Heptameter?
 

I've noticed that many Sphereans say that they don't like hexameter in English, so I suspect that heptameter is out of the question. Is it not? I ask because not long ago I wrote an heptameter "sonnet" (if there is such a thing) in English. Why? Well, because I needed it to be heptameter. You see, it had to be a square. Fourteen lines, fourteen syllables in each line. In that way, I could encrypt a line along the syllabic diagonal, saying something meaningful in the context of the poem.

The poem concerns Georg Cantor, a mathematician whose diagonalization method proves there are more real numbers than natural numbers. A generalization of his method actually shows that there is an infinite hierarchy of infinities. The "sonnet" has lots of slant rhymes, gestures at Cantor's descent into madness, has nice enjambments playing with the concept of descent, and conceptualizes this hierarchy of infinities as an abyss. It obliquely refers to a number that is the key to Cantor's method, but it does not seem to tell the reader how to find said number-- until the reader reads the diagonal (Obviously, this would not work with a nonsquare poem.)

My question is whether the heptameter kills the poem before it arrives. Should I make it a Décima in pentameter?

Pedro,

Wow. That description of the poem is almost enough -- who needs the actual sonnet? But seriously, if you were really able to pull all that off, who cares if it's in dodecameter.

But to answer the general question, I tend to have trouble reading lines longer than pentameter. I have always considered it a personal flaw. Sometimes I can read hendecs, but I usually turn them into loose iambics in my mind. I have the same problem in free verse too -- long lines are almost more difficult for me than long poems. Oddly though, Spanish hendecs don't bother me in the same way.

Which, I suppose, is to say if everyone were me, heptameter wouldn't be a good idea. But lucky for you, most people are not me.

On the other hand, I actually think décimas work best in tri or tet, but if you can compress all of what you described into a pent décima, with that killer rhyme scheme, I say go for it.

David R.

Pedro,

Check out the Sonnet Comparison Chart on Poetry Magnum Opus. There are many ways to write a sonnet--including hex.

Lance Levens

To my ear, heptameter works better as a meter in English than hexameter does. That is because the tet/tri combination is very common in English, and that sounds a lot like heptameter when you hear it rather than seeing it. Alicia Stallings has done a translation of Lucretius in fourteeners (rhymed heptameter couplets). I have translated a few Latin epigrams into heptameter, though I usually boil them down to pentameter. I generally avoid hexameter because it slows the line down so much. An occasional hexameter in a Spenserian stanza doesn't bother me, but I tend to find long poems in hexameter to be tedious.

Susan

That is an excellent point. I frankly haven't read much heptameter, but I bet it would work if I heard it this way.

David R.

Hi Pedro.

Heptameter seems to work for the 14 by 14 editors. Among the current selections is a fourteener, Giants. I would take that as formal endorsement of the metre, along with a bow.

Peter

I write heptameter a lot, though sometimes divide it into ballad metre for easier reading. Here's a sonnet in heptameter of mine that was published in Candelabrum:


Lucky Charms

The sun had been surrounded by a gang of clouds out west;
I felt serene and thought about the way that I would rest.
The moon appeared, invigorated by a day in bed;
I sensed I’d better find a place that I could lay my head.

The silence of the countryside was music to my ear;
I listened briefly to a blackbird singing loud and clear.
The roaring of a car nearby turned out to be a brook;
I noted I was thirsty and resolved to take a look.

The water was delicious, and the air was sweet and good;
I walked upstream and came upon the shelter of a wood.
The ground was buried under leaves, a million lucky charms;
I tumbled down and pulled them to me with my legs and arms.

The stars conspired to close my eyes, and there, beside a log,
I found myself enchanted by the calling of a dog.

Duncan

http://www.14by14.com/Sonnets/January2011/Giants.html

(I really like this poem, Peter.)

Susan nails it. The fourteener couplet is just strict ballad measure without two of the quatrain's line breaks:

There are some heights in Wessex, shaped as if by a kindly hand
For thinking, dreaming, dying on, and at crises when I stand,
Say, on Ingpen Beacon eastward, or on Wylls-Neck westwardly,
I seem where I was before my birth, and after death may be.

In the lowlands I have no comrade, not even the lone man's friend -
Her who suffereth long and is kind; accepts what he is too weak to
mend:
Down there they are dubious and askance; there nobody thinks as I,
But mind-chains do not clank where one's next neighbour is the sky.

In the towns I am tracked by phantoms having weird detective ways -
Shadows of beings who fellowed with myself of earlier days:
They hang about at places, and they say harsh heavy things -
Men with a frigid sneer, and women with tart disparagings.

Down there I seem to be false to myself, my simple self that was,
And is not now, and I see him watching, wondering what crass cause
Can have merged him into such a strange continuator as this,
Who yet has something in common with himself, my chrysalis.

I cannot go to the great grey Plain; there's a figure against the
moon,
Nobody sees it but I, and it makes my breast beat out of tune;
I cannot go to the tall-spired town, being barred by the forms now
passed
For everybody but me, in whose long vision they stand there fast.

There's a ghost at Yell'ham Bottom chiding loud at the fall of the
night,
There's a ghost in Froom-side Vale, thin lipped and vague, in a
shroud of white,
There is one in the railway-train whenever I do not want it near,
I see its profile against the pane, saying what I would not hear.

As for one rare fair woman, I am now but a thought of hers,
I enter her mind and another thought succeeds me that she prefers;
Yet my love for her in its fulness she herself even did not know;
Well, time cures hearts of tenderness, and now I can let her go.

So I am found on Ingpen Beacon, or on Wylls-Neck to the west,
Or else on homely Bulbarrow, or little Pilsdon Crest,
Where men have never cared to haunt, nor women have walked with me,
And ghosts then keep their distance; and I know some liberty.


Now THERE is a great poem! Thank you, Thos. Hardy! Note this wouldn't work in ballad stanza, for Hardy wants the freedom to vary the placement of his caesurae (or skip them). I memorized this in high school and I have it to this day.

Pedro: As with most things, if it works. . .

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.