OTP: Lesson - The Scansion of Poetry - Other Meters

The Scansion of Poetry - Other Meters

Most of what we will work with in this course will be Dactylic Hexameter, especially if you are asked to scan a line or passage. However, there are other common meters, which we will encounter. So, let's briefly cover two of them: Elegiac Couplets and Hendecasyllabic.

Elegiac Couplet

The elegiac couplet is made up of pairs of lines, with the first being in hexameter (six feet) and the second in pentameter (five feet), divided into two segments, each with two and a half feet (each segment ends in a long syllable). This style was again borrowed from the Greeks, but in this case, came out of their lyric tradition, including from the poetry of Sappho. The Romans again borrowed this style from the Greeks and used it almost exclusively for lyric poetry.

An example from the poet Catullus, one of Rome's most famous lyric poets:

Ōdi~et a | mō. Quā | re~id faci | am, for | tasse re | quīris?
Nescio, | sed fie | rī || sentio~et | excruci | or.

• Line one scans as: dactyl, spondee, dactyl, spondee, dactyl, spondee
• Line two scans as: dactyl, spondee, long syllable (caesura), dactyl, dactyl, long syllable

The elegiac couplet is not common in English, and in fact is replaced by a form called "heroic," but there are a few examples, like this, from Alfred Lord Tennyson's Leonine Elegiacs ("Leonine" refers to the rhyming pattern: note the rhyming of pines and shines):

Low flowing breezes are roaming the broad valley dimm'd in the gloaming:
Thoro' the black-stemm'd pines only the far river shines.

Hendecasyllabic

The last style we will encounter is called Hendecasyllabic, because the line contains exactly eleven (hendeca) syllables, in five feet. This was a style once again borrowed from the Greeks (and thus the name uses the Greek prefix for eleven) and was most commonly used by Catullus and Martial. There are various different versions of this style (with names like Phalaecian, Alcaic, and Sapphic), but the basic rule stands. The first line of Catullus' first poem (Catullus, Poem 1):

cui dō | nō lepi | dum no | vum li | bellum

The line scans: spondee, dactyl, trochee, trochee, spondee

In English, we again find an example from Alfred Lord Tennyson, in his poem Hendecasyllabics:

O you chorus of indolent reviewers,
Irresponsible, indolent reviewers,
Look, I come to the test, a tiny poem
All composed in a metre of Catullus

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