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rhythmic break

Meter
Pronunciation

Understanding ARPABET Pronunciation

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The pronunciation guide uses the ARPABET phonetic system—the same system used in speech recognition and text-to-speech applications.

Vowel Examples:
AE1 = cat, bat
EH1 = bed, head
IY1 = see, me
OW1 = go, boat
UW1 = boot, do
Stress Numbers:
0 = no stress (unstressed)
1 = primary stress (loud)
2 = secondary stress (medium)
Example:
AH0 TH IY1 N AH0
= a-THEE-na (Athena)

The stressed syllable (marked with 1) is pronounced louder and clearer than others.

Quick Definition

A momentary interruption in the poem’s expected rhythm to create emphasis or variety

Detailed Definition
Rhythmic break is a deliberate disruption in a poem’s established meter or cadence—through caesura, line break, or syntactic fracture—to signal emotional shift, thematic rupture, or cognitive pause; more jarring than natural variation, this technique (used by Hopkins or contemporary poets exploring trauma) makes silence and irregularity expressive, where the break itself becomes meaningful.
Example
Example in poetry:
Whitman’s "Song of Myself" breaks rhythm for emphasis: "I sound my barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world"; Dickinson uses dashes to create rhythmic breaks; Eliot’s "The Waste Land" uses line breaks to fragment time; Williams’s "This Is Just To Say" uses enjambment as rhythmic break; Plath’s "Lady Lazarus" breaks meter for dramatic effect: "Dying / Is an art".
Additional Notes
Rhythmic break interrupts meter with caesura, enjambment, or silence—to create tension, surprise, or emphasis. It’s a deliberate disruption. Students should scan the line: where does the break occur, and why? How does it affect pace or meaning? Related to “shifting pause.”
Also Known As
Rhythmic caesura Metrical pause Cadential break Temporal gap Poetic pause Separation term
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