[Joseph Bottum]

I thought others might like to join in the discussion Chris Childers and I have been having about representing classical meters in English. Poe, in a famous attack on Longfellow, denied that it could be done:

"We maintain that the hexameter can never be introduced into our language, from the nature of that language itself. This rhythm demands, for English ears, a preponderance of natural spondees. Our tongue has few. Not only does the Latin and Greek, with the Swedish, and some others, abound in them; but the Greek and Roman ear had become reconciled (why or how is unknown) to the reception of artificial spondees—that is to say, spondaic words formed partly of one word and partly of another, or from an excised part of one word. In short, the ancients were content to read as they scanned, or nearly so. It may be safely prophesied that we shall never do this; and thus we shall never admit English hexameters. The attempt to introduce them, after the repeated failures of Sir Philip Sidney and others, is perhaps somewhat discreditable to the scholarship of Professor Longfellow."

Poets have attempted purely accentual representations. Longfellow’s "Evangeline" is an example, often used by classics teachers to introduce students to hexameter: "This is the forest primeval. The murmuring pines and the hemlocks, / Bearded with moss, and in garments green, indistinct in the twilight." Tennyson hated the importation into English of the German attempt to accentualize quantitative verse: at its best in Schiller, Goethe, and Hölderlin, but falling off rapidly thereafter—and, apparently, worth Tennyson’s ire in its English form, which he attacked in "On Translations of Homer":

These lame hexameters the strong-wing’d music of Homer!
No—but a most burlesque barbarous experiment.
When was a harsher sound ever heard, ye Muses, in England?
When did a frog coarser croak upon our Helicon?
Hexameters no worse than daring Germany gave us,
Barbarous experiment, barbarous hexameters.

(Tennyson is alternating hexameter with pentameter: the Elegiac Couplet, most famously rendered into English in Coleridge’s "In the Hexameter rises the fountain’s silvery column, / In the pentameter aye falling in melody back." All three of the "In Quantity" poems in Tennyson’s "Enoch Arden, and Other Poems" are worth examining: "On Translations of Homer," "Milton: Alcaics," and "Hendecasyllabics.")

The trouble is, as "Evangeline" shows, pure accentual representation quickly seems to turn sing-songy, or even to become children’s counting rhymes—a fact A.A. Milne openly embraced in the hilarious hexameters of his "Disobedience":

James James / Morrison Morrison / Weatherby George Dupree
Took great / Care of his Mother, / Though he was only three.

A surprising successful English hexameter is Charles Kingsley’s "Andromeda":

Over the sea, past Crete, on the Syrian shore to the southward,
Dwells in the well-tilled lowland a dark-haired Aethiop people,
Skilful with needle and loom, and the arts of the dyer and carver,
Skilful, but feeble of heart; for they know not the lords of Olympus,
Lovers of men; neither broad-browed Zeus, not Pallas Athene,
Teacher of wisdom to heroes, bestower of might in the battle;
Share not the cunning of Hermes, nor list to the songs of Apollo,
Fearing the stars of the sky, and the roll of the blue salt water.

But one of the things that helps this along are the substitutions and the general lining-up of long vowels in the accentually stressed positions. English poetry has attempted purely quantitative verse. There are, it is said, 16th-century examples (though I don’t know them; does anyone here?), and William Cowper’s "Lines Written During a Period of Insanity" has moments where the stress seems ignored as long as the quantity is right:

Hatred and vengeance, my eternal portion,
Scarce can endure delay of execution,
Wait with impatient readiness to seize my
Soul in a moment.

There was a Victorian craze for this, as well—all that school-boy learning had to issue in something—with Spedding and Tennyson producing quantitative verse. Some modern poetry looks, if not to Latin poetic forms, still to an English recreation of Latin poetic sounds. Basil Bunting is often cited as an example, in "At Briggflatts Meetinghouse," for instance:

Stones indeed sift to sand, oak
blends with saint's bones.
Yet for a little longer here
stone and oak shelter

silence while we ask nothing
but silence. Look how clouds dance
under the wind's wing, and leaves
delight in transience.

And I have always thought there was some quantitative feeling to W.H. Auden’s "In Praise Of Limestone":

The blessed will not care what angle they are regarded from,
Having nothing to hide. Dear, I know nothing of
Either, but when I try to imagine a faultless love
Or the life to come, what I hear is the murmur
Of underground streams, what I see is a limestone landscape.

