Chapter XIII: Part TWO: I. Four-Stress Verse (6)

This ode of Tennyson's is one of the few poems in which he gave himself such liberty of form (compare some of the irregular measures of _Maud_). It shows his usual skill in the adaptation of metrical effects to the purposes of description. Dr. Henry Van Dyke has suggested that the varying--almost lawless--movements of the opening lines are designed to suggest the surging of the crowd through the streets of London, before the entrance into the cathedral for the funeral.

Bow down, dear Land, for thou hast found release!
Thy God, in these distempered days,
Hath taught thee the sure wisdom of His ways,
And through thine enemies hath wrought thy peace!
Bow down in prayer and praise!
No poorest in thy borders but may now
Lift to the juster skies a man's enfranchised brow.
O Beautiful! my Country! ours once more,
Smoothing thy gold of war-dishevelled hair
O'er such sweet brows as never other wore,
And letting thy set lips,
Freed from wrath's pale eclipse,
The rosy edges of their smile lay bare,
What words divine of lover or of poet
Could tell our love and make thee know it,
Among the Nations bright beyond compare?
What were our lives without thee?
What all our lives to save thee?
We reck not what we gave thee;
We will not dare to doubt thee.
But ask whatever else, and we will dare!

(LOWELL: _Harvard Commemoration Ode_, strophe xii. 1865.)

This is undoubtedly the finest of odes by American poets, and remains one of the glories of new-world poetry. Its irregular measures were designed by Mr. Lowell to fit the poem for public reading (see his letter to Mr. Gosse on the subject, quoted in the Appendix to Gosse's _Seventeenth Century Studies_).

In the Year of the great Crime,
When the false English nobles and their Jew,
By God demented, slew
The Trust they stood thrice pledged to keep from wrong,
One said, Take up thy Song,
That breathes the mild and almost mythic time
Of England's prime!
But I, Ah, me,
The freedom of the few
That, in our free Land, were indeed the free,
Can song renew?
Ill singing 'tis with blotting prison-bars,
How high soe'er, betwixt us and the stars;
Ill singing 'tis when there are none to hear;
And days are near
When England shall forget
The fading glow which, for a little while,
Illumes her yet,
The lovely smile
That grows so faint and wan,
Her people shouting in her dying ear:
Are not jays twain worth two of any swan!
Harsh words and brief asks the dishonor'd Year.

(COVENTRY PATMORE: Ode ix. Printed 1868.)

Mr. Patmore's use of the irregular ode forms is of particular interest. He made a special study of the form, and applied it more widely than is commonly done. His first odes were printed (not published) in 1868, and from one of these the present specimen is taken. Later (1877), in connection with _The Unknown Eros_, he set forth his view of the ode form, treating it not as lawless but as governed by laws of its own. "Nearly all English metres," he said, "owe their existence as metres to 'catalexis,' or pause, for the time of one or more feet, and, as a rule, the position and amount of catalexis, are fixed. But the verse in which this volume is written is catalectic _par excellence_, employing the pause (as it does the rhyme) with freedom only limited by the exigencies of poetic passion. From the time of Drummond of Hawthornden to our own, some of the noblest flights of English poetry have been taken on the wings of this verse; but with ordinary readers it has been more or less discredited by the far greater number of abortive efforts, on the part sometimes of considerable poets, to adapt it to purposes with which it has no expressional correspondence; or to vary it by rhythmical movements which are destructive of its character. Some persons, unlearned in the subject of this metre, have objected to this kind of verse that it is 'lawless.' But it has its laws as truly as any other. In its highest order, the lyric or 'ode,' it is a tetrameter, the line having the time of eight iambics. When it descends to narrative, or the expression of a less exalted strain of thought, it becomes a trimeter, having the time of six iambics, or even a dimeter, with the time of four; and it is allowable to vary the tetrameter 'ode' by the occasional introduction of passages in either or both of these inferior measures, but not, I think, by the use of any other. The license to rhyme at indefinite intervals is counterbalanced ... by unusual frequency in the recurrence of the same rhyme." (From Patmore's Prefatory Note to _The Unknown Eros_; quoted by William Sharp, in the Introduction to _Great Odes_, p. xxxii.)[40]

