United States or Yemen ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !


These poems are written in what would be decasyllabic couplets were they reducible to metre in other words, in the barbarous caesural jangle in which many poets of the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries imagined that they reproduced the music of Chaucer, and which, refashioned however almost beyond recognition by a born metrist, we shall meet again in the Shepherd's Calender.

"mich": "rich" or "man": "han". Caesural rhymes are frequently met with, and were considered by Lachmann to be the marks of interpolated strophes, a view no longer held. A further peculiarity of the "Nibelungen" strophe is the frequent omission of the unaccented syllable in the second half of the last line of the strophe between the second and third stresses.

Yet we may say that on the whole the modulation of the verse, the treatment of the caesural pauses and the phrasing compare rather favorably with the Catullan hexameters which obviously served as its models, that in the best lines the poet shows himself sensitive to delicate effects, and that the pastoral scene which Horace compliments a few years later is, despite its imitative notes, written with enthusiasm, and reminds us pleasantly of the Eclogues.

"Il faut que votre mere se reposer," he told her, with the grave caesural pause which he always made in the middle of a French sentence. She understood him. No distortion of her native tongue surprised or perplexed her. She was accustomed to being addressed in all persons, numbers, genders, tenses; by Germans, English, Americans.

Thus it was that at the beginning of the sixteenth century Hawes could write such verse as: It is this prosody, dependent usually upon a strong caesural pause to differentiate it from prose, which may account for the harshness of some of Wyatt's verse, and which rendered possible the barbarous metre of Barclay.

Choate's jury-arguments, and saw a lawyer with a lithe and elastic figure of about five feet and eleven inches, with a face not merely of a scholarly paleness, but wrinkled all over, and, as it were, scathed with thought and with past nervous and intellectual struggles, yet still beautiful, with black hair curling as if from heat and dewy from heightened action and intensity of thought and feeling, and heard a clear, sympathetic, and varying voice uttering rapidly and unhesitatingly, sometimes with sweet caesural and almost monotonous cadences, and again with startling and electric shocks, language now exquisitely delicate and poetic, now vehement in its direct force, and again decorated and wild with Eastern extravagance and fervor of fancy, would have thought him the last man to have been born on New England soil, or to convince the judgments of twelve Yankee jurors.