One obvious place to look for rhythmicity or periodic patterns is in the performance of poems.

REGULAR STYLE

USA. Sometimes poetry is performed with very strong periodicity. Here is a reading of an English nursery rhyme. It is almost as constrained by metrical timing as the song above.

EEny MEEny MIny MO
CATCH a TIger BY the TOE
IF he HOLlers, LET him GO
EEny MEEny MIny MO.

USA. In the verse above, every OTHER syllable has a beat and is tightly constrained in time. But sometimes only a few prominent syllables (stressed ones) are constrained to provide the beat.

In the example below (Please listen several times), the syllables in caps are temporally constrained to be roughly equidistant, and the others seem to be squeezed in to make the stressed ones line up correctly. Try tapping your finger to each capitalized syllable below. They are not perfectly regular, but fairly close. The speaker speeds up and slows down for artistic effect.

Boris Karloff reading the `Grinch Who Stole Christmas' by Dr. Seuss

And he SNUCK to the ICEbox.
He TOOK the Hu's FEAST
He TOOK the Hu PUDding.
He TOOK the roast BEAST.
He CLEANED out the ICEbox
As QUICK as a FLASH.
Why that GRINCH even TOOK
The last CAN of Hu HASH!

As for `stress', notice the last noun phrase, `Hu hash'. The syllable `Hu' has higher pitch (and therefore sounds like it has greater stress), but `hash' is what lines up in time with GRINCH, TOOK, and CAN.

Last line twice

Here is another poem in a strange language. Can you tell that it IS, in fact, a poem?

CLIP-foreign poem

OTHER PERFORMANCE STYLES

But is ALL poetry performance rhythmic? Not necessarily. In one sophisticated reading style, a poem is read without exaggerating the periodicity. For example, to take a familiar American poem:

`Stopping by the Woods on a Snowy Evening' by Robert Frost

Whose woods these are, I think I know
His house is in the village though

Three 'sophisticated' performance styles

In the `sophisticated' style of performance for 20th century European poetry, the regularity of rhythm is usually masked by the reader. A skilled reader is expected to avoid performance that sounds too regular. The goal of performance is to allow the rhythm to be only implicit. But an `unsophisticated' reading is certainly possible. Check those same lines again, read in a `childish' style.

Whose WOODS these ARE, I THINK I KNOW
His HOUSE is IN the VILLage THOUGH.

Two performances in a 'childish' style.

There are many ways to speak poetry. Some are illustrated below.

Continue for more examples similar to these.