[Martin Elster]

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

(I really like this poem, Peter.)

[Tim Murphy]

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.

[Ed Shacklee]

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

[Maryann Corbett]

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.

[Petra Norr]

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.
.