Hexameter

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Hexameter is a metrical line of verses consisting of six feet (a "foot" here is the pulse, or major accent, of words in an English line of poetry; in Greek as well as in Latin a "foot" is not an accent, but describes various combinations of syllables). It was the standard epic metre in classical Greek and Latin literature, such as in the Iliad , Odyssey and Aeneid . Its use in other genres of composition include Horace's satires, Ovid's Metamorphoses, and the Hymns of Orpheus. According to Greek mythology, hexameter was invented by Phemonoe, daughter of Apollo and the first Pythia of Delphi. [1] [2]

Contents

Classical hexameter

In classical hexameter, the six feet follow these rules:

A short syllable (υ) is a syllable with a short vowel and no consonant at the end. A long syllable (–) is a syllable that either has a long vowel, one or more consonants at the end (or a long consonant), or both. Spaces between words are not counted in syllabification, so for instance "cat" is a long syllable in isolation, but "cat attack" would be syllabified as short-short-long: "ca", "ta", "tack" (υ υ –).

Variations of the sequence from line to line, as well as the use of caesura (logical full stops within the line) are essential in avoiding what may otherwise be a monotonous sing-song effect.

Application

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) include Ancient Greek, Latin, Lithuanian and Hungarian.

While the above classical hexameter has never enjoyed much popularity in English, where the standard metre is iambic pentameter, English poems have frequently been written in iambic hexameter. There are numerous examples from the 16th century and a few from the 17th; the most prominent of these is Michael Drayton's Poly-Olbion (1612) in couplets of iambic hexameter. An example from Drayton (marking the six feet on each line):

Nor a/ny o/ther wold / like Cot/swold e/ver sped,
So rich / and fair / a vale / in for/tuning / to wed.

In the 17th century the iambic hexameter, also called alexandrine, was used as a substitution in the heroic couplet, and as one of the types of permissible lines in lyrical stanzas and the Pindaric odes of Cowley and Dryden.

Several attempts were made in the 19th century to naturalise the dactylic hexameter to English — by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Arthur Hugh Clough, and others — none of them particularly successful. Gerard Manley Hopkins wrote many of his poems in six-foot iambic and sprung rhythm lines. In the 20th century a loose ballad-like six-foot line with a strong medial pause was used by William Butler Yeats. The iambic six-foot line has also been used occasionally, and an accentual six-foot line has been used by translators from the Latin and many poets.

In the late 18th century the hexameter was adapted to the Lithuanian language by Kristijonas Donelaitis. His poem "Metai" (The Seasons) is considered the most successful hexameter text in Lithuanian as yet.

For dactylic hexameter poetry in Hungarian language, see Dactylic hexameter#In Hungarian.

Albert Meyer  [ de ] (1893–1962) used a natural form of hexameter in his translation of some verses from Homer's Odyssey into the Swiss dialect of Bern. [3]

See also

Notes

  1. ↑ Pausanias, 10.5.7
  2. ↑ Pliny the Elder, 7.57
  3. ↑ "Bärndütsch isch Chärndütsch" . Retrieved 2024-09-08.

Related Research Articles

Dactylic hexameter is a form of meter or rhythmic scheme frequently used in Ancient Greek and Latin poetry. The scheme of the hexameter is usually as follows :

In poetry, metre or meter is the basic rhythmic structure of a verse or lines in verse. Many traditional verse forms prescribe a specific verse metre, or a certain set of metres alternating in a particular order. The study and the actual use of metres and forms of versification are both known as prosody.

A rhyme is a repetition of similar sounds in the final stressed syllables and any following syllables of two or more words. Most often, this kind of rhyming is consciously used for a musical or aesthetic effect in the final position of lines within poems or songs. More broadly, a rhyme may also variously refer to other types of similar sounds near the ends of two or more words. Furthermore, the word rhyme has come to be sometimes used as a shorthand term for any brief poem, such as a nursery rhyme or Balliol rhyme.

An iamb or iambus is a metrical foot used in various types of poetry. Originally the term referred to one of the feet of the quantitative meter of classical Greek prosody: a short syllable followed by a long syllable. This terminology was adopted in the description of accentual-syllabic verse in English, where it refers to a foot comprising an unstressed syllable followed by a stressed syllable. Thus a Latin word like íbī, because of its short-long rhythm, is considered by Latin scholars to be an iamb, but because it has a stress on the first syllable, in modern linguistics it is considered to be a trochee.

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The foot is the basic repeating rhythmic unit that forms part of a line of verse in most Indo-European traditions of poetry, including English accentual-syllabic verse and the quantitative meter of classical ancient Greek and Latin poetry. The unit is composed of syllables, and is usually two, three, or four syllables in length. The most common feet in English are the iamb, trochee, dactyl, and anapaest. The foot might be compared to a bar, or a beat divided into pulse groups, in musical notation.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Caesura</span> Pause or break in poetry or music

A caesura, also written cæsura and cesura, is a metrical pause or break in a verse where one phrase ends and another phrase begins. It may be expressed by a comma (,), a tick (✓), or two lines, either slashed (//) or upright (||). In time value, this break may vary between the slightest perception of silence all the way up to a full pause.

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Iambic pentameter is a type of metric line used in traditional English poetry and verse drama. The term describes the rhythm, or meter, established by the words in each line. Rhythm is measured in small groups of syllables called "feet". "Iambic" indicates that the type of foot used is the iamb, which in English is an unstressed syllable followed by a stressed syllable. "Pentameter" indicates that each line has five "feet".

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In Greek and Latin metre, brevis in longo is a short syllable at the end of a line that is counted as long. The term is short for (syllaba) brevis in (elemento) longo, meaning "a short [syllable] in a long [element]". Although the phenomenon itself has been known since ancient times, the phrase is said to have been invented by the classical scholar Paul Maas.

The dactylic pentameter is a verse-form which, in classical Greek and Latin poetry, follows a dactylic hexameter to make up an elegiac couplet. It consists of two halves, each consisting of two dactyls, for which spondees can be substituted in the first half only, followed by a longum. Thus the line most normally looks as follows :

 |— ∪ ∪ | — ∪ ∪ | — || — ∪ ∪ | — ∪ ∪ | —

Resolution is the metrical phenomenon in poetry of replacing a normally long syllable in the meter with two short syllables. It is often found in iambic and trochaic meters, and also in anapestic, dochmiac and sometimes in cretic, bacchiac, and ionic meters. In iambic and trochaic meters, either the first or the second half of the metrical foot can be resolved, or sometimes both.

Greek and Latin metre is an overall term used for the various rhythms in which Greek and Latin poems were composed. The individual rhythmical patterns used in Greek and Latin poetry are also known as "metres".

In poetic meter, diaeresis has two meanings: the separate pronunciation of the two vowels in a diphthong for the sake of meter, and a division between feet that corresponds to the division between words.

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.

Prosody is the theory and practice of versification.

Samuel Ogden Andrew was an English classical and Anglo-Saxon scholar, translator and headmaster, known for his verse translations of The Iliad and The Odyssey and of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (1931). He was also known for his books on classics and mathematics for school use.

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.

References

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