Note 12 — Chapter XVI · EDITORIALS—CONSTRUCTIVE

Coleridge here illustrates the feet while explaining them, an admirable device in exposition. “Dactyl” is a fine word; in Greek it means “finger”; like a finger, a poetic dactyl has three parts, one long and two short. “Anapest” comes from a Greek verb which means “strike back”; an anapest is a reversed dactyl. Most English poems are written in iambi. Longfellow’s Hiawatha is in trochees, Evangeline in dactyls, and The Destruction of Sennacherib (see page 70) in anapests.