caesura

plural caesuras · plural caesurae · alternative cesura · alternative archaic cæsura

1. rhetoricA pause or interruption in a poem, music, building, or other work of art.

   Now, then, for my prologue. I am not going to change my cæsuras and cadences for anybody; so if you do not like the heroic, or iambic trimeter brachy-catalectic, you had better not wait to hear it […]

   1857–1858, Oliver Wendell Holmes [Sr.], “(please specify the page)”, in The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table, Boston, Mass.: Phillips, Sampson and Company, published 1858, →OCLC

   4 more examples

   The caesura is meant to fall not with the comma after difficult, but after thou; and there is a most effective and grand suspension intended. It is Satan who speaks— Satan in the wilderness; and he marks, as he wishes to mark, the tremendous opposition of attitude between the two parties to the temptation.

   1847, Thomas De Quincey, Milton Versus Southey and Landor

   We feel of this, as we feel of a great passage in “Hamlet” or “Lear,” that here is verse at once capable of the highest sublimity and capable of sustaining its theme, of lifting and lowering it at will, with endless resource in the slide and pause of the caesura, to carry it on and on.

   1920, Arthur Quiller-Couch, On The Art of Reading

   He disliked the texture of those stiff verses, in their official garb, their abject reverence for grammar, their mechanical division by imperturbable cæsuras, always plugged at the end in the same way by the impact of a dactyl against a spondee.

   1922, chapter 4, in John Howard, transl., Against the Grain, New York: Lieber & Lewis, translation of À rebours by Joris-Karl Huysmans, pages 54–55

   By the third decade of the eighteenth century, the syllabic line that really threatened to stay was an uncouth thing of thirteen syllables (counting the obligative feminine terminal), with a caesura after the seventh syllable: […]

   1964, Vladimir Nabokov, “The Origination of Metrical Verse in Russia”, in Notes on Prosody […] (Bollingen Series; LXXIIa), New York, N.Y.: Bollingen Foundation, →OCLC, page 35

2. Classicalhuman sciencesUsing two words to divide a metrical foot.
3. mediaThe caesura mark ‖ or ||.

   Synonyms: virgule

4. rareA break of an era or other measure of history and time; where one era ends and another begins; turning point.

   A quiet time. A caesura. Then everything happened almost at once, and none of it was good.

   2022, Stephen King, chapter 8, in Fairy Tale, page 133

   1 more example

   Like the knocking at the door in Macbeth, or the cry of the watchman in the Tour de Nesle, they show that the horrible cæsura is over and the nightmares have fled away, because the day is breaking and the ordinary life of men is beginning to bestir itself among the streets.

   c. 1870, Robert Louis Stevenson, Nuits Blanches