The hendecasyllable ( Italian: endecasillabo) is the principal metre in Italian poetry. Tennyson, however, maintained the quantitative features of the metre: Poets wanting to capture the hendecasyllabic rhythm in English have simply transposed the pattern into its accentual-syllabic equivalent: – ⏑ |– ⏑ |– ⏑ ⏑ |– ⏑ |– ⏑ |, or trochee/trochee/ dactyl/trochee/trochee, so that the long/short pattern becomes a stress/unstress pattern. “For Once Then Something.” Contemporary American poets Annie Finch (“Lucid Waking”) and Patricia Smith (“The Reemergence of the Noose”) have published recent examples. The metre has been imitated in English, notably by Alfred Tennyson, Swinburne, and Robert Frost, cf. The third form of hendecasyllabic verse is the “ Sapphic” (Latin: hendecasyllabus sapphicus so named for its use in the Sapphic stanza), with the pattern: – ⏓ – ⏓ – ⏑ ⏑ – ⏑ – –įorty-three of Catullus's poems are hendecasyllabic for an example, see Catullus 1.

The pattern of the “ Phalaecian” (Latin: hendecasyllabus phalaecius) is as follows (using “–” for a long syllable, “⏑” for a short and “⏓” for an “ anceps” or variable syllable): ⏓ ⏓ – ⏑ ⏑ – ⏑ – ⏑ – ⏓Īnother form of hendecasyllabic verse is the “ Alcaic” (Latin: hendecasyllabus alcaicus used in the Alcaic stanza), which has the pattern: ⏓ – ⏑ – ⏓ – ⏑ ⏑ – ⏑ –

The heart of the line is the choriamb (– ⏑ ⏑ –).

Each line has eleven syllables hence the name, which comes from the Greek word for eleven. The classical hendecasyllable is a quantitative meter used in Ancient Greece in Aeolic verse and in scolia, and later by the Roman poets Catullus and Martial.

Hendecasyllabic scansion latin