Hexameter

12 Key excerpts on "Hexameter"

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  The Lesbian Lyre

  Reclaiming Sappho for the 21st Century

  • Jeffrey M. Duban(Author)
  • 2016(Publication Date)
  • Clairview Books

    (Publisher)

  Odyssey to have developed orally, and been performed extemporaneously by the thousands of verses, a performance-facilitating language and meter were needed. The poems were likely never recited in full by a single bard in one or consecutive sittings, but rather recited over several days, in a festival setting, by teams or relays of bards. The meter was dactylic Hexameter, later known as epic, heroic, or Homeric meter. It provided formulaic (though highly variable) phrasing to convey fixed or recurring ideas or events, even while allowing for colorful characterizations, grueling combat scenes, and reflections on mortality and mankind's wretched lot. In short, the full range of human emotion and experience.

  Greek dactylic Hexameter—and Latin Hexameter, as adapted—runs as follows:

  NOTE: A dash indicates a long syllable; an “ ” indicates a short. A dash above two shorts indicates the possible replacement of two shorts by a long. A dash in parentheses above two shorts indicates that the replacement is rare. An “ ” atop a dash indicates a variable syllable (long or short). Vertical lines mark the end of each poetic foot. The need to place long and short marks directly above vowels or diphthongs can create an appearance of uneven spacing.

  The meter is dactylic because it consists of six “finger-shaped” units (Gr. daktulos ‘finger’), the basic unit, or foot, being one long and two short syllables. It is “Hexameter” because there are six feet to the metric line. Lines typically exhibit a pause, or caesura (Lat. caesum ‘cut’), often at word end within a foot, e.g.:

  Arms and the man I sing, who first from shores of Troy

  A long syllable may replace any two shorts syllables, as a matter of metric equivalence. The resultant foot, a “spondee,” may occur anywhere but in the fifth position. The final foot is always disyllabic, with a variably long or short final syllable. The line-ending rhythm is thus characteristically: — | — .

  Classical poetry did not rhyme as we know rhyme. However, rhyme may be thought the later equivalent of line-ending dactylic rhythm for purposes of signaling line finality. Dante suggests as much, noting the arrival—some one hundred and fifty years before his own time—of vernacular poets in Italy: “And it is not so many years ago that such vernacular poets first appeared among us; for to compose vernacular rhyming verse is tantamount, in some measure, to writing Latin metrical poetry.” Dante further notes the circumstance: “The first man who began writing as a vernacular poet was induced to do so because he wanted his words to be understood by a lady, for whom Latin metrical verse was hard to understand.”

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  Poetry

  • John Strachan, Richard Terry(Authors)
  • 2011(Publication Date)
  • EUP

    (Publisher)

  For instance, Arthur Hugh Clough (1819–1861) struggles bravely to make the dactylic Hexameter with extensive modulation an appropriate vehicle for conversational poetry, but perishes in the attempt: Dear Eustatio, I write that you may write me an answer, Or at least to put us again en rapport with each other, Rome disappoints me much, – St. Peter’s perhaps, in especial; Only the Arch of Titus and view from the Lateran please me: This, however, perhaps, is the weather, which truly is horrid. Here we are in the realms of conscious idiosyncrasy, experimentation which does not manage to appear spontaneous or natural, and it is not a pretty sight. Nonetheless, Clough’s contemporary Swinburne shows what can be done in six-foot triple metre, managing to make his anapaestic Hexameter lines in ‘Hesperia’ suit his purpose of creating a languid atmosphere of corruption. This is part of his description of Our Lady of Pain: With the thirst and the hunger of lust though her beautiful lips be so bitter, With the cold foul foam of the snakes they soften and redden and smile; And her fierce mouth sweetens, her eyes wax wide and her eyelashes glitter, And she laughs with a savour of blood in her face, and a savour of guile. A metrical verse line which contains seven feet is known as a heptameter . As heptameters are almost invariably iambic or trochaic, they are sometimes referred to as ‘fourteeners’ on account of the standard number of syllables in the line. The heptameter is also occasionally referred to as a ‘septenary’. Seven-stress lines are most commonly iambic, as in George Chapman’s translation of Homer: And such a stormy day shall come (in mind and soul I know) When sacred Troy shall shed her towers, for tears of overthrow.

