Molossus (poetry)

A molossus is a metrical foot used in Greek and Latin poetry. It consists of three long syllables.^[1] Examples of Latin words constituting molossi are audiri, cantabant, virtutem.

In English poetry, syllables are usually categorized as being either stressed or unstressed, rather than long or short, and the unambiguous molossus rarely appears, as it is too easily interpreted as two feet (and thus a metrical fault) or as having at least one destressed syllable.

The title of Tennyson's poem "Break, Break, Break" is sometimes cited as a molossus, but in context it can only be three separate feet:

Break, / break, / break,

At the foot / of thy crags, / O sea;

But the ten- / -der grace / of the day / that is dead

Will never / come back / to me.

Clement Wood proposes as a more convincing instance: great white chief,^[1] of which an example occurs in "Ballads of a Cheechako" by Robert W. Service:

For thus the / Great White Chief / hath said, / "In all / my lands / be peace". ^[2]

In one literary dictionary, a dubious candidate is given from Gerard Manley Hopkins:^[3]

As a dare-gale / skylark / scanted in a / dull cage

Man's mounting / spirit in his / bone-house, / mean house, dwells

If both lines are scanned as four feet, without extra stress on "dwells", then the words in boldface become a molossus. Another example that has been given^[4] is wild-goose-chase, but this requires that there be no stress on "chase", seeing that in Thomas Clarke's "Erotophuseos" (1840), we have

And led / me im- / -percept- /-ibly,

A wild- / goose chase, / far far / away,

where clearly there is no molossus.

See also

• En rhythme molossique, an étude for piano by Charles-Valentin Alkan that uses the rhythm of the molossus as a theme

References