Thanks for the Hardy, Tim. The most interesting thing about that sample, for me, is that I find the heptameter much easier to take when it's not perfectly even--when it's roughed up with Hardy's substitutions. Without those, it becomes jingly, especially in couplets.

One of the chief troubles with fourteeners is that most of us have not read a lot of great stuff in that meter, and it's more likely to call to mind "Casey at the Bat" than anything we love. But there's Chapman's Iliad, and there's A.E. Stallings's translation of Lucretius, and there's John Ridland's translation of Gawain and the Green Knight.

I've always loved this Yeats poem, heptameter with variations:


Red Hanrahan's Song About Ireland


The old brown thorn-trees break in two high over Cummen Strand,
Under a bitter black wind that blows from the left hand;
Our courage breaks like an old tree in a black wind and dies,
But we have hidden in our hearts the flame out of the eyes
Of Cathleen, the daughter of Houlihan.

The wind has bundled up the clouds high over Knock-narea,
And thrown the thunder on the stones for all that Maeve can say.
Angers that are like noisy clouds have set our hearts abeat;
But we have all bent low and low and kissed the quiet feet
Of Cathleen, the daughter of Houlihan.

The yellow pool has overflowed high up on Clooth-na-Bare,
For the wet winds are blowing out of the clinging air;
Like heavy flooded waters our bodies and our blood;
But purer than a tall candle before the Holy Rood
Is Cathleen, the daughter of Houlihan.
.

See, I read that when when issue came out, and I knew it was long lines, but didn't intuitively know it was heptameter. Anyway, didn't trouble over it at all -- definitely clicks into the 4/3 thing Susan and Tim are talking about -- and it is a very fine poem. So there you go. (Nice work, Peter).

David R.

I think if you roughen it up and vary it it works very well for certain sorts of poem. I wrote one about looking after my very young daughter more than a quarter of a century ago. I won't quote a lot but here's a stanza the first one, so that you get the idea. I've always known the thing as a fourteener, but a lot of the lines here have more than fourteen syllables.

The sportsfield's just a field again, the grass just grass, from the ledge
On the nettled stile, to the exhausted gate, from the ditch to the tousled hedge,
An unmarked, roughly mown, undifferentiated scene,
And in the middle, my tiny daughter, tinier in all that green

Infinity x 14 to the second power is the same size
 

I'm very interested professionally (in two ways) to see the poem. Will you post it (or email me a copy via PM)? Fourteen syllables are good, conceptual infinities are good, too. You could toss in a reply here if you want on how different infinities (seen from different foundations) can be larger or smaller than each other.

Go, guy!

I love a breathlessly long line! The Flea just accepted a long 3 part poem of mine (The Banyan Tree And the Bathers) which is in heptameter and which ups the ante even further with eighteeners and [gasp :eek:] even nineteeners thrown in for good measure.

"Then all the noise and movement of the street before me seemed a sort of dance,
this melody inaudible maintaining order in this realm of chance."

Nemo

Susan said what I would have. Heptameter is better than hexameter in English for the reasons she states.

What is the longest line that has been used in a poem? Swinburne has at least one poem in anapestic octometer, so 24 syllables, but I've never encountered anything longer than that.