[Chris Childers]

A long time ago here there were some great threads on classical meters in English, masterminded by Jody Bottum. The best one was on sapphics, but we also did nicely by hexameters and alcaics. I'd like to resurrect the theme, but this time with elegiac couplets. I'd love to draw on the collective knowledge here, especially for the history of the form in English, but also for excellent or interesting contemporary examples.

I'll get things started with an obvious one, this bit of drivel by Tennyson. ("Leonine" refers to the rhyming of the word at the caesura with the end-word of each line.):

Leonine Elegiacs
Alfred Lord Tennyson

Lowflowing breezes are roaming the broad valley dimm'd in the gloaming:
Thoro' the black-stemm'd pines only the far river shines.
Creeping thro' blossomy rushes and bowers of rose-blowing bushes,
Down by the poplar tall rivulets babble and fall.
Barketh the shepherd-dog cheerily; the grasshopper carolleth clearly;
Deeply the turtle coos; shrilly the owlet halloos;
Winds creep; dews fell chilly: in her first sleep earth breathes stilly:
Over the pools in the burn watergnats murmur and mourn.
Sadly the far kine loweth: the glimmering water outfloweth:
Twin peaks shadow'd with pine slope to the dark hyaline.
Lowthroned Hesper is stayed between the two peaks; but the Naiad
Throbbing in mild unrest holds him beneath in her breast.

The ancient poetess singeth, that Hesperus all things bringeth,
Smoothing the wearied mind: bring me my love, Rosalind.
Thou comest morning and even; she cometh not morning or even.
False-eyed Hesper, unkind, where is my sweet Rosalind?

Perhaps it is clear but I will say anyway that a recognizable elegiac couplet involves a first line of dactylic hexameter followed by a second line (called an elegiac pentameter) that looks more or less like this: -~~-~~-//-~~-~~- The distinctive thing is the beat, caesura, beat in the middle of the second line, with no unstressed syllables between them. Depending on how classical we are being, it is permitted to do some substitutions (technically spondees, but I would allow iambs or trochees as well) in the first four feet of the hexameter and in the first two feet of the pentameter; Tennyson uses spondaic substitutions throughout, e.g., in the first foot of the last line above. The rhyme is, as I have perhaps indicated, an innovation in this poem (well, it's based on the practice of some medieval monk named Leo), but not a requirement of the form. (I am pretty sure Tennyson has an unrhymed one somewhere too, but I can't find it online. Help?)

Here is another one I found searching for Tennyson's; because it is an excerpt, it starts on the pentameter. I did find the full poem but do not want to type it all out (it's at least two pages long):

from Sea-Side Elegiacs
Earl of Lytton

When, at the mid o' the night, high on the shadowy land,
Mournfully watching the ghost-like waves, livid-lipp'd, hollow-breasted,
Sob over shingle and shell, here with my sorrow I stand.
Weary of woe that is in them, fatigued by the violent weathers,
Feebly they tumble and toss, sadly they murmur and moan.

Here's a translation of Callimachus by Daryl Hine that imitates the measure but ignores the pentameter's mid-line caesura:

Detesting the popular novel, I fail to derive any pleasure
........From such a highway as this which the many frequent.
Heartily loathing a flibbertigibbet love-object, I never
........Drink from the tap. I despise what is common or mean.
Yes, I admit you are handsome, Lysanias, terribly handsome.
........Echo improves on the epithet “—and some one else’s!”

I believe this is the approach taken by Mike Juster as well in his Tibullus. Here, too, is Maryann's Alcuin from our translation fest a while back; she honors the pentameter caesura, and the result is lovely: Alcuin Nightingale by Maryann

If you guys know of poems in elegiacs--have written them yourselves, have read good ones--and could post them here or link to them or otherwise indicate how to find them, that would be lovely. I am particularly interested in older dabblings in the meter. All help is appreciated.

Chris

[Andrew Frisardi]

Great topic, Chris.
I love the effect of that caesura you describe in the second line of the couplets, which Maryann brings across so well.

A check on Wiki got me this:

The form was felt by the ancients to contrast the rising action of the first verse with a falling quality in the second. The sentiment is summarized in a line from Ovid's Amores I.1.27: Sex mihi surgat opus numeris, in quinque residat - "Let my work rise in six steps, fall back in five." The effect is illustrated by Coleridge as:

In the hexameter rises the fountain's silvery column,
In the pentameter aye falling in melody back.

