The silence of the verse. The pause and its metric and stylistic implications

Abstract

The metric pause is considered nowadays, in the academia, by practically all researchers, as one of the essential elements in verse. This article makes a review about the metric pause with the aim of offering a broad perspective of the reflections that it has raised, going through some of the points that off er more discussion among the experts, and showing the challenges for its theoretical fixation. The article focuses on the versification in Spanish and what scholars and critics have written about the pause. It takes as its starting point the metric pause and its relevance for versification. The article handles later the pause relation with the writing and the graphic mark that indicates it, the naturalness of the metric pause (enjambment and syntactic end-stopping) and a brief review of the challenges that the pause within a metrical line presents for the theory of versifi cation and metrics.