There are a lot of psychological and physiological music rhythm experiments but very few related to the poetic rhythm. Beat and meter as units of rhythm are the fundamental elements of cognitive mechanisms. Poetic meter may have roots in the mechanisms controlling heart rate, breathing and locomotion which are dominated by brain stem. We designed an experiment to find out if reading verses having different metric structure can affect heart rate variability measures. The subjects were reading pieces of prose and verses in Russian while the HRV measures were being obtained. The results demonstrated that there is relationship between a metric structure of a produced/perceived text and heat rate variability measures. They also pointed out that some acoustic features (syllable duration and accent) correlated with the maximum peaks of the heart rate. The faster rhythm enhanced the heart rate amplitudes. The main finding was that the heart rate is also strongly affected by perceiving a piece of poetry.