Languages & Linguistics
Dactylic
Dactylic refers to a metrical foot in poetry that consists of one stressed syllable followed by two unstressed syllables. This rhythmic pattern is commonly found in classical poetry, particularly in Greek and Latin verse. The dactylic meter creates a distinctive and flowing cadence, and it is often associated with epic poetry and hymns.
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7 Key excerpts on "Dactylic"
eBook - PDF- Rhian Williams(Author)
- 2013(Publication Date)
- Bloomsbury Academic(Publisher)
When they are used more playfully or colloquially, as in some of Browning’s poems, the dactyl falls in more with other triple-syllabled feet, such as anapaests, which, as we’ve seen, at one time were regarded as ‘unpoetic’, disruptive, unruly feet that distracted from the serious mode of contemplation that some readers wished to preserve for poetry. Thus we see that feet have culture to bring to a poem as well as a rhythm; Annie Finch’s study considers this notion in more detail, and her introduction includes a useful summary of the cultural associations ascribed to metrical feet. References Finch, Annie, The Ghost of Meter: Culture and Prosody in American Free Verse (Michigan: University of Michigan Press, 1993). Hopkins, Gerard Manley, Journals and Papers , ed. Humphry House (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1959), pp. 274–5. —‘Author’s Preface’, in Catherine Phillips ed., Gerard Manley Hopkins: The Major Works (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), pp. 106–9. Meynell, Alice, The Flower of the Mind (London: Grant Richards, 1893). 3.4 Metrical lines Stich A line of poetry. Having seen how lines of verse fall into feet, we come to naming these lines metrically; that is, after their metre. The term ‘stich’ is used fairly infrequently, in fact; a line of poetry tends to be characterized first by the type of feet it includes and secondly by the number of feet. If the number of feet varies in each line of the poem then the metre is named simply after the type. This chilling example by Southey mainly uses iambic feet, but the line lengths vary: Prosody 159 [Old Sa -] [rah loved ] [her help -] [less child ] [Whom help -] [less-ness ] [made dear ;] And life was happ i ness to him Who had no hope nor fear . Robert Southey, ‘The Idiot’ (1798), ll. 5–8. Here the number of feet shifts between four and three per line and so the poem may be described as showing alternating iambic tetrameter (four feet) and trimeter (three feet).
eBook - PDFAlexander Blok
A study in rhythm and metre
- Robin Kemball(Author)
- 2019(Publication Date)
- De Gruyter Mouton(Publisher)
the proportion of poems composed - irrespective of the line-lengths employed - in iambic, trochaic, anapaestic, amphibrachic, dac-tylic, and purely accentual ('pure-tonic') measures. One feature, at least, is common to both languages -the overwhelming predominance of iambic metre over all others, virtually at all times and in all types of verse. Of the predominance of the iamb in English verse, the English reader will hardly need convincing. A glance at almost any study of prosody is sufficient to confirm this. English verse, wrote Masson, in his study of Milton's versification, is prevailingly Iambic, or of the xa metre ... Trochaic, Dactylic, and Anapaestic measures occur occasionally in our lyric poetry; but the Iambic is all but our metrical factotum. 142 A foot of two syllables - short, long, says Saintsbury of the iamb, and 140 Vide infra, Ch. VI, p. 209 and p. 220. This opening syllable is so light that many authorities refer (incorrectly, in my view) to absence of stress in such cases. 141 Vide infra, Ch. VI, p. 213 and esp. pp. 221 ff. 14S Milton's Poetical Works, Vol. Ill, p. 207. METRES MOST COMMONLY EMPLOYED 103 continues: the commonest in almost all prosodies, and (though this is sometimes denied) the staple foot of English. 143 The qualification in brackets applies only to that misleading - and happily small -school of prosody which would equate poetry with music pure and simple, and so maintains that all verse is practically either trochaic (if duple-time) or Dactylic (triple-time), with or without 'anacrusis', as the case may be.
