Hexameter
Quick answer: Hexameter is a six foot verse line, from Homer's epic metre to the English alexandrine. Learn how it scans and where poets put this long line to work.
Hexameter is a line of verse containing six metrical feet, so six main beats. The word covers two rather different traditions. In classical poetry it almost always means dactylic hexameter, the quantitative epic line of Homer and Virgil. In English poetry it usually means iambic hexameter, a twelve syllable rising line better known as the alexandrine.
Six feet is one foot past the comfortable English norm, and that extra foot changes everything. The line feels spacious, processional, sometimes slow, and poets exploit exactly that quality. You will meet English hexameters as deliberate variations inside pentameter poems, as the closing gesture of the Spenserian stanza, and occasionally sustained across whole poems by writers who want amplitude.
How It Works
An iambic hexameter runs da-DUM six times, as in this original line: 'The river takes its time between the sleeping farms.' Twelve syllables, six beats, and a natural tendency to pause in the middle, after the third foot. That midpoint caesura is so strong that a hexameter can feel like two trimeters holding hands, which is both the line's music and its structural risk. Classical dactylic hexameter works differently, mixing six-beat lines out of dactyls and spondees, but the shared trait is length: both versions give a poet extra room in every line.
Where You Will See It
Edmund Spenser ended every stanza of The Faerie Queene with a hexameter, letting the longer line close each unit like a slow exhale after eight pentameters. Drayton's 'Poly-Olbion' sustained alexandrine couplets across thousands of lines, a feat few have envied. Alexander Pope famously mocked the sluggish alexandrine in his 'Essay on Criticism', comparing it to a wounded snake. In classical translation, hexameter is everywhere the original was: Homer, Virgil, Ovid. Longfellow's 'Evangeline' brought the dactylic version into American parlours.
How to Use It in Your Own Poems
The simplest modern use is the Spenserian trick: write in pentameter, then let a hexameter close a stanza or the whole poem, and the reader will feel the ground widen. If you sustain hexameters, fight the line's urge to split identically every time; move the caesura, enjamb across the midpoint, and keep verbs strong so the length reads as breadth rather than drag. Long lines suit landscape, procession, memory and any subject that benefits from a slow camera.
What poets can take from this
- Use a single hexameter to close a pentameter stanza for a built-in sense of arrival.
- Shift the mid-line pause around so the line does not always halve into two trimeters.
- Prefer concrete nouns and active verbs; long lines expose padding mercilessly.
- Study the last line of any Spenserian stanza to hear the effect in context.
- Reserve sustained hexameters for expansive subjects that earn the slower pace.
Try it yourself
Write a poem of eight pentameter lines about packing up a childhood bedroom, then end with a single hexameter line that opens the window and lets the whole landscape in.
Questions
What is the difference between hexameter and alexandrine?
An alexandrine is a specific kind of hexameter: the twelve syllable iambic line of French and English verse. Hexameter is the broader term for any six-foot line, including the dactylic hexameter of classical epic.
Why did Pope criticise the alexandrine?
In 'An Essay on Criticism' (1711) Pope joked that a needless alexandrine drags its slow length along, imitating the fault in the line itself. His point was that the six-foot line slows a poem, which is a flaw when unintended and a tool when chosen.
By the Writory editorial team, reviewed by working poets. Updated July 2026.
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