Rhythm and expressiveness of the elegiac couple: Tibullus 1.3.1–4

Abstract

From the recognition that long and short syllables mutually (cor)respond in a system of basic oppositions, it is essential to verify which role is played by them in the phonosyntactic chains that form metric feet, a function that they only perform through psychological values invested in the hierarchically organized structures of the verse, which are generated from the basic opposition they have started. Such values are the combinatorial properties permited by the next level segments in a phonological chain, which are the poetic meters followed by the metric feet that they perform or integrate, then the verse itself and eventually the whole stanza, so as to provide structure to the whole poem. Since this process always consists of a concatenation of elements, the set thus formed tends to generate orientation, that is,  meaning, which is, in principle, a certain poetic rhythm. The rhythm, however, is influenced by other occurrences along the phonosyntactic chain, such as the caesuras that affect the line of a verse. From the passage of Tibullus, 1.3.1–4, the present text aims to take into account such factors to analyze the rhythmic-melodic pace of the strophic unit formed by the elegiac couple, with special focus on the possibilities of scansion generated by the fixed caesura-diaeresis of the so-called pentameter and their consequences for poetic expressiveness.