Available until 18 Jan |Learn moreListening to Poetry
An Introduction for Readers and Writers
- Jeremy Trabue(Author)
- 2019(Publication Date)
- Chemeketa Press(Publisher)
Chapter 11 Rhythmic Language Key terms: rhythm, accentual rhythm, meter, accentual-syllabic rhythm, foot, iamb, trochee, anapest, dactyl, spondee, pyrrhic, minor ionic, foot, monometer, dimeter, trimeter, tetrameter, pentameter, hexameter, heptameter, octameter, scansion From the Middle Ages until the middle of the twentieth century, no one would have dreamed of teaching or even discussing English-language poetry without a central focus on rhythm. The rhythm of the language was an English-language poem’s central feature for more than a thousand years! However, this is no longer true. In fact, it is common now to go through an entire introduction to poetry class—or even an entire English degree—with little more than a passing mention of rhythm. This is tragic and foolish. Studying poetry without learning about rhythm is like studying automotive repair without learning about motors. Rhythm is what powers the whole machine. We will not make this all-too-common mistake. Although you may find it challenging at first, the basic study of rhythm in poetry was once nearly universal in grade schools, so you can handle it. As you’ll see, it’s no different than studying rhyme or any other element. To begin, all you need to do is get comfortable with a couple of basic concepts and learn some new terminology. This chapter builds on the “The Syllable” section from Chapter 9, so it might be a good idea to review that now. While you’re there, reread “Counting-Out Rhyme” again. We’ll take another look at that poem and how rhythm powers it. Rhythm Basics Rhythm refers to any recognizable pattern of repetition and variation in sound or movement. You need both parts—repetition and variation—to create rhythm. Even a very simple rhythm like your heartbeat includes both repetition and variation. Put your hand over your heart and you will feel the rhythm of your own body
- Mick Short(Author)
- 2018(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
138 Exploring the language of poems, plays and prose when iambic pentameter was new as a form, poets did not relax the metrical form much because they needed to establish the pattern. However, after the pattern became established, poets could more easily deviate from the basic metrical structure, thus producing a wider and more interesting range of tension effects. 5.5.2 Metrics and the English stress system Besides the tensions created by the act of getting the right number of syllables into a line, there is also possible tension between the metrical system and the language system in terms of what we might call strong and weak events. Let us pretend that in a slot where the metrical pattern predicts a remiss (weak event) followed by an ictus (strong event), we want to have the word 'summer'. Where the metre predicts a weak event the language rules predict a strong event, and vice-versa. As we noted in 5.1, every lexically full word in English has an accented syllable, the syllable which normally takes a strong stress in speech. The same is true of the grammatical words which consist of more than one syllable, like 'upon' and 'below'. If we make the metre overrule the normal stress- assignment dictates for English, we get a highly unnatural, 'metrical' reading, of the sort young children produce when they are beginning to learn to read poetry out loud. If the normal stress-assignment rules are given precedence over the metre, in this case we have what is traditionally known as a reversed foot and a correspondingly less metrical reading. A good example of a reversed foot in an iambic pentameter poem would be the first word of 'Trances of thought and mountings of the mind' (line 20 of the first book of Wordsworth's Prelude, my emphasis). A competent reader would need a fairly extraordinary set of contextual communicative circumstances to reverse the strong and weak stresses normally associated with the accented and unaccented syllables respectively of Trances.
eBook - PDFIntroduction to metrics
The theory of verse
- Viktor Maksimovic Žirmunskij, E. Stankiewicz, W. N. Vickery, C. F. Brown(Authors)
- 2016(Publication Date)
- De Gruyter Mouton(Publisher)
SYLLABO-TONIC VERSIFICATION 73 The logaoedic terminology of most recent Russian metrical theory is based on a confusion of the concepts of rhythm and meter. The foot is not really an element in the actual phonetic realization of the line and consequently does not belong to the province of rhythm; it is an abstract unit of repetition, a pattern of alternation established for the metrical scheme and applied only in relation to the meter of the poem. For this reason, the line I klánjalsja neprinuïdënno — which has only two stresses, on the second and eight syllables — is just as much a representative of the iambic tetrameter within the context of Evgenij Onegin as is a line with four stresses : Moj djádja sámyx òéstnyx právil... Within the meter, the foot is a regularly recurring sequence of strong and weak syllables — in the iambic meter, for instance, the strong syllable following regularly the weak syllable. If, however, we introduce the principle of replacement and identify the foot with the actual ele-ments of verse rhythm, the result is mixed verse, composed of various disyllabic and tetrasyllable feet, the alternation of which in any one line or in a sequence of lines is not conditioned by any regular periodicity. Hence the familiar — and wholly erroneous — conclusion that the Russian iambic line can be made up of any disyllabic (or tetrasyllable) feet — iambs, trochees, spondees, pyrrhics, paeons II and IV and others — arranged in any order, and that the so-called iambic meter exists only in school metrics. The proof adduced in support of this opinion is already familiar to us: separate lines of poetry with various examples of replacement or deviation sharply divergent from the normal metrical type. But the principal error of these authors lies in their transferring the concept of foot, the element of meter, to the actual rhythm of the line, and in their very system of notation, which is inspired by this transference.
