verse line
- noun
- /vɜrs laɪn/
- Literature
:
verso
- The teacher asked the students to analyze the first verse line of the poem for its metrical pattern.
Examples
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Mostly I use Paradise Lost as a touchstone, reading bits and pieces to solve writing quandaries of my own, looking for Milton's muscle, his force, his sense of purpose, his beautiful, beautifully strange, blank verse lines.
Academic text (2009) -
The following example from Romeo and Juliet (L 1.159-82) illustrates the way chiasmus works on multiple structural levels in the same passage, beginning with chiasmus operating in the space of a single verse line:
Academic text (2005) -
Initially, he does not say whether his own free-verse lines will contain one or two feet.
Fiction book (2000) -
That is, at these points in his emphatically accentual verse line, he is producing the effect of quantity.
Academic text (2016) -
As Shakespeare enters his middle period of writing, this pattern of breaking free from the verse line continues, and he composes complex systems with a wide variety of lengths.
Academic text (2005) -
Featuring work in traditional verse lines as well as poems printed in block paragraphs, Joy Harjo's In Mad Love and War marks an important turn in the development of Harjo's poetic voice.
Academic text (1999) -
Throughout his entire career, the phrasing in Shakespeare's chiastic verse forms appears in a full range of sizes that are smaller than, equal to, or greater than a standard iambic pentameter verse line in length.
Academic text (2005) -
Each illustrates what an English verse line of six metrical feet can do when it obeys a metrical law that is properly "natural" and "poetic" in Swinburne's terms.
Academic text (2016) -
The naming of angels is of great importance in the Zoroastrian religion (see Gathas of the Prophet, Yasna 51.22, 3rd rhymed verse line).
Blog text (9) -
As he begins to break further from the verse line, the phrases occasionally become rather verbose again (reflecting his earliest chiastic phrasing in prose, but with more advanced forms of repetition).
Academic text (2005)
Synonyms
1
3.5
A single row of words in a poem that forms meaning or rhythm
1
4.0
A single row of words that is part of a poem
1
9.9
A single line of a poem often found in classical poetry
Surface Forms
Morphology
The meaning 'a single line of metrical text' is directly derivable from combining 'verse' (poetic composition or stanza/line) with 'line' (a single row or division). This straightforward noun+noun compositional pattern is common and cross-linguistically transparent, so a B1 learner who knows both constituents will readily infer the MWE meaning.
Etymology
Verse line paints a simple picture: imagine a poem on the page and one horizontal row of words. The words verse and line point to that image, so the phrase means 'a single line of poetry'.