United States or Kyrgyzstan ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Horace speaks of a lady named Glycera in this connection; it is probable that she is the same as Nemesis; the custom of erotic poetry being to substitute a Greek name of similar scansion for the original Latin one; if the original name were Greek the change was still made, hence Glycera might well stand for Nemesis.
Thus, both as to the arithmetical measure of the verse, and the degree of regularity in scansion, we see the laws of prosody to have one common purpose: to keep alive the opposition of two schemes simultaneously followed; to keep them notably apart, though still coincident; and to balance them with such judicial nicety before the reader, that neither shall be unperceived and neither signally prevail.
Vast and learned treatises have been written on the prose rhythms of the Greeks and Romans, and Saintsbury's History of English Prose Rhythm is a monumental collection of wonderful prose passages in English, with the scansion of "long" and "short" syllables and of "feet" marked after a fashion that seems to please no one but the author.
So, supplying the deficiencies of torn or defaced pages by reference to another of the copies, he arrived by degrees at a clear understanding of the whole matter. The story was set forth in rhyming doggerel. The poet was not blessed with a gift of melody or of style. Absence of scansion tortured the ear. Coarseness of diction offended the taste.
The People! Like our huge earth itself, which, to ordinary scansion, is full of vulgar contradictions and offence, man, viewed in the lump, displeases, and is a constant puzzle and affront to the merely educated classes.
And oh! ye pale professors, who drilled me in syntax and scansion, ye would deem me ungrateful indeed were I to give utterance to the contempt and indignation which I then felt for ye then, when I looked back upon ten years of wasted existence spent under your tutelage then, when, after believing myself an educated man, the illusion vanished, and I awoke to the knowledge that I knew nothing!
An examination of any line of verse will verify these statements. Take, for example, the first three lines of Shakespeare's song, Blow, blow, thou winter wind, Thou art not so unkind As man's ingratitude. Here the quantitative scansion is perhaps as follows: U U x U U U U
The idea that the metre had prosodiacal laws, which, nevertheless, its greatest masters habitually violated, is one that would never have been maintained had not the desire to systematise all Latin prosody on a Greek basis prevailed almost universally. The true theory of early Latin scansion is established beyond a doubt by the labours of Ritschl in regard to Plautus.
Yet it is evident to us that these, and even minuter points of accentual scansion, have been regarded by Mr. Coleridge as worthy of study and observation. We do not, of course, mean that rules of this kind were always in his mind while composing, any more than that an expert disputant is always thinking of the distinctions of mood and figure, whilst arguing; but we certainly believe that Mr.
There are, moreover, occasional difficulties in this method of scansion, some lines refusing to accommodate themselves to the Procrustean methods of sixteenth-century editors, and exactly similar anomalies are to be found in Spenser.
Word Of The Day