Dizain

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

In French verse theory, a dizain or dixain is a ten-line line made up of eight or more often ten-syllable verses .

The Dizain appears both strophically in poetry forms such as the Chant royal and as an independent poem, especially in the 15th and 16th centuries, for example with Clément Marot and Mellin de Saint-Gelais , mostly with the symmetrical rhyme scheme [ababbccdcd]. In the cycle of poems Délie, objet de plus haute vertu (“Délie, object of the highest virtue”) completed by Maurice Scève in 1544, all 449 poems follow this scheme except for 15. Délie can be seen as the first French cycle in the tradition of Francesco Petrarca's Canzoniere , both in terms of subject matter and structure , with the dizain scévien taking the place of the Petrarkic sonnet . Thomas Sébillet formulates this correspondence in his Art poétique françoys of 1548 as follows:

"... le sonnet n'est autre chose que le parfait épigramme de l'Italie comme le dizain du Français"

"... the sonnet is the perfect form of the epigram in Italy like the dizain is in France"

In the case of the poets of the Pléiade , the dizain appears less independently, more often with changing numbers of syllables in the verses and now mostly with the rhyme scheme[ababccdeed]. Following François de Malherbe , the dizain remains the classic odenstrophe , can still be found occasionally in Voltaire , Jacques Clinchamps de Malfilâtre , Alphonse de Lamartine and Victor Hugo , but then goes out of use until it was used by François Coppée and Paul at the end of the 19th century Verlaine is picked up again.

Outside France there are examples of the use of the dizain in English poetry by Philip Sidney ( Old Arcadia and New Arcadia ) and in Russian poetry of the 18th century by Michail Wassiljewitsch Lomonossow and Gavriil Romanowitsch Derschawin .

literature