sprung rhythm

sprung rhythm, an irregular system of prosody developed by the 19th-century English poet Gerard Manley Hopkins. It is based on the number of stressed syllables in a line and permits an indeterminate number of unstressed syllables. In sprung rhythm, a foot may be composed of from one to four syllables. (In regular English metres, a foot consists of two or three syllables.) Because stressed syllables often occur sequentially in this patterning rather than in alternation with unstressed syllables, the rhythm is said to be “sprung.”

Hopkins claimed to be only the theoretician, not the inventor, of sprung rhythm. He saw it as the rhythm of common English speech and the basis of such early English poems as Piers Plowman and nursery rhymes such as

The first two lines of Hopkins’s “Spring and Fall” provide an example of his use of sprung rhythm:

Identification of stressed and unstressed syllables in poetry using sprung rhythm sometimes differs from reader to reader, and Hopkins’s poetry can diverge from the principles he developed. Sprung rhythm’s partly indeterminate structure makes it a bridge between regular metre and free verse.