I suppose, though, that it's fair to say that in English there is a tendency, when natural pronunciation is not to the contrary, to alternate beats and unstressed syllables in an iambic way. The Tychborne poem I quoted, for example, naturally comes across as iambic from the very first line even though all the words are monosyllabic. And there is also a (somewhat stronger) tendency not to let more than two syllables go by without a metrical beat. These tendencies, when combined with the basic cadences of ordinary speech, can give rise to a perceived meter that would garner a surprisingly strong consensus among most readers.
In other poems, multi-syllabic words often help us zero in on the meter because we know the relative stresses of the syllables of those words, and it often takes only a small number of multi-syllabic words to have a metrical ripple effect that encompasses the monosyllabic words as well.
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Linear Mode