On the shores of a Continent cast,
She won the inviolate soil
By loss of heirdom of all the Past,
And faith in the royal right of Toil!
She planted homes on the savage sod:
Into the wilderness lone
She walked with fearless feet,
In her hand the divining-rod,
Till the veins of the mountains beat
With fire of metal and force of stone!
She set the speed of the river-head
To turn the mills of her bread;
She drove her ploughshare deep
Through the prairie's thousand-centuried sleep.
To the South, and West, and North,
She called Pathfinder forth,
Her faithful and sole companion
Where the flushed Sierra, snow-starred,
Her way to the sunset barred,
And the nameless rivers in thunder and foam
Channeled the terrible canyon!
Nor paused, till her uttermost home
Was built, in the smile of a softer sky
And the glory of beauty yet to be,
Where the haunted waves of Asia die
On the strand of the world-wide sea.

(BAYARD TAYLOR: _National Ode_, strophe iii. 1876.)

Soon shall the Cape Ann children shout in glee,
Spying the arbutus, spring's dear recluse;
Hill lads at dawn shall hearken the wild goose
Go honking northward over Tennessee;
West from Oswego to Sault Sainte-Marie,
And on to where the Pictured Rocks are hung,
And yonder where, gigantic, willful, young,
Chicago sitteth at the northwest gates,
With restless violent hands and casual tongue
Moulding her mighty fates,
The Lakes shall robe them in ethereal sheen;
And like a larger sea, the vital green
Of springing wheat shall vastly be outflung
Over Dakota and the prairie states.
By desert people immemorial
On Arizonan mesas shall be done
Dim rites unto the thunder and the sun;
Nor shall the primal gods lack sacrifice
More splendid, when the white Sierras call
Unto the Rockies straightway to arise
And dance before the unveiled ark of the year,
Sounding their windy cedars as for shawms,
Unrolling rivers clear
For flutter of broad phylacteries;
While Shasta signals to Alaskan seas
That watch old sluggish glaciers downward creep
To fling their icebergs thundering from the steep,
And Mariposa through the purple calms
Gazes at far Hawaii crowned with palms
Where East and West are met,--
A rich seal on the ocean's bosom set
To say that East and West are twain,
With different loss and gain:
The Lord hath sundered them; let them be sundered yet....

... Ah no!
We have not fallen so,
We are our fathers' sons: let those who lead us know!
'Twas only yesterday sick Cuba's cry
Came up the tropic wind, 'Now help us, for we die!'
Then Alabama heard,
And rising, pale, to Maine and Idaho
Shouted a burning word.
Proud state with proud impassioned state conferred,
And at the lifting of a hand sprang forth,
East, west, and south, and north,
Beautiful armies. Oh, by the sweet blood and young,
Shed on the awful hill slope at San Juan,
By the unforgotten names of eager boys
Who might have tasted girls' love and been stung
With the old mystic joys
And starry griefs, now the spring nights come on,
But that the heart of youth is generous,--
We charge you, ye who lead us,
Breathe on their chivalry no hint of stain!
Turn not their new-world victories to gain!
One least leaf plucked for chaffer from the bays
Of their dear praise,
One jot of their pure conquest put to hire,
The implacable republic will require.

(WILLIAM VAUGHN MOODY: _An Ode in Time of Hesitation_, strophes iii. and ix. 1900.)

C.--CHORAL

Different from either of the two classes of odes already represented are the irregular choral measures used by a few English poets in translation or imitation of the odes of the Greek drama.

_Chorus._

O dearly bought revenge, yet glorious!
Living or dying thou hast fulfilled
The work for which thou wast foretold
To Israel, and now liest victorious
Among thy slain self-killed;
Not willingly, but tangled in the fold
Of dire Necessity, whose law in death conjoined
Thee with thy slaughtered foes, in number more
Than all thy life had slain before.

