ALEXANDRINE VERSE, a name given to the leading measure in French poetry. It is the heroic French verse, used in epic narrative, in tragedy, and in the higher comedy. There is some doubt as to the origin of the name; but most probably it is derived from a collection of romances, compiled in the i 2th cen tury, of which Alexander of Macedon was the hero. Before the publication of this work most of the trou\ ere romances appeared in octosyllabic verse. There is also a theory that the form was in vented by a poet named Alexandre. The new work, which was henceforth to set the fashion to F- 2nch literature, was written in lines of 12 syllables, but with a freedom of pause which was after wards greatly curtailed. The new fashion, however, was not adopted all at once. The metre fell into disuse until the reign of Francis I., when it was revived by Jean Antoine de Baif (1532 89), one of the seven poets known as the Pleiade (q.v.). Jodelle (1532-73) mingled episodical Alexandrines with the vers com muns of his tragedies and so introduced them into drama. It was Ronsard, however, who made the verse popular and gave it vogue in France. From his time it became the recognized vehicle for all great poetry, and the regulation of its pauses became more strict. Two laws came to be established with regard to the pauses. The first is, that each line should be divided into two equal parts, the sixth syllable always ending with a word. In the earlier use of this metre, on the contrary, it frequently happened that the sixth and seventh syllables belonged to the same word. The other is that, except under the most stringent conditions, there should be none of what the French critics call enjambement, that is, the overlapping of the sense from one line on to the next. Ronsard completely ignored this rule, which was after his time settled by the authority of Malherbe. Later French poets have abandoned the rigidity of Malherbe, as a reference to a popular play like Rostand's Cyrano de Bergerac will show.
Michael Drayton, who was 2 2 years of age when Ronsard died, seemed to think that the Alexandrine might be as pleasing to English as it was to French ears, and in this metre he wrote a long poem called the Polyolbion. The metre, however, failed to catch the English ear. In English heroic verse it is but rarely introduced; but in the favourite narrative metre, known as the Spenserian, it comes in regularly as the concluding line of each stanza. In Eng lish usage, moreover, there is no fixed rule as to the position of the pause. Thus Thomson (Castle of Indolence, i. 42):— And music lent new gladness to the morning air.
The danger in the use of the Alexandrine is that, in attempting to give dignity to his line, the poet may only produce heaviness, in curring the criticism of Pope:— A needless Alexandrine ends the song, That, like a wounded snake, drags its slow length along.
The Alexandrine was the dominant metre in Dutch poetry from the i 6th to the middle of the i9th century, and about the time of its introduction to Holland it was accepted in Germany by the school of Opitz. In the course of the 17th century, after being used without rhyme by Seckendorf and others, it formed a transi tional station on the route to German blank verse, and has since then been rarely employed, except occasionally in rhymed comedy.