[Mark Allinson]

In the light of recent comments from a few poets on the site, concerning a stated difficulty or puzzlement with regard to accentual meters, I thought I would start a thread dedicated to the subject.

I don't know which one I had in mind now, but this is close at hand. And since our Tim typed it out for another thread some time ago, we will recycle it. This is a passage from Hop'e "Western Elegies", in accentual hexameter.

Who would care to admit to any difficulties scanning this one?


V. The Tongues

Suppiluliumas! What a marvelous name for a monarch,
Ruler of royal Hattusas, whom the thousand gods of the Hatti
Granted an enclave of empire, when Troy was a petty city,
That stretched from the Western Sea to the Tigris and the Euphrates.
The ribs of that carcasse, dear heart, full of archaeological maggots,
Seethe in the Anatolian springtime today at Boghazkoy.

Suppiluliumas the King, may his bones evade their researches;
For his name is a beacon to me of the fabulous babble of Babel,
That fountain of human tongues which I bless and rejoice in forever.
And the one great family of speech I have loved and explored since my boyhood,
That ‘centum’ branch of the western Indo-European hegirah,
First of them all that survives is the Hittite of Suppiluliumas.

Whence did they come? Through the Balkans or south by Georgia or westward by Persia
To settle perversely in Asia, like the feckless Tocharian Buddhists,
While their brothers, the Celts and the Slavs, the Greeks and conquering Latins
And the vanished Illyrians forced ever west their migrations of language.
And even German, that lingo of slaves from their Aryan masters
Transmitted to us today, is the language of Goethe and Shakespeare.

Suppiluliumas, you spoke two tongues of the Hittite dominion
And wrote to the rulers of Egypt, Assyria and Mitanni,
To each in his own true speech as a prince in his dealings with princes;
You would not have thought it a curse as the book of the Hebrews reputes it,
That confounding of tongues in the unfinished ziggurat built in Shinar,
Whence the rivers of language first flowed to enrich the glory of nations.

For the man who knows only one speech is an ox in a paradise orchard,
Munching on grass and ignoring the fruits of delectable flavor
That ripen upon its boughs and depend from the vines that adorn it.
The man who has only one tongue lives forever alone on an island
Shut in on himself by conventions he is only dimly aware of,
Like a beast whose mind is fenced by the narrow extent of its instincts.

But the man who thinks in two tongues wins his mind free of a bondage
Which a sole speech imposes on all his thinking and feeling;
Translate as he will, what is said in the one never matches the other
Precisely in ambience and reach, so his soul grows still and attentive,
Aware, beyond any one speech, of a metaphysics of meaning
Which teaches that not mere words but the heart is what must be translated.

For those mighty rivers of language that fashion the landscapes of time
Like the Amazon and the Danube, the Mississippi and Ganges
Though they set frontiers to nations, act as makers and bearers of spirit;
Growing in volume and power, they build the rich soils of tradition.
How could such marvellous gifts be cursed as the folly of Babel?

I think now of those I have learned, adapting my soul to their music:
Latin, old father of tongues, whose discipline was the adventure,
First step into unknown space, that tempered and tempted my boyhood
To discover new countries of mind called Ovid, Virgil, Catullus,
And the dense and disciplined march of a prose that thinks in inflections.
Then the daughters of Latin, the tongues of Italy, France and Iberia,
So rich in their colour and chime and each so diverse from the others;
And the tongues of the Goths and the Germans, the Norse and the Anglo-Saxons
Which I chose for my province of study when I thought of myself as a scholar—
They were native and near as I listened and moved from one to another
Getting the feel of their strange, their guttural dissonant music;
Till further afield I found the earthy abundance of Russian,
Last of the tongues of men into which my soul found translation.

Suppiluliumas, you were born in bilingual Hattusas;
Which speech did you use for love and in which make war and take counsel?
Which of them would you choose from your heart to the heart of a woman,
Sundered by race and belief, with the width of the world between them,
Yet joined by pride of the mind and the ancient worship of fire?
Surely you would not have sent those words by the usual channels,
Printed on well-baked brick in diplomatic Akkadian.
How shall I tell her, then, the instant thought of the moment,
Thought that can only be told, if at all, in the fire bird language?
How shall I tell her the world is simpler than men imagine,
For those set apart by God speak a tongue used only by angels;
That the distance from East to West is no more than its word for ‘I love you’?
And perpetual pentecost springs and renews itself in that message,
Which blesses the gift of tongues and crowns, the Venture of Babel,
Tongues that descend as flames and flicker about our temples
As we are caught up by the spirits to behold a new earth and new heaven,
We utter in unknown speech which we neither have learned nor remembered


[This message has been edited by Mark Allinson (edited August 20, 2005).]

