French alexandrine French alexandrine The French alexandrine () is a syllabic poetic meter of (nominally and typically) 12 syllables with a medial caesura dividing the line into two hemistichs (half-lines) of six syllables each. It was the dominant long line of French poetry from the 17th through the 19th century, and influenced many other European literatures which developed alexandrines of their own. According to verse historian Mikhail Gasparov, the French alexandrine developed from the Ambrosian octosyllable, by gradually losing the final two syllables, then doubling this line in a syllabic context with phrasal stress rather than length as a marker. The earliest
Metre (poetry) but is hypermetrical (outside the count of syllables, like a feminine ending in English verse), in that case, the rhyme is also called "feminine", whereas it is called "masculine" in the other cases. The most frequently encountered metre in Classical French poetry is the alexandrine, composed of two hemistiches of six syllables each. Two famous alexandrines are (the daughter of Minos and Pasiphae), and Classical French poetry also had a complex set of rules for rhymes that goes beyond how words merely sound. These are usually taken into account when describing the metre of a poem. In Spanish poetry the