[Janet Kenny]

Edwin Arlington Robinson (1869–1935)

Late Summer




CONFUSED, he found her lavishing feminine

Gold upon clay, and found her inscrutable;

     And yet she smiled. Why, then, should horrors

Be as they were, without end, her playthings?



And why were dead years hungrily telling her
          
Lies of the dead, who told them again to her?

     If now she knew, there might be kindness

Clamoring yet where a faith lay stifled.



A little faith in him, and the ruinous

Past would be for time to annihilate,
     
     And wash out, like a tide that washes

Out of the sand what a child has drawn there.



God, what a shining handful of happiness,

Made out of days and out of eternities,

     Were now the pulsing end of patience—
               
Could he but have what a ghost had stolen!



What was a man before him, or ten of them,

While he was here alive who could answer them,

     And in their teeth fling confirmations

Harder than agates against an egg-shell?




But now the man was dead, and would come again

Never, though she might honor ineffably

     The flimsy wraith of him she conjured

Out of a dream with his wand of absence.



And if the truth were now but a mummery,
               
Meriting pride’s implacable irony,

     So much the worse for pride. Moreover,

Save her or fail, there was conscience always.



Meanwhile, a few misgivings of innocence,

Imploring to be sheltered and credited,
          
Were not amiss when she revealed them.

Whether she struggled or not, he saw them.



Also, he saw that while she was hearing him

Her eyes had more and more of the past in them;

     And while he told what cautious honor
               
Told him was all he had best be sure of,



He wondered once or twice, inadvertently,

Where shifting winds were driving his argosies,

     Long anchored and as long unladen,

Over the foam for the golden chances.
     



“If men were not for killing so carelessly,

And women were for wiser endurances,”

     He said, “we might have yet a world here

Fitter for Truth to be seen abroad in;



“If Truth were not so strange in her nakedness,
     
And we were less forbidden to look at it,

     We might not have to look.” He stared then

Down at the sand where the tide threw forward



Its cold, unconquered lines, that unceasingly

Foamed against hope, and fell. He was calm enough,
          
Although he knew he might be silenced

Out of all calm; and the night was coming.



“I climb for you the peak of his infamy

That you may choose your fall if you cling to it.

     No more for me unless you say more.
          
All you have left of a dream defends you:



“The truth may be as evil an augury

As it was needful now for the two of us.

     We cannot have the dead between us.

Tell me to go, and I go.”—She pondered:
          



“What you believe is right for the two of us

Makes it as right that you are not one of us.

     If this be needful truth you tell me,

Spare me, and let me have lies hereafter.”



She gazed away where shadows were covering
          
The whole cold ocean’s healing indifference.

     No ship was coming. When the darkness

Fell, she was there, and alone, still gazing.

[robert mezey]

Good for you, Janet, alcaics deserve a separate thread, and you picked a knockout to illustrate them. Like Auden's poem,
Robinson is simply counting syllables, not imitating the classical meter. I've tried my hand at the English version of the meter--not as successfully as Robinson--but rhythmically interesting. (I'm taking off on Horace, III, 6, of course.)


TO THE AMERICANS

Not till every blackened church has been rebuilt,
and you have repented in dust and ashes—
of God mocked in the universities,
blasphemous jokes in the chic galleries,

repented, even though you yourselves be guiltless,
of covetous hearts, of ears uncircumcised,
deaf to others’ pain, of worshiping
wealth and filth, of overweening power,—no,

not till you call to mind the ancient mystery:
only obedience to Him commands obedience,
will you face your shame, Americans,
and only then begin to make amends.

You have already faced the Lord’s fierce anger,
faced the humiliation of being forced
to watch one of your sons, a naked
corpse dragged through the dust of Mogadishu,

all around him the faces of his killers,
gloating savages, one wearing his dog tags;
and bombed-out embassies, innocent
Africans butchered for your fathers’ sins;

and our own streets in flames, drifting with tear gas,
tears for the future. The long oozings of lust,
rage and rebellion steeped three decades,
the venom gathering strength month by month,

—until today, the nubile preteen reveling
in hip-hop, her virginity twenty times lost
(discarded, rather), lies dreaming of
what new taste-thrill? whips? threesomes? Whatever.

