ABSTRACT
The twelve-syllable line (six-stressed in English verse), as basic to French poetry as iambic pentameter to English, was named for the twelfth-century Roman d’Alexandre. Its use in concluding the Faerie Queene stanza, as well as elsewhere in his work, made it almost a Spenserian trademark, and its subsequent deployment in English poetry seems ever conscious of this. In early Tudor verse-as a pair of trimeters run together-it constituted the first line of the rhyming couplet form called by Gascoigne the ‘poulter’s measure.’ It was first independently used by Surrey in a psalm translation and, as an occasional variation, in his important blank-verse Englishing of Aeneid 4 (pub 1554). The first original poem to use it is Turbervile’s Of Ladie Venus (1567). Sidney frequently employs alexandrines in the Old Arcadia, as well as in the opening sonnet, and five subsequent ones, of Astrophil and Stella.
