Metre (poetry) words made no difference to the metre. A number of other ancient languages also used quantitative metre, such as Sanskrit and Classical Arabic (but not Biblical Hebrew). Finally, non-stressed languages that have little or no differentiation of syllable length, such as French or Chinese, base their verses on the number of syllables only. The most common form in French is the Alexandrine, with twelve syllables a verse, and in classical Chinese five characters, and thus five syllables. But since each Chinese character is pronounced using one syllable in a certain tone, classical Chinese poetry also had more strictly defined rules,
Caesura Pope's line: Caesura is very important in Polish syllabic verse (as in French alexandrine). Every line longer than eight syllables is divided into two half-lines. Lines composed of the same number of syllables with division in different place are considered to be completely different metrical patterns. For example, Polish alexandrine (13) is almost always divided 7+6. It has been very common in Polish poetry for last five centuries. But the metre 13(8+5) occurs only rarely and 13(6+7) can be hardly found. In Polish accentual-syllabic verse caesura is not so important but iambic tetrametre (very popular today) is usually 9(5+4). Caesura