[peter richards]

Reads as pentameter to me.

That referred to the poem initially posted along with the question of whether we had difficulty in reading it as accentual tetrameter.

There is a glaringly obvious problem with scanning this latest effort, as all sorts of sections open with Suppiluliumas, which is not fully included in my everyday vocab., I must confess. SUP-pi-LU-li-u-MAS has half my hexametric budget bursting on the first line almost before it's started.

A sign at the top saying THIS IS HEXAMETRIC, along with a contextually useful inclusion in, say, the quiz page at the back of a magazine, could probably motivate me to find six stressable syllables per line. I'd be hard put to come up with a reading like that under any - er - normal cicumstances though.

p

[This message has been edited by peter richards (edited August 20, 2005).]

[Mark Allinson]

Well, that's certainly another way to read it!

I have no idea what I am hearing here.

Was I thinking of another poem?

Maybe it's Alzheimers.

Just edited back to say I have reposted the top poem.


------------------
Mark Allinson

[This message has been edited by Mark Allinson (edited August 20, 2005).]

[Carol Taylor]

Mark, the one you have posted here now is dactyllic hexameter. You are apparently employing the term accentual to mean "other than iambic." I reserve the term accentual for lines that can't be scanned into duple or triple meter, although I realize many people use it to mean heavily substituted lines whose feet may have one, two, or three syllables in no particular pattern as long as the line has a set number of beats.

But even by that definition this poem is accentual-syllabic. Only one substitution occurs in the first stanza of this poem, a sort of reversed foot in the second line so that the third foot has an extra syllable and the fourth has only two, and I had no trouble with that--I think it is pretty standard substitution for triple meters. Otherwise the dactyllic flow sweeps through enjambments, wrapping from line to line. I can't imagine that Hope went to the trouble of writing this marvelous regular rhythm only to have it flattened into prose by the ignoring of all but the most dominant vocal stresses.

Suppiluliumas! What a marvelous name for a monarch,
Ruler of royal Hattusas, whom the thousand gods of the Hatti
Granted an enclave of empire, when Troy was a petty city,
That stretched from the Western Sea to the Tigris and the Euphrates.
The ribs of that carcasse, dear heart, full of archaeological maggots,
Seethe in the Anatolian springtime today at Boghazkoy.

Carol

[Michael Cantor]

I read it as dactylic hexameter too - but I also read it as overwritten babble.

I think there are limits to how long a line can be and still grab a reader - unless the language is magnificent - and this poem is a good demonstration. The language is very fine and flowing at times - pedantic at others - but the poem is not magnificent, and there are just too many sounds and syllables, too many thoughts, crammed into each line for the ear and eye to handle properly.

Iambic hex works, but it pushes the boundaries. Throw in the extra syllables of a dactyllic line, and all hexameter gets you is seasick. When I'm in charge, dactyllics will be limited to tetrameter. (I nervously await the deluge of rebuttals citing great works in dactyllic hexameter, but, hey, at least we're not talking politics.)

Michael Cantor

[This message has been edited by Michael Cantor (edited August 20, 2005).]

[Jerry Glenn Hartwig]

Mark

Sorry, but I'm with Carol and Michael, also. I'm trying to hear it as accentual, but it fails me. It is too heavy a beat.

A random line:

For the man who knows only one speech is an ox in a paradise orchard,

Stress by ear:

1232341341231241341


123/23/41/34/123/124/134 1

Heavily substituted.

But I'll repeat the question I just posted on the other thread. What's the difference how we label it? Will it change the way we read the line? Will it change the meaning? Does it matter, even, if we both call it metrical?

How does your label change the poem; make it different than my label?

ps - I'm assuming, BTW, you'd call that line accentual tet?

[This message has been edited by Jerry Glenn Hartwig (edited August 20, 2005).]

[Mark Allinson]

SUppilUliUmas! What a MARvelous NAME for a MONarch,
RUler of ROYal HattUsas, whom the THOUsand GODS of the HAtti

This how I read the opening name, which without its three accents would not be "a marvelous name".

Carol, I suppose I don't think of it as acc-syll because I never bother with counting syllables when I write them, which I do with all acc-sylls. I can't speak for Hope, but all I am doing when I write such lines is placing the high points of accent in a more or less dactyllic pattern. And that's it.

But I think Peter and Michael are right, that dac-hex is not the best medium for this discussion, so I would like to pick up the point from Jerry's thread, which was where this thread came from in the first place.

Here is the Larkin poem in question (also presently discussed on "Mastery")


Dublinesque

Down stucco sidestreets,
Where light is pewter
And afternoon mist
Brings lights on in shops
Above race-guides and rosaries,
A funeral passes.

