The oral origins of early written verse can often be detected by the presence of repeated formulas and stock phrases which aid the mnemonic effect of the metre. There are charms and riddles in Old English, as well as heroic poetry. Red sky at night, shepherd's delight, Red sky in the morning, shepherd's warning. In fourteen hundred and ninety-two Columbus sailed the ocean blue. The contemporary world is rich in verse.
Children make up jingles about people and places as well as repeating traditional nursery rhymes.
Advertisers use the power of verse and, through commercial media, have adapted orality and combined it with the pictorial, so that advertising jingles have, while they last, a role comparable to the nursery rhyme. Verse can be spontaneous or planned, ephemeral or enduring. How it works is described by prosody , which discerns and states the patterns. In addition, contemporary linguistic study can aid understanding of how verse works, especially within the field of stylistics , pointing out how verse serves to isolate and emphasize such features of everyday language as rhythm and tone, figurative usage, grammatical form, and the meanings of words. See Poetry , Prosody , Stylistics .