_Semi-chorus._

While their hearts were jocund and sublime,
Drunk with idolatry, drunk with wine
And fat regorged of bulls and goats,
Chaunting their idol, and preferring
Before our living Dread, who dwells
In Silo, his bright sanctuary,
Among them he a spirit of phrenzy sent,
Who hurt their minds,
And urged them on with mad desire
To call in haste for their destroyer.
They, only set on sport and play,
Unweetingly importuned
Their own destruction to come speedy upon them.
So fond are mortal men,
Fallen into wrath divine,
As their own ruin on themselves to invite,
Insensate left, or to sense reprobate,
And with blindness internal struck.

_Semi-chorus._

But he, though blind of sight,
Despised, and thought extinguished quite,
With inward eyes illuminated,
His fiery virtue roused
From under ashes into sudden flame,
And as an evening dragon came,
Assailant on the perched roosts
And nests in order ranged
Of tame villatic fowl, but as an eagle
His cloudless thunder bolted on their heads.
So Virtue, given for lost,
Depressed and overthrown, as seemed,
Like that self-begotten bird
In the Arabian woods embost,
That no second knows nor third,
And lay erewhile a holocaust,
From out her ashy womb now teemed,
Revives, reflourishes, then vigorous most
When most unactive deemed;
And, though her body die, her fame survives,
A secular bird, ages of lives.

(MILTON: _Samson Agonistes_, ll. 1660-1707. 1671.)

Of this passage Mr. Swinburne says: "It is hard to realize and hopeless to reproduce the musical force of classic metres so recondite and exquisite as the choral parts of a Greek play. Even Milton could not; though with his godlike instinct and his godlike might of hand he made a kind of strange and enormous harmony by intermixture of assonance and rhyme with irregular blank verse, as in that last Titanic chorus of Samson which utters over the fallen Philistines the trumpet-blast and thunder of its triumphs." (_Essays and Studies_, pp. 162, 163.)

The lyre's voice is lovely everywhere;
In the court of gods, in the city of men,
And in the lonely rock-strewn mountain-glen,
In the still mountain air.
Only to Typho it sounds hatefully,--
To Typho only, the rebel o'erthrown,
Through whose heart Etna drives her roots of stone,
To embed them in the sea.
Wherefore dost thou groan so loud?
Wherefore do thy nostrils flash,
Through the dark night, suddenly,
Typho, such red jets of flame?
Is thy tortured heart still proud?
Is thy fire-scathed arm still rash?
Still alert thy stone-crushed frame?
Doth thy fierce soul still deplore
Thine ancient rout by the Cilician hills,
And that curst treachery on the Mount of Gore?
Do thy bloodshot eyes still weep
The fight which crowned thine ills,
Thy last mischance on this Sicilian deep?
Hast thou sworn, in thy sad lair,
Where erst the strong sea-currents sucked thee down,
Never to cease to writhe, and try to rest,
Letting the sea-stream wander through thy hair?
That thy groans, like thunder prest,
Begin to roll, and almost drown
The sweet notes whose lulling spell
Gods and the race of mortals love so well,
When through thy caves thou hearest music swell?

But an awful pleasure bland
Spreading o'er the Thunderer's face,
When the sound climbs near his seat,
The Olympian council sees;
As he lets his lax right hand,
Which the lightnings doth embrace,
Sink upon his mighty knees.
And the eagle, at the beck
Of the appeasing, gracious harmony,
Droops all his sheeny, brown, deep-feathered neck,
Nestling nearer to Jove's feet;
While o'er his sovran eye
The curtains of the blue films slowly meet.
And the white Olympus-peaks
Rosily brighten, and the soothed gods smile
At one another from their golden chairs,
And no one round the charmed circle speaks.
Only the loved Hebe bears
The cup about, whose draughts beguile
Pain and care, with a dark store
Of fresh-pulled violets wreathed and nodding o'er;
And her flushed feet glow on the marble floor.

(MATTHEW ARNOLD: _Empedocles on Etna_, Act II. Song of Callicles. 1853.)

