Antipast Foot

Antipast is a metrical foot used in metered poetry. It consists of a short syllable, two long syllables and a short syllable ˘ ¯ ¯ ˘. English poetry uses Qualitative meter where syllables are usually categorized as being stressed or unstressed, rather than long or short as is the case in Quantitative meter of Greek and Roman poetry. In Qualitative meter, the combination of the iambic foot ᵕ ̷  and the trochaic foot  ̷  ᵕ forms an Antipast foot. Book I, Verse 1 “Paradise Lost” by John Milton provides an example of the Antipast foot as shown below.