half-lines

As Mary Carruthers observes, such allegorical games were made possible by a common figural language: A cento is a playful poem that is made up of a pastiche of half-lines and phrases from a canonical poet; it cannot succeed except for an audience who know the original poet as intimately as does the composer of the cento.

Architecture and Memory: The Renaissance Studioli of Federico da Montefeltro 2008

Great Regulars: The last part of Warhorses is a long poem ingeniously titled "Autobiography of My Alter Ego," crafted out of matching half-lines like a call-and-response.

Archive 2009-01-01 Rus Bowden 2009

It was too late for him to make amends, rethink, complete the half-lines, perfect the poem he thought imperfect.

'Lavinia' 2008

Some of these compositions which now lie before me, with their repetitions of lines, half-lines, and half-words, their fugues and their intermediate symphonies, are good singing still, though they would hardly be admitted into such hymn-books as are popular in the churches of fashionable society at the present time.

Under the Greenwood Tree 2006

It is not possible, then, to tell what part of the line it was apprehending in each half of the time: the object has no actual parts until it has been divided: if in thought you think each half separately, then by the same act you divide the time also, the half-lines becoming as it were new wholes of length.

On the Soul 2002

Laghamon was a humble parish priest in Worcestershire, and his thirty-two thousand half-lines, in which he imperfectly follows the Anglo-Saxon alliterative meter, are rather crude; though they are by no means dull, rather are often strong with the old-time Anglo-Saxon fighting spirit.

A History of English Literature Robert Huntington Fletcher

These short lines remind us somewhat of the old Anglo-Saxon short half-lines, except that they rime.

English Literature for Boys and Girls

The two half-lines 'welling ... hid him' would then read: _The bloody deep welled with sword-gore_.

Beowulf An Anglo-Saxon Epic Poem Lesslie [Translator] Hall

Up to 1869 the barometer was given in half-lines in Russia, which, equalling the twentieth of an English inch, were readily reduced to English inches by dividing by 20.

Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 3 "Banks" to "Bassoon" Various

It is not possible, then, to tell what part of the line it was apprehending in each half of the time: the object has no actual parts until it has been divided: if in thought you think each half separately, then by the same act you divide the time also, the half-lines becoming as it were new wholes of length.

ON THE SOUL Aristotle 1935