I'll be following along in this thread, being stuck at the Wiki phase.

[Maryann Corbett]

Thanks for the mention, Chris. I've written one other poem in elegiac couplets, called "Last Dance."

When I was trying to get the hang of the meter, I was thoroughly confused by the different ways of treating the second line, with and without caesura. I asked a lot of questions; some of them are on this thread and some of the answers are interesting and helpful.

I've been able to find the Gavin Ewart poem that John W. mentions on that thread, and I'll try to post it later today, when I've survived the talk I have to give this morning.

[Chris Childers]

Yes, that's a great thread, though not everywhere for the casual; not sure how I missed it when it was happening. I look forward to the Gavin Ewart. I'd also love to find the Heath-Stubbs Epitaph for Thais. I found this quatrain (partially quoted by John), but not the whole thing:

From Epitaph for Thais, John Heath Stubbs

‘Ask not how many young men their fortunes let slip, and careers,
Chancing one night on her couch (and it was worth it, they said);
Neo-Platonic sages failed to show up at their lectures—
Dream of the touch of her lips, metaphysics go hang!

Thais, of course, is a stock name for an ancient courtesan.

I should--shouldn't I?--point out that there is much debate and uncertainty over the etymology of the word 'elegy' and over the origins of the form, how far it should be associated with the dirge or lament, etc.. It is true that the earliest use of the word 'elegos' (from an inscription for a victor in an aulodic competition at Delphi) does seem to use the word in the sense of 'dirge.' However, the corpus of our archaic poetry in this meter has little to do with dirges; the poems are largely written for the symposium (drinking party), and tend to be exhortatory (be brave in battle! behave yourself and don't get too drunk!), preceptive (make friends with nobles; the vulgar are so, well, vulgar! and other bits of life-advice), pederastic (Boy, you're like a horse), and, yes, what we would recognize as elegiac, poems about the brevity of youth, the unpleasantness of old age, the looming inevitability of death. The only thing archaic elegy is NOT is obscene, though Hellenistic elegiacs can be. (In general, 'elegy' is a genre term while 'elegiac' is a metrical term.) The meter, not confined to the symposium, also eventually proves the dominant one for inscriptions and epigrams, and is co-opted by the Roman elegists for their stylized brand of love poetry. About half of Catullus' corpus is in elegiacs (though we don't really consider him an elegist, exactly), and then everything of Propertius and Tibullus and most of Ovid (Metamorphoses excepted). Martial uses the meter as an epigrammatist, not an elegist.

More later.

C

[Janice D. Soderling]

Chris, I'm so glad to see this thread. Thank you for starting it. I hope there are many responses.

And thanks Maryann for pointing to the earlier link.

[Gregory Dowling]

Yes, thanks Chris. I don't have much to contribute right now. I just thought I'd point out that the "drivel" by Tennyson is a piece of juvenilia. I'm away from home, where I have the Ricks edition with its exhaustive footnotes, so can't give it an exact date, but he was pretty young. And Tennyson was a poet who came to maturity fairly late, if we compare him with the Romantics. Just thought I'd mention it...

[Allen Tice]

After the current Classical Outlook molecular copy comes, I'll post my versions of two poems attributed to Phocylides.

Good thread, Chris.

Originally Posted by Allen Tice

See post thirty-eight on this thread, linked here.

[Maryann Corbett]

Advertising Elegiacs, by Gavin Ewart

Advertising! The men at the front are most terribly turdlike!
Backroom boys are the best. They can be human (a bit).
Clients are worst of the lot, bullies and thick as a blanket.
Presentations to them are true purgatorial things.
Ad-managers (if they're new) want to show you that they are the masters.
Chlorophyll once was the vogue: but the Chairman's wife didn't like green!
Everything greenside was out--so campaigns went out of the window.
Thinking up replacement crap, that was the terrible bore.
That's one example, of course, but examples of this come in thousands.
This is what drives them to drink, and the heart attack bang! at the end.
Suppose you've done it all once. Twice is not good. But a third time!
Three campaigns in a row, and the brain gets a bit of a twist!
Is there a moral at all? Is there, somewhere, consolation?
Only that death, in the end, bonks the nasties as well as the nice!


