Final answer:
The basic building blocks for understanding lyric rhythm are rhyming patterns and meters, which involve the pattern of stressed and unstressed syllables that create the 'heartbeat' or beat of a poem.
Step-by-step explanation:
To understand lyric rhythm, we must be familiar with its basic building blocks, which are B) Rhyming patterns and meters. The rhythm of a poem is crafted through the meter, which is the pattern of stressed (/) and unstressed (x) syllables that make up the beat or meter of the poem.
An example of such rhythm in a nursery rhyme is "There was an old woman who lived in a shoe...". A poem's meter is analyzed by scanning lines to identify these syllables, where each complete unit of stressed and unstressed syllables is called a foot.
Rhythm can be likened to the 'heartbeat' of language, where words fall into patterns to create a euphonic or discordant effect. This is often achieved through syllabic emphasis, such as the rising rhythm of an iamb or the falling rhythm of a trochee. In poetry, different metrical patterns, like iambs, trochees, anapests, and dactyls, are combined to create rich and varied rhythms that avoid monotony and mimic the natural cadence of speech.