Caesura

All commentators on the deseterac add to the decasyllabic constraint a regularly recurring caesura between the fourth and fifth syllables, yielding two cola of four and six syllables each:

As this example illustrates, no matter what the syntactic form of the line, the word-break will come at precisely the same place in each decasyllable.^[74] In fact, even when a line is hypermetric or hypometric, one or both of the two cola will be preserved, as in the following instances discussed above:

From a practical standpoint, the caesura is never bridged in the deseterac . Caesura placement and colon formation are constant throughout the sample of more than five thousand lines and show even greater stability, as these two lines help to prove, than syllabicity.

Before moving on to describe the nature of each colon or hemistich, let us make two related theoretical points. First, it will be recalled that the Homeric hexameter exhibited three caesuras, a highly regular mid-line break at two possible positions (B1 and B2, 99 percent) and two somewhat less frequent breaks within the half-line, each of which could also occur at either of two

positions (A1 and A2, 90 percent; C1 and C2, 90 percent). Only by allowing two slots for each caesura do we attain such high percentages, but this controlled variation is to be expected in a verse form in which dactylic-spondaic substitution affects metrical shape so strongly. The point is that the hexameter has three movable caesuras and a correspondingly complex assortment of colon-types; the deseterac , in contrast, with its more focused syllabicity and the absolutely regular placement of its single caesura, has only two possible colon-types: the four- and six-syllable increments that together constitute a whole stich. Given this idiosyncratic situation (both traditions exhibit colon formation but the repertoire of types in Serbo-Croatian epic is far less elaborate), it behooves us to consider the patterns within the four- and six-syllable increments, for within the remarkable regularity of syllable count, caesura, and colon formation, the deseterac allows and even promotes a complicated display of traditional word-craft.

At the foundation of the singer's art, from both an evolutionary and a performance-oriented standpoint, lies the Indo-European principle of right justification. Much as in the hexameter, this increasing metrical (and therefore phraseological) conservatism as the line progresses from the beginning of a unit toward the end governs the shape of prosody and diction. But just as the rule took a tradition-dependent form in the hexameter—one resulting, for example, in varying hemistich and colon lengths—so it takes another series of forms in the deseterac . Indeed, right justification emerges as the principle behind the idiosyncratic texture of both cola, each with its own appreciable collection of individual features. We can trace the synchronic designs created by this diachronic pattern in the textual record of the Stolac songs.