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,
Triadic-line poetry (1955) and "The Desert Music" (1954) contained examples of this form. This is an extract from "The Sparrow" by Williams: Practical to the end, Triadic-line poetry Triadic-line poetry or stepped line is a long line which "unfolds into three descending and indented parts". Created by William Carlos Williams, it was his "solution to the problem of modern verse" and later was also taken up by poets Charles Tomlinson and Thom Gunn. Williams referred to the prosody of triadic-line poetry as a "variable foot", a metrical device to resolve the conflict between form and freedom in verse. Each of the three