Caesura

Caesura (pronounced si-zhoor-uh, si-zoor-uh or siz-yoor-uh)

(1) In modern prosody, a break (especially a sense pause), usually near the middle of a verse, and marked in scansion by a double vertical line (‖ or ||).

(2) In classical prosody, a division made by the ending of a word within a foot, or sometimes at the end of a foot, especially in certain recognized places near the middle of a verse.

(3) Any break, pause, or interruption, applied to poetry, music, literature, architecture and any creative work (used even by the odd (presumably literary-minded) coder).

(4) In typography, the technical term for the caesura mark ‖ or ||. (as the virgule (in its obsolete form), a single slash).

(5) In historiography, a measure of history and time; where one era ends and another begins.

1550-1560: From the Latin caesūra (metrical pause; cutting, hewing (literally “a cutting” from caedere (to cut))), from caesus, the perfect passive participle of caedō (I cut down, hew).  The construct was caes(us) (cut; (past participle of caedere)) + -ūra (-ure) (the suffix -ure was from the Middle English -ure, from the Old French -ure, from the Latin -tūra and was used to create a word meaning (1) a process; a condition; a result of an action or (2) an official entity or function.  In Classical Latin, the caesura was "a metrical pause” from the primitive Indo-European kae-id- (to strike"), used as "the division of a metrical foot between two words, a break within a foot caused by the end of a word" as opposed to a diaeresis which was “a pause between feet”.  Technically, caesura can be used as a synonym for pause, break, rest, interval, interruption, intermission, lull interlude, hiatus and even (in certain contexts), lacuna; however, it's an obscure word and use is better restricted to its traditional purposes; as a general principle, plain, simple and well-understood words are best.  The now obsolete alternative spellings were cesura & cæsura and other languages use variations including the Catalan cesura, the Dutch cesuur and the French césure.  Caesura is a noun and caesural & caesuric are adjectives; the noun plural is caesuras or caesurae.

Although others have co-opted it, the usual purpose of a caesura is the technical description a pause or break in poetry, dictated by the natural rhythm of the language and enforced by punctuation (as opposed to the demands of meter although critics do complain modern poets have been inclined to impose in idiosyncratic ways).  A line may have more than one caesura or it may have none and structurally, it close to the beginning it’s called the initial caesura; if near the middle it’s the medial and if towards the end, the terminal and in English writing, the medial is by far the most common.  For those really immersed in literary theory, an accented (masculine) caesura follows an accented syllable and an unaccented (feminine) caesura an unaccented syllable.  So rigid were the conventions of use in the Old English that it was unusual for a line not to have a medial caesura as a half-line marker, the technique appearing throughout Beowulf:

þær mæg nihta gehwæm || niðwundor seon,

fyr on flode. || No þæs frod leofað

gumena bearna, || þæt þone grund wite;

ðeah þe hæðstapa || hundum geswenced,

heorot hornum trum, || holtwudu sece,

Traditionalists like William Langland (circa 1332–circa 1386), brought up in the alliterative school, maintained the model: Pier’s Ploughman (circa 1377):

Loue is leche of lyf || and nexte owre lorde selue

And also þe graith gate || þat goth in-to heuene;

English thus owes a debt to Geoffrey Chaucer (circa 1344-1400) who developed the iambic pentameter which allowed set verse free to adopt the rhythms and cadences of language as it was spoken: Prologue to The Canterbury Tales (circa 1380-1390):

With him ther was his sone, || a yong Squier

A lovyere || and a lusty bacheler,

With lokkes crulle || as they were leyd in presse.

Chaucer of course wouldn’t have had modernism in mind but he might have approved: Mirror (1961) by Sylvia Plath (1932-1963):

I am silver and exact. || I have no preconceptions.

Whatever I see I swallow immediately

Just as it is, || unmisted by love or dislike

I am not cruel, || only truthful

The eye of a little god, || four-cornered

Most of the time I meditate on the opposite wall.

It is pink, with speckles. || I have looked at it so long

I think it is part of my heart. || But it flickers.

Faces and darkness separate us over and over.

Now I am a lake. || A woman bends over me,

Searching my reaches for what she really is.

Then she turns to those liars, || the candles or the moon.

I see her back, and reflect it faithfully.

She rewards me with tears and an agitation of hands.

I am important to her. || She comes and goes.

Each morning it is her face that replaces the darkness.

In me she has drowned a young girl, || and in me an old woman

Rises toward her day after day || like a terrible fish.

Sylvia Plath in Paris, 1956.