What elements do define form structures?
A. There are several components that can define a form, among them: metrics, verse structure, rhyme scheme, repetition, and other odd requirements that can even encompass mood. Metrics Metrics constrain the way that the words are structured within the line. There are four major metric groups: • Accentual – Anglo-Saxon poetry was accentual. The lines were tied together using the tool of alliteration to bind and accent the stresses: Her hair blazed with beauty in the balm of Baldur’s beam. (Okay, it’s not a perfect example.) In accentual poetry, the meter is based on stressed syllables only. You could have four stresses with no unstressed syllables or with twenty, and it would be valid. • Podic – This form dropped the heavy alliteration and added rhyme. It seems accentual-syllabic, but is not quite. They still don’t count the unstressed syllables. • Accentual-Syllabic – This is probably the most common form of modern English verse. (Free verse is actually prose, as are prose poems, so th
