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22-814: Brentano's version is written in iambic tetrameter . According to a contemporary author, Schiller's Turandot or the moonbow from William Tell might inspire Clemens Brentano , while he was working at his adaptation. The song may be found in the later songbooks and anthologies ("Mythological library", Schwetschke 's "Nature", etc.). Es ist die wunderschönste Brück', Darüber noch kein Mensch gegangen, Doch ist daran ein seltsam Stück, Daß über ihr die Wasser hangen, Und unter ihr die Leute gehn Ganz trocken, und sie froh ansehn, Die Schiffe segelnd durch sie ziehn, Die Vögel sie durchfliegen kühn; Doch stehet sie im Sturme fest, Kein Zoll noch Weggeld zahlen läßt. There's

44-527: A blunt line becoming pendant in catalexis is Goethe 's poem Heidenröslein , or, in the same metre, the English carol Good King Wenceslas : Another example is the children's song Here We Go Round the Mulberry Bush , of which the first stanza ends as follows: In all of these songs, when they are set to music, there is a lengthening of the penultimate syllable in order to equalise the two lines. However, there

66-485: A comparison between the traditional śloka and the mandākrāntā metre reveals the same type of catalexis. The first line of the Bhagavad Gita scans as follows: whereas the mandākrāntā metre is as follows: A similar phenomenon is also found in classical Persian. For example, the metre based on the choriamb pattern (– u u –) has a shortened form as follows: In Latin and Greek, the rarely used trochaic octonarius

88-417: A faint and fairy bridge, Which none climbs and none touches; No wave nor thunder may that breach, Though water droplets let that clutch. Thereunder people go to and fro, They ford, still being dry and glad; The vessels row and sail across, Do fly the birds above the rain. That bridge withstands the gale and storm, The pass is free of any toll. Iambic tetrameter Iambic tetrameter

110-504: A line consisting of four iambic feet . The word " tetrameter " simply means that there are four feet in the line; iambic tetrameter is a line comprising four iambs, defined by accent. The scheme is thus: (In this case, "x" is an unstressed syllable while "/" is a stressed syllable.) Some poetic forms rely upon the iambic tetrameter, for example triolet , Onegin stanza , In Memoriam stanza , long measure (or long meter ) ballad stanza. The term iambic tetrameter originally applied to

132-450: A mixture, as in the following carol, composed by Cecil Frances Alexander in 1848. The 7-syllable lines are catalectic: It has been argued that across a number of Indo-European languages, when the two types of line are mixed in this way, the shorter line tends to be used as a coda at the end of a period or stanza. It has been argued that catalexis can be divided into two types. (Here "x" stands for an anceps syllable.) An example of

154-427: A strong match between word accent and rhythm, as in the line above. A variation on this metre was the iambic septenarius, or iambic tetrameter catalectic . This was similar but with the last syllable omitted. The example below also comes from Terence: The final syllable of the line could be long or short, but every final syllable counted as long by the principle known as brevis in longo . The term iambic tetrameter

176-546: A traditional hymn of anonymous authorship from the Jewish liturgy.) Catalectic A catalectic line is a metrically incomplete line of verse, lacking a syllable at the end or ending with an incomplete foot . One form of catalexis is headlessness , where the unstressed syllable is dropped from the beginning of the line. A line missing two syllables is called brachycatalectic . Poems can be written entirely in catalectic lines, or entirely in acatalectic (complete) lines, or

198-439: Is a poetic meter in ancient Greek and Latin poetry ; as the name of a rhythm , iambic tetrameter consists of four metra, each metron being of the form | x – u – |, consisting of a spondee and an iamb , or two iambs. There usually is a break in the centre of the line, thus the whole line is: ("x" is a syllable that can be long or short, "–" is a long syllable, and "u" is a short one.) In modern English poetry, it refers to

220-458: Is not catalectic, but the common trochaic septenarius is catalectic: The anapaestic octonarius and anapaestic septenarius differ as follows. When the final syllable is removed, the final element must be a long syllable, not a double short (see Metres of Roman comedy ): Catalexis was common in Greek and Latin meter, and also in ancient Sanskrit verse. Catalectic endings are particularly common where

242-513: Is not enough evidence to tell if a similar phenomenon occurred in Ancient Greek. When a poem is doubly catalectic (brachycatalectic), that is, shortened by two syllables, a blunt ending remains blunt: In languages which use quantitative metres, such as Latin, Ancient Greek, Arabic, Persian, and Sanskrit , the final syllable of any line is anceps , that is, indifferently long or short. According to one view dating back to ancient times, even if

