Octameter
Octameter is a poetic meter consisting of eight metrical feet per line. Each foot typically contains two syllables, resulting in a total of 16 syllables per line. This meter is less commonly used in literature compared to other meters like iambic pentameter, but it can create a distinctive and rhythmic effect when employed effectively.
8 Key excerpts on "Octameter"
eBook - ePubThe Prosody Handbook
A Guide to Poetic Form
- Robert Beum, Karl Shapiro(Authors)
- 2012(Publication Date)
- Dover Publications(Publisher)
...Meter is paradoxical. It tends to modify emotion at the same time as it seems to express it. Meter seems appropriate to emotional and imaginative expression not only because it suggests and stimulates feeling, but also because it makes the language in which it appears unlike the language (and experiences) of everyday. Meter introduces a note of the consciously planned, the symmetrical and artful, and thus makes our experience of reading verse an experience greatly different from our direct involvement in ordinary discourse and from our participation in an actual emotional situation. In other words, meter can be a means of obtaining what is often called “aesthetic distance” or “psychic distance.” Considered in itself, a regular beat—whether it be a drum beat, a rhythmical stamping of feet, or an iambic pentameter—evokes and seems to express strong feeling. It unquestionably has connections with the primitive, the emotional, the instinctual, aspects of our nature. In verse, however, meter does not exist independently, but in a context of words; it is conjoined with images and ideas, with a grammar and a rhetoric. And since the determinateness of the beat is “artificial”—a formality, an artifice, a quality not characteristic of ordinary discourse—meter tends to remove poetic discourse from the realm of the ordinary. It creates an aura of distance and indirectness and yields all the pleasures that we derive from such a remove from the direct and the familiar. It satisfies our love of formality, ritual, detachment. Simultaneously, the note of urgency, the hint of the primitive or of intense response, is never quite lost. Metered poetry thus makes a simultaneous appeal to two distinct sides of the personality, and this no doubt is one reason for the continuing appeal of meter from generation to generation and age to age. It is a paradigm of civilization: Bacchus dancing with Athena. Aesthetic distance is what softens the blow of calamity...
eBook - ePub- Goold Brown(Author)
- 2004(Publication Date)
- Perlego(Publisher)
...Lines of two, three, four, five, six, or seven feet, are common; and these have received the technical denominations of dim'eter, trim'eter, tetram'eter, pentam'eter, hexam'eter, and heptam'eter. On a wide page, iambics and trochaics may possibly be written in octom'eter ; but lines of this measure, being very long, are mostly abandoned for alternate tetrameters. ORDER I.—IAMBIC VERSE. In Iambic verse, the stress is laid on the even syllables, and the odd ones are short. Any short syllable added to a line of this order, is supernumerary; iambic rhymes, which are naturally single, being made double by one, and triple by two. But the adding of one short syllable, which is much practised in dramatic poetry, may be reckoned to convert the last foot into an amphibrach, though the adding of two cannot. Iambics consist of the following measures:— MEASURE I.—IAMBIC OF EIGHT FEET, OR OCTOMETER. Psalm XLVII, 1 and 2. "O =all | y~e p=eo | -pl~e, cl=ap | y~our h=ands, | ~and w=ith | tr~i=um | -ph~ant v=oi | -c~es s=ing; No force | the might | -=y power | withstands | of God, | the u | -niver | -sal King." See the " Psalms of David, in Metre," p. 54. Each couplet of this verse is now commonly reduced to, or exchanged for, a simple stanza of four tetrameter lines, rhyming alternately, and each commencing with a capital; but sometimes, the second line and the fourth are still commenced with a small letter: as, "Your ut | -most skill | in praise | be shown, for Him | who all | the world | commands, Who sits | upon | his right | -eous throne, and spreads | his sway | o'er heath | -en lands." Ib., verses 7 and 8; Edition bound with Com. Prayer, N. Y., 1819. An other Example. "The hour | is come | —the cher | -ish'd hour, When from | the bus | -y world | set free, I seek | at length | my lone | -ly bower, And muse | in si | -lent thought | on thee." THEODORE HOOK'S REMAINS: The Examiner, No...
