Dactylic hexameter

The hexameter continued to be used in Christian times, for example in the Carmen paschale of the 5th-century Irish poet Sedulius and Bernard of Cluny's 12th-century satire De contemptu mundi among many others.

It is also long (with certain exceptions) if it has a short vowel followed by two consonants, even if these are in different words: con-dunt, et terrīs, tot vol-ve-re.

qu counts as a single consonant, so that in the word aqua "water" the first syllable is short, not like the Italian acqua.

In certain words like Iuppiter, Iovem, iam, iussit, and iēcit, i is a consonant, pronounced like the English y, so Iup-pi-ter has three syllables and iē-cit "he threw" has two.

In Greek, short vowels elide freely, and the elision is shown by an apostrophe, for example in line 2 of the Iliad: ἣ μυρί᾽ Ἀχαιοῖς ἄλγε᾽ ἔθηκε (hḕ murí᾽ Akhaioîs álge᾽ éthēke) "which caused countless sufferings for the Achaeans".

In this case the 2nd and 4th foot caesuras are obligatory:[7] The hexameter was first used by early Greek poets of the oral tradition, and the most complete extant examples of their works are the Iliad and the Odyssey, which influenced the authors of all later classical epics that survive today.

Early epic poetry was also accompanied by music, and pitch changes associated with the accented Greek must have highlighted the melody, though the exact mechanism is still a topic of discussion.

By the age of Augustus, poets like Virgil closely followed the rules of the meter and approached it in a highly rhetorical way, looking for effects that can be exploited in skilled recitation.

The five spondees and the word accents cutting across the verse rhythm give an impression of huge effort: A slightly different effect is found in the following line (3.658), describing the terrifying one-eyed giant Polyphemus, blinded by Ulysses.

Here again there are five spondees but there are also three elisions, which cause the word accent of all the words but ingens to coincide with the beginning of each foot: A succession of long syllables in some lines indicates slow movement, as in the following example where Aeneas and his companion the Sibyl (a priestess of Apollo) were entering the darkness of the world of the dead: The following example (Aeneid 2.9) describes how Aeneas is reluctant to begin his narrative, since it is already past midnight.

Hexameters are frequently enjambed—the meaning runs over from one line to the next, without terminal punctuation—which helps to create the long, flowing narrative of epic.

[25] In this, classical epic differs from medieval Latin, where the lines are often composed individually, with a break in sense at the end of each one.

Often in poetry ordinary words are replaced by poetic ones, for example unda or lympha for water, aequora for sea, puppis for ship, amnis for river, and so on.

Some ordinary Latin words are avoided, e.g. audiunt, mīlitēs, hominibus, facilius, mulierēs, familiae, voluptātibus etc., simply because they cannot be fitted into a hexameter verse.

Some speeches are themselves narratives, as when Aeneas tells Queen Dido about the fall of Troy and his voyage to Africa in books 2 and 3 of the Aeneid.

An example is the opening of the 9th satire of book 1: The verse innovations of the Augustan writers were carefully imitated by their successors in the Silver Age of Latin literature.

Juvenal, for example, was fond of occasionally creating verses that placed a sense break between the fourth and fifth foot (instead of in the usual caesura positions), but this technique—known as the bucolic diaeresis—did not catch on with other poets.

A treatise on poetry by Diomedes Grammaticus is a good example, as this work categorizes dactylic hexameter verses in ways that were later interpreted under the golden line rubric.

Independently, these two trends show the form becoming highly artificial—more like a puzzle to solve than a medium for personal poetic expression.

Bernard of Cluny, in the 12th century, for example, employs it in his De Contemptu Mundi, but ignores classical conventions in favor of accentual effects and predictable rhyme both within and between verses, e.g.: Not all medieval writers are so at odds with the Virgilian standard, and with the rediscovery of classical literature, later Medieval and Renaissance writers are far more orthodox, but by then the form had become an academic exercise.

[42] With the Neo-Latin period, the language itself came to be regarded as a medium only for serious and learned expression, a view that left little room for Latin poetry.

Many poets have attempted to write dactylic hexameters in English, though few works composed in the meter have stood the test of time.

Friedrich Gottlieb Klopstock's epic Der Messias popularized accentual dactylic hexameter in German.

Subsequent German poets to employ the form include Goethe (notably in his Reineke Fuchs) and Schiller.

The opening lines of Goethe's Reineke Fuchs ("Reynard the Fox"), written in 1793–1794, are: Jean-Antoine de Baïf (1532–1589) wrote poems regulated by quantity on the Greco–Roman model, a system which came to be known as vers mesurés, or vers mesurés à l'antique, which the French language of the Renaissance permitted.

In works like his Étrénes de poézie Franzoęze an vęrs mezurés (1574)[44] or Chansonnettes he used the dactylic hexameter, and other meters, in a quantitative way.

The final -e of vienne, autre, and regarde is sounded, and the word il is pronounced /i/: A modern attempt at reproducing the dactylic hexameter in French is this one, by André Markowicz (1985), translating Catullus's poem 63.

Again the final -e and -es of pères, perfide, and désertes are sounded: Hungarian is extremely suitable to hexameter (and other forms of poetry based on quantitative meter).