Meanwhile, one who could be her older sister,
her mother even, stands ready to open
her scented privacies to a stranger,
some stockbroker buddy of her husband’s

(and her husband knows: he was the go-between!)
Cunt on the house. Or else she’s off on her own—
what fun to find her own whoremaster,
lift her skirts to him in her marriage bed.

Not from such unclean loins did the lean farmboys,
the hardbitten wranglers and factory stiffs spring
who waded ashore at Normandy,
those the bullets hadn’t yet cut in half—

no, those who bled for and saved us, those who died
in the Solomons, in the Ardennes, in the sky,
tough, God-fearing young men who sweated
blood in the blast furnace, rode the tractor

long past sundown, or else rode the rods, cooking
a thin slumgullion in the hobo jungles,
or sold windfall fruit on grey sidewalks,
thin shirts and sharp faces against winter,

they came of better stock. May God have mercy.
Their grandchildren, so licentious, so greedy,
go on dancing, drinking and snorting,
lovelessly fucking, all frantic, manic—

Degeneration doesn’t come suddenly
to an end; shrugged at, accepted, it takes over.
Who will die to save their grandchildren,
come face to face once more with real evil?


after Horace




[This message has been edited by robert mezey (edited July 10, 2004).]

[Janet Kenny]

Robert,
Stunning! I guess Horace spoke like that of the Romans. I could argue with some of it but who cares. It's magnificent! Huge.

Peter Ustinov drew the same parallel.

__________________________________________________ ____________________
I tried a feeble alcaic poem which I'll post below--ephemera but it was my attempt to feel the beat. Is there a mandatory length? Mine is blessedly short. Interestingly, I realised I had heard it in some pop songs by the English pop singer, Kate Bush who has been likened to Sappho. I don't listen to her deliberately, it impinged.
Janet

The Taker


She wanted all the happiness others had,
couldn’t bear seeing anyone beautiful
and always flirted with friends’ husbands;
hooked them then, threw them back, hurt and guilty.

In shops she longed for dresses and luxury,
ran up huge debts to sate her avidity.
Oodles of shoes, some worn, some never.
Owning things always the point of living.

Needy, she stared at faces for certainty
that she was causing comment and interest.
Both were essential, what she worked for.
Panic and anger if nothing happened.

Colourless, she, the succubus, bleached them all,
draining the blood from lovers of other folk,
dressed in the colours of rejection
decked out in finery of her victims.

What have we done to unhappy travellers?
Taunted, denied a place in our family.
Monsters are made by such exclusion.
Welcome them home and make restitution.


[This message has been edited by Janet Kenny (edited July 10, 2004).]

[robert mezey]

Some fine things in that poem. Two criticisms: first, the diction sometimes changes register a little jarringly, e.g. "sate her avidity" and "oodles of shoes" --and second, the rhythm is sometimes good but sometimes a little rocky. In lines of that length, if you're just counting syllables, you're essentially writing free verse and so have to depend on your ear. Rereading the Robinson, I saw and remembered that he wasn't just counting syllables, he was also counting accents:
five in the first two lines of each quatrain, four in the second two. Mine is just syllabics, though most lines are five-beaters. And yes, my accusations are somewhat modeled on Horace's, but I also believe everything I say (as I'm sure he believed what he said). The most beautiful alcaics in English in my opinion is Auden's. Here are the last four stanzas of his elegy.

but he would have us remember most of all
to be enthusiastic over the night,
not only for the sense of wonder
it alone has to offer but also

because it needs our love. With large sad eyes
its delectable creatures look up and beg
us dumbly to ask them to follow:
they are exiles who long for the future

that lies in our power, they too would rejoice
if allowed to serve enlightenment like him,
even to bear our cry of 'Judas',
as he did and all must bear who serve it.

