Molossus (poetry)


A molossus is a metrical foot used in Greek and Latin poetry. It consists of three long syllables. Examples of Latin words constituting molossi are audiri, cantabant, virtutem.
In English poetry, syllables are usually categorized as being either stressed or unstressed, rather than long or short, and the unambiguous molossus rarely appears, as it is too easily interpreted as two feet or as having at least one destressed syllable.
The title of Tennyson's poem "Break, Break, Break" is sometimes cited as a molossus, but in context it can only be three separate feet:
Clement Wood proposes as a more convincing instance: great white chief, of which an example occurs in "Ballads of a Cheechako" by Robert W. Service:

However, given that the in the stanza are constructed predominantly in iambic heptameter – a common form for ballad stanza – it is more likely that the meter appears as:
The double stress on "White Chief" comes from the substitution of a spondee in place of the iamb, mirroring previous substitutions in the poem, rather than a molossus.
In one literary dictionary, a dubious candidate is given from Gerard Manley Hopkins:
If both lines are scanned as four feet, without extra stress on "dwells", then the words in boldface become a molossus. Another example that has been given is wild-goose-chase, but this requires that there be no stress on "chase", seeing that in Thomas Clarke's "Erotophuseos", we have
where clearly there is no molossus.