Choriambic Verse

Choriambic verse is poetry built around the choriamb, a classical metrical foot made of four syllables in the pattern long-short-short-long. It is most closely associated with Greek and Latin lyric poetry, where poets often repeated choriambs or combined them with other feet to create a formal, musical rhythm.

Because it depends on quantitative meter, choriambic verse belongs mainly to classical prosody rather than to ordinary English accentual-syllabic verse. In English imitation, poets usually try to suggest the pattern's rising and falling movement rather than reproduce it exactly.

The choriambus is a verse-foot consisting of a trochee united with and preceding an iambus, -∪∪-. The choriambi are never used alone, but are usually preceded by a spondee and followed by an iambus. The line so formed is called an asclepiad, traditionally because it was invented by the Aeolian poet Asclepiades of Samos. Choriambic verse was first used by the poets of the Greek islands, and Sappho, in particular, produced magnificent effects with it. The measure, as used by the early Greeks, is essentially lyrical and impassioned. Mingled with other metres, it was constantly serviceable in choral writing, to which it was believed to give a stormy and mysterious character. The Greater Asclepiad was a term used for a line in which the wild music was prolonged by the introduction of a supplementary choriambus. This was much employed by Sappho and by Alcaeus, as well as in Alexandrian times by Callimachus and Theocritus. Among the Latins, Horace, in imitation of Alcaeus, made constant use of choriambic verse. Metrical experts distinguish six varieties of it in his Odes. This is an example of his greater asclepiad (Od. i. 11):

Example