Wherefore to me, this fear--
Groundedly stationed here
Fronting my heart, the portent-watcher--flits she?
Wherefore should prophet-play
The uncalled and unpaid lay,
Nor--having spat forth fear, like bad dreams--sits she
On the mind's throne beloved--well-suasive Boldness?
For time, since, by a throw of all the hands,
The boat's stern-cables touched the sands,
Has passed from youth to oldness,--
When under Ilion rushed the ship-borne bands.

And from my eyes I learn--
Being myself my witness--their return.
Yet, all the same, without a lyre, my soul,
Itself its teacher too, chants from within
Erinus' dirge, not having now the whole
Of Hope's dear boldness: nor my inwards sin--
The heart that's rolled in whirls against the mind
Justly presageful of a fate behind.
But I pray--things false, from my hope, may fall
Into the fate that's not-fulfilled-at-all!

Especially at least, of health that's great
The term's insatiable: for, its weight
--A neighbor, with a common wall between--
Ever will sickness lean;
And destiny, her course pursuing straight,
Has struck man's ship against a reef unseen.
Now, when a portion, rather than the treasure
Fear casts from sling, with peril in right measure,
It has not sunk--the universal freight,
(With misery freighted over-full,)
Nor has fear whelmed the hull.
Then too the gift of Zeus,
Two-handedly profuse,
Even from the furrows' yield for yearly use
Has done away with famine, the disease;
But blood of man to earth once falling,--deadly, black,--
In times ere these,--
Who may, by singing spells, call back?
Zeus had not else stopped one who rightly knew
The way to bring the dead again.
But, did not an appointed Fate constrain
The Fate from gods, to bear no more than due,
My heart, outstripping what tongue utters,
Would have all out: which now, in darkness, mutters
Moodily grieved, nor ever hopes to find
How she a word in season may unwind
From out the enkindling mind.

(BROWNING: _Agamemnon_; chorus. 1877.)

Of the same general metrical character as the irregular odes are certain poems (like some of Patmore's) with no regularly organized structure and varying lengths of line. See, for example, Milton's verses _At a Solemn Music_ and _On Time_; Swinburne's _Thalassius_ and _On the Cliffs_; and William Morris's _On a fair Spring Morning_. Compare, also, the effect of the irregular strophic forms in Southey's _Curse of Kehama_, Shelley's _Queen Mab_, and the like.[41]

FOOTNOTES:

[39] On English ode-forms, see the introductions to Mr. Gosse's _English Odes_ and Mr. William Sharp's _Great Odes_; also Schipper, vol. ii. p. 792.

[40] Mr. Patmore has used the same sort of verse for narrative poetry, with unusual daring but also with unusual success. For an example see his _Amelia_, included in the _Golden Treasury_, Second Series. The following passage exhibits the metrical method of the poem at its best:

"And so we went alone By walls o'er which the lilac's numerous plume Shook down perfume; Trim plots close blown With daisies, in conspicuous myriads seen, Engross'd each one With single ardor for her spouse, the sun; Garths in their glad array Of white and ruddy branch, auroral, gay, With azure chill the maiden flower between; Meadows of fervid green, With sometime sudden prospect of untold Cowslips, like chance-found gold; And broadcast buttercups at joyful gaze, Rending the air with praise, Like the six-hundred-thousand-voiced shout Of Jacob camp'd in Midian put to rout; Then through the Park, Where Spring to livelier gloom Quickened the cedars dark, And, 'gainst the clear sky cold, Which shone afar Crowded with sunny alps oracular, Great chestnuts raised themselves abroad like cliffs of bloom."

[41] The easy abuse of these irregular measures is amusingly parodied by Mr. Owen Seaman, in a burlesque of an ode of Mr. Le Gallienne's:

"Is this the Seine? And am I altogether wrong About the brain, Dreaming I hear the British tongue? Dear Heaven! what a rhyme! And yet 'tis all as good As some that I have fashioned in my time, Like _bud_ and _wood_; And on the other hand you couldn't have a more precise or neater Metre."

(_The Battle of the Bays_, p. 37.)