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  Exploring the Language of Poems, Plays and Prose

  • Mick Short(Author)
  • 2018(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Now let us restrict our discussion for a moment to lines of poetry with iambic ·('di dum') feet. Normally, iambic lines will consist of more than one iamb, and poets can choose how 132 Exploring the language of poems, plays and prose many iambs to have as the basic line-template for particular poems. One particular form has dominated English poetry since the fifteenth-century, however, namely a line with five iambs, as in the following example: Example 2 X I X I X I X I X I Then tooke the angrie witch her golden cup X I X I X I X IX I Which still she bore, replete with magick artes; (Edmund Spenser, The Faerie Queene, I, viii, 14) This kind of line is found throughout the verse of Shakespeare, Milton and Wordsworth, for example, and is called iambic pentameter (literally 'iambic five metre'). We might call the iambic pentameter line the metrical norm for English poetry from the fifteenth-century onwards. Other possibilities can, of course, be found: 1. Manometer 2. Dimeter 3. Trimeter 4. Tetrameter 5. Pentameter 6. Hexameter one foot line two feet lines three feet lines four feet lines five feet lines six feet lines These 'number of feet' combinations can in principle involve any kind of foot as the basic unit, and various stanza forms can have patterns involving differing numbers of feet from line to line (for example, Keats's 'Song', which we analysed in 2.2. 7, has tetrameters in the first and third lines of each verse and trimeters in the second and fourth lines). But it is the iamb in units of five which is the dominant English verse form. Exercise 1 (a) Re-examine Keats's 'Song' in 2.2.7. What is the rhythmical effect created by having a 'missing foot' in the second and fourth lines? (b) Below are a series of extracts from poems. Work out, for each example, what the basic foot unit is and how many feet there are to the line.

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  The Poetry of Homer

  • Samuel Eliot Bassett(Author)
  • 2023(Publication Date)
  • University of California Press

    (Publisher)

  In the freedom with which he gives variety to verse of a single pattern he is without a peer. 1 Superior figures refer to notes which will be found on pp. 253-254. [ 1 4 1 ] 142 THE POETRY OF HOMER The dactylic Hexameter permits either a dactyl or a spondee in each of the first five feet. A simple mathematical opera- tion shows that there are thus thirty-two possible arrange- ments of dactyls and spondees. Homer uses every one of them; yet his measure remains dactylic. In the Aeneid the verse containing five dactyls, quadrupedante putrem sonitu quatit ungula campum, is rare; in Homer it is common. In Andromache's excited speech to her handmaids (X 450- 459) half of the ten verses are of this kind. The adjustment of the words to the feet shows the same freedom. The Hexameter, as pure form, is a frame of six compartments. If its Law were strictly enforced, each verse would consist of a single sentence of six words, each word exactly filling a foot. Homer has one verse 3 which by a very slight change would illustrate this slavish obedience to the law of the verse, 8/3pio$/eiveKa/ravrrii/tax^o/eUwv/iifiiv ("As for this outrageous insult, restrain your rage in compliance with our will"). Such an arrangement of words is impossible because of the nature of language; it is also utterly repug- nant to our sense of beauty because it transgresses the fun- damental principle of art and nature alike, that form should not be openly revealed, but should rather be felt as a mold- ing principle. Hence arises the conflict between form and language, which above all distinguishes recitative verse from prose. 4 Each word must not exactly fill a foot, yet each must begin and end within it. This conflict makes possible an infinite variety in the selection and arrangement of the words. In the Hexameter there are seventeen places where a word may end; Homer makes a word end at every one of these places. A third kind of variety depends on the length of the words.

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  Verse

  An Introduction to Prosody

  • Charles O. Hartman(Author)
  • 2015(Publication Date)
  • Wiley-Blackwell

    (Publisher)

  iamb – a slack followed by a stress.

  The Names of Meters

  The names of meters combine an adjective denoting the dominant kind of foot – such as “iambic” – with a noun that signifies a number (also in Greek!) with “-meter” added to it (because what we call a foot the Greeks sometimes called a “metron”). Here are all the nouns in use:

  monometer	mon-o-me-ter	a line 1 foot long
  dimeter	di-me-ter	2 feet
  trimeter	tri-me-ter	3 feet
  tetrameter	te-tra-me-ter	4 feet
  pentameter	pen-ta-me-ter	5 feet
  Hexameter	hex-a-me-ter	6 feet
  heptameter	hep-ta-me-ter	7 feet
  octameter	oc-ta-me-ter	8 feet
  nonameter	non-a-me-ter	9 feet

  So “iambic pentameter” means a line of five iambs. In practice the extremes of length (1, 2, 8, 9) are rare.

