Accent (poetry)

In poetry, accent refers to the stressed syllable of a polysyllabic word, or a monosyllabic word that receives stress because it belongs to an "open class" of words (noun, verb, adjective, adverb) or because of "contrastive" or "rhetorical" stress. In basic analysis of a poem by scansion, accents are represented with a slash ("/"). There is generally one accent in each foot for examples Be-'hold/her,'sin//gle'in/the 'field Yon 'sol-/i-'tar/-y 'high-/land 'lass! 'Reap-ing/and 'sing/-ing 'by/her-'self; 'Stop here/or 'gent-/ly 'pass. here 'mark is symbolizing the stress or accent mark