It has long been suspected that melody plays a more important part in the structure of a poem than the broken and irregular contours of verbal pitch-patterns would seem to indicate. The fact that the voice almost never settles for more than one-twentieth of a second on one pitch, the constant and rapid movements of the melody of speech, the impossibility of representing a verbal melody in musical notation—all have tended to obscure the relation of melody to rhythmical structure. It has been observed, however, that poetic melodies tend to arrange themselves roughly in patterns which coincide with the line or the phrase, and that these patterns are often repetitive. It has also been noticed that the comma-rise and period-fall tend to emphasize the rhythm and to prepare a sort of cadence for the end of a poetic passage. To these functions of melody in verse form may now be added a third: riming words tend to be pronounced on the same pitch.