is a word that quite literally means “a fall”. It came to English from a Latin verb that meant the same, cadere, via the Italian nominalising suffix: cadenza. However, nobody thinks of cadence as a kind of precipitous tumble it is supposed to be etymologically. Perhaps this is due to the influence of music(ology), where a cadence is a sequence leading to a stable point. Poetry uses a form of cadence in the last stanza (oh crap! another Italian word, literally meaning ‘a room’, but it ain’t no room in poetry). For example:

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;

Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,

And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.

I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.

Yes, I know. It is a photography blog and I am abusing the reader’s attention by pushing a great poem of a great poet down their throat, but let me say in my defence that this poem is pure cadence. There is no rhyme nor reason to the first three stanzas without the last and it is the last one that makes an argument, a sequence out of them all. Cadence. A point we reach with a click.

Here:

I leave it to you to decipher this 🙂

May the Bug pass you by,
and have a good week.