[This entry is cross posted at ordinary-times.com]

Happy 250. I don’t guess many need POETS Day encouragement, but Piss Off Early, Tomorrow’s the Semiquincentennial. How blessed are we as a nation that this falls on a weekend?

They pledged their Lives, their Fortunes, and their sacred Honor.

***

Thomas Campion (1567-1620) tried to squish English poetry into Hellenic meter. He wasn’t alone. Spenser and Sir Philip Sidney eyed the same goal. The latter two gave it up for iambic pentameter. Campion beat onward in a doomed campaign.

Classical rhythms don’t work in English. Listen to a romance language speaker. They inherited cadence from the Romans, and they from the Greeks. Syllable to syllable, they’re even. For all the stereotypes about spicy Spaniards and hot Latin lovers, their pitch and speed may vary from sentence to sentence and god knows there are arms in motion, but the actual speech is flat, practically monotone. They have their accentual moments, but those are not the rule. They stretch syllables. There are drawn out and compact vowels, but not much happening on the Y axis. English is bouncy.

Homer’s dactylic hexameter can be mirrored by an English dactylic hexameter, but Robert Fitzgerald, he of the great Iliad and Odyssey translations, found it constraining. In order to match the feel of Ancient Greek verse he took liberties. Homer’s dactylic foot was a long syllable followed by two shorts. The English dactyl is composed of a stress followed by two unstressed. It mirrors the Greek in form but the substitution is imperfect. Fitzgerald opted for some dactyls and some iambs and aimed for five or six stresses per line.

Arthur Golding rendered Ovid’s quantitative verse in iambic pentameter. Rolfe Humphries did the same. Both threw in feminine endings: that last unstressed syllable making pentameter plus one. You’d think it harder to match a foreign meter when translating someone else’s work than when composing an original. Golding and Humphries were bound by an existing concept and narrative. If the original work was about butterflies in the grass, they couldn’t change it to yaks in the grass because yaks scanned better. You could do that if there was no parent text. Spenser probably thought that way, as probably did Sidney. Both threw in the towel and went Chaucer’s iambic way. Campion soldiered on, but his poems presented as quantitative still fall into English stressed verse. He claimed otherwise, but reading aloud shows them prone to the ups and downs of our Germanic influence.

Homer’s Epic Hexameter, also called or Heroic Hexameter, isn’t the only Classical meter. Catullus and Sappho often wrote in Phalaecian hendecasyllable. This is an eleven syllable line which, using “–” for long and “u” for short, follows the pattern – – – u u – u – u – u. The English version substitutes stressed for long and unstressed for short, in line with the treatment Epic received. Our poets consider hendecasyllable vexing; technically difficult.

Attempts at bending hendecasyllablic works to English yoke are less known than translations of the great epics of Greek and Roman literature, but pretty much everything is less known than the Iliad and the Aeneid. They do exist. One by Alfred Lord Tennyson, in what poet Peter Kline called a “virtuosic show-off and a rebuke of ‘indolent reviewers,’” may be the most famous offering.

Hendecasyllabics
Alfred, Lord Tennyson (1809-1892)

O you chorus of indolent reviewers,
Irresponsible, indolent reviewers,
Look, I come to the test, a tiny poem
All composed in a metre of Catullus,
All in quantity, careful of my motion,
Like the skater on ice that hardly bears him,
Lest I fall unawares before the people,
Waking laughter in indolent reviewers.
Should I flounder awhile without a tumble
Thro’ this metrification of Catullus,
They should speak to me not without a welcome,
All that chorus of indolent reviewers.
Hard, hard, hard it is, only not to tumble,
So fantastical is the dainty meter.
Wherefore slight me not wholly, nor believe me
Too presumptuous, indolent reviewers.
O blatant Magazines, regard me rather—
Since I blush to belaud myself a moment—
As some rare little rose, a piece of inmost
Horticultural art, or half-coquette-like
Maiden, not to be greeted unbenignly.

Mapping the line brings a question. Hendecasyllable, as described by the Poetry Foundation: “typically a spondee or trochee, a choriamb, and two iambs, the second of which has an additional syllable at the end.” Using the previous symbols but with “–“ as stressed and “u” as unstressed, that means either [– –] or [– u] then [– u u –], [u –], [u –], and a stand alone [u]. This highlights a problem I have with diagramming, for lack of a better word, in metric feet. Why is there a choriamb?

I don’t mean “Why is there a choriamb in this line?” I mean “Why does a choriamb exist?” Instead of a single foot of [– u u –], why don’t we have two feet: a trochee [– u] and an iamb [u –]. It’s not uncommon for trochees to precede iambs. It’s an accepted practice to begin a traditional iambic pentameter sonnet with a trochee as the first foot and then complete the line with four iambs. No one—no one I’ve read—says such a sonnet begins with a choriamb followed by three iambic feet for a tetrameter line in an otherwise pentameter poem.

Hendecasyllablic reflects a syllable count, so foot number doesn’t matter in the above. But in a hypothetical, when one person says a line begins with an amphibranch [u – u] followed by an iamb [u –] another will correct by calling it an iamb [u –] followed by and anapest [u u –]. It’s u – u u – no matter how you parse it. This shouldn’t matter, but I find myself trying to divine patterns where there are none and see one person being dismissive of another’s scan when both are right. It should be a loose diagnostic, but there’s no reason to introduce unecessaries that confuse. When fringe subjectivity is already baked in, a chimera like the choriamb muddies. Ditch it. The metric foot system works; it just needs tidying. Forgive the frustrated diversion.

