A bacchius () is a
metrical foot
The foot is the basic repeating rhythmic unit that forms part of a line of verse in most Indo-European traditions of poetry, including English accentual-syllabic verse and the quantitative meter of classical ancient Greek and Latin poetry. ...
of three syllables, consisting of one unstressed syllable followed by two stressed ones.
In
accentual-syllabic verse
Accentual-syllabic verse is an extension of accentual verse which fixes both the number of stresses and syllables within a line or stanza. Accentual-syllabic verse is highly regular and therefore easily scannable. Usually, either one metrical fo ...
we could describe a bacchius as a foot that goes like this:
Example:
When day breaks
the fish bite
at small flies.
The Christmas carol 'No Small Wonder' by Paul Edwards is a fair example of usage.
The name is thought to come from its use in ancient Greek songs to the god
Bacchus
In ancient Greek religion and myth, Dionysus (; ) is the god of wine-making, orchards and fruit, vegetation, fertility, festivity, insanity, ritual madness, religious ecstasy, and theatre. He was also known as Bacchus ( or ; ) by the Gre ...
.
[
]
References
Metrical feet
{{poetry-stub