eBook - PDF- (Author)
- 2010(Publication Date)
- De Gruyter Mouton(Publisher)
Thus a metrical system of versification can be based only on the opposition of syllabic peaks and slopes (syllabic verse), on the relative level of the peaks (accentual verse), and on the relative length of the syllabic peaks or entire syllables (quantitative verse). In textbooks of literature we sometimes encounter a superstitious con-traposition of syllabism as a mere mechanical count of syllables to the lively pulsation of accentual verse. If we examine, however, the binary meters of strictly syllabic and at the same time, accentual versification, we observe two homogeneous successions of wavelike peaks and valleys. Of these two undulatory curves, the syllabic one carries nuclear phonemes in the crest and usually marginal phonemes in the bottom. As a rule the accentual curve superimposed upon the syllabic curve alternates stressed and unstressed syllables in the crests and bottoms respectively. For comparison with the English meters which we have discussed at length, I bring to your attention the similar Russian binary verse forms which for the last fifty years have undergone an exhaustive investigation. 24 The structure of the verse can be very thoroughly described and inter-preted in terms of enchained probabilities. Besides the compulsory word boundary between the lines, which is an invariant throughout all Russian meters, in the classic pattern of Russian syllabic accentual verse (syllabo-tonic in native nomenclature) we observe the following constants: (1) the number of syllables in the line from its beginning to the last downbeat is stable; (2) this very last downbeat always carries a word stress; (3) a African tone-riddles or between the parts of a simile in analogous proverbial forms must be, the closer we view them, carefully differentiated from questions of versification patterns. Cf. also K. L. Pike, Tone Puns in Mixteco, International Journal of Ameri-can Linguistics, XI (1945) and XII (1946).
eBook - PDF- Manfred Bierwisch, Karl Erich Heidolph(Authors)
- 2014(Publication Date)
- De Gruyter Mouton(Publisher)
(b) The s's of the meter must correspond to a word final sequence of two syllables in the underlying representation. 3 The metrical pattern (8b) is that of the classical (Greek) hexameter. It is customary to say that Greek verse is quantitative in that it distinguishes between long and short syllables. It must, however, be noted that 'length' here is not a simple phonetic pro-perty. Thus, for instance, the last syllable of a word such as πετρός is metrically long when followed by a word that begins with a consonant, but is metrically short other-wise. There is, of course, no claim intended about the phonetic length of the syllable, which remains the same in all contexts. The mapping rule of the classical hexameter requires therefore a special definition: (12)(a) Definition : A syllable containing a lax vowel separated from the following vowel or from the verse boundary by no more than a single consonant or liquid (but not glide) is METRICALLY SHORT; all other syllables in the line are METRICALLY LONG. (b) Mapping rule·. The syllables in the line must correspond to the s and w of the metrical pattern (8b) in such a way that to each w there corresponds either one metrically long syllable or two consecutive metrically short syllables, and a long syllable corresponds to each s. (c) The last syllable of the line may be metrically either short or long. 4 8 In a recent study of the meter of the Kalevala, Paul Kiparsky (1968) has discussed an even more elaborate example of mapping rules that require reference not to the surface (phonetic) representa-tion of the words, but rather to their abstract (phonological) representation. At the present time I do not know of similar examples from other parts of the world, but it is hardly likely that mapping rules referring to abstract representations quite remote from the surface phonetics should be restricted to a few languages spoken in the Baltic area.
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