Decasyllable

Decasyllable (

iambs or trochees (particularly iambic pentameter

).

Medieval French heroic

romance

(roman) was, however, most often written in 8 syllable (or octosyllable) verse.)

Use of the 10 syllable line in French poetry was eclipsed by the 12 syllable

alexandrine line, particularly after the 16th century. Paul Valéry

's great poem "The Graveyard by the Sea" (Le Cimetière marin) is, however, written in decasyllables.

Similarly, South Slavic and in particular Serbian epic poetry sung with the accompaniment of the gusle is traditionally sung in the decasyllabic verse.^[1]

In 19th-century Italian

I Lombardi, and "Si ridesti il Leon di Castiglia" from Ernani all employ the poetic meter of decasillabi.^[2]

Geoffrey Chaucer, author of The Canterbury Tales, utilized this poetic form. Chaucer^[3] evolved this meter into iambs, or the alternating pattern of five stressed and unstressed syllables made famous by Shakespeare. Because Chaucer's Middle English included many unstressed vowels at the end of words which later became silent, his poetry includes a greater number of hendecassylables than that of Modern English poets.

References

Notes

^ Dragiša Živković (1971). Živan Milisavac (ed.). Jugoslovenski književni leksikon [Yugoslav Literary Lexicon] (in Serbo-Croatian). Novi Sad (SAP Vojvodina, SR Serbia): Matica srpska. p. 92.
^ Gossett, p. 286
^ "Decasyllable". credoreference.com. The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics. Retrieved 2018-01-15.

Sources

ISBN 0-226-30482-5

References

See also