Poulter's measure

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Poulter's measure is a meter consisting of alternate Alexandrines combined with Fourteeners, to form a poem of 12 and 14 syllable lines. It was often used in the Elizabethan era. The term was coined by George Gascoigne, because poulters, or poulterers (sellers of poultry), would sometimes give 12 to the dozen, and other times 14 (see also Baker's dozen). When the poulter's measure couplet is divided at its caesurae, it becomes a short measure stanza, a quatrain of 3, 3, 4, and 3 feet.

In the early 17th century, George Chapman famously used the form when he produced one of the first English translations of Homer's Iliad. Two centuries later, in his "On First Looking into Chapman's Homer," John Keats expressed his appreciation for what he called the "loud and bold" quality of Chapman's translation, which he implicitly contrasted with the more prestigious but more tightly controlled heroic couplets of Alexander Pope's 18th-century translation, thereby using one type of fourteener (a sonnet) to comment on the other (iambic heptameter).

C. S. Lewis, in his English Literature in the Sixteenth Century, castigates the 'lumbering' poulter's measure (p. 109). He attributes the introduction of this 'terrible' meter to Thomas Wyatt (p. 224). In a more extended analysis (pp. 231â€“2), he comments:

"The medial break in the alexandrine, though it may do well enough in French, becomes intolerable in a language with such a tyrannous stress-accent as ours: the line struts. The fourteener has a much pleasanter movement, but a totally different one: the line dances a jig."

The poets Surrey, Tuberville, Gascoigne, Golding and others all used the Poulter's Measure, the rhyming fourteener with authority.

Examples

 * Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey's "Complaint of the Absence of her lover, being upon the sea" (1547) is in Poulter's measure:


 * Good ladies, ye that have your pleasure in exile
 * Step in your foot, come take a place, and mourn with me awhile,
 * And such as by their lord do set but little price
 * Let them sit still, it skills them not what chance come on the dice.

Emily Dickinson's "A Light exists in Spring" uses quatrains with lines of 3,3,4,4 syllables: A Light exists in Spring Not present on the Year At any other period â€” When March is scarcely here