Syllabic verse

Syllabic verse is a poetic form having a fixed or constrained number of syllables per line, while stress, quantity, or tone play a distinctly secondary role — or no role at all — in the verse structure. It is common in languages that are syllable-timed, such as Japanese or modern French or Finnish — as opposed to stress-timed languages such as English, in which accentual verse and accentual-syllabic verse are more common.

Many European languages have significant syllabic verse traditions, notably Italian, Spanish, French, and the Baltic and Slavic languages. These traditions often permeate both folk and literary verse, and have evolved gradually over hundreds or thousands of years; in a sense the metrical tradition is older than the languages themselves, since it (like the languages) descended from Proto-Indo-European.

It is often implied — but it is not true — that word stress plays no part in the syllabic prosody of these languages. Indeed in most of these languages word stress is much less prominent than it is in, say, English or German; nonetheless it is present both in the language and in the meter. Very broadly speaking, syllabic meters in these languages follow the same pattern:

Linguistically, the most significant exceptions to this pattern are in Latvian, Lithuanian, and Serbian verse which, instead of stress, retain the older quantitative markers; that is, they use long and short syllables at the ends of hemistichs, rather than stressed and unstressed.

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