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Strophe   Listen
noun
Strophe  n.  (pl. strophes)  In Greek choruses and dances, the movement of the chorus while turning from the right to the left of the orchestra; hence, the strain, or part of the choral ode, sung during this movement. Also sometimes used of a stanza of modern verse. See the Note under Antistrophe.






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Strophe" Quotes from Famous Books



... for Saint Cecilia's Day, Alexander's Feast, or the Power of Sound, as it is called, was written and printed in 1697. As it was designed for music (it was set by Jeremiah Clarke), the closing lines of every strophe are repeated by way of chorus. I have removed these repetitions as impertinent to the effect of the poem in print, and as interrupting the rushing vehemency of the narrative. The incident described ...
— Lyra Heroica - A Book of Verse for Boys • Various

... ballad, lay; love song, drinking song, war song, sea song; lullaby; music &c. 415; nursery rhymes. [Bad poetry] doggerel, Hudibrastic verse[obs3], prose run mad; macaronics[obs3]; macaronic verse[obs3], leonine verse; runes. canto, stanza, distich, verse, line, couplet, triplet, quatrain; strophe, antistrophe[obs3]. verse, rhyme, assonance, crambo[obs3], meter, measure, foot, numbers, strain, rhythm; accentuation &c. (voice) 580; dactyl, spondee, trochee, anapest &c.; hexameter, pentameter; Alexandrine; anacrusis[obs3], antispast[obs3], blank verse, ictus. ...
— Roget's Thesaurus

... have a considerable market value. Thenceforth the creature who has the luck to have them is absolved from labor. He stands or lies in the sun, or wanders through the Piazza, and sings his whining, lamentable strophe of, "Signore, povero stroppiato, datemi qualche cosa per amor di Dio!"—and when the baiocco falls into his hat, like ripe fruit from the tree of the stranger, he chants the antistrophe, "Dio la benedica, la Madonna ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 22, Aug., 1859 • Various

... subtly attains the beauty of expressiveness by making the very evils and confusions and terrors it presents somehow the exemplifications of a serene eternal order. The function of the chorus in Greek tragedy was indeed chiefly to indicate in solemn strophe and antistrophe the ordered and harmonious verities of which these particular follies and frustrations were so tender and terrible an illustration. They catch up the present and particular evil into the calm and splendid interplay ...
— Human Traits and their Social Significance • Irwin Edman

... remember accurately, or all would be lost. There was one story in particular, told by a friend remarkable as a raconteur, which tried him more than anything he knew in the world,—of the kind. He felt like one of the old Greek chorus with strophe and antistrophe, and it was a weight upon his mind lest he should not laugh properly at the end. I recall one day, when the subject of Walt Whitman's poetry was introduced, Dr. Holmes said he abhorred playing the critic, partly ...
— Authors and Friends • Annie Fields

... Counter-turn; the third, the Epode, or After-song. The origin of these terms may be traced to the use of the ode as an important part of the entertainment presented in the ancient Greek theatre. The Strophe was sung while the chorus moved from one side of the orchestra to the other; the Antistrophe while the reversed movement was being made; and the Epodos after the singers had returned to their original position. The accurate perception of harmony and the relationship between ...
— Six Centuries of English Poetry - Tennyson to Chaucer • James Baldwin

... is very interesting,' said Osborne. 'It is like the strophe and anti-strophe in a ...
— Wives and Daughters • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell

... had hardly got into the carriage, where he was alone, than the thought of the letter tortured him, till he could not sit still. This dreadful analysis of his mother, strophe after strophe, it rose before him, it again drove him into the state of mind in which he had been among the hills and woods of Eidsvold. Beyond the tunnel the character of the scenery was the same.—Good God! that dreadful letter was never absent from his thoughts, otherwise ...
— Absalom's Hair • Bjornstjerne Bjornson

