Editing Alexandrine (section)

==English==
{{multiple image
   | footer      = Spenser added one alexandrine to his iambic pentameter stanza; Drayton composed the longest work entirely in English alexandrines.
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   | image1      = Faerie Queene Title Page.jpg
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   | caption1    = Title page of Spenser's ''Faerie Queene'' (1590/1596)
   | image2      = Michael Drayton00.jpg
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   | caption2    = Title page of Drayton's ''Poly-Olbion'' (1612/1622)
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In English verse, "alexandrine" is typically used to mean "iambic hexameter":

 × / × / × / ¦ × / × / × / (×)
 
 /=''ictus'', a strong syllabic position; ×=''nonictus''
 ¦=often a mandatory or predominant caesura, but depends upon the author

Whereas the French alexandrine is syllabic, the English is accentual-syllabic; and the central caesura (a defining feature of the French) is not always rigidly preserved in English.

Though English alexandrines have occasionally provided the sole metrical line for a poem, for example in lyric poems by [[Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey]]{{sfn|Alden|1903|p=255}} and Sir [[Philip Sidney]],{{sfn|Alden|1903|p=256}} and in two notable long poems, [[Michael Drayton]]'s ''[[Poly-Olbion]]''{{sfn|Alden|1903|pp=256-57}} and [[Robert Browning]]'s ''Fifine at the Fair'',{{sfn|Alden|1903|pp=257-59}} they have more often featured alongside other lines. During the Middle Ages they typically occurred with heptameters (seven-beat lines), both exhibiting metrical looseness.{{sfn|Alden|1903|pp=252-54}} Around the mid-16th century stricter alexandrines were popular as the first line of poulter's measure couplets, [[Fourteener (poetry)|fourteener]]s (strict iambic heptameters) providing the second line.

The strict English alexandrine may be exemplified by a passage from ''Poly-Olbion'', which features a rare caesural enjambment (symbolized <code>¦</code>) in the first line:

<poem style="margin-left:2em">
Ye sacred Bards, that to ¦ your harps' melodious strings
Sung {{not a typo|th'ancient}} Heroes' deeds (the monuments of Kings)
And in your dreadful verse {{not a typo|ingrav'd}} the prophecies,
The agèd world's descents, and genealogies; (lines 31-34)<ref>{{cite book | last=Drayton | first=Michael | author-link=Michael Drayton |editor-last=Hooper | editor-first=Richard | title=The Complete Works of Michael Drayton | volume=1 | date=1876 | location=London | publisher=John Russell Smith |url=https://archive.org/details/completeworksofm01dray | page=2}}</ref>
</poem>

[[The Faerie Queene]] by [[Edmund Spenser]], with its stanzas of eight [[iambic pentameter]] lines followed by one alexandrine, exemplifies what came to be its chief role: as a somewhat infrequent variant line in an otherwise iambic pentameter context. Alexandrines provide occasional variation in the [[blank verse]] of [[William Shakespeare]] and his contemporaries (but rarely; they constitute only about 1% of Shakespeare's blank verse<ref>{{cite book | last=Wright | first=George T. | title=Shakespeare's Metrical Art | url=https://archive.org/details/shakespearesmetr0000wrig | url-access=registration | date=1988 | location=Berkeley | publisher=University of California Press | isbn=0-520-07642-7 | page=[https://archive.org/details/shakespearesmetr0000wrig/page/143 143]}}</ref>). [[John Dryden]] and his contemporaries and followers likewise occasionally employed them as the second (rarely the first) line of [[heroic couplet]]s, or even more distinctively as the third line of a triplet. In his ''[[Essay on Criticism]]'', [[Alexander Pope]] denounced (and parodied) the excessive and unskillful use of this practice:

<poem style="margin-left:2em">
Then at the last and only couplet fraught
With some unmeaning thing they call a thought,
A needless Alexandrine ends the song,
That, like a wounded snake, drags its slow length along. (lines 354-357)<ref>{{cite book | last=Pope| first=Alexander | author-link=Alexander Pope |editor-last=Rogers | editor-first=Pat| title=Alexander Pope: The Major Works | date=1993 | location=Oxford, UK | publisher=Oxford UP | page=28}}</ref>
</poem>