One rational voice is dumb. Over his grave
the household of Impulse mourns one dearly loved:
sad is Eros, builder of cities,
and weeping anarchic Aphrodite.


What an ear.

[Robert E. Jordan]

Janet & Robert,

Thanks for introducing this interesting form to me. I particularly like the meaning of Robert's "America." It's a good thing when a poem is clear in its meaning, and doesn't beat around the bush. "America" also expresses many of my concerns about American society. I liked Janet's too.

Bobby


------------------
Visit Bobby's Urban Rage Poetry Page at:

www.prengineers.com/poetry

Thanks

[Joseph Bottum]

Horace’s alcaic stanza looks like this,

x — u — — ^^ — u u — u x
x — u — — ^^ — u u — u x
x — u — — — u — x
— u u — u u — u — x

(Where "—" means a long syllable, "u" a short, and "x" either, and "^^" means the caesura.) Translated into stresses, with a trochee substituted for the spondee, that makes it in English:

x / v / v / v v / v x
x / v / v / v v / v x
x / v / v / v / x
/ v v / v v / v / x

The first two lines here are hendecasyllabics. Such eleven-syllable lines are of classical origin, but have a strong life in Italian—in Dante, for instance—where they are very flexible and where rules have emerged to keep track of the dactyl and the number of stresses.

Still, these opening lines of alcaics are not exactly hendecasyllabics, as that form has come to much use in English. One can speak here of asclepiads, first, second, etc., but an easier way to think of it might be this: The hendecasyllabic line in English wants the two unstressed syllables to come early, the opening two eleven-syllable lines in an English lines alcaic want them to come late.

Robert Frost’s "For Once, Then, Something" (which Dave Mason has already praised in these discussions) is a fine example of hendecasyllabics. What’s amazing, I think, about this poem is that it sounds unstrained, but every line is exactly regular: /v/vv/v/v/v.

Others taunt me with having knelt at well-curbs
/v/vv/v/v/v
Always wrong to the light, so never seeing
/v/vv/v/v/v
Deeper down in the well than where the water
/v/vv/v/v/v
Gives me back in a shining surface picture
/v/vv/v/v/v
Me myself in the summer heaven godlike
/v/vv/v/v/v
Looking out of a wreath of fern and cloud puffs.
/v/vv/v/v/v

Tennyson’s "Hendecasyllabics" is perhaps even more amazing, though much more artificial, for Tennyson has tried to line up long syllables (so the poem is accurate in quantity) with the stresses:

O you chorus of indolent reviewers,
/v/vv/v/v/v
Irresponsible, indolent reviewers,
/v/vv/v/v/v
Look, I come to the test, a tiny poem
/v/vv/v/v/v
All composed in a metre of Catullus,
/v/vv/v/v/v
All in quantity, careful of my motion,
/v/vv/v/v/v
Like the skater on ice that hardly bears him
/v/vv/v/v/v

In the two eleven-syllable lines that open an alcaic stanza, however, the dactyl typically comes later in the line, not as the second foot but after the caesura: not /v/vv/v/v/v but x/v/v/vv/vx. So, for example, here are the opening two lines of Robert Louis Stevenson’s "Alcaics: to H. F. B."

Brave lads in olden musical centuries
//v/v/vv/vv
Sang, night by night, adorable choruses,
//v/v/vv/vv

And here are the opening two lines of Tennyson’s "Milton: Alcaics" (again a tour-de-force, lining up quantity and stress):

O mighty-mouth’d inventor of harmonies,
//v/v/vv/vv
O skill’d to sing of Time or Eternity,
//v/v/vv/vv

Here’s the beginning of Arthur Hugh Clough’s "Alcaics":

So spake the voice: and as with a single life
//v/v/vv/vx
Instinct, the whole mass, fierce, irretainable,
//v/v/vv/vx

It’s interesting that these Victorian examples all try the difficult task of forcing a spondee to begin each line. Edwin Arlington Robinson’s "Late Summer" doesn’t attempt that (although I think he may "hear" it in some way, thickening that opening foot with a hint of quantity). Here are Robinson’s opening lines:

Confused, he found her lavishing feminine
v/v/v/vv/vv
Gold upon clay, and found her inscrutable;
/vv/v/vv/vv

As this example shows, there’s plenty of room for substitution in the first few feet, but that dactyl in the penultimate position seems to me the defining feature of the hendecasyllabic line in an alcaic stanza.