The hearse is ahead,
But after there follows
A troop of streetwalkers
In wide flowered hats,
Leg-of-mutton sleeves,
And ankle-length dresses.

There is an air of great friendliness,
As if they were honouring
One they were fond of;
Some caper a few steps,
Skirts held skilfully
(Someone claps time),

And of great sadness also.
As they wend away
A voice is heard singing
Of Kitty, or Katy,
As if the name meant once
All love, all beauty.

========

Jerry, you ask:

"What am I missing by not seeing these lines as dimeter?"

By which Jerry meant the long line in this poem.

Well, I would agree with Bob Mezey, who says that to miss the dimeter in the nine syllable line is to miss the writer's intention for reading the piece, and disrupting the flow of the entire poem.

I found another shorter line poem on a "Mastery" thread that readers appeared to have problems with, so here it is:


The Listeners

by Walter De La Mare


'Is there anybody there?' said the Traveller,
Knocking on the moonlit door;
And his horse in the silence champed the grasses
Of the forest's ferny floor:
And a bird flew up out of the turret,
Above the Traveller's head
And he smote upon the door again a second time;
'Is there anybody there?' he said.
But no one descended to the Traveller;
No head from the leaf-fringed sill
Leaned over and looked into his grey eyes,
Where he stood perplexed and still.
But only a host of phantom listeners
That dwelt in the lone house then
Stood listening in the quiet of the moonlight
To that voice from the world of men:
Stood thronging the faint moonbeams on the dark stair,
That goes down to the empty hall,
Hearkening in an air stirred and shaken
By the lonely Traveller's call.
And he felt in his heart their strangeness,
Their stillness answering his cry,
While his horse moved, cropping the dark turf,
'Neath the starred and leafy sky;
For he suddenly smote on the door, even
Louder, and lifted his head:-
'Tell them I came, and no one answered,
That I kept my word,' he said.
Never the least stir made the listeners,
Though every word he spake
Fell echoing through the shadowiness of the still house
From the one man left awake:
Ay, they heard his foot upon the stirrup,
And the sound of iron on stone,
And how the silence surged softly backward,
When the plunging hoofs were gone.

[Alder Ellis]

Hi Mark,

I think the Larkin is a good example of accentual dimeter. In accentual-syllabic meter there is a "rule" (plausibly based on practice) against having 3 unaccented syllables in a row -- one assumes the middle syllable will always be "promoted" to some extent. But here line 13 is clearly dimeter in context & so violates that rule; as perhaps do other lines in the poem:

LEG-of-mutton SLEEVES

some CAper a few STEPS

and of great SADness ALso

as if the NAME meant ONCE

I think in all 4 of these lines one is initially inclined to force the rhythm into a "legal" accentual-syllabic pattern:

leg-of-MUTon SLEEVES

some CAper a FEW steps

and of GREAT sadness ALso

as IF the name MEANT once

Nothing disprovable about these scansions, but I think the feeling of the lines comes across better the other way.

Anyway, a wonderful poem, wonderfully written.

The De La Mare, on the other hand, does seem metrically screwy to me. I have no problem with the trimeter short lines, but the long lines are hard to keep in a tetrameter rhythm. The very first line seems trimeter to me, for example. I guess I can see:

and he SMOTE upon the DOOR again a SEcond TIME

stood THRONGing the faint MOONbeams on the DARK STAIR

but it's too much of a stretch to come up with such readings in the flow of the poem. I see Henry has suggested on the other thread, "I suspect that the meter is more troublesome to some American ears." Yeah, that must be it...

[Mark Allinson]

AE,

I am so relieved to find a kindred reader of the Larkin.

Yes, forcing it into "acceptable" IP patterns wrecks it. I am grateful for your post.

In fact, I could say - "AE - I. O. U."

Yes, the de la Mare poem is more of a challenge, certainly. But I wonder why it should pose a greater challenge to American ears - if indeed it does?



------------------
Mark Allinson

[Jerry Glenn Hartwig]

AE

I don't see any of those lines as an exception. They each have promotions. Disregard the 'rules' and listen: we perform the promotions automatically. They're inherent in the spoken English language. Ignoring them just so we can those lines acc-dimeter seems counter productive.

Mark,

At this point you lose me. I'm going to read a line naturally: I'm not going to ignore natural accents and stresses and just stress two syllables.

Whatever you choose to call it, it reads aloud the same. So, I guess I have no problem with you calling it acc. dimeter, but I think most people would find it confusing to discuss it as such, and would respond better to the acc-syl terminology.

Again, the whole function of the terminology is to discuss the metrics. All it seems you're doing is muddying the conversation for a lot of people.