eBook - ePub- Eric Weiskott(Author)
- 2021(Publication Date)
- University of Pennsylvania Press(Publisher)
...This surprising situation, which I will argue was partly Chaucer’s doing, needs to be seen in verse-historical context. The tetrameter entered the English literary field in the late twelfth or thirteenth century under influence from French octosyllables and Latin accentualsyllabic tetrameter (see Chapter 4). By the time Chaucer set out to compose what is probably his earliest extant long poem, the Book of the Duchess (late 1360s/1370s), the Age of Tetrameter was well under way, and tetrameter was the readiest alternative to the alliterative meter. Chaucer’s exclusive preference for tetrameter for long poems before the Parliament of Fowls and Troilus and Criseyde has attracted remarkably little critical scrutiny. 4 Yet that preference speaks volumes. Chaucer and Langland made opposite metrical choices in the 1360s, a consequence of their divergent social and geographical trajectories. Chaucer’s decision was, in part, expedient. Translating the Roman de la rose during or before work on the Book of the Duchess, Chaucer reached for the English equivalent of French octosyllables. The metrical phonology of tetrameter reflects its medium-length history. Many twelfthand thirteenth-century word forms appeared in fourteenth-century tetrameter. These phantom syllables no longer functioned in everyday speech and may not have been pronounced in performance, but they contributed to metrical structure as they always had. Similar phenomena, however counterintuitive, are attested in many other long-lived metrical traditions, including Ancient Greek quantitative verse, English alliterative verse, Norse alliterative verse, and modern French and Portuguese syllabic verse. 5 Metrical history shapes poets’ and readers’ phenomenological experience of metrical phonology. In Chaucer’s tetrameter, historical word forms stand in free variation with contemporary spoken forms...
eBook - ePub- Jeffrey Wainwright(Author)
- 2015(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...I shall discuss the properties and history of the iambic pentameter, and by extension other metrical lines in ways that will emphasize the importance of variation in more detail later in this chapter (see below ‘Variation in Practice’). What the basic pattern does is act as a real but often intuited structure which the practising poet may vary but never violate. There are however a number of other measures. Iambic lines might be longer and stress six of their twelve syllables making a hexameter, or, to take the name from the most standard French verse line, an alexandrine, like these translated from Pierre Corneille’s Le Cid : No day of joy or tri umph comes un touched by care, No pure con tent with out some sha dow in the soul. Occasionally it can be even longer as in Robert Southwell ’s (c.1561–1595) ‘The Burning. Babe’: As I in hoar y wint er’s night stood shiv ering in the snow, Sur prised I was with sud den heat that made my heart to glow [.] Such a long line, the number of syllables make it a ‘ fourteener ’, has generally been found hard to handle. A verse line needs a tension much as a washing-line does, and longer stretches can sag into incoherence. But the ‘fourteener’ has another life in which it is split into two segments in the pattern of four stress/three stress. This is also known as ballad metre or common metre that we met in Chapter 2 and is strongly associated with the oral tradition : The King sits in Dun ferl ing toune Drink ing the blude -reid wine : O whar will I get a guid sail or To sail this schip of mine. Used independently, the four-stress line and the three-stress line are known as tetrameters and trimeters respectively...
eBook - ePub- Mick Short(Author)
- 2018(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...Because the possession of metre is one of the basic ways in which poetry can be distinguished from prose, it will be important to examine it in some detail. Some traditional treatments of metre have tended to assume that rhythm and metre are the same thing. But as we saw in 5.2, all language has rhythm, and so although metre is an extremely important aspect of poetic rhythm, it is not the only factor involved. The study of metre has had contrasting receptions by poets and students of poetry. Many of my students find metrics tedious to study. This is probably because metrical structure is the level of poetic organisation which is least directly connected with meaning, and because the study of metre is a complicated, and at times difficult, matter. Indeed, there are still a number of disagreements among experts on rhythm and metre about fairly basic aspects of their study. Poets, on the other hand, appear to find the study of poetic rhythm fascinating and central to their art. An indication of this is the number of well known poets who have written essays or longer works on the subject, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Robert Bridges and T. S. Eliot, for example. D. H. Lawrence, though not an analyst of metre, eloquently captures its rhythmic regularity and his feeling for its importance in the following extract from a letter: I think more of a bird with broad wings flying and lapsing through the air, than anything, when I think of metre. (Letter to Edward Marsh, November 1913) Why is poetry metred? Firstly, metrication is one of the formal features which sets poetry off from other kinds of writing; and in earlier times particularly, when poetry was reserved for special subject matters like love and nature, metrication was a formal signal of importance. Even today, when the subject matters of poetry are much more various, writing a text in metred lines appears to say 'I have something significant to tell you'...