VI. IMITATIONS OF CLASSICAL METRES

While English verse is generally admitted to be based on a different system from that of Greek and Latin poetry (the element of accent obscuring that of quantity in English prosody, as the element of quantity obscures that of accent in classical prosody), there have been repeated attempts to introduce the more familiar classical measures into English. Most of these attempts have been academic and have attracted the attention only of critics and scholars; a few have interested the reading public.

Imitations of classical verse in English may conveniently be divided into two classes: imitations of lyrical measures, and imitations of the dactylic hexameter. The latter group is of course much the larger, especially in modern poetry. It will appear that the classical measures might also be divided into two groups according to another distinction: those attempting to observe the quantitative prosody of the original language, and those in which the original measure is transmuted into frankly accentual verse.

The original impulse toward this classical or pseudo-classical
verse was a product of the Renaissance, when all forms of art not
based on Greek and Latin models were suspected. Rime, not being
found in the poetry of the classical languages, was treated as a
product of the dark ages,--the invention of "Goths and Huns." See
Roger Ascham's _Schoolmaster_ (1570) for the most characteristic
representative of this phase of thought in England. The new forms
of verse were, naturally enough, first tried in Italy. Schipper
traces the beginning of the movement to Alberti (1404-1484). A
century later Trissino wrote his _Sophonisbe_ and _Italia Liberata_
in unrimed verse, in professed imitation of Homer, and was looked
upon as the inventor of _versi sciolti_, that is, verses "freed"
from rime (compare the remarks of Milton in the prefatory note to
_Paradise Lost_). In 1539 Claudio Tolomei wrote _Versi e Regole
della Poesia Nuova_, a systematic attempt to introduce the
classical versification. He also wrote hexameters and sapphics. In
France there were similar efforts in the sixteenth century. Mousset
translated Homer into hexameters in 1530, and A. de Baïf, a member
of the "Pleiade" (1532-1589), devised some French hexameters which
he called _vers baïfins_. The English experiments were worked out
independently, and yet under the same neo-classical influences. On
this subject, see Schipper, vol. ii. pp. 2-12, 439-464.

A.--LYRICAL MEASURES

Reason, tell me thy mind, if here be reason
In this strange violence, to make resistance
Where sweet graces erect the stately banner
Of Virtue's regiment, shining in harness
Of Fortune's diadems, by Beauty mustered:
Say, then, Reason, I say, what is thy counsel?

(SIR PHILIP SIDNEY: _Phaleuciakes_, from the _Arcadia_, ab. 1580.)

This is the measure commonly called "Phalæcian." Compare Tennyson's imitation of it, in his Hendecasyllabics quoted below.

O sweet woods, the delight of solitariness!
O how much I do like your solitariness!
Where man's mind hath a freed consideration
Of goodness to receive lovely direction.
Where senses do behold the order of heavenly host,
And wise thoughts do behold what the Creator is.

(SIR PHILIP SIDNEY: _Asclepiadics_, from the _Arcadia_. ab. 1580.)

This is the measure now called "Lesser Asclepiadean."

My Muse, what ails this ardor
To blaze my only secrets?
Alas, it is no glory
To sing my own decay'd state.
Alas, it is no comfort
To speak without an answer;
Alas, it is no wisdom
To show the wound without cure.

(SIR PHILIP SIDNEY: _Anacreontics_, from the _Arcadia_. ab. 1580.)

Sidney was a member of the little group of classical students who called themselves the "Areopagus," and who were interested in introducing classical measures into English verse. Others of the group were Gabriel Harvey and Edmund Spenser, from whose correspondence most of our information regarding the movement is derived. (See the letters in Grosart's edition of Harvey's Works, vol. i. pp. 7-9, 20-24, 35-37, 75-76, 99-107.) Spenser's only known efforts in the same direction are also preserved in this correspondence; a poem in twenty-one iambic trimeters, and this "tetrasticon":--

"See yee the blindfoulded pretie god, that feathered archer,
Of lovers miseries which maketh his bloodie game?
Wote ye why his moother with a veale hath coovered his face?
Trust me, least he my loove happely chaunce to beholde."

