Poetic meter:

Metrical foot: the basic unit of verse meter consisting of any of various fixed combinations or groups of stressed and unstressed or long and short syllables.

iamb: short long: a metrical foot consisting of one short syllable followed by one long syllable, or of one unstressed syllable followed by a stressed syllable (a-bove, de-stroy)

Example of iambic pentameter: If music be the food of love, play on! (Shakespeare, Twelfth Night

trochee: the opposite: long short (Rich-ard, Ma-ry had a lit-tle lamb, top-sy)

anapest: short short long: a metrical foot consisting of two short syllables followed by one long syllable, or of two unstressed syllables followed by a stressed syllable (un-con-firmed, and a fab-u-lous time, and in-ter-vene).

dactyl: the opposite: long short short (ten-der-ly, mer-ri-ly).

spondee: long long (mid-term, a-men)

pyrrhic: short short (the sea | son of | mists)

tribrach: short short short

“In the Germanic languages, stress is the major factor in versification, involving a sequence of stressed syllables in reglar rhythm (in accordance with the stress-timed nature of the language) with unstressed syllables (usually one or two at a time) falling in between.....

[the versification] of Romance languages is primarily syllable-timed, i.e., based on the number of syllables in each line. Verses are found with any number of syllables from two (exceptionally) to twelve...

In modern French, which has no phonemic stress, the favorite longer verse is the twelve-syllable or Alexandrine, with the possibility of a caesura after the fourth, sixth, or eighth syllable and of subdivisions within a six -syllable sequence, thus forming a very flexible type of line.”

from “Prosody,” in the New Harvard Dictionary of Music, p662.