[Paul Lake]

Chris, glad to hear you're checking out Jim's book. He's also published a couple more recent chapbooks, which are harder to come by.

If you ever read my novel Among the Immortals, which is set in San Francisco and Berkeley, see if you can identify which fictional characters bear some resemblance to actual denizens of that area around 1980--and which other fictional characters resemble the immortals still hiding among us.

[Henry Quince]

Aren't the longer lines in a sapphic stanza
meant to be trochaic, except the third foot
only? Why do some of these writers move the
dactyl around so?

[Janet Kenny]

Henry
You're going to have to wrap a wet towel around your brow and read this entire thread.

Cheers,
Janet

[Henry Quince]

Janet, why assume that I haven’t read the
thread from start to finish? I meant that no one’s
yet persuaded me that those substitutions
work as improvements.

Henry

[Janet Kenny]

Humble apologies Henry. I thought you hadn't read their explanations.
Janet

[robert mezey]

I like some of Powell's work very much, but I must say I don't much care for those translations. Here's one to compare it to, my translation of Catullus' translation of Sappho. (The last stanza, which might not be part of the poem, is of course of Catullus' invention.)


That man seems to me almost a god, or even
--dare I say it?--surpasses the gods, he who
sitting turned towards you continually
watches and catches

your dulcet laughter--all of which drains my senses,
for always when I turn and face you, Lesbia,
not a breath remains in my mouth, not a sound,
nothing is left me,

but my tongue thickens and limbs melt, as a flame
races along nerve and vein, with a mute thunder
my ears ring, and my eyes go dark under
wave after wave...

Idleness, Catullus, idleness weakens you.
From idleness you suck too deep a pleasure--
idleness, that has brought down powerful princes,
prosperous kingdoms.


Needless to say, I've taken considerable liberty with
the meter, but I fancy that it gets some of the sound of
the Latin.
I love sapphics, but even more I love alcaics. One of
the most beautiful poems in English is written in this meter, Auden's elegy for Sigmund Freud. (I don't share
his high opinion of Freud, but I can't read the poem
without tears.)
I believe Tennyson did one or two things in alcaics, but it's not a meter much used in our language.




[This message has been edited by robert mezey (edited July 10, 2004).]

[Joseph Bottum]

Prof. Mezey mentions alcaics, and perhaps we should start another thread on the meter. Besides Auden's, alcaics I like include:

Tennyson’s "Milton: Alcaics"
Edwin Arlington Robinson’s "Late Summer"
Robert Louis Stevenson’s "Alcaics: to H. F. B."
Timothy Steele’s "Luck"

It is a curious meter to use for memorial verse, as Auden did, but there seems something in its English form that calls it to that purpose.

Tennyson's "Milton" is in quantity--a deeply impressive feat. Was there ever a poet with a better ear? (Or a weaker mind to go with it?)

Milton: Alcaics

O mighty-mouth'd inventor of harmonies,
O skill'd to sing of Time or Eternity,
God-gifted organ-voice of England,
Milton, a name to resound for ages;
Whose Titan angels, Gabriel, Abdiel,
Starr'd from Jehovah's gorgeous armouries,
Tower, as the deep-domed empyrean
Rings to the roar of an angel onset--
Me rather all that bowery loneliness,
The brooks of Eden mazily murmuring,
And bloom profuse and cedar arches
Charm, as a wanderer out in ocean,
Where some refulgent sunset of India
Streams o'er a rich ambrosial ocean isle,
And crimson-hued the stately palmwoods
Whisper in odorous heights of even.



[This message has been edited by Joseph Bottum (edited July 12, 2004).]

[Joseph Bottum]

Henry:

Horace's Latin sapphic stanza looks like this:

— u — — — ^^ u u — u — x
— u — — — ^^ u u — u — x
— u — — — ^^ u u — u — x
— u u — x

(Where "—" means a long syllable, "u" a short, and "x" either, and "^^" means the caesura.)

Translated directly into accents, that would be:

/ v / / / v v / v / x
/ v / / / v v / v / x
/ v / / / v v / v / x
/ v v / x

In my own sapphics that I posted above, I tried to keep to this pattern—except I started each stanza with an extra unaccented syllable, and varied the caesura, and lopped the last syllable off the third line, because all those feminine endings were driving me crazy:

if I have SEEN GEESE LOW on the EAST hoRIzon,
SEEN the LONG REEDS STRAIN in the DAWN reMAINing,
WATCHED the FIRST CLEAN ICE of the SEAson TAKE
ROOT for the WINTer

So, too, the opening line of Watts:

WHEN the FIERCE NORTH-WIND with his AIRy FORces

But Horace would often use substitutions in the feet before the caesura, and, anyway, three stresses in a row are very hard to do in English, and tend to break down in the reader’s ear to / v /. So, the accentual sapphic pattern in English came to substitute / v / for / / /:

/ v / v / ^^ v v / v / x
/ v / v / ^^ v v / v / x
/ v / v / ^^ v v / v / x
/ v v / x