Of course a large measure of the fun here is the use of a meter usually* associated with solemnity and the strictures of classical education for contemporary material, and in a conversational style full of unabashed cliches. And most of the rest of the fun is the way the thing bounces along.

*Now that I've read the whole of Chris's post above, I know that "usually" is wrong, so forget I said that!

[Chris Childers]

That's really delightful. His pentameters and hexameters start sounding sort of alike after a while, but it's a ton of fun. The moral at the end--that death "bonks the nasties as well as the nice" is just the sort of platitude Greeks loved to remind each other of at drinking parties. Maryann, I wouldn't exactly disagree with you about "solemnity:" poems in elegiacs *are* generally more elevated and decorous than their iambic and trochaic counterparts. It's just that we shouldn't necessarily associate elegiac couplets with elegy in the sense in which we understand it. (Is that why you used elegiacs for the heart-wrenching "Last Dance?" It isn't wrong--there are elegies for the dead in elegiacs--that's just not the most common classical use of the meter.)

Allen, I have seen your Phocylides--I could post them if you want! (I'll be on the same page with you in Classical Outlook (Tyrtaeus and Callinus) & I saw them in the proofs. Good stuff; I love Phocylides' earnest, anxious little tag: 'kai tode Phokylidou.')

Gregory, thanks for leaping to Tennyson's defense. I probably shouldn't throw around words like "drivel." It's better than *my* juvenilia! (Which is, actually, drivel.)

In the interest of continuing to post poems, I have two full elegiacs (from which one of the excerpts in my first post above is taken) which I found in a pasteable format. Apparently the Earl of Lytton is none other than Edward George Bulwer-Lytton, he of the "dark and stormy night" and the magisterial prose contest that bears his name. Anyway, below you will find him waxing elegiac. I wish he weren't such a parody of himself; my goal here, I should say, is not necessarily to convince people that elegiacs in English are great and that we should all write more of them; I'm interested what people think--and it's fine to hate the things--but it's better to have better poems to decide based on. Oh well:

SEA-SIDE ELEGIACS
Edward George Bulwer-Lytton

EVER my heart beateth high and the blood in me danceth delighted,
When, in the wind on the wharf, keen from the edge of the land,
Watching the white- winged black-bodied ships, as they rise uninvited
Over the violet-dark wall o' the waters, I stand.
Wondrous with life that is in them, aware of the waters and weathers,
They to the populous port pass with a will of their own.
Merrily singeth the mariner there, as the cable he tethers
Tight to the huge iron ring, hung in the green gluey stone.
Swept with the spray is the pavement above; and the sea- wind is salt there.
Down on the causeys all day, humming, the mer- chants unlade
Marvellous merchandise, while the sea -engines of burthen, at halt there
Shoulder each other, and loll, lazy in shine or in shade.
O for the wing o' the grey sea-eagle, that far away inland
Croucheth in cave or in creek, waiting the wind on the height !
When night cometh, the great north-wind, blowing bleak over Finland,
Leapeth, and, lifting aloft, beareth him into the night.
O for the wing o' the bird ! and O for the wind o' the ocean !
O for the far-away lands ! O for the faces unfound !
Would I were hence ! for my spirit is fill'd with a mighty emotion.
Why must the spirit, though wing'd, thus to the body be bound ?
Ah, but my heart sinketh low, and the rapturous vein is arrested,
When, at the mid o' the night, high on the shadowy land,
Mournfully watching the ghost-white waves, livid-lipp'd, hollow-breasted,
Sob over shingle and shell, here with my sorrow I stand.
Weary of woe that is in them, fatigued by the violent weathers,
Feebly they tumble and toss, sadly they murmur and moan,
Coldly the moon looketh down through the wan-rolling vapour she gathers
Silently, cloud after cloud, round her companionless throne.
Dark up above is the wharf; and the harbour. The night-wind alone there
Goeth about in the night, humming a horrible song.
Black misshapen bulks, coil'd cumbrous things, over thrown there,
Seem as, in sullen dismay, silently suffering wrong.
O for the wing o' the grey sea-eagle, roamer of heaven !
Him doth the wind o' the night bear through the night on its breast.
Over the howling ocean, and unto his ancient haven,
Far in the land that he loves finding the realms of his rest.
O for the wing o' the bird ! and O for the wind o' the Ocean
O for the lands that are left ! O for the faces of eld !
Would I were hence ! for my spirit is fill'd with a mourn- ful emotion.
Why must the spirit, though wing'd, still by the body be held ?

