canam patri filioque
simul atque procedente
ex utroque.
hoc cano ultronee.
"8. Benedictus es, domine,
pater, nate, paraclite,
deus trine, deus une,
deus summe, deus pie,
deus iuste.
hoc cano spontanee.
"9. Exul ego diuscule
hoc in mare sum, domine:
annos nempe duos fere
nosti fore, sed iam iamque
miserere,
hoc rogo humillime.
"10. Interim cum pusione
psallam ore, psallam mente,
psallam voce (psallam corde),
psallam die, psallam nocte
carmen dulce
tibi, rex piissime."[1]
Gottschalk (and for this it is hard to love him) was one of the initiators of the leonine hexameter, in which a syllable in the middle of the line rhymes with the last syllable.
"Septeno Augustas decimo praeeunte Kalendas"
is the opening hexameter in his Epistle to his friend Ratramnus.[2] To what horrid jingle such verses could attain may be seen from some leonine hexameter-pentameters of two or three hundred years later, on the Fall of Troy, beginning:
"Viribus, arte, minis, Danaum clara Troja ruinis,
Annis bis quinis fit rogus atque cinis."
- ↑ Traube, Poetae Lat. aevi Car. iii. p. 731. Cf. Ebert, Gesch. etc. ii. 169 and 325.
- ↑ Poet. Lat. aev. Car. iii. 733.
- ↑ Du Meril, Posies populaires latines, i. 400.
Perhaps the most successful attempt to write hexameters containing rhymes or assonances is the twelfth-century poem of Bernard Morlanensis, a monk of Cluny, beginning with the famous lines:
"Hora novissima, tempora pessima sunt, vigilemus.
Ecce minaciter imminet arbiter ille supremus."Bernardi Morlanensis, De contemptu mundi, ed. by Thos. Wright, Master of the Rolls Series, vol. 59 (ii.), 1872. Bernard says in his Preface, as to his measures: "Id genus metri, tum dactylum continuum exceptis finalibus, tum etiam sonoritatem leonicam servans.…"
