Rhyme

In English versification, standard rhyme consists of the repetition,
in the rhyming words, of the last stressed vowel and of all the speech sounds
following that vowel: láte-fáte; fóllow-hóllow.
 

End rhymes, by far the most frequent type, occur at the end of a verseline.
Internal rhymes occur within a verse-line. 

Meter 

the recurrence, in regular units, of a prominent feature in the sequence
of speech-sounds of a language.  

There are four main types of meter  

(1) In classical Greek and Latin, the meter was quantitative; that is, it was established by the relative duration of the utterance of a syllable, and consisted of a recurrent pattern of long and short syllables.  

(2) In French and many other Romance languages, the meter is syllabic, depending
on the number of syllables within a line of verse, without regard to the fall of the stresses.  

(3) In the older Germanic languages, including Old English, the meter is accentual, depending on the number of stressed syllables within a line, without regard to the number of intervening unstressed syllables.  

(4) The fourth type of meter, combining the features of the two preceding types, is
accentual-syllabic, in which the metric units consist of a recurrent pattern of stresses on a recurrent number of syllables. The stress-and-syllable type has been the predominant meter of English poetry since the fourteenth century.
 

In all sustained spoken English we sense a rhythm; In meter, this rhythm is structured into a recurrence of regular—that is, approximately equivalent—units of stress-pattern. Compositions written in meter are also known as verse. 

A foot is the combination of a strong stress and the associated weak stress or stresses which make up the recurrent metric unit of a line. The relatively stronger-stressed syllable is called, for short, "stressed"; the relatively weaker-stressed syllables are called "light," or most commonly, "unstressed."
The four standard feet distinguished in English are:
 

(1) Iambic (the noun is "iamb"): an unstressed syllable followed by a
stressed syllable.  

The cúr / few tolls / the knéll / of par / ting day. (Thomas Gray, "Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard") 


 

(2) Anapestic (the noun is "anapest"): two unstressed syllables followed by a stressed syllable. 

 


The Äs syr / iän came down / like ä wólf / on the fold. /
(Lord Byron, "The Destruction of Sennacherib") 


(3) Trochaic (the noun is "trochee"): a stressed followed by an unstressed syllable.
 

There they / are, my / fif ty / men and / wó men. /
(Robert Browning, "One Word More") 


(4) Dactylic (the noun is "dactyl"): a stressed syllable followed by two  unstressed syllables. 


 

Eve, with her / bas kët, was /
Deep in the / bells and grass. /
(Ralph Hodgson, "Eve") 


Iambs and anapests, since the strong stress is at the end, are called "rising
meter"; trochees and dactyls, with the strong stress at the beginning, are
called "falling meter." Iambs and trochees, having two syllables, are called
"duple meter"; anapests and dactyls, having three syllables, are called "triple
meter." It should be noted that the iamb is by far the commonest English
foot.
Two other feet are often distinguished by special titles, although they
occur in English meter only as variants from standard feet:
 

Spondaic (the noun is "spondee"): two successive syllables with approximately
equal strong stresses, as in each of the first two feet of
this line:
 

Good stróng/ thick stulpë fy/ ing in/cënse smóke./
(Browning, "The Bishop Orders His Tomb")

Pyrrhic (the noun is also "pyrrhic"): a foot composed of two successive
syllables with approximately equal light stresses, as in the second
and fourth feet in this line: 


My way / is to / be gin / with the / be gin ning/
(Byron, Don Juan)
 

A metric line is named according to the number of feet composing it:
 

monometer: one foot
dimeter: two feet
trimeter: three feet
tetrameter: four feet
pentameter: five feet
hexameter: six feet (an Alexandrine is a line of six iambic feet) 

heptameter: seven feet

octameter: eight feet