Caesura

A c?sura, in prosody, is an audible pause that breaks up a long line of verse.

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Also used in musical notation as a complete cessation of musical time.

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C?sur? figure prominently in Greek and Latin versification, especially in the heroic verse form, dactylic hexameter.

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Latin

Virgil's opening line of the ?neid:

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:Arma virumque cano, || Troi? qui primus ab oris

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:("I sing of arms and the man, who first from the shores of Troy. . .")

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displays an obvious cæsura in the middle of the line , its usual position. The cæsura can move around freely in the lines of dactylic hexameter. Technically, in dactylic hexameter, a cæsura occurs anytime when the ending of a word coincides with the ending of a metrical foot; it is usually only called one when the ending also coincides with an audible pause in speaking the line. The ancient elegiac couplet form of the Greeks and Romans contained a line of dactylic hexameter followed by a line of pentameter; the pentameter often displayed an even more obvious cæsura:

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:Cynthia prima fuit; || Cynthia finis erit.

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:("Cynthia was the first; Cynthia will be the last" — Horace)

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Old English

But the c?sura was even more important to Old English verse than it was to Latin or Greek poetry. In Latin or Greek poetry, the c?sura could be suppressed for effect in any line at will. In the alliterative verse that is shared by most of the oldest Germanic languages, the c?sura is an ever-present and necessary part of the verse form itself. Consider the opening line of Beowulf:

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:Hwæt! we Gar-Dena || on geardagum

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:("Lo! we Spear-Danes, in days of yore. . .")

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Middle English

But compare that with some lines from William Langland's Piers Plowman:

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:I loked on my left half || as ?e lady me taughte

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:And was war of a womman || wor?eli yclo?ed.

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:("I looked on my left side, as the lady told me to, and perceived an expensively dressed woman.")

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Prosody: Prosody may mean several things:...

Verse: Vers? is a fictional character of the Star Wars universe, specifically for ....

Greek: The noun Greek refers to:...