The nimble dactyl striving to out-go, The drawling spondeespacing it below.
Whoever saw a colt wanton and wild Yok'd with a slow-foot ox on fallow field, Can right areed how handsomely besets Dull spondees with the English dactylets.
Thus he tried to introduce more real spondees into his hexameters than Longfellow and others had done.
Southey says we have but one, Egypt; and gives this as a reason why the spondees of classical hexameters are replaced by trochees in German and English.
As to Southey's example, Egypt is no more a spondee than precept or rescript; but the fact is, that we have in English spondees in abundance; and these spondees have tended more than any thing else to spoil our hexameters.
The four other feet may be either spondees or dactyls.
In English the lack of true spondees is severely felt, even though the English metre depends, not, as in Greek and Latin, on the distinction between long and short syllables, but on that between accented and unaccented syllables.
Spondees are not admitted in the first colon, and no resolutions occur in the second colon.
Spondees are admitted in the first tripody, but not in the second.
Spondees and apparent bacchii (reduced to anapaests by the law of iambic shortening; see 2470) are extremely common, and metrical irregularities of various kinds abound.
The above list will hopefully give you a few useful examples demonstrating the appropriate usage of "spondees" in a variety of sentences. We hope that you will now be able to make sentences using this word.