... grief of mourning for a loved one lying beneath the pall; unless it has felt the emotions that fill the heart, uttered by that Hymn of Despair, by those cries that crush the mind, by that sacred fear augmenting strophe by strophe, ascending heavenward, which terrifies, belittles, and elevates the soul, and leaves within our minds, as the last sound ceases, a consciousness of immortality. We have met and struggled with the vast idea of the Infinite. After that, all is silent in the church. No word is said; sceptics ...
— Ferragus • Honore de Balzac

... did at last discover what words it was they were singing. When it first flashed on me, I really could not believe it. But at the end of the next verse no doubt or error was possible. The young maenad nearest me was concluding every strophe by shrieking that she didn't care where the water went if it didn't get into ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Maisie Ward

... verses, the first two of which are always eleven-syllable alcaics of the first kind; the third verse is an iambic dimeter hypercatalectic consisting of nine syllables; and the fourth verse is a ten-syllable alcaic of the second kind. The following strophe is of this species, which Horace calls Alcaei ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia

... Its half-dozen beds were so many cantos. Nature crowded them for him with imagery such as no Laureate could copy in the cold mosaic of language. The rhythm of alternating dawn and sunset, the strophe and antistrophe still perceptible through all the sudden shifts of our dithyrambic seasons and echoed in corresponding floral harmonies, made melody in the soul of Abel, the plain serving-man. It softened his ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)

... Rainbow, and that means the storm is over. Marriage supper, and that means gladdest festivity. Twelve manner of fruits, and that means luscious and unending variety. Harp, trumpet, grand march, anthem, amen, and hallelujah in the same orchestra. Choral meeting solo, and overture meeting antiphon, and strophe joining dithyramb, as they roll into the ocean of doxologies. And you and I may have all that, and have it forever through Christ, if we will let Him with the blood of one wounded hand rub out our sin, and with the other wounded hand ...
— New Tabernacle Sermons • Thomas De Witt Talmage

... il plane, avec un hymne en ses agres; Et l'on voit voir passer la strophe du progres. Il est la nef, il est le phare! L'homme enfin prend son sceptre et jette son baton. Et l'on voit s'envoler le calcul de Newton Monte ...
— The Idea of Progress - An Inquiry Into Its Origin And Growth • J. B. Bury

... an hour's steady firing, on the same lines as the strophe and anti-strophe of a Greek chorus—noise and damage about equal, that is—the excitement began in real earnest. The guns were limbered up and we advanced out of the barley fields and galloped under ...
— With Our Army in Palestine • Antony Bluett

... American heart. And if we do but peer into their labyrinth of graceful windings and reach their Chrimhilde Rose-garden, we shall find it begirt with the strong, fighting men of humor. This element lurks under many a musical strophe and crowns many a regal verse. And yet in real humorous poetry we have been sadly deficient. Only of late years have the constant lions by the gate begun to rouse from their strong slumber, to shake their tawny manes, and rumble out a warning of ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. I. February, 1862, No. II. - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various

... lullaby; music &c 415; nursery rhymes. [Bad poetry] doggerel, Hudibrastic verse^, prose run mad; macaronics^; macaronic verse^, leonine verse; runes. canto, stanza, distich, verse, line, couplet, triplet, quatrain; strophe, antistrophe^. verse, rhyme, assonance, crambo^, meter, measure, foot, numbers, strain, rhythm; accentuation &c (voice) 580; dactyl, spondee, trochee, anapest &c; hexameter, pentameter; Alexandrine; anacrusis^, antispast^, blank verse, ictus. ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget

... prevailed for the insertion of what notes there are, and would have had more. Mr. Gray said, whatever wanted explanation did not deserve it, but that sentence was never so far from being an axiom as in the present case. Not to mention how he had shackled himself with strophe, antistrophe, and epode (yet acquitting himself nobly), the nature of prophecy forbade him naming his kings. To me they are apparent enough—yet I am far from thinking either piece perfect, though with what faults they have, I hold them in the first ...
— Selected English Letters (XV - XIX Centuries) • Various