  Now that we’ve plunged into foreign vocabulary, a word about why we use it might be appropriate. This traditional terminology of feet isn’t the only way to analyze meter or metrical lines; it may not even be the most precise. (In Chapter 6 we’ll look at a couple of alternatives.) Its greatest advantage is that it is traditional: poets and readers have been using these terms for centuries, frequently thinking of and hearing lines as composed of these conventional units, and using these names when they want to discuss what goes on in a metrical line. Presumably an iambic pentameter that falls in the forest makes the same sound as one that has all its parts labeled, and it’s possible to feel the movement of the line like a dancer or hear it like a musician without knowing the terminology. But to discuss how we feel and hear the lines we read and write, some analytical tools like names are useful. These are the names that lie to hand.

  If all iambic pentameter lines were composed of five iambs, scanning them would be easy but there would be little point to it. In fact only a minority of iambic pentameters are exactly regular. There are two main kinds of variation. We’ll investigate “promoted stress” a little later. First we’ll discuss metrical substitution

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  The Creative Writing Handbook

  • John Singleton, Mary Luckhurst, John Singleton, Mary Luckhurst(Authors)
  • 2000(Publication Date)
  • Bloomsbury Academic

    (Publisher)

  When you feel ready, you should go on to try sequences of lines each governed by the same principle. The most interest-ing question that arises is whether each line is to be syntact-ically self-contained, or whether the sense will run-on from line to line: • Write ten consecutive self-contained lines, and then ten in which the sense runs on (so that full stops etc. are in the middle of lines). Which set of lines reads aloud better? • What happens if you spread one image over two or three lines? Is it more or less interesting to read? to listen to? Are some images better in one line, and others in several lines? In conclusion -later workshops require more exact ways of shaping and combining lines, but before you begin to do that you need lines to work with! The integrity or coherence (ima-gistic, syllabic, aural, or visual) of lines is a basic feature of all poetry, with which you will be confronting your readers. You can do almost anything, but you always need to know what you are doing -and why! 2 Metrical Lines Metre (the pattern of stressed and unstressed beats in a line) is conventionally analysed as the repetition of a basic unit, called a foot, and the description of a metrical line therefore specifies the type of foot, and the number of such feet per line: thus 172 THE CREATIVE WRITING HANDBOOK iambic pentameter means a line of five iambs, trochaic trimeter a line of three trochees, and so on. The great bulk of English poetry uses one of four basic feet: duple feet the iamb ti-TUM or ux iambic the trochee TUM-ti or xu trochaic triple feet the anapzest ti-ti-TUM or uux anapzestic the dactyl TUM-ti-ti or xuu dactylic These feet are most commonly used with between three and seven per line: trimeter tetrameter pentameter Hexameter heptameter three feet per line four five six seven trimetric tetrametric pentametric hexametric heptametric These nine terms, in their twenty combinations, can be used to describe most poetry in English.

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  Rhythm and Meaning in Shakespeare : A Guide for Readers and Actors

  • Peter Groves(Author)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • Monash University Publishing

    (Publisher)

  2. Pentameter and its Common Variations | 31 2. Pentameter and its Common Variations Hotspur: I had rather be a kitten and cry mew Tan one of these same metre ballad-mongers. … Tis like the forc’d gait of a shufing nag ( Henry IV, Part 1 , 3.1.127-33) A strange and rather literal-minded (but widespread) misconception about iambic pentameter is that the term can only be properly applied to lines with alternating unstressed and stressed syllables, like “ Ŏ f hánd, ŏ f fóot, ŏ f líp, ŏ f éye, ŏ f brów” ( Son . 106.6), and that any line deviating from this pattern represents an ‘exception’, an ‘irregularity’ or a ‘metrical licence’. As Roman Jakobson (1960) has observed, one of the fundamental structuring devices of art is repetition with variation: there must be enough repetition to suggest a pattern, and thus stimulate interest, with enough variation to maintain that interest. Regulated variation is the life of pentameter: it is what makes it simultaneously ordered and lively, where other kinds of metre in English (some of which are discussed in Chapter 6) tend to be either ordered or lively. § 2.1: The Prototype: Verse and Line Metre is a way of representing or embodying simple patterns in the relatively complex prosodic material of speech: this is normally done by regulating just one aspect of the prosody into basic structures of alternation and recurrence, and letting the other aspects fend for themselves. Te result is not in itself simple, but is a representation of simplicity in and through complexity which is aesthetically pleasing. Te main prosodic feature regulated in English metre is the beat ( § 1.5): because the placement of beats in English is constrained but not completely determined by the given prosody – stress, syntax, contextually determined

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  The Shakespeare Workbook and Video

