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Updated: June 29, 2025
Ennius compelled the intractable forms of Latin speech to accommodate themselves to the dactylic rhythm. Difficulties of two kinds met him, those of accent and those of quantity. The former had been partially surmounted by the comic writers, and it only required a careful extension of their method to render the deviations from the familiar emphasis of daily life harmonious and acceptable.
And I think that I have an indistinct recollection of his mentioning a complex Cretic rhythm; also a dactylic or heroic, and he arranged them in some manner which I do not quite understand, making the rhythms equal in the rise and fall of the foot, long and short alternating; and, unless I am mistaken, he spoke of an iambic as well as of a trochaic rhythm, and assigned to them short and long quantities.
Or, combining these two modes of nomenclature, one may legitimately speak of iambic feet as "duple rising," "And never lifted up a single stone"; trochaic as "duple falling," "Here they are, my fifty perfect poems"; anapestic as "triple rising," "But he lived with a lot of wild mates, and they never would let him be good"; and dactylic as "triple falling";
Esau Hittall would we not have given! what volumes of polemic with the Guardian and amateur discussions of the Gospel of St John! In the first place, note the metrical structure, the sober level octosyllables of the overture changing suddenly to a dance-measure which, for a wonder in English, almost keeps the true dactylic movement. How effective is the rhetorical iteration of
With the principal lyric metres, too, the sapphic and alcaic, he had done what Virgil had done with the dactylic hexameter, carried them to the highest point of which the foreign Latin tongue was capable. They were naturalised, but remained sterile.
Musical, beautiful; beautiful, musical; little Miss Butterfly fly fly fly away! And he brought his fingers down upon the gamut at last, with a hasty, flickering touch that seemed really as delicate as Edie's own. 'I can never get words for it in English, he said again, half speaking with his parted lips; 'it's too dactylic in rhythm for English verse to go to it.
For some people think that it is the iambic rhythm, because that is the most like a speech, on which account it happens that it is most frequently employed in fables, because of its resemblance to reality because the dactylic hexameter rhythm is better suited to a lofty and magniloquent subject But Ephorus himself, an inconsiderable orator, though coming from an excellent school, inclines to the paeon, or dactyl, but avoids the spondee and trochee.
Longfellow's unconsciousness is charming, even when it seems childlike. As a master of verse he has no English rival since Spenser. "Evangeline" is perhaps the most successful instance of Greek and Latin hexameter being grafted on to an English stem. Matthew Arnold considered it too dactylic, but the lightness of its movement personifies the grace of the heroine herself. Lines like Virgil's
Taking advantage of the tendency to shorten final vowels, he fixed almost every doubtful case as short, e.g. musa, patre, dare, omnibus, amaveris, pater, only leaving the long syllable where the metre required it, as condiderit. By this means he gave a dactylic direction to Latin prosody which it afterwards, though only slightly, extended.
There is, however, no absolute contrast between the two kinds, because a falling rhythm is still a rhythm, and that means a movement which necessarily contains something of instability and unrest. The contrast is sharpest in the anapestic and dactylic, less sharp in the trochaic and iambic.
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