cadence

In poetry, cadence describes the fall in pitch of the intonation of the voice, and its modulated inflection with the rise and fall of its sound. Etymology From Middle French cadence, and from Italian cadenza, and from Latin cadentia with the meaning to fall. Cadence in poetry In poetry cadence describes the rhythmic pacing of language to a resolution and was a new idea in 1915 used to describe the subtle rise and fall in the natural flow and pause of ordinary speech where the strong and weak beats of speech fall into a natural order restoring the audible quality to poetry as a spoken art. Cadence verse is non-syllabic resembling music rather than older metrical poetry with a rhythmic curve containing one or more stressed accents and roughly corresponding to the necessity of breathing, the cadence being more rapid and marked than in prose.