
alexandrine
Sign in to savethumb|Alexander the Great in a diving bell: a scene from the line's namesake, the ''Roman d'Alexandre''. Alexandrine is a name used for several distinct types of verse line with related metrical structures, most of which are ultimately derived from the classical French alexandrine. The line's name derives from its use in the Medieval French ''Roman d'Alexandre of 1170, although it had already been used several decades earlier in Le Pèlerinage de Charlemagne''. The foundation of most alexandrines consists of two hemistichs (half-lines) of six syllables each, separated by a caesura (a metrical p
~9 min read
Encyclopedic overview
12 sectionsContents
- Scope of the term
- French
- English
- Other languages
- Spanish
- Dutch
- German
- Polish
- Czech
- Hungarian
- Notes
- References
thumb|Alexander the Great in a diving bell: a scene from the line's namesake, the ''Roman d'Alexandre''. Alexandrine is a name used for several distinct types of verse line with related metrical structures, most of which are ultimately derived from the classical French alexandrine. The line's name derives from its use in the Medieval French ''Roman d'Alexandre of 1170, although it had already been used several decades earlier in Le Pèlerinage de Charlemagne. The foundation of most alexandrines consists of two hemistichs (half-lines) of six syllables each, separated by a caesura (a metrical pause or word break, which may or may not be realized as a stronger syntactic break):
o o o o o o | o o o o o o
Excerpted from Wikipedia’s “alexandrine” article, available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 licence.