[Maryann Corbett]

My curiosity's been piqued by the poetry column in The Guardian last week. Can anyone point me to examples of elegiac couplets in English? Google searches only point me to Latin and Greek.

Thanks for any help!

[Janice D. Soderling]

Maryann, this seems to be right up your Exeter Alley.

http://www.billhealeypoet.myby.co.uk...orms_elegy.htm

I hope it helps.

[Mark Allinson]

Maryann, the original meaning of elegeia was a funeral elegy written in couplets of a hex line followed by a pent.

For the Roman poets, it could mean any love poem in meter. And by the English renaissance, "elegy" meant a love poem in rhymed couplets, usually both pent.

So here is an example of elegaic couplets in English:

ELEGY V.


HIS PICTURE.


HERE take my picture ; though I bid farewell,
Thine, in my heart, where my soul dwells, shall dwell.
'Tis like me now, but I dead, 'twill be more,
When we are shadows both, than 'twas before.
When weatherbeaten I come back ; my hand
Perhaps with rude oars torn, or sun-beams tann'd,
My face and breast of haircloth, and my head
With care's harsh sudden hoariness o'erspread,
My body a sack of bones, broken within,
And powder's blue stains scatter'd on my skin ;
If rival fools tax thee to have loved a man,
So foul and coarse, as, O ! I may seem then,
This shall say what I was ; and thou shalt say,
" Do his hurts reach me? doth my worth decay?
Or do they reach his judging mind, that he
Should now love less, what he did love to see?
That which in him was fair and delicate,
Was but the milk, which in love's childish state
Did nurse it ; who now is grown strong enough
To feed on that, which to weak tastes seems tough."

– John Donne

[David Landrum]

Some good ones here, Maryann, though I'm not sure this is exactly what you're looking for: http://web.cn.edu/kwheeler/epitaphs.html

I liked this one:

A Maid of Queen Elizabeth (early 17th century)

Here lies, the Lord have mercy upon her,
One of her Majesty's maids of honour:
She was both young, slender, and pretty,
She died a maid, the more the pity.

And this one:

Peter Robinson (19th century)

Here lies the preacher, judge, and poet, Peter
Who broke the laws of God, and man, and metre.

Maybe I'll have that one of my tombstone.


dwl

[Susan McLean]

Maryann,
I have been translating Martial, who wrote a lot of elegiac couplets in Latin (alternating lines of dactylic hexameter and pentameter). In translating him, I changed dactylic to iambic (to achieve a more conversational rhythm) but kept the number of feet six and five in some of my translations. However, I haven't done it often because straight iambic pentameter tends to pack more punch for satirical couplets. I have kept the hexameters only in those cases in which I needed the extra foot to fit in all the content.

Susan

[Maryann Corbett]

Thanks, everyone. I am guilty of being unclear. What I had in mind was specifically the classical meter--dac-hex alternating with dac-pent--used for English verse, rhymed or not. It sounds like Susan is doing at least a bit of that, though not with dactyls, and giving me good reasons for not doing it all the time.

What's arousing my curiosity is that I can write dac-hex with ease, but trying to alternate hex and pent is a very stumbly sort of thing! So I wondered if I could find English examples. I also wondered if there were any rules that the couplets should be self-contained--end-stopped--or whether they can connect or enjamb.

I see that Janice has pointed me to some--but honestly, I can't hear a meter in those translations! I'll give it another try.

Swinburne did things in classical meters; did he do any of this? A.D. Hope wrote reams of hexameters; did he ever alternate with pentameter? Anybody know? Thanks for putting up with my niggling questions!

[John Whitworth]

Gavin Ewart wrote a poem in elegiacs. It begins thus:

Advertising! The men at the front are terribly turdlike!
Backroom boys are the best. They can be human a bit.

John |Heath-Stubbs wrote 'Epitaph for Thais'. Here is a couplet:

Neo-platonic sages failed toshow up at their lectures -
Dream of the touch of her lips, metaphysics go jhang!

And I wrote this poem. Sorry, but you're going to get all of it.

Blood Ties

First it's the ground-up glass. You wouldn't believe the trouble.
Pounding it down for days, shoving it under the crust.
Smack of his red, wet lips as he gulps it down at the double,
Ashes to flaming ashes, dust to perishing dust.
(That one's out of a book – Kev's a one for the reading.)
Tesco's Somerset Style Chicken-and-Mushroom Pie.
Accidental Death, see. Death from Internal Bleeding.
Why don't he die then? Jesus, why don't the bastard die
In the piss and puke of his sin (what no book actually said)?
Kev kneels on the stairs and prays, but he still isn't dead.

Kev has this duff idea then, crush his skull in the toilet.
Over the door a wire to a clock-weight stood on the flush.
Likewise the deadly mushroom, hours and hours we boil it
In a cocoa tin on a fire till the bugger's down to a mush.
We mix it with three big sugars, stir it up in his tea then.
He knows about that all right. Kev gets smashed in the face
For a snotnosed, evil toe-rag. Right. So it's down to me then.
Kev on the line to Jesus, sat in his own dark place
With her home-made damson jam, shelf upon shelf upon shelf.
'All that's left of her now, sis.' Shit! So I do it myself.

Pick my time for a Monday. Mondays he watches the footie
Boozing. It's always the same - six big tins of stout.
Sat flat out in the armchair watching the late night movie.
From his wet, red lips the ropes of spit come bobbling out.
Smashed his head in with a hammer, one from out of the cupboard,
Right where the skin shows pink, hard as ever I could,
That hammerhead goes in easy. Kev, he would sure've blubbered.
Me, I screw up my face and I smash him again. It's good.
The sucking, snuffling sound like when water runs out of a bath.
I grab his hand. 'Come on, Kev!' We run down the garden path,

Over the back wall and out into the water meadow,
Down there by the lake with a big moon shining clear.
'D'you do it?' he says. I nod. We're stood out there together.
'My hand's like ice,' I say. 'There's nothing more for us here.'
'D'you do right?' he says. I shake my head. 'I dunno, Kev.
But it's done. I done it. Oh Kev, don't you tell on me, please.
Hold me. I'm cold as ice. Where are we going to go, Kev?'
The jinking, winking moonlight dancing over the trees.
'Why d'you ask if I'd tell, sis? What sort of noise did he make?'
See Jesus walking, walking over the face of the lake.

[Maryann Corbett]

Thanks for all of those, John. Just what I was hoping for, though I'm back to square one if I have to rhyme. Great story, too.

[John Whitworth]

No, you don'thave to rhyme.In fact, if you are being properly classical you ought not to. But some classicist will tell you that my elegiacs are not always accurate. Heath-Stubbs should be your model. He was a very classical chap.

Here's Coleridge. Or rather here isn't Coleridge because I can't find it. But he wrote an elecgiac couplet designed as a kind of pattern. It begins 'In the hexameter.... '

[Maryann Corbett]

Thanks, John--I found the Coleridge, right there in the Wikipedia article:

In the Hexameter rises the fountain's silvery column,
In the pentameter aye falling in melody back.

It's a good example to have (and your poem is too) because the explanation "hex alternating with pent" doesn't make clear that the pentameter line actually has six stresses and ends on a stressed syllable.

I'll hunt up some Heath-Stubbs too.

My experiments need to go back to the drawing board; thanks again.