I may be wrong, however, for more recent poets have treated the opening two lines of the alcaic stanza in English as almost genuine "syllabic" lines: carrying any metrical pattern that sounds good, as long as it has eleven syllables. W.H. Auden’s "In Memory of Sigmund Freud" are alcaics that will sometimes use the traditional pattern:

Only Hate was happy, hoping to augment
/v/v/v/vv/v

but often Auden will vary this wildly, to great effect:

For about him till the very end were still
/v/v/v/v/v/
those he had studied, the fauna of the night,
/vv/vv/v/v/

The alcaic poem Robert Mezey posted here, "To the Americans," does the same thing—some examples of the older placement of the dactyl in the penultimate position:

Degeneration doesn’t come suddenly
v/v/v/vv/vv

but much variation:

Not till every blackened church has been rebuilt,
/v/v/v/v/v/
and you have repented in dust and ashes
v/vv/vv/v/v

Regardless, after the opening eleven-syllable lines, the alcaic stanza adds two more, a nine-syllable line and a ten-syllable line. At an early stage in Greek, these were apparently one nineteen-syllable line, but by the time they reach the Romans, it is routine to hear them as two lines (so Horace, for example, will admit hiatus between them).

x / v / v / v / x
/ v v / v v / v / x

To use the same examples as above, here’s Stevenson’s "Alcaics: to H. F. B.":

Brave lads in olden musical centuries
Sang, night by night, adorable choruses,
Sat late by alehouse doors in April
Chaunting in joy as the moon was rising.

These final lines run //v/v/v/v and /vv/vv/v/v. Tennyson’s "Milton: Alcaics" is precisely the same:

O mighty-mouth’d inventor of harmonies,
O skill’d to sing of Time or Eternity,
God-gifted organ-voice of England,
Milton, a name to resound for ages;

These end with //v/v/v/x and /vv/vv/v/x, as do Clough’s "Alcaics":

So spake the voice: and as with a single life
Instinct, the whole mass, fierce, irretainable,
Down on that unsuspecting host swept;
Down, with the fury of winds, that all night

Robinson’s "Late Summer" drops the attempt to have a spondee open the third line, but otherwise uses the same pattern for the last two lines, v/v/v/v/x and /vv/vv/v/x:

Confused, he found her lavishing feminine
Gold upon clay, and found her inscrutable;
And yet she smiled. Why, then, should horrors
Be as they were, without end, her playthings?

[Joseph Bottum]

These patterns are easier to see in bulk, so maybe we should post the poems. Janet has already posted Robinson’s "Late Summer."

Here’s Robert Louis Stevenson’s "Alcaics: to H. F. B.":

Brave lads in olden musical centuries
Sang, night by night, adorable choruses,
Sat late by alehouse doors in April
Chaunting in joy as the moon was rising.

Moon-seen and merry, under the trellises,
Flush-faced they play’d with old polysyllables
Spring scents inspired, old wine diluted:
Love and Apollo were there to chorus.

Now these, the songs, remain to eternity,
Those, only those, the bountiful choristers
Gone—those are gone, those unremember’d
Sleep and are silent in earth for ever.

So man himself appears and evanishes,
So smiles and goes; as wanderers halting at
Some green-embower’d house, play their music,
Play and are gone on the windy highway.

Yet dwells the strain enshrined in the memory
Long after they departed eternally,
Forth-faring tow’rd far mountain summits,
Cities of men or the sounding Ocean.

Youth sang the song in years immemorial:
Brave chanticleer, he sang and was beautiful;
Bird-haunted green tree-tops in springtime
Heard, and were pleased by the voice of singing.

