'What oft was th ought | but n e'er so w ell expr essed'В (Pope)

'G ood str ong th ick st upef ying incense-sm oke!'В ('The Bishop Orders His Tomb at Saint Praxed's')ДҐ.В A caesura, marked '|,' indicates the rhetorical center or pause in a given line: 'Th is is the f orest prim eval, | the m urmuring p ines and the h emlocks.'Д)В the spondee, or spondaic foot:В // as in Browning's pentameter line below, in which the first two feet are spondaic: (The final, shorter, foot runs /U or //.) 'C ourage, he s aid and p ointed t oward the l and' (Tennyson)Д¬)В the dactyl, or dactylic foot:В /UU as in verilyВ (see Longfellow's 'Evangeline').В In the epic hexameter verse below, the feet are dactylic, with the hexameter pattern being /UU /UU /UU /UU /UU /U. The first foot in the following verse is trochaic: 'My b odily f orm from any n atural th ing' (Yeats)Д«)В the trochee, or trochaic foot:В /U as in groovy. The second and fifth foot of the following pentameter verse are anapestic: 'With th at misf ormГЁd spr ight he b ack ret urned ag aine' (Edmund Spenser)ДЈ.В When a poem is basically iambic but still varies at points in its metrical pattern-which often happens-the poet has substituted some other kind of foot for a basic iamb, U /.ДЄ)В the anapest, or anapestic foot:В UU/ as in intervene. 'Whose w oods these are I th ink I kn ow'В (Robert Frost) 'This m ounting w ave will r oll us sh oreward s oon' For the sake of formatting, a boldface syllable equals '/' and unbolded syllables are short 'U.' a line consisting of five iabic feet:В unstressed U + stressed /.В Five iambs equal one line of iambic pentameter:В U/ U/ U/ U/ U/. New York :В Random, 1979.)ДЎ.В When you cite two or three lines of a poem, you should mark the division between lines like this:В 'Whose woods these are I think I know / His house is in the village though' (1-2).В Use // to mark the division between stanzas.В It is not necessary to mark divisions between lines when your quotation is in offset form.В (Moreover, do not use quotation marks when you offset lines.)Дў.В The poetic line is divided into feet.В The most common form of line is iambic pentameter-i.e. (See Paul Fussell's Poetic Meter and Poetic Form.

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