Czech alexandrine Jiří Orten: <poem style="margin-left: 2em; font-style:italic"> </poem> Czech alexandrine Czech alexandrine (in Czech "český alexandrín") is a verse form found in Czech poetry of the 20th century. It is a metre based on French alexandrine. The most important features of the pattern are number of syllables (twelve or thirteen) and a caesura after the sixth syllable. It is an unusual metre, exhibiting characteristics of both syllabic and syllabotonic (accentual-syllabic) metre. Thus it occupies a transitional position between syllabic and accentual patterns of European versification. It stands out from the background of modern Czech versification, which is modeled chiefly after German
French alexandrine as an alternative rhythm to the classical alexandrine. His famous self-descriptive line: exemplifies the structure of the ", which preserves the medial caesura with a word break, but de-emphasizes it by surrounding it with two stronger phrase breaks after syllables four and eight: Although generally embraced by the French Romantics and Symbolists, the ' remained a supplemental line, used within a classical alexandrine context and forming no more than one quarter of the alexandrine lines written during this time. Passages of classical alexandrines were still written by these poets, as for example this ' quatrain by Charles Baudelaire: These three