lyric caesura

In prosody, a caesura is a pause within a poetic line that disrupts the regular meter. It can occur anywhere in the line and is often marked by punctuation, though not always. While sometimes used to emphasize the line's structure, it frequently introduces the natural rhythms of speech into the metrical pattern. In older Germanic poetry, caesuras were formal, dividing lines into two halves. Modern prosody distinguishes between masculine caesuras (following a stressed syllable) and feminine caesuras (following an unstressed syllable). The lyric caesura is a type of feminine caesura that occurs where the meter requires an unstressed syllable. Prosody itself is the study of rhythmic and acoustic elements in language, primarily in poetry, examining syllable length, meter, and sound devices.12