  A Practical Course for Actors

  • David Carey, Rebecca Clark Carey(Authors)
  • 2015(Publication Date)
  • Methuen Drama

    (Publisher)

  But what are the characteristics of blank verse that Shakespeare inherited? Blank verse was composed of unrhymed lines in the meter known as iambic pentameter . This term, which has come down to us from the poetry of classical Greece, tells us that the metrical structure of each line is based on a rhythmic unit (or foot ) composed of a syllable of weak stress followed by a syllable of stronger stress; for example, the word ‘composed’ would make such a rhythmic unit because the first syllable (com) is relatively weak or unstressed, while the second syllable (posed) is more strongly stressed This type of foot is called an iamb (from the use of this rhythm in Greek satirical poems called iambi ) and it occurs five times ( penta , from the Greek for ‘five’) in a line of iambic pentameter. RHYTHM AND METER 113 Take a look at this line from Marlowe’s Tamburlaine the Great, Part Two (Act 3 Scene 2): I’ll have you learn to sleep upon the ground Speak it out loud and notice how the writer has arranged it into a pattern of five iambic feet (the vertical line is used to show the foot divisions): I’ll have| you learn| to sleep| u-pon| the ground We call this a regular iambic pentameter line, because the pattern of a relatively weak syllable followed by a more strongly stressed syllable is kept constant over the five feet. But notice that not all the stressed syllables have the same weight: if you say the line quite naturally, it’s likely that learn , sleep and ground have more stress than have and -pon . Similarly, the unstressed syllables are not all equally weak: it’s likely that I’ll and you are more strongly stressed than to , u-, and the . This is because words with more semantic content (or significance) normally take more stress in English than words with little or no semantic content. So, the iambic pattern exists in the relative strength of the syllables in each foot rather than across the whole line.

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  The Arden Introduction to Reading Shakespeare

  Close Reading and Analysis

  • Jeremy Lopez(Author)
  • 2018(Publication Date)
  • The Arden Shakespeare

    (Publisher)

  You will probably have heard that Shakespeare’s plays and poems are written in ‘iambic pentameter’. What does this mean? It means that each line can be measured (‘meter’) in five (‘penta’) iambs. An iamb is a pair of syllables – the technical word for this pair is ‘foot’ – where the first syllable is accented weakly and the second accented strongly. Composed of five iambs, an iambic pentameter METRE 143 line consists of ten syllables. Here is the first line of sonnet 130, where lower-case letters indicate weak accents and capital letters indicate strong: my MIStress’ EYES are NOthing LIKE the SUN The majority of Shakespeare’s lines can be scanned this way. The iambic line is common because it is easy to speak and interesting to hear. It is easy to speak because of the regular alternation between weak and strong accents. It is interesting to hear because most polysyllabic English words are strong on the first syllable and weak on the last (MIStress, NOthing), but the iambic pattern demands that you begin with a weak syllable and end with a strong. Natural rhythms of speech are put in dynamic tension with artificially imposed poetic rhythms. It would probably be impossible, and in any case uninteresting, to write only iambic lines. To accommodate and exploit the natural rhythms of speech, as well as to create rhythmic or musical variety in the poetry, Shakespeare varies the iambic pattern with other kinds of poetic ‘feet’: the most frequent of these is the ‘trochee’, which is a pair of syllables arranged STRONG–weak; less frequent though not rare is the ‘spondee’, which is a pair of syllables arranged STRONG–STRONG. The second line of sonnet 130 begins with a trochee, and finishes with four iambs: CORal is FAR more RED than HER lips’ RED It is also possible that this line, and line 10, might each contain a spondee; in the quotations below I have put the spondee syllables in boldface as well as capitals.

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  The Sound Sense of Poetry

  • Peter Robinson(Author)
  • 2018(Publication Date)
  • Cambridge University Press

    (Publisher)

