Editing Poetry analysis (section)

===Meter and Rhyme===
One can derive pleasure<ref>Louise Bogan, 'The Pleasures of Formal Poetry', in Reginald Gibbons (ed.), ''The Poet's Work: 29 Poets On The Origins And Practice Of Their Art'' (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1979) {{ISBN|978-0-395-27616-7}}</ref> from two of the most fundamental tools in the poet's toolbox—[[Meter (poetry)|meter]] and [[rhyme]]—without necessarily knowing a lot of terminology. Consider, for example, the first [[stanza]] of [[George Gordon Byron, 6th Baron Byron|Byron]]'s "The Destruction of Sennacherib":

:The Assyrian came down like the wolf on the fold,
:And his cohorts were gleaming in purple and gold;
:And the sheen of their spears was like stars on the sea,
:When the blue wave rolls nightly on deep Galilee.

Byron's use of meter and rhyme is especially evident and rewarding when one reads the lines out loud. The lines have a powerful, rolling, and very evident rhythm, and they rhyme in a way that is impossible to ignore. In other words, the ''physicality'' of the language—how it sounds and feels—accounts for a large measure of the poem's effect. The poem does not have a deep, hidden, [[Symbolism (arts)|symbolic]] meaning. Rather, it is simply pleasurable to read, say, and hear.

Critical terminology becomes useful when one attempts to account for ''why'' the language is pleasurable, and ''how'' Byron achieved this effect. The lines are not simply rhythmic: the rhythm is regular within a line, and is the same for each line. A poem having a regular rhythm (not all poems do) is said to follow a certain [[meter (poetry)|meter]]. In "The Destruction of Sennacherib," each line has the basic pattern of two unstressed syllables followed by a third stressed syllable, with this basic pattern being repeated four times in a line. Those basic patterns are called [[Foot (prosody)|feet]], and this particular pattern (weak weak STRONG) is called an [[anapest]]. A line with four feet is said to be in [[tetrameter]] (''[[Wiktionary:tetra-|tetra-]]'', from the Greek for four). Therefore, this poem is written in ''anapestic tetrameter''. (This process of analyzing a poem's rhythms is called [[Meter (poetry)|scansion]].) The poem also rhymes (not all poems do), and the rhymes follow a pattern (they do not have to). In this case, the rhymes come right next to each other, which emphasizes them, and therefore emphasizes the sound, the physical nature, of the language. The effect of the poem's language derives in part from Byron's choice of an appropriate pattern of rhyme (or [[rhyme scheme]]): these adjacent, rhyming lines are called [[couplet]]s. The sound, the physical nature, of the language is also emphasized by [[alliteration]], as in the repetition of ''s'' sounds in the third line: "And the sheen of their spears was like stars on the sea".