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
Alexandrine as the second (rarely the first) line of heroic couplets, or even more distinctively as the third line of a triplet. In his "Essay on Criticism", Alexander Pope denounced (and parodied) the excessive and unskillful use of this practice: <poem style="margin-left:2em"> Then at the last and only couplet fraught With some unmeaning thing they call a thought, A needless Alexandrine ends the song, That, like a wounded snake, drags its slow length along. (lines 354-357) </poem> The Spanish "alejandrino" is a line of 7+7 syllables, probably developed in imitation of the French alexandrine. It was used beginning about 1200 for