These are your long short short syllables, or dactyl. Dactyls are represented graphically as follows: The next two (between the two knuckles and from the knuckle to the tip) are roughly the same length, but shorter than the first. The first, from your palm to the first knuckle, is the longest. If you remember that dactylos means finger in Greek, it is easy to remember the unit: just turn your finger sideways and look at the relative size of the three segments: In this first post, I’ll introduce the two major Latin meters: dactylic hexameter and pentameter.īoth major Latin meters are based on the dactyl, a unit of verse that is comprised of three parts: long, short, and short. The nice thing about scansion is that it’s in many ways easier than other tasks beginning language students have to perform. Although the untrained viewer can’t see this meter in an ancient text (unlike, for example, the musical notation on modern sheet music), once you know how to scan well, you can quickly begin to recite texts as they were meant to be heard. Nowhere is this performance context more clear than in the use of meter in ancient poetry. Poetry in particular was probably chanted or sung, as we know from the use of words relating to music in the opening lines of poems and poetic collections. Here are some more serious examples of the various meters.Although we now approach ancient texts primarily through the written word, they were originally meant for performance. A good example of trochaic monometer, for example, is this poem entitled "Fleas": The number of syllables in a line varies therefore according to the meter. A line of one foot is a monometer, 2 feet is a dimeter, and so on-trimeter (3), tetrameter (4), pentameter (5), hexameter (6), heptameter (7), and oĬtameter (8). DACTYLIC (/ x x): This is the forest pri meval, the murmuring pines and the hemlock (a trochee replaces the final dactyl)Įach line of a poem contains a certain number of feet of iambs, trochees, spondees, dactyls or anapests.ANAPESTIC (x x /): And the sound of a voice that is still. SPONDAIC (/ /): Break, break, break/ On thy cold gray stones, O Sea!.TROCHAIC (/ x): Tell me not in mournful numbers.IAMBIC (x /) : That time of year thou mayst in me be hold.In this document the stressed syllables are marked in boldface type rather than the traditionĪl "/" and "x." Each unit of rhythm is called a "foot" of poetry. The meters are iambs, trochees, spondees, anapests and dactyls. English poetry employs five basic rhythms of varying stressed (/) and unstressed (x) syllables.
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