Sapphic stanza in Polish poetry for Renaissance poets. Horace's Sapphic stanza comprised three "lesser sapphics" and an "adonic": In Polish there was no quantitative verse, as phonemic quantity itself was extinct. Nor was there accentual-syllabic versification, save some attempts by Jan Kochanowski. But Polish syllabic lines were available. A syllabic hendecasyllable 11(5+6) took the place of the quantitative lesser sapphic; likewise with the adonic. The hendecasyllable (with caesura after the fifth syllable) is very common in Polish poetry, and the pentasyllable is so typical for Polish verse that Karol Wiktor Zawodziński gave it the name of "polonik". Pentasyllables occur in Polish poetry either in a
A Gest of Robyn Hode Many elements of the Gest, including the knight's debt, form a major part of the Robin McKinley novel, "The Outlaws of Sherwood". Bob Frank has recorded the entire Gest on a CD, in a modern English version entitled "A Little Gest of Robin Hood." (Bowstring Records, 2002) He performs it with a guitar, in a "talking blues" style. Stanza 1: <poem> </poem> Stanza 144: <poem> </poem> A Gest of Robyn Hode "A Gest of Robyn Hode" is Child Ballad 117; it is also called A Lyttell Geste of Robyn Hode in one of the two oldest books that contain it.