or masculine caesura after the second foot:
Ye sácred bárds | that to || your hárps’ melódious stríngs.
ib.
Enjambement is only sporadically met with; breaking of the rhyme still more seldom.
Less significance is to be attached to the fact that Brysket, in a poem on Sidney’s death, entitled The Mourning Muse of Thestylis (printed with Spenser’s works, Globe edition, p. 563), makes Alexandrines rhyme together, not in couplets, but in an arbitrary order; further, that Surrey and Blennerhasset occasionally composed in similarly constructed rhymeless Alexandrines (cf. Metrik, ii, p. 83).
Of greater importance is the structure of the Alexandrine when used as the concluding line of the Spenserian stanza and of its imitations.
It is here noteworthy that the lyric caesura, unusual in Middle English, often occurs in Spenser after the first hemistich:
That súch a cúrsed créature || líves so lóng a spáce.
F. Q. I. i. 31;
as well as in connexion with minor caesuras: