caesura

Noun

caesura (plural caesuras or caesurae)

1. (rhetoric) A pause or interruption in a poem, music, building, or other work of art.
   • The caesura is meant to fall not with the comma after difficult, but after thou; and there is a most effective and grand suspension intended. It is Satan who speaks— Satan in the wilderness; and he marks, as he wishes to mark, the tremendous opposition of attitude between the two parties to the...1847, Thomas De Quincey, Milton Versus Southey and Landor
   • Now, then, for my prologue. I am not going to change my cæsuras and cadences for anybody; so if you do not like the heroic, or iambic trimeter brachy-catalectic, you had better not wait to hear it […]1857–1858, Oliver Wendell Holmes [Sr.], “(please specify the page)”, in The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table, Boston, Mass.: Phillips, Sampson and Company, published 1858, →OCLC
2. (Classical) Using two words to divide a metrical foot.
3. The caesura mark ‖ or ||.

   Synonyms:

   virgule

4. (rare) A break of an era or other measure of history and time; where one era ends and another begins; turning point.
   • Like the knocking at the door in Macbeth, or the cry of the watchman in the Tour de Nesle, they show that the horrible cæsura is over and the nightmares have fled away, because the day is breaking and the ordinary life of men is beginning to bestir itself among the streets.c. 1870, Robert Louis Stevenson, Nuits Blanches
   • A quiet time. A caesura. Then everything happened almost at once, and none of it was good.2022, Stephen King, chapter 8, in Fairy Tale, page 133