Abstract Rhythm is a fundamental principle of natural being and a common characteristic among all the arts, and it is the basis on which any work of literature and art is based. This fact justifies the study of poetry rhythm between Al-Mutanabbi and Li Bai, which aims to go into the Arabic and Chinese poetries to describe the manifestations of rhythm in both of them and to reveal the similarities and differences between them. To answer these questions, we ascertained the rhythmic structure in poetry based on previous studies, and had Al-Mutanabbi and Li Bai to be the representa tives of the two poetries, and lined up from both collections of several pairs of poems as samples, provided that they are different in prosodic structure and typical of their form and each pair of them with the same subject. We described the manifestations of rhythm in these samples and analyzed it from two fields: one is traditional prosody, another is rhetorical arts, then we reached some results, the most important of which are: 1- The rhythm of poetry includes the external rhythm and internal rhythm.The external rhythm is derived from the external characteristics of the poetic language, and it has two aspects: one is the auditory rhythm that IX is derived from the phonological characteristics of the language, including the prosodic rhythm and the free rhythm and what the verbal rhetorical arts contribute to, and the other is the visual rhythm that is derived from the written images of the poetic language; and internal rhythm contains the moral rhythm that results from the repetition of meaning and the rhetorical arts that relate to repetition, and emotional rhythm that stems from the eruption of emotion in poetry as it follows the moral rhythm, but they are not united at all times. 2- In terms of the external rhythm, the Arabic and Chinese poetries coincide in the formation of the prosodic rhythm from three circles: the organization, the metre and the rhyme, but they differ in the composition of these circles, and they agree in enhancing the external rhythm through the contrived arts; and in the aspect of the internal rhythm, they agree to achieve and strengthen it by distributing diffterent sentences and unites and contrived arts, but both of them have preference for some of these arts and deviation from others due to the characteristics of the two languages