2 - The octosyllable, rhythmicity and syllabic position

Summary

The octosyllable has received, relatively speaking, as little attention as the poetry of Théophile Gautier. This is partly because it has so consistently been overshadowed by the alexandrine, at least from the seventeenth century onwards, partly because it has been seen as the line peculiar to light verse. As a point of departure for my discussion of the octosyllable, particularly as it appears in Gautier's Emaux et camées, I would like to refer to my summary in French Verse-Art (p. 42):

The octosyllable is perhaps the most mercurial and mobile of lines. Without the structural point de repère of a caesura, it situates itself uneasily between a two-accents-per-six-syllables norm on the one one hand, and a three-accents-per-decasyllable norm on the other. Of course the octosyllable has its own conventions: 3+5 and 5+3 are the classic divisions of the line, though 4+4 is probably as common. But measures of four and five syllables are already pushing towards the limit of tolerable accentlessness, particularly in a line whose brevity tends to encourage a more attentive reading, a reading that positively looks for accent. There may be some simplification in these assertions, but we can justifiably propose that recitational considerations interfere more continuously with the rhythmic structure of this line than with any other, and this characteristic, resulting from the line's instability, reinforces that instability.