It would seem that Spenser was attempting, more conscientiously than Sidney did, to follow the classical rules of quantity in making his verses; hence they are more difficult to read according to English rhythm. Sidney's experiments in the classical versification are perhaps the most successful, to modern taste, of all those made in the Elizabethan period. Among the other songs in the _Arcadia_ will be found sapphics and hexameters.

See especially Spenser's letter of April, 1580, and Harvey's reply
(_op. cit._, vol. i. pp. 35, 99), for notable passages indicating
the seriousness with which the members of the "Areopagus" were
trying to orm English verse so as to bring it under the rules of
classical prosody. The relations of quantity and accent were not
understood, as indeed they may be said still not to be understood
for the English language. Spenser suggests, in a frequently quoted
passage, that in the word _carpenter_ the middle syllable is "short
in speech, when it shall be read long in verse,"--that is, because
the vowel is followed by two consonants; hence it "seemeth like a
lame gosling that draweth one legge after her.... But it is to be
wonne with custome, and rough words must be subdued with use."
Harvey resented the idea that the common pronunciation of words
could be departed from in order to conform them to arbitrary
metrical rules, and in his reply said: "You shall never have my
subscription or consent ... to make your Carp[=e]nter our
Carp[)e]nter, an inche longer or bigger, than God and his Englishe
people have made him.... Else never heard I any that durst presume
so much over the Englishe ... as to alter the quantitie of any one
sillable, otherwise than oure common speache and generall receyved
custome woulde beare them oute." But while all English verse must
be consistent with "the vulgare and naturall mother prosodye,"
Harvey does not despair of finding a system that shall be at the
same time "countervaileable to the best tongues" in making possible
quantitative verse. The whole passage is well worth reading. The
best account of the movement toward classical versification in the
days of the "Areopagus" will be found in Professor Schelling's
_Poetic and Verse Criticism in the Reign of Elizabeth_
(Publications of the University of Pennsylvania).

O ye Nymphes most fine who resort to this brooke,
For to bathe there your pretty breasts at all times:
Leave the watrish bowres, hyther and to me come at my request nowe.

And ye Virgins trymme who resort to Parnass,
Whence the learned well Helicon beginneth:
Helpe to blase her worthy deserts, that all els mounteth above farre.

(WILLIAM WEBBE: Sapphic Verse, in _A Discourse of English Poetrie_. 1586.)

Webbe was another of those who believed "that if the true kind of versifying in immitation of Greekes and Latines, had been practised in the English tongue, ... it would long ere this have aspyred to as full perfection, as in anie other tongue whatsoever." So he added to his _Discourse_ (see Arber Reprint, pp. 67-84) a discussion of the principles of quantitative prosody, and some specimens of what might be done by way of experiment.[42] The Sapphics from which the present specimen is taken are a paraphrase of Spenser's praise of Elizabeth in the fourth eclogue of the _Shepherd's Calendar_. (For a specimen of Webbe's hexameters, see p. 334, below.)

Greatest in thy wars,
Greater in thy peace,
Dread Elizabeth;
Our muse only truth,
Figments cannot use,
Thy ritch name to deck
That itselfe adorns:
But should now this age
Let all poesye fayne,
Fayning poesy could
Nothing faine at all
Worthy halfe thy fame.

(THOMAS CAMPION: Iambic Dimeter, "an example Lyrical," in _Observations in the Art of English Poesie_. 1602.)

Rose-cheekt Lawra come
Sing thou smoothly with thy beawtie's
Silent musick, either other
Sweetely gracing.

Lovely formes do flowe
From concent devinely framed,
Heav'n is musick, and thy beawtie's
Birth is heavenly.

(THOMAS CAMPION: Trochaic Dimeter, _ib._)

The full title of Campion's work was: "Observations in the Art of English Poesie; wherein it is demonstratively proved, and by example confirmed, that the English toong will receive eight severall kinds of numbers, proper to it selfe, which are all in this booke set forth, and were never before this time by any man attempted." Campion, like other classical versifiers, condemned rime as a barbarity; but in imitating the classical measures he does not violate the normal English accent, so that his verses read smoothly in English rhythm. Curiously enough, he includes among his innovations an iambic measure which proves to be ordinary decasyllabic verse:

"Goe numbers boldly passe, stay not for ayde
Of shifting rime, that easie flatterer,
Whose witchcraft can the ruder eares beguile".

