I loked on my left half || as þe lady me taughte And was war of a woman || worþeli ycloþed. Old English poetry added alliteration and other devices to this basic pattern. The basic form is accentual verse, with four stresses per line separated by a caesura. (Behold! The Spear-Danes in days gone by,) (and the kings who ruled them had courage and greatness,) (We have heard of these princes' heroic campaigns.) Hwæt! We Gardena || in gear-dagum, þeodcyninga, || þrym gefrunon, hu ða æþelingas || ellen fremedon. In the alliterative verse that is shared by most of the oldest Germanic languages, the caesura is an ever-present and necessary part of the verse form itself. In Latin or Greek poetry, the caesura could be suppressed for effect in any line. This makes the caesura arguably more important to the Old English verse than it was to Latin or Greek poetry. In Old English, the caesura has come to represent a pronounced pause in order to emphasize lines in Old English poetry that would otherwise be considered to be a droning, monotonous line. (Cynthia was the first Cynthia will be the last) Old English The pentameter often displayed a clearer caesura, as in this example from Propertius:Ĭynthia prima fuit || Cynthia finis erit. The ancient elegiac couplet form of the Greeks and Romans contained a line of dactylic hexameter followed by a line of pentameter. In dactylic hexameter, a caesura occurs any time the ending of a word does not coincide with the beginning or the end of a metrical foot in modern prosody, however, it is only called one when the ending also coincides with an audible pause in the line. This line uses caesura in the medial position. Latin Ĭaesurae were widely used in Latin poetry, for example, in the opening line of Virgil's Aeneid:Īrma virumque cano || Troiae qui primus ab oris (Of arms and the man, I sing. Unlike the tragedians in their hexameters, Homeric lines more commonly employ feminine caesurae this preference is observed to an even higher degree among the Alexandrian poets. This line includes a masculine caesura after θεὰ, a natural break that separates the line into two logical parts. For example, in the opening line of the Iliad: Examples Homer Ĭaesurae were widely used in Greek poetry. The same mark separately developed as the virgule, the single slash used to mark line breaks in poetry. In verse scansion, the modern caesura mark is a double vertical bar ⟨||⟩ or ⟨ ‖ ⟩, a variant of the single-bar virgula ("twig") used as a caesura mark in medieval manuscripts. Initial and terminal caesurae are rare in formal, Romance, and Neoclassical verse, which prefer medial caesurae.
A caesura is also described by its position in a line of poetry: a caesura close to the beginning of a line is called an initial caesura, one in the middle of a line is medial, and one near the end of a line is terminal. A masculine caesura follows a stressed syllable while a feminine caesura follows an unstressed syllable. In modern European poetry, a caesura is defined as a natural phrase end, especially when occurring in the middle of a line. The opposite of an obligatory caesura is a bridge where word juncture is not permitted. All other caesurae are only potentially places of articulation. Some caesurae are expected and represent a point of articulation between two phrases or clauses. In contrast, a word juncture at the end of a foot is called a diaeresis. In classical Greek and Latin poetry a caesura is the juncture where one word ends and the following word begins within a foot.
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