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,
Fourteener (poetry) (p. 224). In a more extended analysis (pp. 231–2), he comments: The medial break in the alexandrine, though it may do well enough in French, becomes intolerable in a language with such a tyrannous stress-accent as ours: the line struts. The fourteener has a much pleasanter movement, but a totally different one: the line dances a jig. The poets Surrey, Tuberville, Gascoigne, Balassone, Golding and others all used the Poulter's Measure, the rhyming fourteener with authority. Fourteener (poetry) In poetry, a fourteener is a line consisting of 14 syllables, which are usually made of seven iambic feet for which the