  Fur- ther, hearing and responding to their rhythms, we do not simultaneously hear their meters as distinct (which may be why the two terms, meter and rhythm, tend so frequently to be confused, or confusingly substituted for each other, in writings on prosody). Rather we remember regularities and irregularities from previous instances in the poem being read, or in other poems already known. Meter in poetry is not, as it were, a bass line existing under the treble of the speaking voice. To illustrate the meter of a poem, if there is one, it will be necessary to exaggerate the stressed syllables, giving them a prominence equally different from the similarly weakened syllables. Doing this, the line’s sound sense is thoroughly denatured to make a point. There is usually, as I say, when reading a poem, only one instrument producing a single stream of naturally sounded human phonemes. This is why poems in regular or regularly varying meters often place guide versions of the metrical scheme in lines that come next to expressively discrepant variations on it. But the regular pattern is not heard simultaneously behind an irregular variation; rather, tension is produced by comparing and contrasting in memory temporally distinct verbal experiences of theme and variation. To hear and experience the rhythm you have to read the poem out loud (or attentively listen to it being read), monitoring while you do what you are hearing and feeling in body-and-mind. Rhythm is experi- enced as muscular, aural and conceptual.  The rhythm of a poem is an experience of the patterned sound it makes when read aloud; any identifiable pattern, regularised in hinted at binary alternations of stress, is its meter.  As already noted, the meter is an abstract template that can, with varying degrees of plausibility, depending on the complexity of the cases, be identified by analyzing a poem’s lines and phrases.

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  The Music of Verse

  Metrical Experiment in Nineteenth-Century Poetry

  • Joseph Phelan(Author)
  • 2012(Publication Date)
  • Palgrave Macmillan

    (Publisher)

  The English Hexameter in Theory and Practice 73 consideration of notions of quantity in composing English verse in classical metres. Clough’s classical scruples never disappeared completely, and in fact (as we shall see) re-emerged with renewed force during the 1850s; but he seems to have recognised in Evangeline a demonstration of the possibilities of the English Hexameter when liberated from classical precept. His friend John Conington, writing many years later, recalls a discussion of the metre of The Bothie with Clough on the eve of the poem’s publication: He repeated, in his melodious way, several lines, intended to show how a verse might be read so that one syllable should take up the time of two, or, conversely, two of one. The line which he instanced (altered, I think, from Evangeline), was this:– White / naked / feet on the / gleaming / floor of her / chamber. This was new to me, as I had not risen beyond the common notion of spondees, dactyls, and the rest. So I asked for more explanation. He bade me scan the first line of the Paradise Lost. I began, ‘“Of man’s:” iambus.’ ‘Yes.’ ‘“First dis-”’—There I was puzzled. It did not seem an iambus or a spondee: it was nearly a trochee, but not quite one. He then explained to me his concep- tion of the rhythm. The two feet ‘first disobe-’ took up the time of four syllables, two iambic feet: the voice rested awhile on the word ‘first,’ then passed swiftly over ‘diso-,’ then rested again on ‘be,’ so as to recover the previous hurry.

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  Synchrony and Diachrony of Ancient Greek

  Language, Linguistics and Philology

  • Georgios K. Giannakis, Luz Conti, Jesús de la Villa, Raquel Fornieles, Georgios K. Giannakis, Luz Conti, Jesús de la Villa, Raquel Fornieles(Authors)
  • 2021(Publication Date)
  • De Gruyter

    (Publisher)

  Greek com-edy also had a tetrameter, usually catalectic, which had eight feet per line for a total of 32µ (30 counting the catalexis). (9) Aristophanes , Clouds 960ff. (– –) (– –) (– –) (– –) ⋮ (– –)(– –) (⏑⏑–)(– ø) λέξω τοίνυν τὴν ἀρχαίαν παιδείαν ὡς διέκειτο, ὅτ’ ἐγὼ τὰ δίκαια λέγων ἤνθουν καὶ σωφροσύνη ’νενόμιστο. πρῶτον μὲν ἔδει παιδὸς φωνὴν γρύξαντος μηδέν’ ἀκοῦσαι· εἶτα βαδίζειν ἐν ταῖσιν ὁδοῖς εὐτάκτως εἰς κιθαριστοῦ τοὺς κωμήτας γυμνοὺς ἁθρόους, κεἰ κριμνώδη κατανείφοι. So I’ll tell you about the state that the old education was in, when I said the right things and bloomed and sanity was the rule. First, you didn’t have to listen to the voice of a grumbling boy. Second, they had to march in formation on those streets to the sound of a lute, naked neighbor boys in a column, even if it snowed as thick as oatmeal. The last full foot is almost always ⏑⏑–, which some take as evidence that the me-ter is inherently anapestic, as Paul Kiparsky points out (p.c.); this is not true of the meter at the center of the discussion here, as seen above in (5), (7) and (8). Diaeresis is regular after the second metron (fourth foot) and common after the first metron (second foot) (Raven 1962, 58ff.). 4 Classical Sanskrit At first blush, Classical Sanskrit meters are at the opposite end of the metrical pool from Greek. There are some 600 named meters and each line in a given meter is metrically identical to the next. The following is a good example (the name of the meter coming from the last word of the poem; I have supplied ‘ ⋮ ’ to mark di-aeresis):

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