Latin verse composition is a fancy way of saying “writing Latin poetry”, and this blog is an attempt to put down in writing my adventures in this wonderful area.
Of course, it is a rare student who can write English poetry without a whole lot of preparation, and the same is true with Latin. This blog post will sketch out the terrain, as a sort of high-level overview before any detailed examination of the work required.
The Rules of Prosody
Latin poetry is based on patterns of long and short syllables. Whether a syllable is long or short (known as the “quantity”) is governed by the rules of prosody, looking at the letters around vowels. There are exceptions to these rules, and the “rules” of one textbook will not exactly match with the rules of another – they are guidelines to ease the memorization of syllable lengths rather than true rules of poetry.
One of the first exercises for the learner is marking the quantity of syllables over a selection of isolated Latin words. These longs and shorts are indicated by macron and breve accents over the vowel (or final vowel in a diphthong). The macron is a straight bar, and the breve looks like the bottom half of a circle.
It is important to realise that these long-syllable markings in poetry are not the same as the long-vowel markings in prose. For example, perturbant contains no long-vowels, but has three long syllables.
Here is a worksheet showing the first three rules:
Scansion
The long and short vowels form various patterns. On the smallest scale, there are “feet”, which are two, three, or four syllables in a particular pattern. Two longs make a Spondee. One long and two shorts make a Dactyl. There are other patterns, but the Spondee and Dactyl are the most common in Latin poetry.
These feet can be collected together in a line. Six feet make a hexameter line. A pentameter line has two halves, each half having two feet and a long syllable. There are a few more rules about the order in which feet can appear.
Put a hexameter line with a pentameter line, and you have an Elegiac Couplet, which is the mainstay of Ovid and Latin love poems.
Gourlay’s Latin 