The dactylic pentameter is a verse-form which, in

classical Greek Ancient Greek (, ; ) includes the forms of the Greek language used in ancient Greece and the ancient world from around 1500 BC to 300 BC. It is often roughly divided into the following periods: Mycenaean Greek (), Dark Ages (), the Archa ...

and

Latin poetry The history of Latin poetry can be understood as the adaptation of Greek models. The verse comedies of Plautus, the earliest surviving examples of Latin literature, are estimated to have been composed around 205–184 BC. History Scholars conv ...

, follows a

dactylic hexameter Dactylic hexameter is a form of meter used in Ancient Greek epic and didactic poetry as well as in epic, didactic, satirical, and pastoral Latin poetry. Its name is derived from Greek (, "finger") and (, "six"). Dactylic hexameter consists o ...

to make up an

elegiac couplet The elegiac couplet or elegiac distich is a poetic form used by Greek lyric poets for a variety of themes usually of smaller scale than the epic. Roman poets, particularly Catullus, Propertius, Tibullus, and Ovid, adopted the same form in L ...

. It features two halves, each consisting of two dactyls, for which

spondee A spondee (Latin: ) is a metrical foot consisting of two long syllables, as determined by syllable weight in classical meters, or two stressed syllables in modern meters. The word comes from the Greek , , 'libation'. Spondees in Ancient Gree ...

s can be substituted in the first half only, followed by a longum. Thus the line most normally looks as follows (note that "—" marks a long syllable, "∪" a short syllable and " ∪ ∪ " either one long or two shorts): , — ∪ ∪ , — ∪ ∪ , — , , — ∪ ∪ , — ∪ ∪ , — As in all classical verse-forms, the phenomenon of

brevis in longo In Greek and Latin metre, ''brevis in longo'' (; ) is a short syllable at the end of a line that is counted as long. The term is short for , meaning "a short yllablein a long lement. Although the phenomenon itself has been known since ancien ...

is observed, so the last syllable can actually be short or long. Also, the line has a diaeresis, where a word boundary must occur, after the first half-line, here marked , , . "Pentameter" may seem a slightly strange term for this meter, as it seems to have six parts, but the reason is that each half of the line has two and a half feet, the two together thus making up five. Each half-line is called a hemiepes (half-epic), as resembling half a line of epic dactylic hexameter. The pentameter is notable for its very tight structure, with substitutions allowed only in the first two feet. It rarely occurs except in elegiac couplets.

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Meter and Scansion
with several Latin verse forms. Types of verses pl:Dystych elegijny {{Poetry-stub

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