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The Scarlet Pimpernel vocabulary

143 vocabulary words, including people, places, music, artists, etc.

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strophe: ► definition

Definition:

a poetic term originally referring to the first part of the ode in Ancient Greek tragedy, followed by the antistrophe and epode. The term has been extended to also mean a structural division of a poem containing stanzas of varying line length. Strophic poetry is to be contrasted with poems composed line-by-line non-stanzaically, such as Greek epic poems or English blank verse, to which the term stichic applies.

In its original Greek setting, "strophe, antistrophe and epode were a kind of stanza framed only for the music," as John Milton wrote in the preface to Samson Agonistes, with the strophe chanted by a Greek chorus as it moved from right to left across the scene.

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according to Wikipedia, Keats' Ode to a Nightingale is similar in form to a Greek strophe:

My heart aches, and a drowsy numbness pains
My sense, as though of hemlock I had drunk,
Or emptied some dull opiate to the drains
One minute past, and Lethe-wards had sunk:
’Tis not through envy of thy happy lot,
But being too happy in thine happiness,—
That thou, light-winged Dryad of the trees,
In some melodious plot
Of beechen green, and shadows numberless,
Singest of summer in full-throated ease.

https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Ode_to_a_Nightingale

► uses

Uses:

But the singular works of Latin and Anglo-Saxon literature allured him still further. They included the whole series of riddles by Adhelme, Tatwine and Eusebius, who were descendants of Symphosius, and especially the enigmas composed by Saint Boniface, in acrostic strophes whose solution could be found in the initial letters of the verses.

Joris-Karl Huysmans. À Rebours

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"then you are where you were before, aren't you? and you can let me enjoy the last strophe of the aria. Faith!"

Emma Orczy. The Scarlet Pimpernel (1905)

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When he came to the distribution of the prizes, he painted the joy of the prize-winners in dithyrambic strophes.

Gustave Flaubert. Madame Bovary