Home › Glossary › Letter C

combined medial stop

Device
Pronunciation

Understanding ARPABET Pronunciation

Want to hear it? Click the Listen button to hear the browser speak the word using text-to-speech!

The pronunciation guide uses the ARPABET phonetic system—the same system used in speech recognition and text-to-speech applications.

Vowel Examples:
AE1 = cat, bat
EH1 = bed, head
IY1 = see, me
OW1 = go, boat
UW1 = boot, do
Stress Numbers:
0 = no stress (unstressed)
1 = primary stress (loud)
2 = secondary stress (medium)
Example:
AH0 TH IY1 N AH0
= a-THEE-na (Athena)

The stressed syllable (marked with 1) is pronounced louder and clearer than others.

Quick Definition

A metrical device where two anticipated caesuras or pauses within a line are merged into a single, stronger pause for rhythmic compression.

Detailed Definition
A combined medial stop is a prosodic pause occurring at the midpoint of a poetic line that simultaneously functions as both a syntactic break and a rhythmic caesura, often reinforcing thematic tension or creating dramatic emphasis; this dual-function pause enhances the line’s expressive power by aligning grammatical and metrical structure.
Example
Example in poetry:
In Gerard Manley Hopkins’ “The Windhover,” medial caesuras like “daylight’s dauphin, dapple-dawn-drawn Falcon” combine stop and flow; In Emily Dickinson’s “Because I could not stop for Death,” dashes create combined medial stops that pause then propel; In Gwendolyn Brooks’ “We Real Cool,” enjambment and end-stops (“We / Left school”) merge pause and motion; In Sylvia Plath’s “Daddy,” “I never could talk to you” uses comma and line break for combined stop-run effect; In Terrance Hayes’ “American Sonnet,” commas and line breaks create rhythmic tension between halt and surge.
Additional Notes
combined medial stop|A point within a line of verse (medial) where two distinct punctuation marks or syntactic breaks occur close together, creating a strong, perhaps jarring, pause; impacts the poem's rhythm and reading pace.
Also Known As
fused medial stop joined middle caesura combined mid-break Blended caesura
Skip to main content