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,
Blank verse "The Watershed" and John Betjeman's "Summoned by Bells". A complete listing is impossible, since a sort of loose blank verse has become a staple of lyric poetry, but it would be safe to say that blank verse is as prominent now as it has been any time in the past three hundred years. The largest English poems as "The Fall of Nineveh" by Edwin Atherstone and "King Alfred" by John Fitchett are written in blank verse. In Germany blank verse was used by Gotthold Ephraim Lessing in the tragedy "Nathan der Weise" ("Nathan the Wise"): Lines are 10 syllables long