Take five words all starting with the same letter,they don't have to make sense,and repeat them over and over. You will notice that one word tends to get the emphasis.This is the "sounding off" that is the essence of a poems definition. The sound echoes in your ears,it resonnates in a place all by itself.A person must understand this type of sounding first before other types of sounding can be defined.

If I had a line of five words all starting with the same letter, would different people percieve the same word as the one having emphasis? If most all perceive the same word as having emphasis, and a few do not, does that mean the few do not have an ear for poetry? Just some food for thought. Curious cats can cause confusion. hmmm. jon

Now therin lies the rub. When you draw a picture certain clues tell you if an object is closer or further away. We use those visual clues to interpret the depths that we otherwise would just have to guess at. There are audio clues that also tell us which word to accent. Generally hard vowels are pushed to the front, the long a,o,i and so forth. The soft vowels receed. In consonnance the point of the mouth that produces the sound indicates how hard the chime will be. An "R" produced in the front of the mouth will chime stronger than an "l","RA" (ray) will chime stronger than "RE"(reh). Most people tend to stress words the same. Dialects still have the same stresses but the phonemes the short letter combinations are pronounced differently. Try the nonsense phrase Bay Bi Bi Boh Bi Beh and you find the Bay and the Boh coming to the front. That's the chime and a New Englander might pronounce it different than a Texan, but the same words would still ring out.

I pronounced "Bay Bi Bi Boh Bi Beh" with "Bay" and "Beh" getting the most stress, not "Bay" and "Boh." The reason is, I took that phrase and unconsciously treated it as a sentence. I had to repeat it a few times to see "where I went wrong." In English, we can tell if the speaker is stating something or asking a question not just by word order, but by how they stress the last word of a sentence. Say these two sentences out loud: You went for a walk today. You went for a walk today? In the second example, you probably put some emphasis on the word "today" and your voice rose on the last syllable to indicate this was a question. You can sometimes pick out someone who reads and writes English well but isn't as practiced at speaking it because all the words are pronounced properly but the rhythm is off. The harder vowels and consonents do chime out more, but just keep in mind that sentence construction will also affect how the words sound out. Not trying to be a wet blanket .... ;-)

I wasn't inferring any rising inflection on the last word. Heaven's Bi is as in bits, not as in bite. Don't get me going on natural cesura's occurring on the forth syllable...I ain't ready for that yet. I was thinking in terms of normal speech.

Fully understood. I just look at things a bit differently. I couldn't help but sound out that phrase as a sentence, so my results were atypical. If anyone else gets picky, you can say, "but you're hearing the sentence rhythm, not the individual words/sounds." Cheers!

The parsing of the individual sounds is what makes the meter. I'm aiming in that direction I just haven't got there yet...Try the infamous "Doo wah diddy diddy dum diddy doo"and see if you come out with /././. //./ or .//././/./ thelong "oo" and the "ah" are in direct competition with the "D" consonnance.

One of my pet peeves: someone needs to check the definitions of imply and infer.