Thanks for this link, Jay, and many welcomes!

More on the meter
 

By the way, I'm a bit confused by the ongoing discussion of the opening feet. My understanding of the Alcaic stanza is that each of the first three lines begins with a spondee (or, if you prefer, a headless iamb followed by a trochee)--in any event, with two stresses, making the meter particularly unwieldy in English. Thus you have Tennyson resorting to "O" to begin each of the first two lines of "Milton," and inversions like "Me rather" (appropriate though it is for Miltonic syntax). Tennyson does comment on the "freer & lighter" Greek Alcaic vs. the Horatian Alcaic, which taps into the earlier discussion.

Jay

Jay! I had No Idea that AGNI would publish something that good. I gave up on it long ago....

I have to agree with Jay that the trickiness lies in the spondees--both in creating them and in hearing them. How does one make them so definitely equal, at least in the opening lines, that it's absolutely clear one intends alcaics? And since we're so conditioned to hear up-and-down alteration in English poetry, how do we know not to?

I would start on attempts to answer this if today weren't such a tense day. Since I'm a little constrained, perhaps someone else would like to....?

I don't think the spondees are absolutely necessary in English. Many people of course don't believe they exist at all; when Milton writes "Rocks, Caves, Lakes, Fens, Bogs, Dens, and shades of Death," the line could hardly be more spondaic, but because we're used to iambic pentameter (and in an IP context), we're going to stress it like IP; and in truth, I don't hear spondees there, I hear demotion, & its effect. Even if you start an alcaic line with two absolutely equal stresses (Wait! Look! The wart's grown bigger since yesterday), there's always a chance that a reader not expecting spondees will not hear them, and read "wait! LOOK! the WART'S grown BIGger since YESterDAY." Which is good enough for me.

In general, it is good practice, & admirably Roman, to go for a string of heavy monosyllables at the beginning of an alcaic line, as above ("WAIT! LOOK! the WART'S GROWN BIGger since YESterDAY,") just as in the sapphic it's good practice to do the same, i.e., ALL the NIGHT SLEEP CAME not upON mine EYELIDS." Still, just as we hear the sapphic whether we stress "sleep" there or not, we hear the alcaic whether or not we stress "wait" and "grown." I have been working on a couple of my own alcaics lately and I use heavy monosyllables where they present themselves but don't scruple at simple iambs where they don't. This is perhaps a less rigorous attitude than Jay's but I think more suited to a serious adaptation of the form to English. If it's ever going to catch on like the sapphic has (doubtful, but you never know), we should allow ourselves to be free with the spondees. I say.

Chris

Iambs & spondees
 

Just a quick reply to Chris. Maybe our ears differ, but I don't hear any fewer than eight stresses in the Milton line, esp since the monosyllables in the usually unstressed positions feature hard consonants like k and g to ensure their emphasis. It's as wacky as Hopkins in "God's Grandeur":

"CRUSHED. WHY do MEN THEN NOW NOT RECK his ROD?"

Granted, Alcaics will never catch on much in English if they're not made easier to write (I don't imagine returning to the form often, which I tried mostly on a dare)--but they sure won't sound* much like Alcaics. There's a lot of loosening in contemporary Sapphics, and some of it is admirable (see, for example, Mary Jo Salter's "Roses and Mona Lisa" in her new & selected, in which she floats the dactyl around in the line), but I think there are lot of poems that purport to be Sapphics but really only emulate the form in their syllable count.

Jay

*By "sound," I mean in accentual English, as opposed to quantitative Greek.

Thanks for your reply, Jay. My guess is that we hear more or less the same thing, but have different ideas about prosody / scansion / how to talk about it. In the Milton line, I feel the metrical beats exactly where they're supposed to be, thanks largely to the weight of expectation and immersion in pentameter; but I also feel the weight of the off-beats, rocks, lakes, bogs, getting caught in the cogs, as it were, slowing down the line, creating emphasis and inexorability. Hopkins is rather a different animal; his sprung rhythm doesn't easily allow you to settle into the expectation of an IP clip-clop. My basic feeling is this: a great deal of meter is expectation; English readers do not expect spondees; & it is surely ALWAYS arguable, for a reader so inclined, that s/he hears iambs or trochees where you or I would claim a spondee. Then moreover, to force rhythmical spondees with the frequency demanded by the alcaic takes some pretty extraordinary dexterity, as your fine linked example demonstrates (not free from hijinks to make it happen, e.g., 'under-/foot'). One need not move the dactyl around or resort to syllabics, but spondees are not really natural to our poetry & are best considered "optional."

Chris

PS.: The alcaic rhythm is not "unnatural" (not that anybody said it was!). I just sent a text message to a former student which said, "Congratulations, Captain Irrelevant," & then thought, hey, that's an alcaic...