Professor Schelling exclaims: "Where could the musical Doctor have kept his ears all this time? to propose this measure thus innocently for the drama, when the English stage had been ringing with his 'licentiate iambics' for more than two decades!"

The second of the specimens quoted above Campion describes as a dimeter "whose first foote may either be a Sponde or Trochy: the two verses following are both of them Trochaical, and consist of foure feete, the first of either of them being a Spondee or Trochy, the other three only Trochyes. The fourth and last verse is made of two Trochyes. The number is voluble and fit to expresse any amorous conceit." (See also another of Campion's measures, in Part One, p. 27.)[43]

In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries few, if any, notable English poems were written in the classical measures. Goldsmith, in one of his essays (xviii, on Versification), maintained the possibility of reducing English words to the classical prosody, and said: "We have seen several late specimens of English hexameters and sapphics so happily composed that, by attaching them to the idea of ancient measure, we found them in all respects as melodious and agreeable to the ear as the works of Virgil and Anacreon, or Horace." But whose these were it seems to be impossible to say.

Needy knife-grinder! whither are you going?
Rough is the road, your wheel is out of order--
Bleak blows the blast;--your hat has got a hole in't,
So have your breeches!

Weary knife-grinder! little think the proud ones
Who in their coaches roll along the turnpike-
road, what hard work 'tis crying all day, "Knives and
Scissors to grind O!"

(CANNING and FRERE: _Sapphics; the Friend of Humanity and the Knife-Grinder_, in the _Anti-Jacobin_, November, 1797).

These "Sapphics" were a burlesque of some by Southey in similar stanzas, opening:

"Cold was the night wind, drifting fast the snow fell,
Wide were the downs and shelterless and naked,
When a poor wanderer struggled on her journey,
Weary and way-sore."

"In this poem," said the _Anti-Jacobin_, not unjustly, "the pathos of the matter is not a little relieved by the absurdity of the metre."

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 armories,
Tower, as the deep-domed empyrean
Rings to the roar of an angel onset.

(TENNYSON: _Milton; Alcaics._)

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 is it, only not to tumble,
So fantastical is the dainty metre.
Wherefore slight me not wholly, nor believe me
Too presumptuous, indolent reviewers.

(TENNYSON: _Hendecasyllabics._)

On the first of these stanzas of Tennyson, compare his stanzas to Maurice, and note, p. 77, above. With the hendecasyllabics, compare the "Phaleuciakes" of Sidney, p. 331, above, and "Hendecasyllabics" in Swinburne's _Poems and Ballads_.

Tennyson took no little interest in the relations of classical and English metres, and seems to have believed in the possibility of genuine English quantitative verse. He did not, however, regard it as of practical value, and treated his own experiments as trifles. In his Memoirs, written by his son, Tennyson is said to have observed that he knew the quantity of every English word except _scissors_, a mysterious saying which may be set beside Southey's declaration that _Egypt_ is the only spondee in the English language. His son also preserves an extemporaneous line composed by Tennyson to illustrate the observance of quantity "regardless of accent":

"All men alike hate slops, particularly gruel;"

and a sapphic stanza, also extemporized, quantitative but conforming to common accent:

"Faded ev'ry violet, all the roses;
Gone the glorious promise; and the victim,
Broken in this anger of Aphrodite,
Yields to the victor."

(_Memoir_, vol. ii. p. 231.)

God, on verdurous Helicon
Dweller, child of Urania,
Thou that draw'st to the man the fair
Maiden, O Hymenæus, O
Hymen, O Hymenæus!

(ROBINSON ELLIS: _Poems of Catullus_, LXI. 1871.)

