caesura

• cesura, cæsura

Latin caesūra (“cutting, hewing”), from caesus, perfect passive participle of caedō (“I cut down, hew”).

• (Received Pronunciation) IPA^(key): /sɪˈzjʊəɹə/
• (US) IPA^(key): /səˈʒʊɹə/

• Audio (US)

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• Rhymes: -ʊəɹə

caesura (plural caesuras or caesurae)

1. A pause or interruption in a poem, music, building, or other work of art.
   • 1847, Thomas De Quincey, Milton Versus Southey and Landor:

     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.

   • 1858, Oliver Wendell Holmes, The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table:

     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 […]

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

     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.

   • 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:

     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.

2. (Classical prosody) Using two words to divide a metrical foot.
3. (typography) The caesura mark ‖ or ||.

   Synonym: (in its obsolete form) virgule

4. (rare) A break of an era or other measure of history and time; where one era ends and another begins; turning point.
   • c. 1870, Robert Louis Stevenson, Nuits Blanches:

     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.

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

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

In poetry bearing caesuras, it is marked by a double vertical line ⟨‖⟩.

• enjambment
• hemistich

From caedō +‎ -tūra.

• (Classical) IPA^(key): /kae̯ˈsuː.ra/, [käe̯ˈs̠uːrä]
• (modern Italianate Ecclesiastical) IPA^(key): /t͡ʃeˈsu.ra/, [t͡ʃeˈs̬uːrä]

caesūra f (genitive caesūrae); first declension

1. a cutting, felling, hewing down
2. a pause in a verse, caesura

First-declension noun.

• (caesura): incīsiō
• (cutting): caesus, sectiō

• “caesura”, in Charlton T. Lewis and Charles Short (1879) A Latin Dictionary, Oxford: Clarendon Press
• caesura in Charles du Fresne du Cange’s Glossarium Mediæ et Infimæ Latinitatis (augmented edition with additions by D. P. Carpenterius, Adelungius and others, edited by Léopold Favre, 1883–1887)
• caesura in Gaffiot, Félix (1934) Dictionnaire illustré latin-français, Hachette.