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Dactylic tetrameter is a metre in poetry. [1] It refers to a line consisting of four dactylic feet. "Tetrameter" simply means four poetic feet. Each foot has a stressed syllable followed by two unstressed syllables, the opposite of an anapest, sometimes called antidactylus to reflect this fact.
An example of dactylic meter is the first line of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's epic poem Evangeline (1847), which is in dactylic hexameter: This is the / forest prim- / eval. The / murmuring / pines and the / hemlocks, The first five feet of the line are dactyls; the sixth a trochee.
Horace composed some poems in the Alcmanian strophe [2] or Alcmanian system.It is also called the Alcmanic strophe [3] or the 1st Archilochian. [4] It is a couplet consisting of a dactylic hexameter followed by a dactylic tetrameter a posteriore (so called because it ends with a spondee, thus resembling the last four feet of the hexameter).
A dactylic tetrameter catalectic is sometimes joined to the dactylic hexameter to form a couplet termed the Alcmanian Strophe, named after the lyric poet Alcman (some scholars however refer to the Alcmanian Strophe as the First Archilochian, as indeed there is a strong likeness between the two forms).
In poetry, a tetrameter is a line of four metrical feet. However, the particular foot can vary, as follows: Anapestic tetrameter: "And the sheen of their spears was like stars on the sea" (Lord Byron, "The Destruction of Sennacherib") "Twas the night before Christmas when all through the house" ("A Visit from St. Nicholas")
The first archilochian stanza consists of a dactylic hexameter followed by a dactylic hemiepes: – u u – u u – u u – u u – u u – x – u u – u u x. An example is Horace, Odes 4.7, praised by A. E. Housman in a lecture in 1914 as "the most beautiful poem in Latin literature": [10] diffūgēre nivēs, redeunt iam grāmina campīs
Though the rhyme is tetrametric, it follows no consistent metrical foot; however, the lines correspond roughly to a monosyllabic tetrameter, a dactylic tetrameter, a trochaic tetrameter, and an iambic tetrameter respectively. The poem has historically made use of assonant half rhyme.
The individual rhythmical patterns used in Greek and Latin poetry are also known as "metres" (US "meters"). Greek poetry developed first, starting as early as the 8th century BC with the epic poems of Homer and didactic poems of Hesiod, which were composed in the dactylic hexameter. A variety of other metres were used for lyric poetry and for ...