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Examples
The "double pipes" or "train tracks" are not original to any of the texts quoted, but only serve to show the position of the audible pause.
Homer
Caesuras were widely used in Greek poetry, for example in the opening line of the Iliad:
- μῆνιν ἄειδε θεὰ || Πηληϊάδεω Ἀχιλῆος οὐλομένην
This line includes a masculine caesura after θεὰ, a natural break that separates the line into two logical parts. Unlike later writers, Homeric lines more commonly employ the feminine caesura
Latin
Caesuras were widely used in Latin poetry, for example in Virgil's opening line of the Aeneid:
- Arma virumque cano, || Troiae qui primus ab oris
- ("I sing of arms and the man, who first from the shores of Troy. . .")
This line displays an obvious caesura in the medial position. 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. The ancient elegiac couplet form of the Greeks and Romans contained a line of dactylic hexameter followed by a line of pentameter; the pentameter often displayed an even more obvious caesura:
- Cynthia prima fuit; || Cynthia finis erit.
- ("Cynthia was the first; Cynthia will be the last" — Propertius)
Old English
The caesura was even more important to Old English verse than it was to Latin or Greek poetry. In Latin or Greek poetry, the caesura could be suppressed for effect in any line at will. 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. Consider the opening line of Beowulf:
- Hwæt! we Gar-Dena || on geardagum
- ("Lo! we Spear-Danes, in days of yore. . .")
Middle English
William Langland's Piers Plowman:
- I loked on my left half || as þe lady me taughte
- And was war of a womman || worþeli ycloþed.
- ("I looked on my left side, as the lady told me to, and perceived an expensively dressed woman.")
Other examples
Caesuras can occur in later forms of verse; in these, though, they are usually optional. The so-called ballad meter, or the common meter of the hymn odists, is usually thought of as a line of iambic tetrameter followed by a line of trimeter, but it can also be considered a line of heptameter with a fixed caesura at the fourth foot.
Considering the break as a caesura in these verse forms, rather than a beginning of a new line, explains how sometimes multiple caesuras can be found in this verse form (from the limerick Tom o' Bedlam):
- From the hag and hungry goblin || that into rags would rend ye,
- And the spirits that stand || by the naked man || in the Book of Moons, defend ye!
In later and freer verse forms, the caesura is optional. It can, however, be used for rhetorical effect, as in Alexander Pope's line:
- To err is human; || to forgive, divine.
See also
References
- [1] “caesura” Encyclopædia Britannica. 2007. Encyclopædia Britannica Online. 3 March 2007
