agrammar:

But if you don’t feel like picking it up, and like pop music, and just want a good Friday moment of feeling like your old poetry professor was weird and wrong, about everything, maybe especially that poem you wrote about Boston that she hated, and if she’d ever just listened to a pop song she’d have known all of that, well, you can just look at a limerick—which, being “pop” poetry, originally sung, will have the four beats of pop, ticked off inaudibly by some imaginary percussionist back there (playing 3/4, oom-pah-pah, because these are anapests):

(and) There was a young girl from Madras (and a FOUR and)

Who had a most beautiful ass (and a FOUR and)

Not rounded and pink

As you probably think (and)

But gray, with long ears, and ate grass (and a BOOM)

You knew that. Everyone knows there are rests after the first and second lines. Everyone knows there isn’t one, usually, between the third and fourth. Everyone knows there’s basically a rimshot built into the last line—that you finish and the imaginary music goes bah-dump-TISH while everyone gets the joke. I don’t imagine Baker/Chowder is the first person to go and point out that the same thing’s in operation everywhere.

And yet, when they’re trying to teach you simple prosody, a lot of folks will tell you that lines like those are maybe anapestic trimeter—three anapests, three stresses. Which is close to accurate in describing the actual words, but just plain confusing when it comes to describing the actual rhythm. And from there you can just follow that difference out into more complex things like pentameter and metrical variations and triplets and a bunch of other things that might be more simply described by bucket drummers than traditional prosody.

The technical term is, I believe, the “Hickory Dickory Dock Riddim”