eBook - ePub- Geoffrey N. Leech(Author)
- 2014(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...A pentameter can be regarded as a hexameter with one stress silent, and so on. The double measure (corresponding to the traditional ‘dipode’) is a basic unit of metre. To test this, read through the following extracts, and note how a pause seems to be required between trimeters or between pentameters, but not between dimeters or between tetrameters. Again, tapping in time with the stressed syllables may aid the perception of silent stresses. Recognizing the existence of silent stresses can help us to appreciate further connections between verse and music. Just as the simpler song and dance forms of music tend to break down into four-bar, eight-bar, and sixteen-bar sections, so many verse forms are constructed out of the basic rhythm units by multiples of two. Each of the three popular metrical patterns set out below has the symmetrical structure of a square, being composed of four sections of four measures each. These sections do not in every case correspond to verse lines, which are separately indicated (by the symbol 1): If, as I hope, the reader has been able to decipher these formulae without too much difficulty, they may well be recognized as [ a ] the metre of Old Mother Hubbard, [ b ] the limerick metre, and [ c ] the popular ballad metre of The Ancient Mariner and many other poems. This way of displaying the metrical pattern shows a regularity obscured by the normal line-by-line arrangement. In more sophisticated stanza forms, this mathematical symmetry of pattern is generally less marked, but it may be part of the set of expectations we bring to English verse. Whilst on the subject of duality, we may notice that there is a curious ambivalence between single measures and double measures, which is parallel to the ambivalence of two-time and four-time in musical time-signatures...
eBook - ePub- Bartolo Natoli, Angela Pitts, Judith Hallett(Authors)
- 2022(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...Appendix B Introduction to Ancient Meter Ancient Greek and Latin poetic verse was composed in lines of long and short syllables in different combinations. These combinations imbued ancient poetry a variety of rhythms that furthered the meaning of the poetry and provided entertainment to the audience of the poems. In antiquity, these rhythms were called metra in Greek (μέτρον) and, therefore, have been refered to as meter through the present day. Unlike the meters of English poetry, which are based on word-stress (stressed and unstressed syllables), Greek and Latin poetry relies on the length of syllables (long and short) to determine the rhythm of the meter. Long syllables are considered long because they take twice the time to pronounce as do short syllables. In musical notation, we may consider long syllables to be equivalent to a quarter note (♩) and short syllables equivalent to an eighth note (♪). In traditional metrical notation, long syllables are marked with a (⎻) above the long syllable and short syllables with a (⏑) above the short syllable. Reading ancient poetry aloud in meter or analyzing the meter of a given line of poetry is commonly referred to as scanning. In order to successfully scan a line of poetry—and thus understand how it is contributing to the meaning of the line of poetry—one needs the ability to complete two tasks: (1) dividing Latin and Greek words into syllables and (2) determining the length of individual syllables. Dividing Up Greek and Latin Words into Syllables A syllable is the smallest unit of sound that can be pronounced. A Latin or Greek word has as many syllables as it has vowels or diphthongs. To divide words into syllables, use the following rules: A single consonant goes with the following vowel...
eBook - ePub- G. S. Fraser(Author)
- 2017(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...But there are one or two strictly regular lines like Sh púshed/ h m oút/wård wíth/ h r throúgh/ th dóor, where the little word ‘with’, weak in itself, rightly gets a strong stress for sense, to remind us that it is verse not prose that we are reading. Ezra Pound and other experimenters have spoken a great deal about poets in this century ‘breaking the tyranny of the iambic line’. These two passages, utterly different in tone and movement, may remind us both what an extraordinarily flexible instrument the iambic pentameter is, and also that much of the greatest modem poetry is written in this line, and not in free verse. IAMBIC TETRAMETERS, TRIMETERS AND LONGER IAMBIC LINES Shorter types of iambic line raise interesting metrical problems, but not of the same type as the iambic tetrameter. The possibility of foot reversal, or trochaic substitution, makes it sometimes hard to tell whether a poem in tetrameters is fundamentally iambic or trochaic: Únd r / néath th s / sábl / heárse Liés th / súbj ct/ óf áll/ vérse: Sídne ’s/ síst r,/ Pémbr ke’s/ móth r. Deáth, re thóu tåke/ súch ån/ óth r Faír a d / wíse a d/ goód ås/ shé, Tíme shåll/ thrów å/ dárt åt/ thée. This famous epigram is clearly trochaic, with the last trochee in some lines truncated. But what of Shakespeare’s ‘The Phoenix and the Turtle’? When we scan trochaically Lét th / bírd f / loúd st/ láy Ón th / sóle r/ ábiån/ trée Héråld/ sád a d/ trúmp t/ bé, we feel instinctively that this misrepresents the movement of the lines, which is better represented thus: Lét/ th bírd/ f loúd/ st/ láy Ón th / sóle/ ráb/ iån trée Hér/åld/ sád/ a d trúmp t bé. The tetrameter, a four beat line, can be of seven syllables as well as eight: as it can end with a shortened trochee, so it can begin with the stressed syllable of a shortened iambic foot. When we reflect on this, we may begin to wonder whether the little epigram on Sidney’s sister is trochaic all through...
