In poetry, the word music means the total of the sounds and rhythms in a poem. That means the rhymes, the chimes, the line endings, and the pauses, just to name a few. But you don't have to know the labels to enjoy the sounds, any more than you have to know the number of a symphony to appreciate the music.

Related to the aural (heard) music is the visual rhythm of the poem — how it looks, its shape, the line lengths, and your response to all that word-sculpture.

Form refers to the mode, shape, or structure in which a poem is written (ballad, sonnet, epic), its rhyme scheme (or lack of one), the way it sounds, and even the way a poem looks — its physical body. Shape conveys feelings, just as sounds do. A poem written in bursts of brief lines strikes you differently from a poem that sprawls across the page in long lines.