Alexandrine

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  • In English poetry an Alexandrine is a line of verse consisting of six iambic feet, i.e., an iambic hexameter. Usually there is a break - or caesura, to use the technical term - after the third foot in the line, as in this Alexandrine from To a Skylark by Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822) - the caesura is marked by a double vertical line:


Until we hardly see, || we feel that it is there.


Poems written entirely in Alexandrines are relatively uncommon in English poetry, but one example is The Prisoner by Emily Brontë (1818-1848). Here is the first stanza of the seven stanzas which make up the poem. Again, notice the caesura halfway through each line.


Still let my tyrants know, I am not doom'd to wear
Year after year in gloom and desolate despair;
A messenger of Hope comes every night to me,
And offers for short life, eternal liberty.


It is more usual in English poetry to find an Alexandrine as the final line of a stanza which, apart from this final line, consists of shorter lines of verse. An example is Shelley's To a Skylark, of which the following is the final stanza:


Teach me half the gladness
That thy brain must know;
Such harmonious madness
From my lips would flow,
The world would listen then, as I am listening now.


  • In French poetry, where the metre is first noted, an Alexandrine is a line of verse of twelve syllables, i.e., it need not consist of six iambic feet.

The plays of the great French dramatists Pierre Corneille (1606-1684) and Jean Racine (1639-1699) use rhyming Alexandrine couplets; and poems composed in Alexandrines are very common in French poetry. Here, as an example, are three lines from L'Expiation, a long poem written entirely in Alexandrines by Victor Hugo (1802-1885). (In counting the syllables in the lines remember that in French poetry the final 'e' of a word is sounded if the following word in the line begins with a consonant.)


Le soir tombait; la lutte était ardente et noire.
Il avait l'offensive et presque la victoire;
Il tenait Wellington acculé sur un bois.


[Translation: Evening was falling; the struggle was intense and black. He was on the offensive and almost had victory; he held Wellington cornered against a wood.]

Etymological note: the alexandrine takes its name from the French epic Roman d'Alixandre written in that metre round about the turn of the twelfth into the thirteenth century. It treats of Alexander the Great.