... movement have been greatly extended and varied. As a rule the form chosen for the Finale is that called the Rondo. Borrowed from an artificial verse-form (the French Rondeau), this species of composition illustrates the peculiarity of that form in the reiteration of a strophe ever and anon after a new theme or episode has been exploited. In modern society verse, which has grown out of an ambition to imitate the ingenious form invented by mediaeval poets, we have the Triolet, which may be said to be a ...
— How to Listen to Music, 7th ed. - Hints and Suggestions to Untaught Lovers of the Art • Henry Edward Krehbiel

... gorgeous studies of antique myth, and by Tennyson for his "Death of the Duke of Wellington." It is an error to call these iambic odes "irregular," although they do not follow the classic rules with strophe, antistrophe, and epode. The enchanting "I have led her home," in "Maud," is an example of this kind of lyric at ...
— Victorian Songs - Lyrics of the Affections and Nature • Various

... frantic. Fifty thousand people, arranged in guilds, defiled before the king, who sat like a statue on his bay horse, upright and impassible. Cavour walked in the company of journalists, and all those who had opposed him a few weeks before were there too, with Valerio at their head. They sang their strophe of Mameli's hymn, "Fratelli d'Italia," very badly. Cavour whispered to his neighbour, "We are so ...
— Cavour • Countess Evelyn Martinengo-Cesaresco

... been sung below, and the sweet-voiced sisters caught up the antistrophe, Brother Friedsam, sitting in the midst, listened with painful attention, vainly trying to detect the sound of Tabea's voice. But when the second strophe had been sung, and the sisters began their second response, a thrill of excitement went through all as the long-silent voice of Sister Tabea rose above the rest with even more than its old ...
— Duffels • Edward Eggleston

... poem with varying number of verses to the strophe), written, it would seem, in 1064. The dialect is Alemannic. Ezzo was dean of the Bamberg cathedral. The introduction states that Bishop Gunter ordered his clergy to 'make a good song'; that 'Ezzo began to write, will ...
— An anthology of German literature • Calvin Thomas

... epic, where, however, his experiment, la Franciade, was a complete failure, abandoned when but four of the proposed twelve cantos were finished. But his genius was essentially lyric. The ode was his special contribution to French verse; in it he followed the classical form with its divisions into strophe, antistrophe, and epode, sometimes in direct imitation of Pindar, Anacreon, Theocritus, or Horace. His best work is that in which he freed himself most fully from the influence of a model. His deepest and truest note's are those that celebrate ...
— French Lyrics • Arthur Graves Canfield

... like a long expiring sigh, sometimes with a tremble in it as of a dry leaf swiftly vibrating in the wind. No sooner would one cease than another would begin; and so it would go on, demand and response, strophe and antistrope; and at intervals several voices would unite in a kind of low mysterious chorus, death-watch and flutter and hiss; while I, lying awake in my bed, listened and trembled. It was dark ...
— Far Away and Long Ago • W. H. Hudson

... transitions, and in the sober majesty of lofty sense, it appeared to them to approach more nearly, than any other poetry they had heard, to the style of our Bible, in the prophetic books. The first strophe will suffice as ...
— Biographia Literaria • Samuel Taylor Coleridge

... and hears in the voices of evening a general symphony of praise. It is still the Klopstockian strain of magniloquent religiosity, tempered somewhat by the influence of Haller. In 'The Conqueror', a poem published in 1777, the Klopstockian note is still more audible. The form is a pseudo-antique strophe such as Klopstock often used; the substance a rhetorical denunciation of military ambition. The most awful curses are imprecated upon the head of the ruthless 'conqueror', whose badness is portrayed ...
— The Life and Works of Friedrich Schiller • Calvin Thomas

... masculine, as no woman would drop a wedding-ring), and follow him whither he listed all the world over. Amiable giggling Forey girls called Clare, The Betrothed. Dark man, or fair? was mooted. Adrian threw off the first strophe of Clare's fortune in burlesque rhymes, with an insinuating gipsy twang. Her aunt Forey warned her to have her dresses in readiness. Her grandpapa Forey pretended to grumble at bridal presents ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith

... countries, were intermixed and heightened with dances peculiarly composed in honor of their deities. From before their altars, and from their places of worship, they were soon introduced upon their theatres, to which they were undoubtedly a prior invention. The strophe, antistrophe, and epode, were nothing but certain measures performed by a chorus of dancers, in harmony with the voice; certain movements in dancing correspondent to the subject, which were all along considered as a constitutive part of the performance. The dancing even governed ...
— A Treatise on the Art of Dancing • Giovanni-Andrea Gallini

... to appreciate Chopin rightly, one must love gentle impressions, and have the feeling for poetry: to hear Chopin is to read a strophe of Lamartine....Everyone went away full of sweet joy ...
— Frederick Chopin as a Man and Musician - Volume 1-2, Complete • Frederick Niecks

... was a rare strophe! But it doesn't seem to have any special bearing upon the subject and our present conditions. ...
— Lucky Pehr • August Strindberg

... style, or in that of Pompei's Cleanthes, might give us some idea of the merit of the original. The character, too, of the poetry of these hymns is singular to us; written in monostichs, each divided into strophe and antistrophe, the sentiment of the first member responded with amplification or antithesis ...
— Memoir, Correspondence, And Miscellanies, From The Papers Of Thomas Jefferson - Volume I • Thomas Jefferson

... had traveled only in certain districts, while Switzerland, of which his William Tell contains such vivid descriptions, he had never seen. Any one who has ever stood by the Falls of the Rhine will involuntarily recall, at the sight, the beautiful strophe in The Diver in which this confusing tumult of waters, that so captivates the eye, is depicted; and yet no personal view of these rapids had served as ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. IV • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke

... paged separately throughout. His phrase "fronde gemina," ("with double leafing") was therefore perfectly exact.] Then the Antistrophe asks what had become of the former copy of the same, on its way to the sources of the Thames and the great seat of learning there established. The second Strophe and Antistrophe continue the strain, with a hope that now at length the wretched civil tumults may cease in England and Peace and Literature come back, but still with a return of the query what could possibly have ...
— The Life of John Milton Vol. 3 1643-1649 • David Masson

... more elaborate than that to Mendelssohn's "Antigone" (the "Oedipus in Kolonos" begins strongly with only one period of thirteen measures). The opening chorus of Paine's "Oedipus" is the weakest thing in the work. The second strophe has a few good moments, but soon falls back into what is impudent enough to be actually catchy!—and that, too, of a Lowell Mason, Moody and Sankey catchiness. Curiously enough, Mendelssohn's "Antigone" begins with ...
— Contemporary American Composers • Rupert Hughes

... where'er the red bloom burns I' the dull dark verdure of the bounteous tree, Dethroning, in the Rosy Isle, the rose, You shall find food, drink, odour, all at once; Cool leaves to bind about an aching brow. And, never much away, the nightingale. Sing them a strophe, with the turn-again, Down to the verse that ends all, proverb like. And save us, thou ...
— The Poetry Of Robert Browning • Stopford A. Brooke

... the symphonies That praise the Ever-blest, Some strophe of surpassing peace Inviteth ...
— Early Letters of George Wm. Curtis • G. W. Curtis, ed. George Willis Cooke

... Greeks, the march of the Choruses in their theatres represented the movements of the Heavens and the planets, and the Strophe and Anti-Strophe imitated, Aristoxenes says, the movements of the Stars. The number five was sacred among the Chinese, as that of the planets other than the Sun and Moon. Astrology consecrated the numbers twelve, seven, thirty, and three ...
— Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry • Albert Pike

... angry with us for being sorry to go north—you wouldn't think it unnatural. As for me, I have all sorts of pain in England—everything is against me, except a few things; and yet, while my husband and I groan at one another, strophe and antistrophe (pardon that rag of Greek!) we admit our compensations—that it will be an excellent thing, for instance, to see Mr. Ruskin! Are we ...
— The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Volume II • Elizabeth Barrett Browning

... a few of the various disks which I came at last to see in this gem of first water. Even now, in memory, the subject looms vast before me, and the freighted pen halts. Bear with me: let us pause for one moment. Matter like this asks a new strophe. ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 85, November, 1864 • Various



Words linked to "Strophe" :   stanza, lyric poem, lyric



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