Catalectic

A catalectic line is a metrically incomplete line of verse, lacking a syllable at the end or ending with an incomplete foot. One form of catalexis is headlessness, where the unstressed syllable is dropped from the beginning of the line.

Making a meter catalectic can drastically change the feeling of the poem, and catalexis is often used to achieve a certain effect. Compare this selection from Book III of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's "Song of Hiawatha" with that from W. H. Auden's "Lay Your Sleeping Head, My Love". The first is in trochaic tetrameter (a trochaic dimeter in ancient terms, as a Greek trochaic metron is a doubled 'trochee'), and the second in trochaic tetrameter catalectic (or headless iambic tetrameter).

--H. W. Longfellow

--W. H. Auden

A line missing two syllables is called brachycatalectic.

Very few ancient Greek poems survive with authentic musical notation. Four of these are by Mesomedes (early 2nd century CE). The Sphinx employs a form of anapestic dimeter and its catalectic form, the paroemiac. Secondary sources of Mesomede's poems To Helios and To Nemesis are in a catalectic meter known as apokrota "sonorous." In each case, in place of the missing short element of the text (i.e., missing syllable) one often finds lengthening signs. In two cases in To Helios, this appears to be a three-note melisma. It is possible ancient use of catalexis indicated some form of melody or continued singing in place of the missing syllables.

In ancient Greek drama, catalectic meters may have been associated with a male aulete or had some other special use. For example, of Menander's surviving plays, almost all are in iambic trimeters. He changed the meter in one long scene in Misanthrope to 15-syllable catalectic iambic tetrameter recited to an aulos accompaniment.

Poem 25 by Catullus is in iambic tetrameter catalectic. Of Catullus' extant 114 or so poems and fragments, this meter appears only the one time.

Venantius Fortunatus' hymn Pange lingua is in trochaic tetrameter catalectic—the meter of the marching chants of the Roman armies. The hymn is one of the oldest with surviving musical notation.

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