A1

‘Why the tears?’ said a young girl at the junction to her friend.

As raindrops fall upon their silhouette,

My window tinkles on as if to ask,

‘Will you, or not, take her in your arms?’

A2

‘Take my hand.’ Those words echo through my mind, my memory.

I shut my eyes and yet her voice remains,

No hiding from all those regrets of mine,

‘Will you, or not, take me in your arms?’

B1

In that little box that she has left

Sits her rusty sword and broken sca-les.

Was it you or me who’s blindfolded all along?

Matters not now — far too late to judge my hands.

C1

There comes a time when everybody must decide in their minds

Whether to stand or to hide,

To absolve my sins and to lend my hand when I dared not before.

What passed is past! Let not the darkness cloud my heart, as I carve:

‘Tomorrow there’s a new start.

With her, walk on, walk on.’

A3

‘Call my name,’ said the young girl to my ears on tha-t day.

Oh how I wish that this our Sto-ry

Unending too like how the Empress was.

‘Will you, or not, call her by your name?’

B2

In that little box that she has left

Sits her rusty sword and broken sca-les,

And a little note in her own hand saying it’s

‘Up to you now —

Let nobody judge your hands.’

C2

There comes a time when everybody must believe despite all

The damning words you receive,

And now with her gifts I decide to walk her path for evermore.

What passed is past! Let all the darkness now be gone, as I find

In all my dreams a new dawn.

‘For her, walk on, walk on.’

C3

‘There comes a time when everybody must decide what to do

When all your dreams seem to die.’

And so left the young girl who at the junction said these words to me.

Break now the dawn, as all the dark clouds in the skies are all gone,

My fate, my hands, my own path.

‘I shall walk on, walk on.’

English poetry begins with metre. Without metrical writing, the result would be prose 散文, not verse 詩詞.

The soul of the English language, to poets, is the rhythm 節奏. Rhyming 押韻 and word choice 字詞 and all other poetic devices 修辭 follow the basic rhythm of a line.

When the rhythm of each line becomes regular throughout the entire poem, that structure is called the metre, and the art of finding this regularity is called scansion (you 'scan' the lines to find the rhythmic pattern).

Take, as an example, this line:

'From time to time and for as long as it takes.'

If we take 'x' to mean an unstressed beat, and '/' to mean a stressed one, then we'll scan the line as follows:

x / x / x x x / xx /

This isn't regular, as it doesn't have a pattern, so the line is probably prose, not verse.

As a second example, see:

'He bangs the drum and makes a dreadful noise.'

'If winter comes, can Spring be far behind?'

For both lines, the stressed and unstressed beats are regular, following this pattern:

x / x / x / x / x /

Or, five sets of 'weak-strong'. In technical terms, one set of 'weak-strong' is called an 'iamb', and five in Greek is 'pente', so we call these two lines' metre 'iambic pentameter'.

In the case where the poetry needs to fit an existing piece of music, as in the job of a lyricist, the metre of each line would then have to conform with the rhythm of strong- and weak-beats already existent as implied by the melody.

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