Caesura
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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In meter, a caesura (alternative spellings are cæsura and cesura) is a complete pause in a line of poetry or in a musical composition. The plural form of caesura is caesuras or caesurae. Caesurae feature prominently in Greek and Latin verse, especially in the heroic verse form, dactylic hexameter.
In poetry, a masculine caesura follows a stressed syllable while a feminine caesura follows an unstressed syllable. A caesura is also described by its position in a line of poetry. A caesura close to the beginning of a line is called an initial caesura, one in the middle of a line is medial, and one near the end of a line is terminal. Initial and terminal caesurae were rare in formal, Romance, and Neoclassical verse, which preferred medial caesurae. In scansion, poetry written with signs to indicate the length and stress of syllables, the "double pipe" sign ("||") is used to denote the position of a caesura.
In musical notation, caesura denotes a brief, silent pause, during which metrical time is not counted.
In musical notation, the symbol for a caesura is a pair of parallel lines set at an angle, rather like a pair of forward slashes: //. The symbol is popularly called "tram-lines" in the U.K. and "railroad tracks" in the U.S.
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