I think this is the pattern you’re expecting to find. (Except perhaps without the steady break in the middle: The Greek caesura was always much more flexible than Horace’s, and English tends to treat it as entirely movable.) Thus Hardy’s line:

SET me SUN by SUN near to ONE unCHOSen

and the root rhythm of Swinburne’s sapphics:

SAW the WHITE imPLAcable APHroDIte,
SAW the HAIR unBOUND and the FEET unSANDalled
SHINE as FIRE of SUNset on WESTern WATers;
SAW the reLUCtant

But / v / is a compromise, a surrendering to the fact that English doesn’t want to do spondees. Horace would have substituted a dactyl for the spondee, not a trochee, and so classically trained poets have tried to do that as well. Indeed, they’ve made substitutions all down the line. As Peterjb pointed out about Tim Steele’s sapphics:

May I imagine being in the Inferno, /--/-/-/--/-
(Extra dactyl, in the first foot)

A madman. What Atilla did to Europe, -/-/-/-/-/-
(No dactyl)

I tend to think the dactyl in the fourth foot is the defining feature of sapphics in English, and so I don’t entirely approve of these substitution of Steele’s, but it seems to work in the general effect of substitutions he uses.

Jody




[This message has been edited by Joseph Bottum (edited July 10, 2004).]

[Tim Murphy]

I've been out rolling across the high plains sans computer, so I come to this late at Jody's invitation. Yes, it's the best presentation of and discussion of sapphics I've ever run across, a credit to the Sphere, and intimidating to this pig farmer. Having read through the entire thread, I'm struck again by the magnitude of peterjb's achievement in Courting The Nine. Not easy to go up against the likes of Campion, Swinburne and Steele and come out a winner. Of course I adore Bob's version of the Cat's version of Sappho, and I thought Paul's rhymed poem for the draft dodger was very fine as soon as I acquired Walking Backwards. Were I to attempt to recreate Sapphics in English, I think my guides would be two: strict syllabic counts of elevens and five; and every line would end XyyXy. I suspect I'd be pretty free in substituting in the first six syllables, and I suppose I'd try to make it rhyme, just to give the English ear a little more than a pattern of stress and unhearably long syllabic count to latch onto.

[Chris Childers]

This is from my edition of Greek lyric poetry, about the differences between Horace's, Catullus's, & Sappho's use of the meter.

The 4th syllable of lines 1-3, long in Horace though not always long in Catullus, is long in only two-thirds of Sappho's lines; word-end after the 5th syllable, usual in Horace but observed in only two-thirds of Catullus' lines, occurs in less than half of Sappho's examples.

There's some solid philology for you. Anyway, I generally think of that syllable as an anceps, a long or short (x), probably because that's the way I saw it scanned first in my Student's Catullus, being the way Catullus treated it.

But there's something else here; we keep talking about dactyls, but the main unit of the Sapphic, (as it is for most if not all of the Aeolic meters,) is not the dactyl but the choriamb. In Greek class, we divide the feet of the Sapphic line as follows:

-~-x / -~~- / ~--

We describe this as a trochee (trochees in Greek are twice as long as in English, same with iambs), a choriamb, and a bacchius. This isn't merely to use difficult terms & make ourselves feel smart; if we look at the scansions of other Aeolic meters, we'll see the choriamb in a similar position of prominence. Examples:

Lines 1 & 2 of the Alcaic: x-~-x / -~~- / ~-, and in the final line, where it is said to undergo dactylic expansion: -~~-~~- / ~--.

The glyconic: xx -~~- ~-

The Greater Aesclepiad: -x / -~~- / -~~- / -~~- / ~-

& of course, the fourth line of the Sapphic: -~~--

The reason for this is historical: the choriamb is also the basic unit for formulaic utterance in the Indo-European proto-language. Formulas of our own such as “last but not least” or “sadly but surely,” with their further Indo-European characteristics of marked alliteration and consonance, attest to its persistence. In Indo-European poetics, which in those societies was inextricable from ritual and religion, such phrases were ritualistic, being both familiar and elevated; they stuck in the mind, making verses memorable for generations of poets whose livelihood was their memory, before the invention of writing. It is thought, in fact, that the stanzas of Sappho and Alcaeus were mere refinements, or even appropriations, of the meters of folk songs already in use in their corner of Asia Minor, the virtual equivalent of our own ballad stanza. In other Indo-European metrics, too, most notably the Indic, the choriamb is enshrined as the basic metrical unit; & I’m confident that if I were to research this, I would find no shortage of examples throughout the Indo-European world, no less in the Germanic ancestors of our own tongue than in those that flourished around the Mediterranean. Anyway, it is the choriamb which gives these Aeolic meters their distinct Indo-European character, a character which the dactylic hexameter lacks--most philologists therefore do not think the hexameter of Indo-European origin, but rather borrowed late from some other tradition, though there are loose cannons who disagree.

Practically speaking, there is no reason why contemporary writers of English sapphics should not speak of a dactyl surrounded by four trochees, or some combination of trochees and spondees; but it makes me wrinkle my nose, & this is why.

Chris