Trimeter

Literary/ Cultural Context Note

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  • The Literary Encyclopedia. WORLD HISTORY AND IDEAS: A CROSS-CULTURAL VOLUME.

Trimeter: a metre in which the line has three sounded beats and one silent beat or rest (

I have met them at close of day
Coming with vivid faces
From counter or desk among grey
Eighteenth-century houses (Yeats, “Easter 1916”)

The repeated final silent beat gives such verse an awkward, incomplete, thwarted quality, here clearly in tune with the subject matter. …

69 words

Citation: Groves, Peter Lewis. "Trimeter". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 04 June 2007 [https://staging.litencyc.com/php/stopics.php?rec=true&UID=1762, accessed 24 November 2024.]

1762 Trimeter 2 Historical context notes are intended to give basic and preliminary information on a topic. In some cases they will be expanded into longer entries as the Literary Encyclopedia evolves.

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