THE SHORE
Edward George Bulwer-Lytton

CAN it be women that walk in the sea-mist, under the cliffs there
Which the unsatisfied surge sucks with importunate lip?
There, where out from the sand-chok'd anchors, on to the skiffs there,
Twinkle the slippery ropes, swinging adip and adrip ?
All the place in a lurid, glimmering, emerald glory,
Glares like a Titan world come back under heaven again :
Yonder, aloof are the steeps of the sea-kings, famous in story ;
But who are they on the beach? they are neither women nor men.
Who knows, are they the land's, or the water's, living creatures ?
Born of the boiling sea? nurst in the seething storms?
With their woman's hair dishevell'd over their stern male features,
Striding, bare to the knee; magnified maritime forms !
They may be the mothers and wives, they may be the sisters and daughters
Of men on the dark mid-seas, alone in those black coii'd hulls,
That toil 'neath yon white cloud, whence the moon will rise o'er the waters
To-nigh i, with her face on fire, if the wind in the evening lulls.
But they may be merely visions, such as only sick men witness,
(Sitting as I sit here, fill'd with a wild regret),
Framed from the sea's misshapen spume with a horrible fitness
To the winds in which they walk, and the surges by which they are wet :
Salamanders, sea- wolves, witches, warlocks; marine monsters
Which the dying seaman beholds, when the rats are swimming away,
And an Indian wind 'gins hiss from an unknown isle, and alone stirs
The broken cloud which burns on the verge of the dead, red day.
I know not. All in my mind is confused; nor can I dissever
The mould of the visible world from the shape of my thought in me.
The Inward and Outward are fused : and, through them, murmur for ever
The sorrow whose sound is the wind, and the roar of the limitless sea.

[Chris Childers]

And here, for the sake of completeness, is Whitworth's actually good poem from the earlier thread Maryann linked to:

Blood Ties
The Whitworth

First it's the ground-up glass. You wouldn't believe the trouble.
Pounding it down for days, shoving it under the crust.
Smack of his red, wet lips as he gulps it down at the double,
Ashes to flaming ashes, dust to perishing dust.
(That one's out of a book – Kev's a one for the reading.)
Tesco's Somerset Style Chicken-and-Mushroom Pie.
Accidental Death, see. Death from Internal Bleeding.
Why don't he die then? Jesus, why don't the bastard die
In the piss and puke of his sin (what no book actually said)?
Kev kneels on the stairs and prays, but he still isn't dead.

Kev has this duff idea then, crush his skull in the toilet.
Over the door a wire to a clock-weight stood on the flush.
Likewise the deadly mushroom, hours and hours we boil it
In a cocoa tin on a fire till the bugger's down to a mush.
We mix it with three big sugars, stir it up in his tea then.
He knows about that all right. Kev gets smashed in the face
For a snotnosed, evil toe-rag. Right. So it's down to me then.
Kev on the line to Jesus, sat in his own dark place
With her home-made damson jam, shelf upon shelf upon shelf.
'All that's left of her now, sis.' Shit! So I do it myself.

Pick my time for a Monday. Mondays he watches the footie
Boozing. It's always the same - six big tins of stout.
Sat flat out in the armchair watching the late night movie.
From his wet, red lips the ropes of spit come bobbling out.
Smashed his head in with a hammer, one from out of the cupboard,
Right where the skin shows pink, hard as ever I could,
That hammerhead goes in easy. Kev, he would sure've blubbered.
Me, I screw up my face and I smash him again. It's good.
The sucking, snuffling sound like when water runs out of a bath.
I grab his hand. 'Come on, Kev!' We run down the garden path,

Over the back wall and out into the water meadow,
Down there by the lake with a big moon shining clear.
'D'you do it?' he says. I nod. We're stood out there together.
'My hand's like ice,' I say. 'There's nothing more for us here.'
'D'you do right?' he says. I shake my head. 'I dunno, Kev.
But it's done. I done it. Oh Kev, don't you tell on me, please.
Hold me. I'm cold as ice. Where are we going to go, Kev?'
The jinking, winking moonlight dancing over the trees.
'Why d'you ask if I'd tell, sis? What sort of noise did he make?'
See Jesus walking, walking over the face of the lake.