There are differences, of course, between Greek and Latin uses of poetic lines and forms. Horace’s fixing of the caesura and metrical substitutions, for instance, generally made Latin sapphics more stately and sonorous than the Greek, which, curiously, makes the rare example of successful accentual sapphics in English closer to the sprightlier Greek than to the Latin.

Perhaps, for rendering a Latin feeling, then, a combination of quantitative and accentual would work best. Anyway, I thought we might throw the discussion up here to see what others thought, concentrating for now on sapphics, with everybody’s favorites posted.


[This message has been edited by Joseph Bottum (edited July 06, 2004).]

[Joseph Bottum]

Here's William Cowper 's "Lines Written During a Period of Insanity"


Hatred and vengeance, my eternal portion,
Scarce can endure delay of execution,
Wait with impatient readiness to seize my
Soul in a moment.

Damned below Judas; more abhorred than he was,
Who for a few pence sold his holy Master.
Twice-betrayed Jesus me, the last delinquent,
Deems the profanest.

Man disavows, and Deity disowns me;
Hell might afford my miseries a shelter;
Therefore Hell keeps her ever-hungry mouths all
Bolted against me.

Hard lot! encompassed with a thousand dangers,
Weary, faint, trembling with a thousand terrors,
I'm called, if vanquished, to receive a sentence
Worse than Abiram's.

Him the vindictive rod of angry Justice
Sent quick and howling to the centre headlong;
I, fed with judgement, in a fleshy tomb, am
Buried above ground.

[Joseph Bottum]

Here's Algernon Charles Swinburne's "Sapphics"

All the night sleep came not upon my eyelids,
Shed not dew, nor shook nor unclosed a feather,
Yet with lips shut close and with eyes of iron
Stood and beheld me.

Then to me so lying awake a vision
Came without sleep over the seas and touched me,
Softly touched mine eyelids and lips; and I too,
Full of the vision,

Saw the white implacable Aphrodite,
Saw the hair unbound and the feet unsandalled
Shine as fire of sunset on western waters;
Saw the reluctant

Feet, the straining plumes of the doves that drew her,
Looking always, looking with necks reverted,
Back to Lesbos, back to the hills whereunder
Shone Mitylene;

Heard the flying feet of the Loves behind her
Make a sudden thunder upon the waters,
As the thunder flung from the strong unclosing
Wings of a great wind.

So the goddess fled from her place, with awful
Sound of feet and thunder of wings around her;
While behind a clamour of singing women
Severed the twilight.

Ah the singing, ah the delight, the passion!
All the Loves wept, listening; sick with anguish,
Stood the crowned nine Muses about Apollo;
Fear was upon them,

While the tenth sang wonderful things they knew not.
Ah the tenth, the Lesbian! the nine were silent,
None endured the sound of her song for weeping;
Laurel by laurel,

Faded all their crowns; but about her forehead,
Round her woven tresses and ashen temples
White as dead snow, paler than grass in summer,
Ravaged with kisses,

Shone a light of fire as a crown for ever.
Yea, almost the implacable Aphrodite
Paused, and almost wept; such a song was that song.
Yea, by her name too

Called her, saying, "Turn to me, O my Sappho;"
Yet she turned her face from the Loves, she saw not
Tears for laughter darken immortal eyelids,
Heard not about her

Fearful fitful wings of the doves departing,
Saw not how the bosom of Aphrodite
Shook with weeping, saw not her shaken raiment,
Saw not her hands wrung;

Saw the Lesbians kissing across their smitten
Lutes with lips more sweet than the sound of lute-strings,
Mouth to mouth and hand upon hand, her chosen,
Fairer than all men;

Only saw the beautiful lips and fingers,
Full of songs and kisses and little whispers,
Full of music; only beheld among them
Soar, as a bird soars

Newly fledged, her visible song, a marvel,
Made of perfect sound and exceeding passion,
Sweetly shapen, terrible, full of thunders,
Clothed with the wind's wings.

Then rejoiced she, laughing with love, and scattered
Roses, awful roses of holy blossom;
Then the Loves thronged sadly with hidden faces
Round Aphrodite,

Then the Muses, stricken at heart, were silent;
Yea, the gods waxed pale; such a song was that song.
All reluctant, all with a fresh repulsion,
Fled from before her.

