Misplaced Pages

#221778

48-508: Long metre or long measure , abbreviated as L.M. or LM , is a poetic metre consisting of four line stanzas , or quatrains , in iambic tetrameter with alternate rhyme pattern ABAB. The term is also used in the closely related area of hymn metres . When the poem is used as a sung hymn, the metre of the text is denoted by the syllable count of each line; for long metre, the count is denoted by 8.8.8.8, 88.88, or 88 88, depending on style. Poets and composers have used long metre for more than

96-497: A caesura . Dactylic pentameter is never used in isolation. Rather, a line of dactylic pentameter follows a line of dactylic hexameter in the elegiac distich or elegiac couplet , a form of verse that was used for the composition of elegies and other tragic and solemn verse in the Greek and Latin world, as well as love poetry that was sometimes light and cheerful. An example from Ovid 's Tristia : The Greeks and Romans also used

144-463: A trochee ( daa-duh ). The initial syllable of either foot is called the ictus , the basic "beat" of the verse. There is usually a caesura after the ictus of the third foot. The opening line of the Aeneid is a typical line of dactylic hexameter: In this example, the first and second feet are dactyls; their first syllables, "Ar" and "rum" respectively, contain short vowels, but count as long because

192-529: A dactyl, then two more trochees. In the Sapphic stanza , three hendecasyllabics are followed by an "Adonic" line, made up of a dactyl and a trochee. This is the form of Catullus 51 (itself an homage to Sappho 31 ): The Sapphic stanza was imitated in English by Algernon Charles Swinburne in a poem he simply called Sapphics : The metrical system of Classical Arabic poetry, like those of classical Greek and Latin,

240-487: A libation to Thee this beginning of (my) hymns." However, in most Greek and Latin poetry, the spondee typically does not provide the basis for a metrical line in poetry . Instead, spondees are found as irregular feet in meter based on another type of foot. For example, the epics of Homer and Virgil are written in dactylic hexameter . This term suggests a line of six dactyls , but a spondee can be substituted in most positions. The first line of Virgil's Aeneid has

288-400: A line with six iambic feet. Sometimes a natural pause occurs in the middle of a line rather than at a line-break. This is a caesura (cut). A good example is from The Winter's Tale by William Shakespeare ; the caesurae are indicated by '/': In Latin and Greek poetry, a caesura is a break within a foot caused by the end of a word. Each line of traditional Germanic alliterative verse

336-542: A millennium: Venantius Fortunatus ( c.  530 – c. 600/609) wrote " Vexilla regis ", and probably also wrote " Quem terra, pontus, aethera ", both of which are in long metre. Metrical psalters include many such tunes, some of which are still sung today, such as "All people that on Earth do dwell", a paraphrase of Psalm 100 sung to a tune that first appeared in the Genevan Psalters of 16th century. Many church hymns are also based on long metre tunes, such as

384-461: A non-trivial case). The most famous writers of heroic couplets are Dryden and Pope . Another important metre in English is the common metre , also called the "ballad metre", which is a four-line stanza, with two pairs of a line of iambic tetrameter followed by a line of iambic trimeter ; the rhymes usually fall on the lines of trimeter, although in many instances the tetrameter also rhymes. This

432-471: A number of lyric metres, which were typically used for shorter poems than elegiacs or hexameter. In Aeolic verse , one important line was called the hendecasyllabic , a line of eleven syllables. This metre was used most often in the Sapphic stanza , named after the Greek poet Sappho , who wrote many of her poems in the form. A hendecasyllabic is a line with a never-varying structure: two trochees, followed by

480-399: A poem's metre is to use a concatenation of various derivations of the verbal root F-ʿ-L (فعل). Thus, the following hemistich قفا نبك من ذكرى حبيبٍ ومنزلِ Would be traditionally scanned as: فعولن مفاعيلن فعولن مفاعلن That is, Romanized and with traditional Western scansion: Al-Kʰalīl b. ˀAḫmad al-Farāhīdī's contribution to the study of Arabic prosody is undeniably significant: he was

528-406: A syllable to end in more than one consonant or a consonant to occur in the same syllable after a long vowel. In other words, syllables of the type -āk- or -akr- are not found in classical Arabic. Each verse consists of a certain number of metrical feet ( tafāʿīl or ʾaǧzāʾ ) and a certain combination of possible feet constitutes a metre ( baḥr ). The traditional Arabic practice for writing out

SECTION 10

#1733086294222

576-414: Is tetrameter ; five is pentameter ; six is hexameter , seven is heptameter and eight is octameter . For example, if the feet are iambs, and if there are five feet to a line, then it is called an iambic pentameter . If the feet are primarily dactyls and there are six to a line, then it is a dactylic hexameter . In classical Greek and Latin, however, the name " iambic trimeter " refers to

