Anacreontics are verses in a metre used by the Greek poet Anacreon in his poems dealing with love and wine. His later Greek imitators (whose surviving poems are known as the Anacreontea) took up the same themes and used the Anacreontic meter. In modern poetry, Anacreontics are short lyrical pieces that keep the Anacreontic subject matter but not the metre.
A section from an ancient metrical treatise concerning the anacreonteus. Above the description the lengths of all but the first syllable can be seen marked out; the final syllable is marked as anceps. Near the beginning of the description it is reported that some call the anacreonteus "Parionic" (παριωνικόν) because of its resemblance to the "class of Ionic meters" (Ἰωνικῶν γένους). (P.Oxy. II 220 col. vii, 1st or 2nd century CE).
The Anacreontic verse or anacreonteus is the eight-syllable line u u – u – u – –[2] (where u = breve and – longum). It has been suggested that the anacreontic in its origin may be an "anaclastic" variant of the Ionic dimeter (u u – – u u – –), i.e. an ionic dimeter with the 4th and 5th syllables reversed; but whether this is so or not, the two meters have been associated since Anacreon, who often used them together in compositions.[3]
One example of anacreontics from the corpus of Anacreon is fr. 11b PMG, which ends as follows:
The anacreontic rhythm also occurs in classical Persian poetry, for example in the following example from the 13th-century poet Saadi:
man agar nazar harām ast * bas-ī gonāh dāram
če konam? nemītavānam * ke nazar negāh dāram
uu – u – u – – || (u)u – u – (u) – –
"If looking is forbidden, I have plenty of sin.
What am I to do? I can't stop looking!"
The syllables ast, nāh and gāh are "overlong" and count in Persian metre as equivalent to – u.
English Anacreontics
In English poetry, Anacreontics are the title given to short lyrical pieces, of an easy kind, dealing with love and wine. The English word appears to have been first used in 1656 by Abraham Cowley, who called a section of his poems "anacreontiques" because they were paraphrased out of the so-called writings of Anacreon into a familiar measure which was supposed to represent the meter of the Greek.[4]
Half a century later, when the form had been much cultivated, John Phillips (1631–1706) laid down the arbitrary rule that an anacreontic line "consists of seven syllables, without being tied to any certain law of quantity." In the 18th century, the antiquary William Oldys (1696–1761) was the author of a little piece which is the perfect type of an anacreontic; this begins:
In 1800 Thomas Moore published a collection of erotic anacreontics which are also typical in form; Moore speaks of the necessity of catching "the careless facility with which Anacreon appears to have trifled," as a reason why anacreontics are often tame and worthless. He dwells, moreover, on the absurdity of writing "pious anacreontics," a feat, however, which was performed by several of the Greek Christian poets, and in particular by Gregory of Nazianzus and John of Damascus.[4]
Modern lyric poetry is a formal type of poetry which expresses personal emotions or feelings, typically spoken in the first person.
Anacreon was a Greek lyric poet, notable for his drinking songs and erotic poems. Later Greeks included him in the canonical list of Nine Lyric Poets. Anacreon wrote all of his poetry in the ancient Ionic dialect. Like all early lyric poetry, it was composed to be sung or recited to the accompaniment of music, usually the lyre. Anacreon's poetry touched on universal themes of love, infatuation, disappointment, revelry, parties, festivals and the observations of everyday people and life.
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 tribrach is a metrical foot used in formal poetry and Greek and Latin verse. In quantitative meter, it consists of three short syllables; in accentual-syllabic verse, the tribrach consists of a run of three short syllables substituted for a trochee.
Glyconic is a form of meter in classical Greek and Latin poetry. The glyconic line is the most basic and most commonly used form of Aeolic verse, and it is often combined with others.
This is a glossary of poetry.
Sonnet 153 is a sonnet by William Shakespeare.
Versus Galliambicus (Latin), or the Galliambic Verse (English), is a verse built from two anacreontic cola, the second one catalectic. The metre typically has resolution in the last metron, and often elsewhere, leading to a run of short syllables at the end. An example is the first line of Catullus's poem 63:
u u - u | - u - - || u u - u u | u u u sŭpĕr āltă vēctŭs Āttĭs || cĕlĕrī rătĕ mărĭă
Hazaj meter is a quantitative verse meter frequently found in the epic poetry of the Middle East and western Asia. A musical rhythm of the same name is based on the literary meter.
Basīṭ, or al-basīṭ (البسيط), is a metre used in classical Arabic poetry. The word literally means "extended" or "spread out" in Arabic. Along with the ṭawīl, kāmil, and wāfir, it is one of the four most common metres used in pre-Islamic and classical Arabic poetry.
Aeolic verse is a classification of Ancient Greek lyric poetry referring to the distinct verse forms characteristic of the two great poets of Archaic Lesbos, Sappho and Alcaeus, who composed in their native Aeolic dialect. These verse forms were taken up and developed by later Greek and Roman poets and some modern European poets.
The ionic is a four-syllable metrical unit (metron) of light-light-heavy-heavy that occurs in ancient Greek and Latin poetry. According to Hephaestion it was known as the Ionicos because it was used by the Ionians of Asia Minor; and it was also known as the Persicos and was associated with Persian poetry. Like the choriamb, in Greek quantitative verse the ionic never appears in passages meant to be spoken rather than sung. "Ionics" may refer inclusively to poetry composed of the various metrical units of the same total quantitative length that may be used in combination with ionics proper: ionics, choriambs, and anaclasis. Equivalent forms exist in English poetry and in classical Persian poetry.
Latin prosody is the study of Latin poetry and its laws of meter. The following article provides an overview of those laws as practised by Latin poets in the late Roman Republic and early Roman Empire, with verses by Catullus, Horace, Virgil and Ovid as models. Except for the early Saturnian poetry, which may have been accentual, Latin poets borrowed all their verse forms from the Greeks, despite significant differences between the two languages.
Greek lyric is the body of lyric poetry written in dialects of Ancient Greek. It is primarily associated with the early 7th to the early 5th centuries BC, sometimes called the "Lyric Age of Greece", but continued to be written into the Hellenistic and Imperial periods.
Prosody is the theory and practice of versification.
Persian metres are the patterns of long and short syllables, 10 to 16 syllables long, used in Persian poetry.
Kāmil is the second commonest metre used in pre-Islamic and classical Arabic poetry. The usual form of the metre is as follows :
Anaclasis is a feature of poetic metre, in which a long and a short syllable exchange places in a metrical pattern.
A metron, , plural metra, is a repeating section, 3 to 6 syllables long, of a poetic metre. The word is particularly used in reference to ancient Greek. According to a definition by Paul Maas, usually a metron consists of two long elements and up to two other elements which can be short, anceps or biceps.
The sotadean metre was a rhythmic pattern used by and named after the 3rd-century BC Greek poet Sotades. It is generally classified as a type of ionic metre, though in fact it is half ionic and half trochaic. It has several variations, but the usual pattern is this:
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