Tim, I suppose you’re right that Hope’s hexameter there was classically based, or inspired, but to me this is quite satisfactorily analysed as unrhymed English accentual hexameter, with one or two unstressed syllables before each stress in most instances.
You could call it mixed iambic-anapaestic, though some lines start on a beat and there are feminine endings. The accentual label fits here — speech stresses, with minimal need for promotion or demotion.
Though I can’t think offhand of another Hope hexameter, it’s clear that the meter of his earlier poem Observation Car belongs to the same family — but with five main speech stresses per line, and with rhyme. I’ll post it here and ask forgiveness in advance if it’s too much of a digression from the hexameter thread.
OBSERVATION CAR by A. D. Hope
To be put on the train and kissed and given my ticket, --^--^-^-^--^-
Then the station slid backward, the shops and the neon lighting, --^--^--^--^-^-
Reeling off in a drunken blur, with a whole pound note in my pocket --^--^-^--^-^--^-
And the holiday packed with Perhaps. It used to be very exciting. --^--^--^-^--^--^-
The present and past were enough. I did not mind having my back
To the engine. I sat like a spider and spun
Time backward out of my guts or rather my eyes and the track
Was a Now dwindling off to oblivion. I thought it was fun:
The telegraph poles slithered up in a sudden crescendo
As we sliced the hill and scattered its grazing sheep;
The days were a wheeling delirium that led without end to
Nights when we plunged into roaring tunnels of sleep.
But now I am tired of the train. I have learned that one tree
Is much like another, one hill the dead spit of the next
I have seen tailing off behind all the various types of country
Like a clock running down. I am bored and a little perplexed;
And weak with the effort of endless evacuation
Of the long monotonous Now, the repetitive, tidy
Officialdom of each siding, of each little station
Labelled Monday, Tuesday and goodness ! what happened to Friday ?
And the maddening way the other passengers alter:
The schoolgirl who goes to the Ladies' comes back to her seat
A lollipop blonde who leads you on to assault her,
And you've just got her skirts round her waist and her pants round her feet
When you find yourself fumbling about the nightmare knees
Of a pink hippopotamus with a permanent wave
Who sends you for sandwiches and a couple of teas,
But by then she has whiskers, no teeth and one foot in the grave.
I have lost my faith that the ticket tells where we are going.
There are rumours the driver is mad we are all being trucked
To the abattoirs somewhere the signals are jammed and unknowing
We aim through the night full speed at a wrecked viaduct.
But I do not believe them. The future is rumour and drivel;
Only the past is assured. From the observation car
I stand looking back and watching the landscape shrivel,
Wondering where we are going and just where the hell we are,
Remembering how I planned to break the journey, to drive
My own car one day, to have choice in my hands and my foot upon power,
To see through the trumpet throat of vertiginous perspective
My urgent Now explode continually into flower,
To be the Eater of Time, a poet and not that sly
Anus of mind the historian. It was so simple and plain
To live by the sole, insatiable influx of the eye.
But something went wrong with the plan: I am still on the train.
....
Well, there are more of the masculine line endings here, but still, recognizably the same type of rhythm. A couple of lines of the hexameter for comparison:
And even German, that lingo of slaves from their Aryan masters -^-^--^--^--^--^-
Transmitted to us today, is the language of Goethe and Shakespeare. -^-^--^--^--^--^-
Without consciously imitating Hope, I’ve found myself using a pentameter similar to his on occasion, for example in Ern Malley’s Account of the Affair.
As my sister they sent in samples, her covering letter --^--^-^--^--^-
artfully artless. Harris, who printed and praised them, ^--^-^--^--^-
Henry
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