SOURCE: Clarke, Dorothy Clotelle. “The verso de arte mayor” and “General Comments.” In Morphology of Fifteenth-Century Castilian Verse, pp. 51-61; 219-222. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1964.

In the following excerpt, Clarke analyzes the verso de arte mayor—the dominant metrical form of cancionero poetry—and examines its decline in relation to octosyllablic verse.

The Verso De Arte Mayor

The verso de arte mayor is a metrically simple but rhythmically complex form. It may be roughly defined as a verse whose time measure is 6 + 6 syllables,¹ and whose basic pattern is: (U)″UU′(U) / (U)″UU′(U). The caesura is movable between stresses, the secondary stresses are not absolutely fixed in required presence or in position, and the unstressed syllables in parentheses are optional except that at the caesura at least one of the unstressed syllables is usually present.² The first and tenth coplas of Juan de Mena's Laberinto de Fortuna...