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
Syllabic verse in one verse tradition will typically not fit in another. Humans can perceive the number of members in a small set without actually counting them or mentally breaking them into subsets; the upper limit of this ability is estimated at between 5 and 9 units, and this seems to hold true in sequences of audible stimuli (e.g. syllables in a line of verse); so it is no surprise that syllabic hemistichs tend to be very short (typically 4 to 8 syllables), and to be grouped — and therefore separated from their neighbors — by markers such as stress, word boundary,