624-495: Is based on the weight of syllables classified as either "long" or "short". The basic principles of Arabic poetic metre Arūḍ or Arud ( Arabic : العروض al-ʿarūḍ ) Science of Poetry ( Arabic : علم الشعر ʿilm aš-šiʿr ), were put forward by Al-Farahidi (718 - 786 CE) who did so after noticing that poems consisted of repeated syllables in each verse. In his first book, Al-Ard ( Arabic : العرض al-ʿarḍ ), he described 15 types of verse. Al-Akhfash described one extra,

672-451: Is classified according to the same system as Classical metre with an important difference. English is an accentual language, and therefore beats and offbeats (stressed and unstressed syllables) take the place of the long and short syllables of classical systems. In most English verse, the metre can be considered as a sort of back beat, against which natural speech rhythms vary expressively. The most common characteristic feet of English verse are

720-469: Is divided into two half-lines by a caesura. This can be seen in Piers Plowman : By contrast with caesura, enjambment is incomplete syntax at the end of a line; the meaning runs over from one poetic line to the next, without terminal punctuation. Also from Shakespeare's The Winter's Tale : Poems with a well-defined overall metric pattern often have a few lines that violate that pattern. A common variation

768-435: Is equivalent to two morae. A long syllable contains either a long vowel, a diphthong , or a short vowel followed by two or more consonants. Various rules of elision sometimes prevent a grammatical syllable from making a full syllable, and certain other lengthening and shortening rules (such as correption ) can create long or short syllables in contexts where one would expect the opposite. The most important Classical metre

816-407: Is often compared to a musical measure and the long and short syllables to whole notes and half notes. In English poetry, feet are determined by emphasis rather than length, with stressed and unstressed syllables serving the same function as long and short syllables in classical metre. The basic unit in Greek and Latin prosody is a mora , which is defined as a single short syllable. A long syllable

864-545: Is often considered alien to English). The use of foreign metres in English is all but exceptional. The most frequently encountered metre of English verse is the iambic pentameter , in which the metrical norm is five iambic feet per line, though metrical substitution is common and rhythmic variations are practically inexhaustible. John Milton 's Paradise Lost , most sonnets , and much else besides in English are written in iambic pentameter. Lines of unrhymed iambic pentameter are commonly known as blank verse . Blank verse in

912-475: Is often to slow the line down and to represent slow movement. Thus Alexander Pope writes, in a poem illustrating how the sound of the words should imitate their meaning: When Ajax strives, some Rock's vast Weight to throw, The Line too labours, and the Words move slow; In the first line above, most of the syllables, even those in weak positions, are long and heavy: "A-jax strives some Rock's vast weight"; only

960-399: Is the dactylic hexameter , the metre of Homer and Virgil. This form uses verses of six feet. The word dactyl comes from the Greek word daktylos meaning finger , since there is one long part followed by two short stretches. The first four feet are dactyls ( daa-duh-duh ), but can be spondees ( daa-daa ). The fifth foot is almost always a dactyl. The sixth foot is either a spondee or

1008-420: Is the dactylic pentameter . This was a line of verse, made up of two equal parts, each of which contains two dactyls followed by a long syllable, which counts as a half foot. In this way, the number of feet amounts to five in total. Spondees can take the place of the dactyls in the first half, but never in the second. The long syllable at the close of the first half of the verse always ends a word, giving rise to

SECTION 20

#1733086294222

1056-449: Is the inversion of a foot, which turns an iamb ("da-DUM") into a trochee ("DUM-da"). A second variation is a headless verse, which lacks the first syllable of the first foot. A third variation is catalexis , where the end of a line is shortened by a foot, or two or part thereof – an example of this is at the end of each verse in Keats' "La Belle Dame sans Merci": Most English metre

1104-625: Is the metre of most of the Border and Scots or English ballads. In hymnody it is called the "common metre", as it is the most common of the named hymn metres used to pair many hymn lyrics with melodies, such as Amazing Grace : Emily Dickinson is famous for her frequent use of ballad metre: Versification in Classical Sanskrit poetry is of three kinds. Standard traditional works on metre are Pingala's Chandaḥśāstra and Kedāra's Vṛttaratnākara . The most exhaustive compilations, such as

1152-547: The Good Friday hymn " When I Survey the Wondrous Cross ". Related to long metre are other metres: long metre double, 88 88 88 88, as in the traditional Irish tune "St. Patrick", which has been used with the hymn "I bind unto myself today", " St. Patrick's Breastplate ", translated by Cecil Frances Alexander ; and long particular metre, 88 88 88, as in the tune "Melita", composed by John Bacchus Dykes , which has been used with

