Counting as Meaning
Romance verse counts syllables, not stresses. A Castilian or Catalan line is named for how many syllables it holds, and the count is fixed before a word is chosen, so a poet's first decision is a shape, and the shape carries meaning.
Jorge Manrique (c. 1440–1479) wrote the Coplas por la muerte de su padre, the most famous elegy in Spanish, in a stanza that makes the counting audible. The copla de pie quebrado runs in sestets of
Two full octosyllables and then a broken foot: a four-syllable line, half length. A full sestet is therefore forty syllables, and the effect is not decorative: the short line arrives like a step missed on a staircase, and Manrique uses it to land his hardest statements. Nuestras vidas son los ríos / que van a dar en la mar, / que es el morir, our lives are the rivers that flow to the sea, which is dying. The definition of death falls in the broken line.
Ausiàs March (1400–1459) writes in Catalan at a moment when Provençal was still the expected language of serious lyric, and the choice is as consequential as Dante's. His subject is a divided interior — Amor, amor, un hàbit m'he tallat — analysed rather than displayed, and his refusal of troubadour ornament makes him sound startlingly close to the modern.
Luís de Camões (c. 1524–1580) wrote Os Lusíadas (1572), the Portuguese national epic, in ottava rima: eight hendecasyllabic lines rhyming
Three sounds only — A, B and C — with six lines alternating between two of them and a closing couplet. The alternation builds a tension the couplet resolves, which is why the form suits narrative: each stanza is a small argument with a conclusion.
| Form | Lines | Syllable pattern | Distinct rhymes |
|---|---|---|---|
| Copla de pie quebrado | 6 | 8 8 4 8 8 4 | 3 |
| Ottava rima | 8 | 11 throughout | 3 |
| Sonnet (Italian) | 14 | 11 throughout | 4 or 5 |
The hendecasyllable, eleven syllables, is the workhorse of Italian, Portuguese, Spanish and Catalan verse, and its dominance is the reason the sonnet travelled so easily between them.
Common pitfall: counting syllables in Romance verse the way you would count them in English. Spanish counts to the last stressed syllable plus one, and merges vowels across word boundaries by sinalefa, so a line of eleven written syllables may well be a ten-syllable line.