ABSTRACT
This chapter argues that, as an instrument of lawfulness, the alexandrine has a metalinguistic status which overarches the linguistic and paralinguistic freedoms it allows within it. It is hardly controversial to suggest that English verse art is most at home in the alternating, both in its metrics and in its rhyme-schemes. In pre-Romantic verse, as indeed, to some extent, in all verse, concern for euphony, for imitative appropriacy, for a visible design, both in language and the world, interfere with, and muddy, any attempts to isolate significant acoustic gestures. Delille had much to do with English verse, and, as a translator, he produced a version of the Duchess of Devonshire's The Passage of the Mountain of St Gothard. The Duchess's favouring of the dash, no trace of which is to be found in Delille's version, is evidently a dramatizing punctuation, important because it synthesizes, or echoes with the variety of, its different functions.
