Poet Alison Chisholm guides you through the language of poetry
A LINE, rather than a number of words, is the unit for calculating the length of a poem. Visually, it occupies a stretch of words across the page, and when spoken aloud it presents a phrase from the music of the poem. If a line is longer than the physical space across the page, it should be indented to ensure that the additional words remain a part of the same line rather than beginning another.