Classical alexandrines are always rhymed, often in couplets alternating masculine rhymes and feminine rhymes, though other configurations (such as quatrains and sonnets) are also common. Victor Hugo began the process of loosening the strict two-hemistich structure. While retaining the medial caesura, he often reduced it to a mere word-break, creating a three-part line (alexandrin ternaire) with this structure: o o o S | o o ¦ o S | o o o S (e) |=strong caesura; ¦=word break The Symbolists further weakened the classical structure, sometimes eliminating any or all of these caesurae. However, at no point did the newer line replace the older; rather, they were used concurrently, often in the same poem. This loosening process eventually led to vers libéré and finally to vers libre. English In English verse, "alexandrine" is typically used to mean "iambic hexameter": × / × / × / ¦ × / × / × / (×) /=ictus, a strong syllabic position; ×=nonictus ¦=often a mandatory or predominant caesura, but depends upon the author Whereas the French alexandrine is syllabic, the English is accentual-syllabic; and the central caesura (a defining feature of the French) is not always rigidly preserved in English. Though English alexandrines have occasionally provided the sole metrical line for a poem, for example in lyric poems by Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey and Sir Philip Sidney, and in two notable long poems, Michael Drayton's Poly-Olbion and Robert Browning's Fifine at the Fair, they have more often featured alongside other lines. During the Middle Ages they typically occurred with heptameters (seven-beat lines), both exhibiting metrical looseness. Around the mid-16th century stricter alexandrines were popular as the first line of poulter's measure couplets, fourteeners (strict iambic heptameters) providing the second line. The strict English alexandrine may be exemplified by a passage from Poly-Olbion, which features a rare caesural enjambment (symbolized ¦) in the first line: Ye sacred Bards, that to ¦ your harps' melodious strings Sung Heroes' deeds (the monuments of Kings) And in your dreadful verse the prophecies, The agèd world's descents, and genealogies; (lines 31-34) The Faerie Queene by Edmund Spenser, with its stanzas of eight iambic pentameter lines followed by one alexandrine, exemplifies what came to be its chief role: as a somewhat infrequent variant line in an otherwise iambic pentameter context. Alexandrines provide occasional variation in the blank verse of William Shakespeare and his contemporaries (but rarely; they constitute