For Better for Verse: An interactive learning tool that can help you understand what makes metered poetry in English tick.

Link to U.Va. English Department

Pertinax(1936)

Robert Frost

Let chaos storm!
MeterLet chaos storm!
Let cloud shapes swarm!
MeterLet cloud shapes swarm!
I wait for form.
MeterI wait for form.

Note on line 3:Make the first foot here a trochee if you like by stressing the pronoun “I.” But strict iambics keep better company with the poet’s modest attendance on “form,” which gets the last word with an epigrammatic aplomb that, needing no exclamation point. “Form” is worth the wait, which is lengthened, and strengthened, when the near-homonym “for” loyally heralds its rhyme-cinching arrival.


Rhyme
Show Stress    Foot division    Caesura    Syncopation