[Chris Childers]

If you call it an "elegiac pentameter," the people who know what you're talking about will know what you're talking about. The other people, though...

[Allen Tice]

Half in jest, I propose a new name. Let's start calling it the "Greco-Roman elegiac pentameter", and abbreviate that as appropriate to "G-R elegiac pentameter", and finally shorten that and make it vaguely steam-punk with the acronym : GREP !!

There's a precedent. 'Iambic pentameter' is abbreviated as IP.

GREP is easy to grasp, and cool to the 21st century touch. Maybe (I'd never tell), it has some masonic tendrils.

A cup of grappa goes well with a book of verse in the GREP, O Fitzg.

Grep on, thou foul and beastlie pentapede, grep on.

[Chris Childers]

Looking for something else, just found this fine example by EA Robinson:

Pasa Thalassa Thalassa

“The sea is everywhere the sea.”

I

GONE—faded out of the story, the sea-faring friend I remember?
Gone for a decade, they say: never a word or a sign.
Gone with his hard red face that only his laughter could wrinkle,
Down where men go to be still, by the old way of the sea.

Never again will he come, with rings in his ears like a pirate, 5
Back to be living and seen, here with his roses and vines;
Here where the tenants are shadows and echoes of years uneventful,
Memory meets the event, told from afar by the sea.

Smoke that floated and rolled in the twilight away from the chimney
Floats and rolls no more. Wheeling and falling, instead, 10
Down with a twittering flash go the smooth and inscrutable swallows,
Down to the place made theirs by the cold work of the sea.

Roses have had their day, and the dusk is on yarrow and wormwood—
Dusk that is over the grass, drenched with memorial dew;
Trellises lie like bones in a ruin that once was a garden, 15
Swallows have lingered and ceased, shadows and echoes are all.

II

WHERE is he lying to-night, as I turn away down to the valley,
Down where the lamps of men tell me the streets are alive?
Where shall I ask, and of whom, in the town or on land or on water,
News of a time and a place buried alike and with him? 20

Few now remain who may care, nor may they be wiser for caring,
Where or what manner the doom, whether by day or by night;
Whether in Indian deeps or on flood-laden fields of Atlantis,
Or by the roaring Horn, shrouded in silence he lies.

Few now remain who return by the weed-weary path to his cottage, 25
Drawn by the scene as it was—met by the chill and the change;
Few are alive who report, and few are alive who remember,
More of him now than a name carved somewhere on the sea.

“Where is he lying?” I ask, and the lights in the valley are nearer;
Down to the streets I go, down to the murmur of men. 30
Down to the roar of the sea in a ship may be well for another—
Down where he lies to-night, silent, and under the storms.

[R. S. Gwynn]

Mental Cases

Who are these? Why sit they here in twilight?
Wherefore rock they, purgatorial shadows,
Drooping tongues from jaws that slob their relish,
Baring teeth that leer like skulls' tongues wicked?
Stroke on stroke of pain, -- but what slow panic,
Gouged these chasms round their fretted sockets?
Ever from their hair and through their hand palms
Misery swelters. Surely we have perished
Sleeping, and walk hell; but who these hellish?

-- These are men whose minds the Dead have ravished.
Memory fingers in their hair of murders,
Multitudinous murders they once witnessed.
Wading sloughs of flesh these helpless wander,
Treading blood from lungs that had loved laughter.
Always they must see these things and hear them,
Batter of guns and shatter of flying muscles,
Carnage incomparable and human squander
Rucked too thick for these men's extrication.

Therefore still their eyeballs shrink tormented
Back into their brains, because on their sense
Sunlight seems a bloodsmear; night comes blood-black;
Dawn breaks open like a wound that bleeds afresh
-- Thus their heads wear this hilarious, hideous,
Awful falseness of set-smiling corpses.
-- Thus their hands are plucking at each other;
Picking at the rope-knouts of their scourging;
Snatching after us who smote them, brother,
Pawing us who dealt them war and madness.

Wilfred Owen

Hendecasyllabics, if I'm not mistaken.

[Chris Childers]

Actually, those are decasyllables--trochaic pentameter, I'd say. There are various classical hendecasyllabic lines. Both the sapphic and the Alcaic has a different kind of hendecasyllable; the first three lines of a sapphic look like this: -~---~~-~-~ while the first two lines of an alcaic look like this --~---~~-~-. The line we normally refer to as the hendecasyllable, actually the phalaecan hendecasyllable, used so often by Catullus, looks like this: -~-~~-~-~-~. It's pretty similar to the sapphic hendecasyllable, especially in English, except the dactyl is in a different spot. The most commonly cited example is Frost's "For Once, Then, Something;" Tennyson also has used it in quantitative experiments, and I know it appears frequently in translations of Catullus (Peter Green, I think, and Charles Martin).

A quick search and I'm not sure we've had a thread here on English hendecasyllables. I'd be interested in one if someone were to start it...

Chris

[Andrew Frisardi]

Originally Posted by Chris Childers

A quick search and I'm not sure we've had a thread here on English hendecasyllables. I'd be interested in one if someone were to start it...

Chris

I'd be interested in this too. The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics says that hendecasyllables in English are usually just pentameters feminine endings, but adds that "true hendecs in English after the Renaissance are usually translations or imitations of Catullus." No specific references on that, though.

[Maryann Corbett]

Well, I know we have at least one alcaics thread, since I was the one who raised the question:
Alcaics

Searching (advanced search) on "hendecasyllabics" just in thread titles gets no hits. But searching on whole posts gets many. So we've talked about them, even if we apparently haven't devoted entire threads to them.

[Allen Tice]

While I am not a master to "muse" about, here are my two translations with leading second-line spondees alluded to in posts 7, 15, 23, 25, and 29 above, built as attempts to make create legitimate and interesting Greco-Roman elegiac couplets (GREPs, see post 32). They were published in the Winter 2012 Classical Outlook [USA] alongside Chris's own longer translations of Tyrtaeus 11 and Callinus 1 on p 51 under the heading Two Epigrams Often Attributed to Phocylides :

                    Two Epigrams often attributed to Phocylides

                                  People from Leros

  This by Phocylides.  People from Leros are bad.  Not just “one bad,
     one good.”  All bad.  Except: Procles.  And he’s from there too!


                                   The Mannequins

Many who look to be sober, controlled, and who dress in the best threads,
          who seem solid and sound, haven’t a thought in their heads.