All withdrew long since, and the land was barren,
Full of fruitless women and music only.
Now perchance, when winds are assuaged at sunset,
Lulled at the dewfall,

By the grey sea-side, unassuaged, unheard of,
Unbeloved, unseen in the ebb of twilight,
Ghosts of outcast women return lamenting,
Purged not in Lethe,

Clothed about with flame and with tears, and singing
Songs that move the heart of the shaken heaven,
Songs that break the heart of the earth with pity,
Hearing, to hear them.

[Joseph Bottum]

Here's William Meredith's "Effort at Speech"

Climbing the stairway gray with urban midnight,
Cheerful, venial, ruminating pleasure,
Darkness takes me, an arm around my throat and
Give me your wallet.

Fearing cowardice more than other terrors,
Angry I wrestle with my unseen partner,
Caught in a ritual not of our making,
panting like spaniels.

Bold with adrenaline, mindless, shaking,
God damn it, no! I rasp at him behind me,
Wrenching the leather from his grasp. It
breaks like a wishbone,

So that departing (routed by my shouting,
not by my strength or inadvertent courage)
Half the papers lending me a name are
gone with him nameless.

Only now turning, I see a tall boy running,
Fifteen, sixteen, dressed thinly for the weather.
Reaching the streetlight he turns a brown face briefly
phrased like a question.

I like a questioner watch him turn the corner
Taking the answer with him, or his half of it.
Loneliness, not a sensible emotion,
breathes hard on the stairway.

Walking homeward I fraternize with shadows,
Zigzagging with them where they flee the streetlights,
Asking for trouble, asking for the message
trouble had sent me.

All fall down has been scribbled on the street in
Garbage and excrement: so much for the vision
Others taunt me with, my untimely humor,
so much for cheerfulness.

Next time don't wrangle, give the boy the money,
Call across chasms what the world you know is.
Luckless and lied to, how can a child master
human decorum?

Next time a switchblade, somewhere he is thinking,
I should have killed him and took the lousy wallet.
Reading my cards he feels a surge of anger
blind as my shame.

Error from Babel mutters in the places,
Cities apart, where now we word our failures:
Hatred and guilt have left us without language
that might have led to discourse.

[Joseph Bottum]

Timothy Steele, "Sapphics against Anger"

Angered, may I be near a glass of water;
May my first impulse be to think of Silence,
Its deities (who are they? do, in fact, they
Exist? etc.).

May I recall what Aristotle says of
The subject: to give vent to rage is not to
Release it but to be increasingly prone
To its incursions.

May I imagine being in the Inferno,
Hearing it asked: "Virgilo mio, who's
That sulking with Achilles there?" and hearing
Virgil say: "Dante,

That fellow, at the slightest provocation
Slammed phone receivers down, and waved his arms like
A madman. What Atilla did to Europe,
What Genghis Khan did

To Asia, that poor dope did to his marriage."
May I, that is, put learning to good purpose,
Mindful that melancholy is a sin, though
Stylish at present.

Better than rage is the post-dinner quiet,
The sink's warm turbulence, the streaming platters,
The suds rehearsing down the drain in spirals
In the last rinsing.

For what is, after all, the good life save that
Conducted thoughtfully, and what is passion
If not the holiest of powers, sustaining
Only if mastered.

[Joseph Bottum]

And, saving my blushes, my own "In Refusal of Politics: Sapphics for Fr. Richard John Neuhaus"


If I have seen geese low on the east horizon,
seen the long reeds strain in the dawn remaining,
watched the first clean ice of the season take
root for the winter,

what worth are those clear scenes in a day that fathers
lunge at half-born sons with a knife, and daughters
name the swift-gained deaths of their mothers high
gestures of mercy?

And they that speak strong words in the failing season,
sparking new fires, cursing the embers—they must
scorn the faint hearts nursing a private flame,
skirting the darkness.

But still the cold reeds sway in the wind and whisper:
Leave the great voice raging to stave the winter.
Autumn’s own soft music has need of songs,
gentle and dying.

[Joseph Bottum]

And here's a link to the discussion of Peterjb's "Courting the Nine," accentual sapphics recently posted on the Deep End metrical forum:

http://www.ablemuse.com/erato/ubbhtm...ML/002328.html

[Janet Kenny]

Jody
I agree with what you say in your introduction.
I have a deep conviction (although I have written sapphic stanzas myself), that there is something wilful about forcing English into Greek patterns. The result is always leaden in my opinion. If Rita Dove can be criticised for tricking out prose into an apparent poetic line, then surely the musician in us must balk at pushing the graceful English language into a more cubist form. The result is interesting but retains an air of unsuccessful experiment to my ears.

