning, and performance.
• medium
An intentionally loose in-between mark for performance weight; not part of a rigid binary scansion system.
| foot
A boundary between metrical
feet ↗, such as iambs or trochees.
‖ pause
A
caesura ↗: a noticeable pause or break inside a line.
Meter
The recurring pattern of stressed and unstressed syllables.
Meter ↗Scansion
The practice of marking and analyzing a poem’s rhythmic structure.
Scansion ↗Prosody
The broader study of poetic rhythm and metrical structure.
Prosody ↗
These marks describe a reading, not a verdict. English stress is context-sensitive, and good lines often bend or resist a regular meter.
Community poems
The demo library comes from poems.json beside this page. Each contribution needs title, author, text, and license. Optional: tags, source, and excerpt.