Talk:Trochaic octameter

I wouldn't mind someone double checking the scanning on that verse! Sam 01:18, 7 June 2006 (UTC)

I'm not sure I know how to fix this, given the format that's employed here to show The Raven's scansion. But it's simply an error to say--in the third paragraph under description and uses--that the poem uses dactyls. What Poe employs in the second foot of the second line is simply "elision"--a very well established practice by that time in poetry written in English. "Many a" is scanned as two syllables: "man/ya." Similarly, Gray in his "Elegy" writes: "Full many a flower is born to blush unseen"--a line of perfectly regular iambic pentameter. This is a practice that was common among poets who would never have employed a dactyl in iambic verse. Further along in the same line, "curious" is not a dactyl either. It's simply scanned as two syllables, reflecting the fact the "i" in "curious" tends to be deemphasized in speech. This sort of thing enabled poets for centuries to get a sort of "triple effect" without using triple feet (anapests and dactyls).

Compare Keats's perfectly regular iambic pentameter line in "The Eve of St. Agnes": "Came many a tiptoe amorous cavalier."

And there simply is no dactyl or anything close to it in the fifth line.

So this needs to be changed, but then the scansion chart would have to be changed in accordance with this. If no one does this, I'll come back when I have a little more time and figure out how to change that chart. [Desecoles] 19 June 2013

Trochaic octameter
To Wikipedia

I think your article Trochaic Octameters is mistaken, because a trochaic line with eight feet is not an octameter but a tetrameter. Why do I say this? The Oxford Classical Dictionary, s.v. Metre, Greek (footnote, p. 680, 1970 edition), says, ‘In dactyls the metron, or unit of measurement, is the foot; in iambics, trochaics and anapaests it is the dipody, consisting of two feet.’  It goes on to give an example of a trochaic tetrameter (actually one that is catalectic, i.e. with the last two syllables reduced to one). To show this, I use a dash for a long and a ‘u’ for a short, and an oblique stroke for the end of a metron: -u-u/-u-u/-u-u/-u-.

This may surprise even some who know some Latin and Greek. Surely, they will say, what Homer, Virgil, etc. wrote was in hexameters, and a hexameter has six feet (hex in Greek means six). Yes, but their hexameters were dactylic, and in dactyls the metron (above) is the foot.

You may not have many classical scholars left in America (even here in England there aren’t many left), but if you can find any they may remember that the dramatists like Aeschylus wrote their dialogues in iambic feet (an iambus is u-, the opposite of a trochee), six feet to a line, and these are called iambic trimeters, not hexameters.

I hope this is useful.

Fred Wright, England  29.4.14  — Preceding unsigned comment added by 195.194.187.132 (talk) 11:06, 29 April 2014 (UTC)

Talk:Trochaic octameter in Lord of the rings
In the poam in the first book of "the Lord of the rings" "the tale of Tinúviel" it seem to be written in Trochaic octameter. How many other Tolkien works are written in this format? I wonder why he chose it? Anyone else have any insight on this? What other literature incorporate this? Cymmitch (talk) 16:38, 27 May 2018 (UTC)