Alexandrines are rhyming verses consisting each of twelve syllables or six measures. The name is most probably derived from an old French poem on Alexander the Great, composed between 1180 and 1190, in which this measure was first used; according to others, it was so called from the name of one of its authors, Alexander de Bernay. The Alexandrine has become the regular epic or heroic verse of the French, among whom each line is divided in the middle into two hemistichs, the sixth syllable always ending a word. In English, this rule is not always observed, as in the following verse:
That all the woods shall an | swer, and their echoes ring.
The only considerable English poem wholly written in Alexandrines is Drayton's Polyolbion; but the Spenserian stanza regularly ends in an Alexandrine, and the measure occurs occasionally in our common heroic verse of five feet, as the last line of a couplet:
When both are full, they feed our blest abode,
Like those that watered once | the paradise of God.—DRYDEN.
Pope's lines in the Essay on Criticism are familiar:
A needless Alexandrine ends the song,
That, like a wounded snake, drags its slow length along.
In spite of this, Pope introduced Alexandrines at the close of his Messiah and elsewhere, though his later poems contain very few examples. According to Dr Johnson, 'Cowley was the first poet that mingled Alexandrines at pleasure with the common heroic of ten syllables; and from him Dryden borrowed the practice, whether ornamental or licentious.'