Caesura

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A caesura, in poetry, is an audible pause that breaks up a line of verse. This may come in the form of any sort of punctuation which causes a pause in speech; such as a comma; semicolon; full stop etc. It is also used in musical notation as a complete cessation of musical time.

Caesurae figure prominently in Greek and Latin versification, especially in the heroic verse form, dactylic hexameter.

Please note that in this article, "||" denotes a caesura. The two verticle lines did not feature in any of the texts quoted, but only serve to show the position of the break in the line; in other words, where the reader audibly pauses whilst reading the prose.

Contents

1 Examples

1.1 Latin
1.2 Old English
1.3

2 Classification
3 See also

Examples

Latin

Caesuras feature prominently in Latin poetry, such as in Virgil's opening line of the Aeneid:

Arma virumque cano, || Troiae qui primus ab oris

("I sing of arms and the man, who first from the shores of Troy. . .")

This line displays an obvious caesura in its middle (this is, of course, not the middle of the verse, as the writer says, the caesura is the so called penthemimeres (or B1 or masculine caesura). the middle would be after the third (leaving apart, that a hexameter is katalectic), but not in the third foot), its usual position. The caesura can move around freely in the lines of dactylic hexameter. Technically, in dactylic hexameter, a caesura occurs anytime when the ending of a word does not coincide with the beginning or end of a metrical foot; it is usually only called one when the ending also coincides with an audible pause in speaking the line. The ancient elegiac couplet form of the Greeks and Romans contained a line of dactylic hexameter followed by a line of pentameter; the pentameter often displayed an even more obvious caesura:

Cynthia prima fuit; || Cynthia finis erit.

("Cynthia was the first; Cynthia will be the last" — Horace)

Old English

But the caesura was even more important to Old English verse than it was to Latin or Greek poetry. In Latin or Greek poetry, the caesura could be suppressed for effect in any line at will. In the alliterative verse that is shared by most of the oldest Germanic languages, the caesura is an ever-present and necessary part of the verse form itself. Consider the opening line of Beowulf:

Hwæt! we Gar-Dena || on geardagum

("Lo! we Spear-Danes, in days of yore. . .")

But compare that with some lines from William Langland's Piers Plowman:

I loked on my left half || as þe lady me taughte

And was war of a womman || worþeli ycloþed.

("I looked on my left side, as the lady told me to, and perceived an expensively dressed woman.")

Classification

A masculine caesura is one that occurs after a stressed syllable; a feminine caesura follows an unstressed syllable.

Caesurae can occur in later forms of verse; in these, though, they are usually optional. The so-called ballad metre, or the common metre of the hymnodists, is usually thought of as a line of iambic tetrameter followed by a line of trimeter, but it can also be considered a line of heptameter with a fixed caesura at the fourth foot. Considering the break as a caesura in these verse forms, rather than a beginning of a new line, explains how sometimes multiple caesurae can be found in this verse form (from the limerick Tom o' Bedlam):

From the hag and hungry goblin || that into rags would rend ye,

And the spirits that stand || by the naked man || in the Book of Moons, defend ye!

In later and freer verse forms, the caesura is optional. It can, however, be used for rhetorical effect, as in Alexander Pope's line:

To err is human; || to forgive, divine.

Caesurae can be classed into three further categories - initial, medial and terminal. This very simply corresponds to the point at which the break occurs in the line: initial caesura describes a break at the beginning of a line, medial denotes a pause in the middle and terminal occurs at the very end.