Definitions
from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.
- noun Plural form of
spondee .
Etymologies
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Examples
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This is all tuned to an extended figure in which music is not music, but its cessation, a suspense both of motion and sound finely compounded in still, and underscored by the arrest of pentameter into spondees:
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These spondees punctuate the lighthearted rhythm with emphasis that suggests the seriousness of the blessings, and the repetition at the end rounds out the poem with sweet insistence.
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I, Montese Crandall, rely heavily on such strategies as alliteration, condensation, the strange, ghostly echo of metrical feet, iambs and dactyls, spondees and amphibrachs.
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Instead of scansion by pyrrhics and spondees, iambs and trochees, anapæsts and similar simplifications he invented a system of weights (“wuzún”).
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English we have few if any spondees: the Arabic contains about three longs to one short; hence its gravity, stateliness and dignity.
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Nor have I followed the practice of my learned friend, Reverend G.P. Badger, in mixing bars and acute accents; the former unpleasantly remind man of those hateful dactyls and spondees, and the latter should, in my humble opinion, be applied to long vowels which in
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A man acquainted only with dactyls and spondees, and with a head full of rhymes, is rarely a man of sense; but Virgil is endowed with superior reason.
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‘Written, I presume you mean, in the Anacreontic measure of three feet and a half — spondees and iambics?’ said a gentleman in spectacles, glancing round, and giving emphasis to his inquiry by causing bland glares of a circular shape to proceed from his glasses towards the person interrogated.
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In line 5, another expressive variant appears in the meter: the spondee in the second foot of that line, "rich veins," adds weight and emphasis, as spondees normally do, and that emphasis again matches musically the imagistic content of the line.
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Renaissance rhetoricians would call attention to the spondees, or feet with two heavy stresses: 'dogs bark', 'halt by', as expressive of limping.
Shakespeare Bevington, David 2002
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