Traditional treatments of folk verse have two disadvantages. First, they focus only on a small number of lines. Second, they pursue derivational rules on a language-specific basis, but lack universal validity. This paper establishes a corpus of 720 lines of Southern Min folk verse in Changhua and provides a non-derivational analysis of the data. The corpus shows a preference for masculine rhythm, which is found in 90.67% of the data. Metrical beat sharing, then, allows feminine lines to be avoided. This paper puts forth a set of metrical constraints under the framework of Prince and Smolensky's (1993) Optimality Theory. The constraints are part of Universal Grammar, but are ranked language-specifically in Changhua folk verse.