Formal Friday: The Alexandrine!

The alexandrine is the kind of line the French used in their poetry for hundreds of years. Twelve syllables. No worrying about which syllables are stressed and unstressed, because the French language doesn’t work so much that way. A little break, or caesura, after the sixth syllable. No enjambment: the end of the line is the end of a phrase or sentence.




Here are a couple of alexandrines from Paul Verlaine:

"Je fais souvent ce rêve étrange et pénétrant

d'une femme inconnue et que j'aime et qui m'aime..."

According to Google Translate, that says,

"I often have this strange and penetrating dream

an unknown woman and I love and who loves me ... "

I don’t know if Verlaine wrote that before or after he got married, or after he left his wife and started carrying on with Arthur Rimbaud, whom he later shot, but only in the wrist. I haven’t read Verlaine or much at all of those decadent Symbolists, and I really need to.

If you want to read a scandalous poem by Charles Baudelaire written in alexandrines, you can go here (scroll down for English). It’s not that scandalous actually, but it freaked people out back in 1857. If I could find a completely non-scandalous poem in alexandrines to link to, I would, but it’s slim pickings on Google.

The twentieth-century poet Robert Desnos, who I told you about before, could improvise poems out loud in cafes in perfect alexandrines. When he started writing down poetry in alexandrines, the Surrealists, who hated convention, became furious with him. Andre Breton wrote bad things about Desnos in his second Manifesto of Surrealism. Of course, no one is more dogmatic than a dedicated nonconformist.

A few English poets have changed up their iambic pentameter poems by throwing a few alexandrines in there. They still keep the iambs (unstressed/stressed); otherwise it would really interrupt the flow. Spenser did this in The Faerie Queene, which was an epic suck-up to Queen Elizabeth that I found skull-crushingly boring. I read it a long time ago, so who knows.

I do think alexandrines would be great for a contemporary long narrative poem, though not as long as The Faerie Queene. If I try this line out, I’m not going to use iambs. I think they’d be less authentic, and they’d make the lines sound a little weird because one is more used to iambic pentameter. Besides, iambs are hard.

An alexandrine is also a good-looking variety of parakeet. I put that picture of one up there just because they're pretty.