Towards that tidiness I was very happy on finding a description of Phalaecian hendecasyllable as an eleven syllable line with stresses on syllables 1, 4, 6, 8, and 10. It’s a simpler and more elegant explanation that doesn’t glue feet together for no reason. I was less happy when I realized that the Poetry Foundation stressed syllables 2 and 3 and left 4 unstressed. The very delicate and technically demanding was looking to be pretty flexible. That there are variations and disagreements about early stresses doesn’t make it less problematic; so I’m told and tempted to believe given the esteem in which successful examples in English are given. But, still.

It gets lost in his grandfatherly plain spokenness, but Robert Frost was a formidable craftsman. He played on sentiment and that’s what the public latched onto, but he was a student and innovator of form. Below is his go at hendecasyllablic poetry. It’s superficially a poem about searching for truth, but he knew his Tennyson. The first line’s reference to “Others” who “taunt” echos Tennyson’s indolent reviewers. He’s doing a little showing off himself.

For Once, Then, Something
Robert Frost (1874-1963)

Others taunt me with having knelt at well-curbs
Always wrong to the light, so never seeing
Deeper down in the well than where the water
Gives me back in a shining surface picture
Me myself in the summer heaven godlike
Looking out of a wreath of fern and cloud puffs.
Once, when trying with chin against a well-curb,
I discerned, as I thought, beyond the picture,
Through the picture, a something white, uncertain,
Something more of the depths—and then I lost it.
Water came to rebuke the too clear water.
One drop fell from a fern, and lo, a ripple
Shook whatever it was lay there at bottom,
Blurred it, blotted it out. What was that whiteness?
Truth? A pebble of quartz? For once, then, something.

In English, we naturally speak in iambs. We say “the HOUSE” with stress on the second syllable. We speak in trochee, too, though not as often. “THE house” stresses the first syllable and implies specificity. Poets want to guide us through a rhythm, but we’re habitual. Start us on iambs and we’ll carry on. Start us on trochees, and we may pause, revert to iambs, or carry on. In either case, once you’re in the middle of a rise and fall accentually we’re lost in troughs and crests and don’t care where we started so long as we keep on as we’re going. The hecadecasyllabic poet has to guide the reader through multiple changes in the roll of the language while making it seem natural.

It’s easy to fall into trochees all the way or try and “cheat” by starting with a preposition to take stress over its two word subject. Frost avoids pitfalls and easy ways all the while taunting his critics who say he has no depth. It’s a poem about looking deeper for something that may or may not be there. “Maybe you’re right, maybe you missed it, maybe you’re not as worldly as you think you are,” he implies and ends the poem on a relativistic note about truth. There’s no doubting his other message.

It’s an attractive pattern because many great works, continental as well as classical, are written in the style.

This is the meter of Dante’s Divine Comedy, usually translated in English as blank verse or iambic pentameter with or without terza rima. It’s the meter of Petrarch. Like Dante, his work is almost exclusively iambic pentameter in English. The other Dante, Dante Gabrielle Rossetti, similarly treated the hendecasyllables of Calvalcanti. Pound rendered Cavalcanti in free verse, maybe governed by the same philosophy as obtained when he translated Li Bai from Chinese: that where there is no workable equivalent, re-imagine the work in available terms as best match the spirit of the original. Pound did try his hand at the classic pattern in his own Canzones, loosely blending free verse and hendecasyllabic in a way makes me think I should have written loosely instead. Over and over, when presented with hendecasyllablic, our poets demur.

My favorite English example comes from Swinburne. There’s no hint beyond the title that he’s showing off though I think his is more perfect than either of the above. Read aloud, it works both inflected and in a wistful monotone. It shouldn’t surprise. Swinburne was known as a masochist. I imagine meticulous suffering over a difficult poetic task was right up his alley.

Hendecasyllabics
Algernon Charles Swinburne (1837-1909)

In the month of the long decline of roses
I, beholding the summer dead before me,
Set my face to the sea and journeyed silent,
Gazing eagerly where above the sea-mark
Flame as fierce as the fervid eyes of lions
Half divided the eyelids of the sunset;
Till I heard as it were a noise of waters
Moving tremulous under feet of angels
Multitudinous, out of all the heavens;
Knew the fluttering wind, the fluttered foliage,
Shaken fitfully, full of sound and shadow;
And saw, trodden upon by noiseless angels,
Long mysterious reaches fed with moonlight,
Sweet sad straits in a soft subsiding channel,
Blown about by the lips of winds I knew not,
Winds not born in the north nor any quarter,
Winds not warm with the south nor any sunshine;
Heard between them a voice of exultation,
“Lo, the summer is dead, the sun is faded,
Even like as a leaf the year is withered,
All the fruits of the day from all her branches
Gathered, neither is any left to gather.
All the flowers are dead, the tender blossoms,
All are taken away; the season wasted,
Like an ember among the fallen ashes.
Now with light of the winter days, with moonlight,
Light of snow, and the bitter light of hoarfrost,
We bring flowers that fade not after autumn,
Pale white chaplets and crowns of latter seasons,
Fair false leaves (but the summer leaves were falser),
Woven under the eyes of stars and planets
When low light was upon the windy reaches
Where the flower of foam was blown, a lily
Dropt among the sonorous fruitless furrows
And green fields of the sea that make no pasture:
Since the winter begins, the weeping winter,
All whose flowers are tears, and round his temples
Iron blossom of frost is bound for ever.”