Poetic contraction

Poetic contractions are contractions of words found in poetry but not commonly used in everyday modern English. Also known as elision, these contractions are usually used to lower the amount of syllables in a particular word in order to adhere to the meter of a composition.[1] In languages like French, elision removes the end syllable of a word that ends with a vowel sound when the next begins with a vowel sound, in order to avoid hiatus, or retain a consonant-vowel-consonant-vowel rhythm.[2]

Many of these poetic contractions originate from archaic English. By the end of the 18th century, contractions were generally looked down upon in standardized formal writing. This development may have been influenced by the publication of Samuel Johnson's A Dictionary of the English Language (1755).

List of common poetic contractions
Archaic Modern
'tis it is
'twas it was
o'er over
gi' give
ne'er never
i' in
e'er ever
oft often
a' he
e'en even
ope open
th' the
o' of
heav'n heaven
an' and
ta'en taken
gollark: That would be mean so they can't.
gollark: I worry that one day someone will become annoyed by incdec and assemble a vast botnet of compromised IoT devices to send increment and decrement commands unreasonably fast and saturate my internet connection.
gollark: I suppose it'd work for a bit.
gollark: Most people are on dynamic IPs.
gollark: That happened accidentally when a restart occurred I think?

References
  1. McArthur, Thomas Burns; McArthur, Tom; McArthur, Roshan (2005). "Elision". Concise Oxford Companion to the English Language. Oxford University Press. ISBN 9780192806376. elision.
  2. Ayoun, Dalila (2007). French Applied Linguistics. John Benjamins Publishing. pp. 64–65. ISBN 9789027219725.


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