Original scientific paper

The Two Characters of Marulić’s Dodecasyllabic

Mirko Tomasović

Abstract

Starting out from the assertion that Marulić’s dodecasyllabic verse has not been specially studied, the author carries on with an analysis of double and quadruple rhymed dodecasyallabics. In double rhymed hexameters we have 23, and in quadruple rhymed hexameters we have 5 Marulić’s poems. From the first group, the author particularly analyses Prayer against the Turks, and from the second Judita and Suzana. While the first form of the dodecasyllabic can be linked with the Old French alexandrine in the Venetian version, no express model has been found for the second. If it is not Marulić’s own verse invention, then the Split maker certainly put his own mark on it, like Dante on the terza rima, Petrarch on the sonnet, and it was to function as the trademark of the tradition founded on Marulić’s oeuvre and intertextual identifiability. Exhaustive analysis shows that Marulić’s distribution of rhymes (even and diagonal) is of an exceptionally high level of rhyming skill, very hard to emu-late. The end rhyme of the first couplet is transferred to the central position in the next couplet, there thus being a quadruple assonance achieved. This arrangement of the verse gives the poetic text a very particular and solemn significance, additional instruments of versification are bent, the metrical scale is raised to the highest level in Croatian poetry, one that was to be hard to come up to. The resonances of Marulić’s dodecasyllabics are registered not only in the quadruple rhyme, but in the lexis, in the expression, as it were, right down to our days in the poems Oproštaj (Farewell) of Tin Ujević, in Suprotiva (Against) of Tonči Petrasov Marović; in Svečana pjesma (Solemn poem) of Tonko Maroević and Marulić by Ante Stamać. Marulić’s dodecasyllabic banner flutters still today, then, at the end of this century. The two types of hexameter, the double and the quadruple rhymed, have cut a traditional groove that cannot be ignored, and constitute factors of the historical development of Croatian versification, have inspired contemporary poets. Thus it is necessary to know their metrical substance and the distinction between them at least at a primary level.

Keywords

Hrčak ID:

9031

URI

https://hrcak.srce.hr/9031

Publication date:

22.4.1999.

Article data in other languages: croatian

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