Youth goes and leaves behind him a prodigy—
Songs sent by thee afar from Venetian
Sea-grey lagunes, sea-paven highways,
Dear to me here in my Alpine exile.


Here’s Tennyson’s "Milton: Alcaics":

O mighty-mouth'd inventor of harmonies,
O skill'd to sing of Time or Eternity,
God-gifted organ-voice of England,
Milton, a name to resound for ages;
Whose Titan angels, Gabriel, Abdiel,
Starr'd from Jehovah's gorgeous armouries,
Tower, as the deep-domed empyrean
Rings to the roar of an angel onset--
Me rather all that bowery loneliness,
The brooks of Eden mazily murmuring,
And bloom profuse and cedar arches
Charm, as a wanderer out in ocean,
Where some refulgent sunset of India
Streams o'er a rich ambrosial ocean isle,
And crimson-hued the stately palm-woods
Whisper in odorous heights of even.

Here’s Clough’s "Alcaics":

So spake the voice: and as with a single life
Instinct, the whole mass, fierce, irretainable,
Down on that unsuspecting host swept;
Down, with the fury of winds, that all night
Upbrimming, sapping slowly the dyke, at dawn
Fall through the breach o’er holmstead and harvest; and
Heard roll a deluge: while the milkmaid
Trips i’ the dew, and remissly guiding
Morn’s first uneven furrow, the farmer’s boy
Dreams out his dream; so, over the multitude
Safe-tented, uncontrolled and uncon-
trollably sped the Avenger’s fury.

And here’s Auden’s "In Memory of Sigmund Freud":

When there are so many we shall have to mourn,
when grief has been made so public, and exposed
to the critique of a whole epoch
the frailty of our conscience and anguish,

of whom shall we speak? For every day they die
among us, those who were doing us some good,
who knew it was never enough but
hoped to improve a little by living.

Such was this doctor: still at eighty he wished
to think of our life from whose unruliness
so many plausible young futures
with threats or flattery ask obedience,

but his wish was denied him: he closed his eyes
upon that last picture, common to us all,
of problems like relatives gathered
puzzled and jealous about our dying.

For about him till the very end were still
those he had studied, the fauna of the night,
and shades that still waited to enter
the bright circle of his recognition

turned elsewhere with their disappointment as he
was taken away from his life interest
to go back to the earth in London,
an important Jew who died in exile.

Only Hate was happy, hoping to augment
his practice now, and his dingy clientele
who think they can be cured by killing
and covering the garden with ashes.

They are still alive, but in a world he changed
simply by looking back with no false regrets;
all he did was to remember
like the old and be honest like children.

He wasn't clever at all: he merely told
the unhappy Present to recite the Past
like a poetry lesson till sooner
or later it faltered at the line where

long ago the accusations had begun,
and suddenly knew by whom it had been judged,
how rich life had been and how silly,
and was life-forgiven and more humble,

able to approach the Future as a friend
without a wardrobe of excuses, without
a set mask of rectitude or an
embarrassing over-familiar gesture.

No wonder the ancient cultures of conceit
in his technique of unsettlement foresaw
the fall of princes, the collapse of
their lucrative patterns of frustration:

if he succeeded, why, the Generalised Life
would become impossible, the monolith
of State be broken and prevented
the co-operation of avengers.

Of course they called on God, but he went his way
down among the lost people like Dante, down
to the stinking fosse where the injured
lead the ugly life of the rejected,

and showed us what evil is, not, as we thought,
deeds that must be punished, but our lack of faith,
our dishonest mood of denial,
the concupiscence of the oppressor.