We feel clever after we have written one but how much real poetic merit is there in the exercise?

I should add that geese and reeds evoke delightful images in your own poem. I think it is by far the most successful of the poems posted above.

If anything is vital about poetry it is its intimate relation with language and speech.

Just for the mix.
Janet


[This message has been edited by Janet Kenny (edited July 06, 2004).]

[Robert E. Jordan]

Joseph,

Thanks for introducing this to me, it's a form I never saw before. Rather, I should say, I never tried it, or knew what it was. Here is a link I found explaining it.
http://www.fact-index.com/s/sa/sapphic_stanza.html

I think I'll try one.

Bobby

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

www.prengineers.com/poetry

Thanks

[This message has been edited by Robert E. Jordan (edited July 06, 2004).]

[Chris Childers]

Since my post falls naturally into two parts, I'm going to split it up, in the hope it will be easier to read or ignore that way. The first part is a reaction to Poe; the second is a more general explanation of quantitative meter for anyone who may be a little fuzzy on its technical workings.

I don't really have the patience to read Poe. I mentioned something to Jody earlier about him, & he seems in his essay "The Rationale of Verse" to speak rather at length on the classical meters, but I'm not quite sure he knows what he's talking about. He keeps going on and on about feet, as if to have a dactyl you really ought to have a dactylic word, or for a spondee a spondaic word; in this passage Jody quotes, for example:

"but the Greek and Roman ear had become reconciled (why or how is unknown) to the reception of artificial spondees—that is to say, spondaic words formed partly of one word and partly of another, or from an excised part of one word."

This strikes me as a rather silly thing to say. What the Greek & Roman ear became accustomed to (and it's not very hard to imagine how) were the general templates of their meters, which in reality are far less complicated than their names (Third Aesclepiadean, Second Archilochean, etc.) make them seem. A spondee was substituted for a dactyl in hexameter because the measure is by nature musical, and the two took more or less the same amount of time to say. Thus it made no difference to the Greeks or anybody else whether what functions in the line as a spondee is a whole word on its own or a part of two words or a part of one; but that's true of our measures as well. No one would assume that one needs a line of four trochaic words to make trochaic tetrameter, though "Willows whiten, aspens quiver" fits the bill. "It little profits that an idle king" has three trochaic words in it, but is perfectly regular pentameter; no one cares that one has to split up the words to get the feet. Scansion is a descriptive tool, & very helpful to us in beginning to hear the alien meters of Aeolia; it is a way of explaining what we hear & what we're supposed to hear, but certainly not a compositional principle.

But Poe goes on & criticizes Longfellow as follows:

"Here is a specimen of the Longfellownian hexameter.

Also, the church within was adorned; for this was the season
In which the young, their parents' hope, and the loved ones of Heaven,
Should, at the foot of the altar, renew the vows of their baptism.
Therefore each nook and corner was swept and cleaned, and the dust was
Blown from the walls and ceiling and from the oil-painted benches.

Mr. Longfellow is a man of imagination--but can he imagine that any individual, with a proper understanding of the danger of lock-jaw, would make the attempt of twisting his mouth into the shape necessary for the emission of such spondees as "parents," and "from the," or such dactyls as "cleaned and the," and "loved ones of"? "Baptism" is by no means a bad spondee--perhaps because it happens to be a dactyl;--of all the rest, however, I am dreadfully ashamed."

Poe is certainly right that "parents" is not a spondee, but I see no reason to suppose that Longfellow intends for it to be one. In accentual hexameter I see no reason why one can't use trochees & dactyls interchangeably, as the principle at work involves beat rather than length, & the trochee is just as good as the spondee for varying the rhythm & preventing it from becoming oppressively dactylic. As far as "cleaned and the," however, I find his criticism incomprehensible. Certainly it's inelegant excerpted on its own, but feet aren't designed for such excerption, & in context the prose rhythm makes it very easy to put the beat where it belongs. If one is going to criticize a line's meter, one should criticize the relation of the foot to the line, not the foot on its own, since "foot" by itself, without the other feet in relation to which its nature and role are defined, is a meaningless concept.

Next I ramble about quantitative meters. Load up on caffeine if you're interested, or, alternatively, take this to bed as a sedative.

Chris