When a poem is doubly catalectic (brachycatalectic), that is, shortened by two syllables, a blunt ending remains blunt:Īmazing Grace! How sweet the sound (4 beats) That saved a wretch like me. However, there is not enough evidence to tell if a similar phenomenon occurred in Ancient Greek. In all of these songs, when they are set to music, there is a lengthening of the penultimate syllable in order to equalise the two lines. Here we go round the mulberry bush (4 beats, blunt) On a cold and frosty morning (3 beats, pendant) Good King Wenceslas looked out, (4 beats, blunt) On the Feast of Stephen, (3 beats, pendant) When the snow lay round about, (4 beats, blunt) Deep and crisp and even (3 beats, pendant)Īnother example is the children's song Here We Go Round the Mulberry Bush, of which the first stanza ends as follows: (b) When a line with a blunt ending such as iambic (x – u –) is made catalectic, the result is a line with a pendant ending (u – x).Īn example of a blunt line becoming pendant in catalexis is Goethe's poem Heidenröslein, or, in the same metre, the English carol Good King Wenceslas: (a) When a line with a pendant ending such as trochaic (– u – x) is made catalectic, the result is a line with a blunt (or "masculine") ending (– u –). (Here "x" stands for an anceps syllable.) It has been argued that catalexis can be divided into two types. It has been argued that across a number of Indo-European languages, when the two types of line are mixed in this way, the shorter line tends to be used as a coda at the end of a period or stanza. Once in Royal David's city (8 syllables) Stood a lowly cattle shed, (7 syllables) Where a mother laid her Baby (8 syllables) In a manger for His bed: (7 syllables) Mary was that mother mild, (7 syllables) Jesus Christ her little Child. Poems can be written entirely in catalectic lines, or entirely in acatalectic (complete) lines, or a mixture, as the following carol, composed by Cecil Frances Alexander in 1848:
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