Training in Lyric Poetry & Verse for songwriters.
With Complete Rhyming Dictionary
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POETIC LICENCES. 1 I 7 |
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page he gives a bad example of the quite contrary kind:
Alpha the prayer of Chryses sings ; The army's plague, the strife of kings.
• In these words, the army's, the ending with a vowel, and army's beginning with another vowel, without cutting off the first (by which it had been, th' army's), there remains a most horrible ill-sounding gap betwixt those words. I cannot say that I have every way observed the rule of the synalepha in my translation : but wheresoever I have not, it is a fault in the sound."*
As Dryden acknowledges that, in the verses to which this dedication is prefixed, he has sometimes admitted an hiatus, let us pass to his
 wherehe professes to have avoided it throughout; only allowing himself a certain latitude. But, indeed, what he allows himself is nothing less than an admission of the hiatus, as will appear by various instances.
On every altar sacrifice renew.
Book iv- line 76.
He claims a latitude in the letter y ; but that letter is, here and everywhere else, at the end of a word as much a vowel as any in the alphabet. He says, " W aspirates." It does so at the beginning of a word, but at the end it is either silent or makes a diphthong : |
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* Dedication to " Trynslations from Ovid's Metamorphoses." |
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