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264-593: The quantitative meter of Classical Greek poetry, in which an iamb consisted of a short syllable followed by a long syllable. Two iambs, or a spondee and an iamb, were joined to make a "metron". In Greek and Latin iambic poetry the first syllable of each iambic metron could optionally be long instead of short. An example in Latin is the hymn Aeterne rerum conditor composed in the 4th century by St Ambrose, which begins: Aetérne rérum cónditór, noctém diémque quí regís, ... "Eternal Creator of (all) things, Who rulest

286-425: The final syllable is prosodically short, it counts as long because of the pause which follows it (see brevis in longo ). Thus, any line ending x – u –, when catalectic, becomes u – x. An example in Ancient Greek is the iambic tetrameter, which in normal and catalectic form is as follows: In classical Arabic, the most commonly used metre, the ṭawīl , has normal and catalectic forms as follows: In Sanskrit ,

308-416: The following from Terence, the break came after the 9th, not the 8th, metrical position: A characteristic of iambic metre in early Latin was that even the short elements in the metre were often replaced with a long syllable, as with tun in fórtunátus , or two short ones, as with mihi above; but if so, they were usually unaccented to give the impression of being short. There was usually therefore quite

330-427: The last foot will be one syllable shorter than the others. For example: The first four metres above, which have 11 syllables each, are commonly used for long masnavi poems, written in rhyming couplets, such as Ferdowsi 's Shahnameh , while the longer metres are used for lyric poems. There is one masnavi metre, however, which has only 10 syllables: Bruce Hayes suggests a rule to explain this, namely that where

352-666: The meter in one long scene in Misanthrope to a 15-syllable catalectic iambic tetrameter recited to an aulos accompaniment. Poem 25 by Catullus is in iambic tetrameter catalectic. Of Catullus' extant 114 or so poems and fragments, this meter appears only in this poem. About 115 different metres are used in Persian poetry, but many of them are rare. The common ones are about 30 in number. Almost all Persian metres are made up of repeated patterns of three, four, or eight syllables, and this makes it easy to see that some metres are catalectic, since

374-400: The night and day" The two lines above consist of the following rhythm, and joined make a tetrameter: Latin poetry was quantitative, i.e. based on syllable length not stress accent, and in places the word-accent does not match the metrical accent (e.g. noctém and regís ). In Ambrose's hymn, there is a strong break at the end of each half of the tetrameter, so that it is usual to write

396-405: The rhythm of the verse is dactylic ( – u u ), trochaic ( – u ), or anapestic ( u u – ); they tend to be associated with the end of a strophe or period, so much so that it can almost be said that acatalectic forms cannot end a period. In classical verse, the final syllable of a line always counted as long, so that if a dactyl ( – u u ) is made catalectic, it becomes a spondee ( – – ). Ancient poetry

418-534: The text (i.e., missing syllable) one often finds lengthening signs. In two cases in To Helios, this appears to be a three-note melisma. It is possible that ancient use of catalexis indicated some form of melody or continued singing in place of the missing syllables. In ancient Greek drama, catalectic meters may have been associated with a male aulete or had some other special use. For example, of Menander 's surviving plays, almost all are in iambic trimeters. He changed

440-475: The two halves of the verse on separate lines. The iambic tetrameter was one of the metres used in the comedies of Plautus and Terence in the early period of Latin literature (2nd century BC). This kind of tetrameter is also known as the iambic octonarius, because it has eight iambic feet. There were two varieties. One had a break at the end of the second metron as in Ambrose's hymn. In some lines, however, such as

462-439: Was adopted to describe a similar metre in accentual-syllabic verse , as composed in English, German, Russian, and other languages. Here, iamb refers to an unstressed syllable followed by a stressed syllable. A line of iambic tetrameter consists of four such feet in a row: ( Christopher Marlowe , " The Passionate Shepherd to His Love ") ( Emanuel Schikaneder , libretto to The Magic Flute ) (the opening line of Adon Olam ,

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484-401: Was often performed to music, and the question arises of what music accompanied a catalectic ending. A few ancient Greek poems survive with authentic musical notation. Four of these are by Mesomedes (early second century CE). Secondary sources of Mesomedes' poems To Helios and To Nemesis are in a catalectic meter known as apokrota "sonorous." In each case, in place of the missing short element of

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