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,
Line break (poetry) Beginning a line with an uppercase letter when the beginning of the line does "not" coincide with the beginning of a new sentence is referred to by some as "majusculation". (this is an invented term derived from majuscule). The correct term is a coroneted verse. In T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land, where ambiguity abounds, a line break in the opening ("ll". 5–7) starts things off. Because the lines start with capitalized letters, Eliot could be saying "Earth" as the planet or "earth" as the soil. Line break (poetry) A line break in poetry is the termination of the line of