Upón his fóe, | a Drágon, || hórriblé and stéarne. ib. I. i. 3.
The closing line of the Spenserian stanza is similarly handled by other poets, such as Thomson, Scott, Wordsworth, while poets like Pope, Byron, Shelley, and others admit only masculine caesuras after the third foot. By itself the Alexandrine has not often been employed in Modern English.
Connected in couplets it occurs in the nineteenth century in Wordsworth’s verse, e.g. in The Pet Lamb (ii. 149), and is in this use as well as in the Spenserian stanza treated by this poet with greater freedom than by others, two opening and medial disyllabic theses as well as suppression of anacrusis, being frequently admitted, while on the other hand the caesura and close of the verse are always monosyllabic.
§ 150. The three-foot line has its origin theoretically, and as a rule also actually, in a halving of the Alexandrine, and this is effected less frequently by the use of leonine than by cross rhyme.
Two Alexandrine long lines are, for instance, frequently resolved in this metrical type into four three-foot short lines with crossed rhymes, as, e.g., in Robert Mannyng’s Chronicle, from p. 69 of Hearne’s edition onwards.
From our previous description of the four types of the Middle English Alexandrine, determined by the caesura and the close of the verse, it is clear that the short verses resulting from them may rhyme either with masculine or feminine endings, as, e.g., on p. 78, ll. 1, 2:
Wílliam the Cónqueróur
Chángis his wícked wíll;
Óut of his fírst erróur
repéntis óf his ílle.