1200-408: The hendecasyllable favoured by Catullus and Martial, which can be described as: x x — ∪ ∪ — ∪ — ∪ — — (where "—" = long, "∪" = short, and "x x" can be realized as "— ∪" or "— —" or "∪ —") Macron and breve notation: – = stressed/long syllable , ◡ = unstressed/short syllable If the line has only one foot, it is called a monometer ; two feet, dimeter ; three is trimeter ; four

1248-704: The iamb in two syllables and the anapest in three. (See Metrical foot for a complete list of the metrical feet and their names.) The number of metrical systems in English is not agreed upon. The four major types are: accentual verse , accentual-syllabic verse , syllabic verse and quantitative verse . The alliterative verse found in Old English, Middle English, and some modern English poems can be added to this list, as it operates on somewhat different principles than accentual verse. Alliterative verse pairs two phrases (half-lines) joined by alliteration; while there are usually two stresses per half-line, variations in

1296-542: The 16th. A short syllable contains a short vowel with no following consonants. For example, the word kataba, which syllabifies as ka-ta-ba , contains three short vowels and is made up of three short syllables. A long syllable contains either a long vowel or a short vowel followed by a consonant as is the case in the word maktūbun which syllabifies as mak-tū-bun . These are the only syllable types possible in Classical Arabic phonology which, by and large, does not allow

1344-536: The 20th and the 21st centuries, numerous scholars have endeavored to supplement al-Kʰalīl's contribution. Spondee Sometimes libations were accompanied by hymns in spondaic rhythm, as in the following hymn by the Greek poet Terpander (7th century BC), which consists of 20 long syllables: Ζεῦ πάντων ἀρχά, πάντων ἀγήτωρ, Ζεῦ, σοὶ σπένδω ταύτᾱν ὕμνων ἀρχάν. Zeû pántōn arkhá, pántōn āgḗtōr, Zeû, soì spéndō taútān húmnōn arkhán. "Zeus, Beginning of all things, Leader of all things, Zeus, I make

1392-442: The English language is most famously represented in the plays of William Shakespeare and the great works of Milton, though Tennyson ( Ulysses , The Princess ) and Wordsworth ( The Prelude ) also make notable use of it. A rhymed pair of lines of iambic pentameter make a heroic couplet , a verse form which was used so often in the 18th century that it is now used mostly for humorous effect (although see Pale Fire for

1440-535: The Western world and elsewhere is based on patterns of syllables of particular types. The familiar type of metre in English-language poetry is called qualitative metre , with stressed syllables coming at regular intervals (e.g. in iambic pentameters , usually every even-numbered syllable). Many Romance languages use a scheme that is somewhat similar but where the position of only one particular stressed syllable (e.g.

1488-471: The accomplished scholar cannot utilize and apply it with ease and total confidence. Dr. ˀIbrāhīm ˀAnīs, one of the most distinguished and celebrated pillars of Arabic literature and the Arabic language in the 20th century, states the issue clearly in his book Mūsīqā al-Sʰiˁr: “I am aware of no [other] branch of Arabic studies which embodies as many [technical] terms as does [al-Kʰalīl’s] prosody, few and distinct as

Long metre - Misplaced Pages Continue

1536-447: The actual use of metres and forms of versification are both known as prosody . (Within linguistics , " prosody " is used in a more general sense that includes not only poetic metre but also the rhythmic aspects of prose , whether formal or informal, that vary from language to language, and sometimes between poetic traditions.) An assortment of features can be identified when classifying poetry and its metre. The metre of most poetry of

1584-450: The fifth: Spondees can also add solemnity, as in the following lines where Dido , Queen of Carthage, curses Aeneas after he has abandoned her. The first line begins with three spondees, the second with four: Only two hexameter lines in Latin poetry use spondees throughout the verse. One is by Ennius : The other is in an elegiac couplet in the last poem of Catullus (116), perhaps mocking

1632-439: The first scholar to subject Arabic poetry to a meticulous, painstaking metrical analysis. Unfortunately, he fell short of producing a coherent theory; instead, he was content to merely gather, classify, and categorize the primary data—a first step which, though insufficient, represents no mean accomplishment. Therefore, al-Kʰalīl has left a formulation of utmost complexity and difficulty which requires immense effort to master; even

1680-478: The hymn " Eternal Father, strong to save ", the Navy Hymn, by William Whiting . Metre (poetry) In poetry , metre ( Commonwealth spelling ) or meter ( American spelling ; see spelling differences ) is the basic rhythmic structure of a verse or lines in verse . Many traditional verse forms prescribe a specific verse metre, or a certain set of metres alternating in a particular order. The study and

1728-437: The last foot, "to throw", is a true iamb. The final foot of the second line "move slow" is another spondee replacing an iamb. John Masefield also uses spondees effectively in the line: Dirty British / coaster with a / salt-caked / smoke-stack Here the last four syllables make two spondees, contrasting with the eight short syllables in the first two feet. The length and weight of the last four syllables derives partly from

1776-455: The last) needs to be fixed. The alliterative metre of the old Germanic poetry of languages such as Old Norse and Old English was radically different, but was still based on stress patterns. Some classical languages, in contrast, used a different scheme known as quantitative metre , where patterns were based on syllable weight rather than stress. In the dactylic hexameters of Classical Latin and Classical Greek , for example, each of

1824-435: The meters are: al-Kʰalīl’s disciples employed a large number of infrequent items, assigning to those items certain technical denotations which—invariably—require definition and explanation. …. As to the rules of metric variation, they are numerous to the extent that they defy memory and impose a taxing course of study. …. In learning them, a student faces severe hardship which obscures all connection with an artistic genre—indeed,

1872-465: The metre of a verse can be described as a sequence of feet , each foot being a specific sequence of syllable types – such as relatively unstressed/stressed (the norm for English poetry) or long/short (as in most classical Latin and Greek poetry). Iambic pentameter , a common metre in English poetry, is based on a sequence of five iambic feet or iambs , each consisting of a relatively unstressed syllable (here represented with "˘" above

1920-521: The modern ones by Patwardhan and Velankar contain over 600 metres. This is a substantially larger repertoire than in any other metrical tradition. The metrical "feet" in the classical languages were based on the length of time taken to pronounce each syllable, which were categorized according to their weight as either "long" syllables or "short" syllables (indicated as dum and di below). These are also called "heavy" and "light" syllables, respectively, to distinguish from long and short vowels. The foot

1968-450: The most artistic of all—namely, poetry. ………. It is in this fashion that [various] authors dealt with the subject under discussion over a period of eleven centuries: none of them attempted to introduce a new approach or to simplify the rules. ………. Is it not time for a new, simple presentation which avoids contrivance, displays close affinity to [the art of] poetry, and perhaps renders the science of prosody palatable as well as manageable?” In

Long metre - Misplaced Pages Continue

2016-419: The number of stresses do occur. Accentual verse focuses on the number of stresses in a line, while ignoring the number of offbeats and syllables; accentual-syllabic verse focuses on regulating both the number of stresses and the total number of syllables in a line; syllabic verse only counts the number of syllables in a line; quantitative verse regulates the patterns of long and short syllables (this sort of verse

2064-547: The number of syllables only. The most common form in French is the Alexandrin , with twelve syllables a verse, and in classical Chinese five characters, and thus five syllables. But since each Chinese character is pronounced using one syllable in a certain tone , classical Chinese poetry also had more strictly defined rules, such as thematic parallelism or tonal antithesis between lines. In many Western classical poetic traditions,

2112-458: The pattern dactyl-dactyl-spondee-spondee-dactyl-spondee: Most of Virgil's lines, like the above, are a mixture of dactyls and spondees. However, sometimes he will begin a line with three or four spondees for special effect, such as the following, which describes how Aeneas and his companion made their way slowly down a dark passage into the Underworld. In this line all the feet are spondaic except

2160-556: The poetic style of his addressee: In Latin and Greek meter spondees are easily identified because the distinction between long and short syllables is unambiguous. In English meter indisputable examples are harder to find because metrical feet are identified by stress, and stress is a matter of interpretation. For example, the first part of this line from Shakespeare's Troilus and Cressida (in iambic pentameter ) would normally be interpreted as two spondees: Crý, crý! Tróy búrns, or élse let Hélen gó. The effect of spondees in verse

2208-664: The six feet making up the line was either a dactyl (long-short-short) or a spondee (long-long): a "long syllable" was literally one that took longer to pronounce than a short syllable: specifically, a syllable consisting of a long vowel or diphthong or followed by two consonants. The stress pattern of the words made no difference to the metre. A number of other ancient languages also used quantitative metre, such as Sanskrit , Persian , Old Church Slavonic and Classical Arabic (but not Biblical Hebrew ). Finally, non-stressed languages that have little or no differentiation of syllable length, such as French or Chinese, base their verses on

2256-562: The syllable) followed by a relatively stressed one (here represented with "/" above the syllable) – "da-DUM"="˘ /": This approach to analyzing and classifying metres originates from Ancient Greek tragedians and poets such as Homer , Pindar , Hesiod , and Sappho . However some metres have an overall rhythmic pattern to the line that cannot easily be described using feet. This occurs in Sanskrit poetry; see Vedic metre and Sanskrit metre . It also occurs in some Western metres, such as

2304-445: The vowels are both followed by two consonants. The third and fourth feet are spondees, the first of which is divided by the main caesura of the verse. The fifth foot is a dactyl, as is nearly always the case. The final foot is a spondee. The dactylic hexameter was imitated in English by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow in his poem Evangeline : Notice how the first line: Follows this pattern: Also important in Greek and Latin poetry

#221778