Mal su grado.
Ama: é serás amado;
Y podrás
Hazer lo que no harás
Desamado.[30]
Footnote 29:[ (return) ] They are less common in Spanish than in Italian:
Sai tu dirme, o fanciullino,
In qual pasco gita sia
La vezzosa Egeria mia
Ch'io pur cerco dal mattino?
(Paolo A. Rolli)
Footnote 30:[ (return) ] Note the example of hiatus in this older Spanish.
Next to the popular 8-syllable line the most important measure in modern Spanish verse is that of eleven syllables, with binary movement, which came to Spain from Italy in the fifteenth century, and was generally accepted by the writers of the Siglo de Oro. This 11-syllable line, though of foreign origin, has held the boards as the chief erudite measure in Spanish verse for four centuries, and taken all in all it is the noblest metrical form for serious poems in modern Spanish. A striking peculiarity of the line is its flexibility. It is not divided into hemistichs as were its predecessors, the 14-syllable Alexandrine and the 12-syllable arte mayor verse; but it consists of two phrases and the position of the inner rhythmic accent is usually variable.
A well constructed line of this type has a rhythmic accent on the sixth syllable, or a rhythmic accent on the fourth syllable (usually with syllabic stress on the eighth), beside the necessary accent in the tenth position. Generally the inner accent falls on the sixth syllable approximately twice as often as on the fourth.