In poetry, this pattern of the stressed and unstressed parts of words is called the metre, which is the number and type of rhythmic beats in a line of poetry. In types of poems, such as haikus ...

Breaking the poem into two separate events helps to increase the drama. The final word on each line within a stanza rhymes: hands/lands/stands and crawls/walls/falls. A rhyme scheme of AAA BBB.

These lines come from Robert Frost’s brief essay “The Prerequisites,” on first encountering and not understanding — not fully — an Emerson poem. Some 50 years later, “the poem turned ...