Hendecasyllable

The hendecasyllable is a line of eleven syllables, used in Ancient Greek and Latin quantitative verse as well as in medieval and modern European poetry.

The classical hendecasyllable is a quantitative meter used in Ancient Greece in Aeolic verse and in scolia, and later by the Roman poets Catullus and Martial. Each line has eleven syllables; hence the name, which comes from the Greek word for eleven. The heart of the line is the choriamb (- u u -). There are three different versions. The pattern of the Phalaecian (Latin: hendecasyllabus phalaecius) is as follows (using "-" for a long syllable, "u" for a short and "x" for an "anceps" or variable syllable):

Another form of hendecasyllabic verse is the "Alcaic" (Latin: hendecasyllabus alcaicus; used in the Alcaic stanza), which has the pattern:

The third form of hendecasyllabic verse is the "Sapphic" (Latin: hendecasyllabus sapphicus; so named for its use in the Sapphic stanza), with the pattern:

Forty-three of Catullus's poems are hendecasyllabic; for an example, see Catullus 1.

The metre has been imitated in English, notably by Alfred Tennyson, Swinburne, and Robert Frost, cf. "For Once Then Something." Contemporary American poets Annie Finch ("Lucid Waking") and Patricia Smith ("The Reemergence of the Noose") have published recent examples. Poets wanting to capture the hendecasyllabic rhythm in English have simply transposed the pattern into its accentual-syllabic equivalent: /u|/u|/uu/u|/u|, or trochee/trochee/dactyl/trochee/trochee, so that the long/short pattern becomes a stress/unstress pattern. Tennyson, however, maintained the quantitative features of the metre:

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