However, marking stress is not the same as marking meter. All other aspects of language are present, indeed they are vital to the rhythm of the verse but they are not ordered by the meter. In English (and in many modern languages) the language is ordered by syllabic stress. It is an ordering of language by means of an extremely limited subset of its characteristics. Lewis observes, "f the scansion of a line meant all the phonetic facts, no two lines would scan the same way". The rhythm of language is infinitely varied all aspects of language contribute to it: loudness, pitch, duration, pause, syntax, repeated elements, length of phrases, frequency of polysyllabic words. To understand any form of scansion, it is necessary to appreciate the difference between meter and rhythm. There is even a debate among scholars as to what systems were inherited from the Greek and Roman poetry. Systems of scansion, and the assumptions (often tacit or even subconscious) that underlie them, are so numerous and contradictory that it is often difficult to tell whether differences in scansion indicate opposed metrical theories, conflicting understandings of a line's linguistic character, divergent practical goals, or whether they merely constitute a trivial argument over who has the "better ear" for verse. Over the years, many systems have been established to mark the scansion of a poem. In both cases, the meter often has a regular foot. In English poetry, they are based on the different levels of stress placed on each syllable. In classical poetry, these patterns are quantitative based on the different lengths of each syllable. ʃ ə n/ SKAN-shən, rhymes with mansion verb: to scan), or a system of scansion, is the method or practice of determining and (usually) graphically representing the metrical pattern of a line of verse. An example of scansion over a quote from Alexander Pope
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