Choliambic verse ( grc, χωλίαμβος), also known as limping iambs or scazons or halting iambic,. is a form of

meter The metre (British spelling) or meter (American spelling; see spelling differences) (from the French unit , from the Greek noun , "measure"), symbol m, is the primary unit of length in the International System of Units (SI), though its pref ...

in poetry. It is found in both

Greek Greek may refer to: Greece Anything of, from, or related to Greece, a country in Southern Europe: *Greeks, an ethnic group. *Greek language, a branch of the Indo-European language family. **Proto-Greek language, the assumed last common ancestor ...

and

Latin Latin (, or , ) is a classical language belonging to the Italic languages, Italic branch of the Indo-European languages. Latin was originally a dialect spoken in the lower Tiber area (then known as Latium) around present-day Rome, but through ...

poetry in the classical period. Choliambic verse is sometimes called ''scazon'', or "lame iambic", because it brings the reader down on the wrong "foot" by reversing the stresses of the last few beats. It was originally pioneered by the Greek lyric poet

Hipponax Hipponax ( grc, Ἱππῶναξ; ''gen''. Ἱππώνακτος; fl. late 6th century BC), of Ephesus and later Clazomenae, was an Ancient Greek iambic poet who composed verses depicting the vulgar side of life in Ionian society. He was celebrat ...

, who wrote "lame trochaics" as well as "lame iambics". The basic structure is much like iambic trimeter, except that the last

cretic A cretic (; also Cretic, amphimacer and sometimes paeon diagyios)Squire, pp. 142, 384. is a metrical foot containing three syllables: long, short, long ( ). In Greek poetry, the cretic was usually a form of paeonic or aeolic verse. ...

is made heavy by the insertion of a longum instead of a

breve A breve (, less often , neuter form of the Latin "short, brief") is the diacritic mark ˘, shaped like the bottom half of a circle. As used in Ancient Greek, it is also called , . It resembles the caron (the wedge or in Czech, in S ...

. Also, the third anceps of the iambic trimeter line must be short in limping iambs. In other words, the line scans as follows (where — is a long syllable, u is a short syllable, and x is an anceps): :x — u — , x — u — , u — — — As in all classical verse forms, the phenomenon of brevis in longo is observed, so the last

syllable A syllable is a unit of organization for a sequence of speech sounds typically made up of a syllable nucleus (most often a vowel) with optional initial and final margins (typically, consonants). Syllables are often considered the phonological ...

can actually be short or long. The Roman poet Catullus' poems 8, 22 and 39 serve as examples of choliambic verse.

Notes

References

* . * . * . * . {{poetry-stub Types of verses Latin poetry Greek poetry Poetry-related lists Latin-language literature

See also

Notes

References