Metre (poetry)

Oh, hello! Today we will talk about poetry and something called meter. Do you know what a poem is? It's like a little story that is written down and can be sung or spoken out loud. Poets use something called meter to make sure that their poems sound nice when you say them out loud.

Meter is like a beat, a rhythm, or a pattern of stressed and unstressed sounds in the words of the poem. It's like when you clap your hands to a song or when you dance to music. Sometimes words in a poem sound louder and stronger, and sometimes they sound quieter and weaker. That's what poets mean when they say "stressed" or "unstressed" sounds.

There are many different types of meter. One of the most common is iambic meter – this is when the first syllable in a word is unstressed, and the second syllable is stressed. For example, the word "hello" has two syllables, and the stress is on the second syllable: "heLLO!"

In a poem, you can have lots of words with different numbers of syllables, and they might all have different stresses. Poets have to be very clever and use their words carefully to create a pattern of sounds that makes the poem sound good when you say it out loud.

So, when you hear someone reciting a poem, try to listen for the patterns of stressed and unstressed sounds, and see if you can hear the meter. It will help you understand the poem better and appreciate all the work the poet put into creating it.