BusterStronghart@Gmail.com

My leg pain woke me up at about 5:30 this morning so I went out on the terrace, so as to watch the coming sunrise, and brought with me Don Quixote, thinking that the quiet would help me to get further along.

But I decided to begin again, and this time read the prologue and the poems that follow it.

The very first poem is Urganda the Unrecognised which is described in a footnote as a "verso de cabo rato," which is described as a poem in which the final endings of each word at the end of a line are dropped.

If to reach goodly read--
oh book, you proceed with cau-,
you cannot, by the fool--,
be called a stumbling nin--.


A few months ago, while searching through my Oxford I came across the English for this same idea. Why anyone would write poems in which the last syllables of words are dropped is not apparent to me, but apparently it is done, at least in Spanish and English, and Cervantes gives us the example quoted above.

The English word, which unlike most words new to me at this age, has stuck:

It is Catalexis.

I know you needed to know this.

mek