Notes on an Easter Sunday

 Christ is risen! My recent immersion into meters other than epic has triggered a certain sensitivity, so the portion of the introit that caught my eye was the meter. On the surface, it was four lines of iambic trimeter, hardly unusual for a hymn in English. The ictus of the measure, however, corresponded to the first long rather than the short first syllable. This inverted the iambs (short-long) into trochees (long-short), creating three lines, of which the first was acephalous - which, contrary to intuition, here indicates an extra syllable at the beginning of the line. This short syllable was “stolen” from the final iamb. The lines, therefore, viewed from this perspective, were an acephalous trochaic trimeter, followed by three lines of trochaic trimeter, and then a cretic (long-short-long). This made it a lyric meter in stress and measure, which is suitable for a hymn, but also a reminder of how much of what we use today derives from a tradition at least twenty-six centuries old.