Choriambics Line

[Tinker]

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Greek Verse, the beginnings.

Choriambics line is an unrhymed, 16 syllable line consisting of 2 trochees, iamb, trochee, iamb, trochee and 2 iambs in that order. Or you could say it was made up of a trochee, 3 choriambs and an iamb.

Quantitative Verse
Ls-Ls-sL-Ls-sL-Ls-sL-sL
Ls-LssL-LssL-LssL-sL
Children playing with dolls, girls being girls, getting prepared for life.

Choriambics by Rupert Brooke

Here the flame that was ash, shrine that was void, lost in the haunted wood,
I have tended and loved, year upon year, I in the solitude
Waiting, quiet and glad-eyed in the dark, knowing that once a gleam
Glowed and went through the wood. Still I abode strong in a golden dream,
Unrecaptured. For I, I that had faith, knew that a face would glance
One day, white in the dim woods, and a voice call, and a radiance
Fill the grove, and the fire suddenly leap . . . and, in the heart of it,
End of laboring, you! Therefore I kept ready the altar, lit
The flame, burning apart. Face of my dreams vainly in vision white
Gleaming down to me, lo! hopeless I rise now. For about midnight
Whispers grew through the wood suddenly, strange cries in the boughs above
Grated, cries like a laugh. Silent and black then through the sacred grove
Great birds flew, as a dream, troubling the leaves, passing at length. I knew
Long expected and long loved, that afar, God of the dim wood, you
Somewhere lay, as a child sleeping, a child suddenly reft from mirth,
White and wonderful yet, white in your youth, stretched upon foreign earth,
God, immortal and dead! Therefore I go; never to rest, or win
Peace, and worship of you more, and the dumb wood and the shrine therein.