Cannons to left of them

^/ | ^/

We have the so-called pyrrhic foot (пиррихий) when the stress is lifted from a syllable on which the language will not allow stress:

But makes surrender to some thoughtless boy

^/ | ^/ | | ^{/ /}

The insertion in a foot of two stressed syllables makes a foot called a spondee (спондей). It is used instead of an iambus or a trochee:

Roll on, thou deep and dark blue ocean, roll

^{/ /} | ^/ | ^/ | ^/ | ^/

There are some more departures from the norms of classic verse. A syllable may be missing as in the following line from E. Poe’s “The Raven”:

Thrilled me, filled me with fantastic terrors never felt before

^/ | ^/ | | ^/ | ^/ | ^/ | ^/ | ^/

This is called a hypometric line. Other lines in the poem have the full sixteen syllables.

A line with an extra syllable is called hypermetric, as in the Shakespeare’s sonnet:

Then in these thoughts myself almost despising

^/ | ^/ | ^/ | ^/ | ^/ |

The transfer of a part of syntagm from one line to the following one is called enjambment, or the run-on line. This term is used to denote the transfer of a part of a syntagm from one line to the following one, as in the following lines from Byron’s «Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage»:

Fair is proud Seville; let her country boast

Her strength, her wealth, her site of ancient days.

The Stanza. It is the largest unit in verse. Composed of a number of lines the stanza has a definite measure and rhyming system which is repeated throughout the poem.

There are many widely recognized stanza patterns in English poetry. Here are only some of them:

1. couplets – when the last words of two successive lines are rhymed. This is commonly marked aa:

The seed ye sow, another reaps;

The wealth ye find, another keeps;

2. triple rhymes – aaa;

3. cross rhymes – abab;

4. framing or ring rhymes – abba;

5. the Spencerian stanza, named after Edmund Spencer, the 16th century poet who first used this type of stanza. It consists of nine lines, the first eight of which are iambic pentameters and the ninth is one foot longer, that is an iambic hexameter. The rhyming scheme is ababbcbcc;

6. ottava rima – the stanza borrowed from Italian poetry. It is composed of eight iambic pentameters, the rhyming scheme being abababcc. This sanza was used by Philip Sidney and G.Byron;

7. the ballad stanza. This is generally an alternation of iambic tetrameters with iambic dimeters or trimesters, and the rhyming scheme is abcb;

8) the sonnet. The English sonnet is composed of fourteen iambic pentameters with the following rhyming scheme: ababcdcdefefgg, that is three quatrains with cross rhymes and a couplet at the end. The English sonnet, also called the Shakespearean sonnet, was borrowed from Italian poetry, but on English soil it underwent structural and certain semantic changes. The characteristic feature of the English sonnet is the epigram-like last two lines.