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A hexameter line can be divided into six feet (Greek ἕξ hex = "six"). In strict dactylic hexameter, each foot would be a dactyl (a long and two short syllables, i.e. – u u), but classical meter allows for the substitution of a spondee (two long syllables, i.e. – –) in place of a dactyl in most positions. Specifically, the first four ...
In modern terms, a caesura is a natural break which occurs in the middle of a foot, at the end of a word. This is contrasted with diaeresis, which is a break between two feet. In dactylic hexameter, there must be a caesura in each line, and such caesuras almost always occur in the 3rd or 4th foot. There are two kinds of caesura:
A masculine caesura follows a stressed syllable while a feminine caesura follows an unstressed syllable. A caesura is also described by its position in a line of poetry: a caesura close to the beginning of a line is called an initial caesura, one in the middle of a line is medial , and one near the end of a line is terminal.
In poetry, a hendecasyllable (as an adjective, hendecasyllabic) is a line of eleven syllables.The term may refer to several different poetic meters, the older of which are quantitative and used chiefly in classical (Ancient Greek and Latin) poetry, and the newer of which are syllabic or accentual-syllabic and used in medieval and modern poetry.
When x ᴗ – – is used, the caesura always follows the 4th syllable. Another study, by Gunkel and Ryan (2011), based on a much larger corpus, confirms the above and shows that the propensity for a syllable to be long in a triṣṭubh is greatest in the 2nd, 4th, 5th 8th and 10th positions of the line, while the 6th and 9th are almost ...
Example: Paradise Lost, [1] by John Milton; Dactylic hexameter. Examples: Iliad, [2] by Homer; The Metamorphoses, by Ovid; Iambic tetrameter. Examples: To His Coy Mistress, by Andrew Marvell; Eugene Onegin, [3] by Aleksandr Pushkin; Trochaic octameter. Example: The Raven, [4] by Edgar Allan Poe; Anapestic tetrameter. Examples: The Hunting of ...
Although the rules seem simple, it is hard to use classical hexameter in English, because English is a stress-timed language that condenses vowels and consonants between stressed syllables, while hexameter relies on the regular timing of the phonetic sounds. Languages having the latter properties (i.e., languages that are not stress-timed ...
In the example above, it is found after the fifth element, as so (with ¦ representing the caesura): | x – u – | x ¦ – u – | x – u – | Finally, Porson's Law is observed, which means here that if the anceps of the third metron is long, there cannot be a word-break after that anceps.