Poetry Example: Metric, Number Of Syllables

The verses are divided, by the number of syllables, into two classes: minor art and major art.
The verses of minor art consist of two to eight syllables; those of major art, from nine to twenty-four syllables.

a) Examples of minor art
Of two syllables (bisyllables): Nieva ...
Of three syllables (trisyllables): Angelica.. .
Four-syllable (four-syllable or tetrasyllable): One night. ..
(José Asunción Silva, Nocturnal)
Five-syllable (pentasyllables): Ave de paso ...
(José Santos Chocano, Traveling)
Six-syllable (hexasyllables.): Let me laugh ...
(Luis G. Urbina, Lamps in agony, 1914) Of seven syllables (heptasyllables or septasyllables): It is a ray of the moon. .
(Amado Ñervo, Old chorus, 1902)
Of eight syllables (octosyllables):
I go dreaming roads... .
(Antonio Machado, Soledades, 1903)
b) Examples of major art
Nine syllables (eneasyllables):
Youth, divine treasure! .
(Rubén Darío, Songs of life and hope, 1903)
The eneasyllable is the least used in Spanish versification.
Of ten syllables (decasyllables):
A red Chinese silk screen. ..

(Julián del Casal, Busts and rhymes, 1893)
Of eleven syllables (hendecasyllables):
the wind came down from other realms. ..
(Pablo Neruda, Canto general, 1950) *
The hendecasyllable was the most widely used in the Golden Age of Castilian poetry. It lends itself to the high and deep.
Of twelve syllables (twelve syllables):
What is whiter than candid lily?
(Manuel Gutiérrez Nájera, In white, 1888 ")
Of thirteen syllables:
Under my window, the moon on the rooftops,.. .
(José Juan Tablada, Panorama, haikáis, 1922)
Of fourteen syllables:
nailed between the jungles of the tropic of fire.. .
José Juan Tablada, Scattered Poems, 1894)
Of fifteen syllables:
sprinkled with pearls the sensual corollas, ...
(Luis G. Urbina, Sunsets, 1910)
Sixteen syllables:
along the flowered path through the plain. ...
(José Asunción Silva, Nocturnal)
Seventeen syllables:
and the terrible howls of the crushed cows.
(Federico García Lorca, Poet in New York, 1929-1930) Of eighteen syllables:
Like a dog, dragging the tender shadow of my veins,.. .
(Ricardo E. Molinari, Odes of love)
Of nineteen syllables:
Because desire is a question whose answer no one knows ...
(Luis Cernuda. Forbidden Pleasures, 1931)
Of twenty syllables:
I would like to discover a tree where no one has found shade... .
(Ricardo E. Molinari, Ode of love, 1940)
Of twenty-four syllables:
A night full of murmurs, perfumes and music of wings... .
(José Asunción Silva, Nocturnal)
The verses of minor art intermingle, at the discretion of the poet, with the verses of major art. A multiplicity of examples of this class of compositions are offered to us in anthologies by Spanish and Hispanic American writers.