If some traces of the autocratic pose,
the paternal strictness he distrusted, still
clung to his utterance and features,
it was a protective coloration

for one who'd lived among enemies so long:
if often he was wrong and, at times, absurd,
to us he is no more a person
now but a whole climate of opinion

under whom we conduct our different lives:
Like weather he can only hinder or help,
the proud can still be proud but find it
a little harder, the tyrant tries to

make do with him but doesn't care for him much:
he quietly surrounds all our habits of growth
and extends, till the tired in even
the remotest miserable duchy

have felt the change in their bones and are cheered
till the child, unlucky in his little State,
some hearth where freedom is excluded,
a hive whose honey is fear and worry,

feels calmer now and somehow assured of escape,
while, as they lie in the grass of our neglect,
so many long-forgotten objects
revealed by his undiscouraged shining

are returned to us and made precious again;
games we had thought we must drop as we grew up,
little noises we dared not laugh at,
faces we made when no one was looking.

But he wishes us more than this. To be free
is often to be lonely. He would unite
the unequal moieties fractured
by our own well-meaning sense of justice,

would restore to the larger the wit and will
the smaller possesses but can only use
for arid disputes, would give back to
the son the mother's richness of feeling:

but he would have us remember most of all
to be enthusiastic over the night,
not only for the sense of wonder
it alone has to offer, but also

because it needs our love. With large sad eyes
its delectable creatures look up and beg
us dumbly to ask them to follow:
they are exiles who long for the future

that lives in our power, they too would rejoice
if allowed to serve enlightenment like him,
even to bear our cry of 'Judas',
as he did and all must bear who serve it.

One rational voice is dumb. Over his grave
the household of Impulse mourns one dearly loved:
sad is Eros, builder of cities,
and weeping anarchic Aphrodite.

[Janet Kenny]

Jody
I haven't had time to study these yet so this is just a superficial impression. I have written syllabic poems--not consciously derived from Greek forms-- and I came to the conclusion that they were at best a gimmick in English. Not in languages which don't depend on stress but in English they are like a photographic negative.

I accept exceptions to this but in general I believe this is so.

I wish I spoke Greek. Most forms come alive in their own language.
I will read these with great interest and, I hope, an open mind. Thank you for the terrific templates.
Janet

[robert mezey]

Thanks to Mr. Bottum for his learneed disquisition on classical alcaics. I must confess, though, that although I fancy myself alert to the most delicate subtleties in metrical verse in English, I can't for the life of me imagine how the
quantitative system would have sounded in Latin; nor were any of my teachers in classics able to read them in such a way that the metrical effects were audible. In any case, once one takes over the line-lengths and subsitutes stress & accent for quantity, the order of feet in Latin or Greek ceases to matter much--one's responsibility is only to the sound of the line in English. And by the way, the hendecasyllable (one of Catullus' favorite meters) has had a long life in Romance languages, up to the present day (though of course those languages too have been overrun by deaf freeversers). Almost all of Borges' many metrical poems are in hendecasyllables: the sonnets, the rhymed quatrains, the unrhymed "blank verse," etc. It's his basic measure, as pentameter is mine.

[Tim Murphy]

Indeed, a deeply learned disquisition. Jody, whenever I witness such a performance by you, I think of Charles Martin's hilarious title: "For a Child of Seven, Taken by Jesuits!" Wilbur in his elegy for Dudley Fitts expresses the envy tinged by gratitude of all "Who lack his learning and his Greek." Friend Mason recently told me that one of the poems of mine he's using in the new Western Wind is a joke I wrote for the students in the Creative College at U Cal Santa Barbara, not a praticularly good poem but a great favorite with students who are wrestling with declension and conjugation:

Poet’s Prayer

When I die and go to hell,
as I most certainly shall
(being such an unbeliever)
good Lord, please deliver
my soul to that shady dell
where the pagan poets dwell.
And there, Lord, let me seek
masters of trope and rhyme—
the infernal and the sublime—
and toil until the end of time
to learn Latin and Greek.

Comfort thyself, Janet. No comfort is in me! Frankly, I agree with you that these borrowed classical meters are a curiosity, though the examples on this and the sapphics thread surely show their viability in English. It is particularly fascinating here to see what the Victorians did in strict imitation of alcaics and contrast that to the powerful expressions of Auden and Mezey. For my part, I find accentual syllabic verse (and pure accentual verse) so powerful and infinitely expressive, that I confine my efforts to those English systems.