Wherefore Art Thou Romeo? How Reciting Verse Reduces Stress
Synchronizing breath and heart rate by speaking poetry relaxes the mind.
Posted March 9, 2026 | Reviewed by Lybi Ma
Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer / The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune / Or to take arms against a sea of troubles, / And by opposing end them? The benefits of reciting poetry were not clear to me as a schoolboy forced to memorize verse by Shakespeare or Victor Hugo and voice it verbatim before a strict teacher, in front of classmates eager to catcall when I floundered or forgot a line (or worse, when I had to admit I hadn't memorized the poem at all). But it seems that reciting, or even just reading verse aloud—outside of 7th grade at least—can provide concrete benefits for our state of mind. This was made clear in a European research project that showed reciting verse aloud results in a significant synchronization of heart rate and respiration to the spoken words, which in turn lowers mental stress . In the words of the study, speaking in verse strongly affected respiratory sinus arrhythmia, or RSA, an indicator of synchronization, in a way that regular breathing or conversation did not. Regulating and slowing the pace of breathing through recitation was responsible for the lowering of stress. In an interview with the BBC , one of the study's authors, Dietrich von Bonin of the Swiss Association of Art Therapies, asserted that five minutes of reading rhythmic poetry aloud can relax the mind better than deliberately slow-paced breathing, which, of course, is beneficial on its own for reducing anxiety . The European researchers studied people reciting ancient Greek texts, which historically were often performed and sung as much as recited; the results of the study might not surprise those who have acted in or recited plays, such as Shakespeare's, written in iambic pentameter —lines consisting of iambs (two syllables, with accent usually on the second) repeated five times, as in "But soft / what light / through yon - / der win -/ dow breaks ?" A line written in iambic pentameter is just short enough for an actor to speak in one breath (Try it: "It is / the East / and Ju - / liet is / the sun ." Or, 'We are / such stuff / as dreams / are made / on, and [breath] / our litt- /le life / is round- / ed with / a sleep .' Even more interestingly, the accents in a sentence written in iambic pentameter conform to the rhythm—ba- dum / ba- dum —of the heart of anyone reciting it. While it's unlikely that an actor performing Romeo and Juliet on stage in front of an audience will be entirely free of stress, it is worth considering that one's physiological link to rhythmic verse might provide a measure of psychological security while acting—as in, "Even my body is marking time to the lines"—and a corresponding decrease in stagefright or general anxiety. Given how important it is in a scene—many coaches will tell you this—for an actor to perform in synch with the body, it seems reasonable to speculate that speaking lines which beat like your heart as they fit to your breathing might boost the power of a performance overall.
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George Michelsen Foy is an essayist and novelist. He teaches creative writing at NYU. His latest non-fiction book, Run the Storm: A Savage Hurricane, a Brave Crew, and the Wreck, came out in May 2018 with Scribner.
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This article is part of the Bringwise Psychology Journal — daily insights on human behavior, mental health, and personal growth.