I thought others might like to join in the discussion Chris Childers and I have been having about representing classical meters in English. Poe, in a famous attack on Longfellow, denied that it could be done:
"We maintain that the hexameter can never be introduced into our language, from the nature of that language itself. This rhythm demands, for English ears, a preponderance of natural spondees. Our tongue has few. Not only does the Latin and Greek, with the Swedish, and some others, abound in them; but the Greek and Roman ear had become reconciled (why or how is unknown) to the reception of artificial spondees—that is to say, spondaic words formed partly of one word and partly of another, or from an excised part of one word. In short, the ancients were content to read as they scanned, or nearly so. It may be safely prophesied that we shall never do this; and thus we shall never admit English hexameters. The attempt to introduce them, after the repeated failures of Sir Philip Sidney and others, is perhaps somewhat discreditable to the scholarship of Professor Longfellow."
Poets have attempted purely accentual representations. Longfellow’s "Evangeline" is an example, often used by classics teachers to introduce students to hexameter: "This is the forest primeval. The murmuring pines and the hemlocks, / Bearded with moss, and in garments green, indistinct in the twilight." Tennyson hated the importation into English of the German attempt to accentualize quantitative verse: at its best in Schiller, Goethe, and Hölderlin, but falling off rapidly thereafter—and, apparently, worth Tennyson’s ire in its English form, which he attacked in "On Translations of Homer":
These lame hexameters the strong-wing’d music of Homer!
No—but a most burlesque barbarous experiment.
When was a harsher sound ever heard, ye Muses, in England?
When did a frog coarser croak upon our Helicon?
Hexameters no worse than daring Germany gave us,
Barbarous experiment, barbarous hexameters.
(Tennyson is alternating hexameter with pentameter: the Elegiac Couplet, most famously rendered into English in Coleridge’s "In the Hexameter rises the fountain’s silvery column, / In the pentameter aye falling in melody back." All three of the "In Quantity" poems in Tennyson’s "Enoch Arden, and Other Poems" are worth examining: "On Translations of Homer," "Milton: Alcaics," and "Hendecasyllabics.")
The trouble is, as "Evangeline" shows, pure accentual representation quickly seems to turn sing-songy, or even to become children’s counting rhymes—a fact A.A. Milne openly embraced in the hilarious hexameters of his "Disobedience":
James James / Morrison Morrison / Weatherby George Dupree
Took great / Care of his Mother, / Though he was only three.
A surprising successful English hexameter is Charles Kingsley’s "Andromeda":
Over the sea, past Crete, on the Syrian shore to the southward,
Dwells in the well-tilled lowland a dark-haired Aethiop people,
Skilful with needle and loom, and the arts of the dyer and carver,
Skilful, but feeble of heart; for they know not the lords of Olympus,
Lovers of men; neither broad-browed Zeus, not Pallas Athene,
Teacher of wisdom to heroes, bestower of might in the battle;
Share not the cunning of Hermes, nor list to the songs of Apollo,
Fearing the stars of the sky, and the roll of the blue salt water.
But one of the things that helps this along are the substitutions and the general lining-up of long vowels in the accentually stressed positions. English poetry has attempted purely quantitative verse. There are, it is said, 16th-century examples (though I don’t know them; does anyone here?), and William Cowper’s "Lines Written During a Period of Insanity" has moments where the stress seems ignored as long as the quantity is right:
Hatred and vengeance, my eternal portion,
Scarce can endure delay of execution,
Wait with impatient readiness to seize my
Soul in a moment.
There was a Victorian craze for this, as well—all that school-boy learning had to issue in something—with Spedding and Tennyson producing quantitative verse. Some modern poetry looks, if not to Latin poetic forms, still to an English recreation of Latin poetic sounds. Basil Bunting is often cited as an example, in "At Briggflatts Meetinghouse," for instance:
Stones indeed sift to sand, oak
blends with saint's bones.
Yet for a little longer here
stone and oak shelter
silence while we ask nothing
but silence. Look how clouds dance
under the wind's wing, and leaves
delight in transience.
And I have always thought there was some quantitative feeling to W.H. Auden’s "In Praise Of Limestone":
The blessed will not care what angle they are regarded from,
Having nothing to hide. Dear, I know nothing of
Either, but when I try to imagine a faultless love
Or the life to come, what I hear is the murmur
Of underground streams, what I see is a limestone landscape.
There are differences, of course, between Greek and Latin uses of poetic lines and forms. Horace’s fixing of the caesura and metrical substitutions, for instance, generally made Latin sapphics more stately and sonorous than the Greek, which, curiously, makes the rare example of successful accentual sapphics in English closer to the sprightlier Greek than to the Latin.
Perhaps, for rendering a Latin feeling, then, a combination of quantitative and accentual would work best. Anyway, I thought we might throw the discussion up here to see what others thought, concentrating for now on sapphics, with everybody’s favorites posted.
[This message has been edited by Joseph Bottum (edited July 06, 2004).]
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