Alexandrine - Accentual-syllabic Verse

Accentual-syllabic Verse

In accentual-syllabic verse, it is a line of iambic hexameter - a line of six feet or measures ("iambs"), each of which has two syllables with an unstressed syllable followed by a stressed syllable. It is also usual for there to be a caesura between the sixth and seventh syllables (as the examples from Pope below illustrate). Robert Bridges noted that in the lyrical sections of Samson Agonistes, Milton significantly varied the placement of the caesura.

In Edmund Spenser's Faerie Queene 8 lines of pentameter are followed by an alexandrine, the eponymous Spenserian stanza. The 6-foot line slowed the regular rhythm of the 5-foot lines. After Spenser, alexandrine couplets were used by Michael Drayton in his Poly-Olbion.

Alexander Pope famously characterized the alexandrine's potential to slow or speed the flow of a poem in two rhyming couplets consisting of an iambic pentameter followed by an alexandrine:

A needless alexandrine ends the song

that like a wounded snake, drags its slow length along.

A few lines later Pope continues:

Not so, when swift Camilla scours the Plain,

Flies o'er th'unbending corn and skims along the Main.

As in the Spenserian stanza above, alexandrines are sometimes mixed with pentameter verse. Shakespeare used them rarely in his blank verse. In the Restoration and eighteenth century, poetry written in couplets is sometimes varied by the introduction of a triplet in which the third line is an alexandrine, as in this sample from Dryden, which introduces a 6-5-6 triplet after two pentameter couplets:

But satire needs not those, and wit will shine

Through the harsh cadence of a rugged line:

A noble error, and but seldom made,

When poets are by too much force betrayed.

Thy generous fruits, though gathered ere their prime,

Still showed a quickness; and maturing time

But mellows what we write to the dull sweets of rhyme.

Alexandrines also formed the first line of the couplet form Poulter's Measure (the second line being a fourteener) as exemplified in Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey's poem, Complaint of the Absence of her lover, being upon the sea (1547).