A beat is one of a fixed number of prosodically prominent syllables in a line of metrical verse; in the performance of isoictic and ictosyllabic verse, beats will tend to recur at roughly regular intervals of time. In some kinds of verse a beat can also fall on silence (a rest), represented below by ‘<!>’:
Hickory dickory dock! <!>
The mouse ran up the clock. <!>
The clock struck one, the mouse ran down,
Hickory dickory dock! <!>
In ictothetic verse the beats, though still present, are less insistent and less regularly …
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