Poetic forms and metre

In short: Poems are usually divided into lines and stanzas and often follow a particular rhythm and rhyme scheme. This shaping is what distinguishes poetry from ordinary prose.

In more detail: In German, as in English, rhythm arises mainly from the alternation of stressed and unstressed syllables. Besides this there are fixed poetic forms with their own rules, but also free verse without a fixed metre or rhyme.

In detail

• Line and stanza: A line (verse) is a single line of a poem, and several lines together form a stanza.
• Rhyme schemes: In couplets two consecutive lines rhyme (aabb), in alternate rhyme every second line rhymes (abab), and in enclosed rhyme one rhyming pair surrounds another (abba).
• Iamb and trochee: The iamb follows the pattern unstressed–stressed, the trochee the pattern stressed–unstressed; both are very common in German.
• Dactyl and anapaest: These three-syllable feet consist of stressed–unstressed–unstressed and unstressed–unstressed–stressed respectively, and often sound lively.
• Sonnet: The classic form has 14 lines, usually divided into two four-line quatrains and two three-line tercets, and was very popular in the Renaissance and Baroque, among other periods.
• Ballad: A ballad tells a usually exciting or dramatic story in verse, combining poetry, narrative and drama.
• Haiku: This short Japanese form traditionally consists of three parts with five, seven and five sound units and often captures an impression of nature.
• Free verse: Since the late 19th and especially in the 20th century, many poets have done without rhyme and fixed metre and shaped the rhythm freely.
• Analysing poems: Looking at the form, sound and imagery of a poem together shows how form and content work together (stilmittel-und-rhetorische-figuren, phonetik-und-lautschrift).