Mr. Ellis's translations from Catullus are all "in the metres of the original," and are among the most interesting specimens of modern classical versifying. "Tennyson's Alcaics and Hendecasyllabics," he said in his Preface, "suggested to me the new principle on which I was to go to work. It was not sufficient to reproduce the ancient metres, unless the ancient quantity was reproduced also." Of special interest is the imitation of the "almost unapproachable" galliambic verse of the _Attis_ (pp. 49-53):

"When awoke the sun, the golden, that his eyes heaven-orient
Scann'd lustrous air, the rude seas, earth's massy solidity,
When he smote the shadowy twilight with his healthy team sublime,
Then arous'd was Attis; o'er him sleep hastily fled away
To Pasithea's arms immortal with a tremulous hovering."

As Mr. Ellis observes, the metre of Tennyson's _Boadicea_ was modelled on this of Catullus. Compare also Mr. George Meredith's _Phaëthon_, "attempted in the galliambic measure":

"At the coming up of Ph[oe]bus, the all-luminous charioteer,
Double-visaged stand the mountains in imperial multitudes,
And with shadows dappled, men sing to him, Hail, O Beneficent;
For they shudder chill, the earth-vales, at his clouding, shudder
to black."

--Saw the white implacable Aphrodite,
Saw the hair unbound and the feet unsandalled
Shine as fire of sunset on western waters;
Saw the reluctant

Feet, the straining plumes of the doves that drew her,
Looking always, looking with necks reverted,
Back to Lesbos, back to the hills whereunder
Shone Mitylene.

(SWINBURNE: _Sapphics_, in _Poems and Ballads_.)

Love, what ailed thee to leave life that was made lovely, we thought,
with love?
What sweet visions of sleep lured thee away, down from the light above?

What strange faces of dreams, voices that called, hands that were raised
to wave,
Lured or led thee, alas, out of the sun, down to the sunless grave?

(SWINBURNE: _Choriambics_, in _Poems and Ballads_, Second Series, 1878.)

Swinburne's imitations of classical measures are frankly accentual, with no effort to introduce fixed quantities into English.

B.--DACTYLIC HEXAMETER

Lady, reserved by the heavens to do pastors' company honor,
Joining your sweet voice to the rural Muse of a desert,
Here you fully do find this strange operation of love,
How to the woods Love runs, as well as rides to the palace,
Neither he bears reverence to a prince nor pity to beggar,
But (like a point in midst of a circle) is still of a nearness,
All to a lesson he draws, neither hills nor caves can avoid him.

(SIR PHILIP SIDNEY: _Dorus and Zelmane_, in the _Arcadia_. ab. 1580.)

Sidney was evidently trying to write genuinely quantitative hexameters. Thus "of love," in the third line, may be regarded as a quantitative spondee (the _o_ being followed by two consonants), although the _of_ would not naturally be stressed. In like manner it is very possible that "pallace" was spelled with two _l_'s in order to make the first syllable seem long.

Sidney's hexameters are the first in literary verse which have come down to us; but there must have been earlier efforts at least by the time of Ascham's _Schoolmaster_ (1570), which vigorously attacked "our rude beggerly ryming, brought first into Italie by Gothes and Hunnes, ... and at last receyved into England by men of excellent wit in deede, but of small learning, and less judgement in that behalfe." (Arber Reprint, p. 145.) One hexameter distich by a contemporary and friend of Ascham's, Master Watson of Cambridge, is handed down to us by Webbe, as being "common in the mouthes of all men":

"All travellers doo gladlie report great praise to Ulisses
For that he knewe manie mens maners, and saw many citties."

(_Discourse of English Poetrie_, p. 72.)

But the Queene in meane while with carks quandare deepe anguisht,
Her wound fed by Venus, with firebayt smoldred is hooked.
Thee wights doughtye manhood leagd with gentilytye nobil,
His woords fitlye placed, with his hevnly phisnomye pleasing,
March throgh her hert mustring, al in her brest deepelye she printeth.
Theese carcking cratchets her sleeping natural hynder.
Thee next day foloing Ph[oe]bus dyd clarifye brightlye
Thee world with luster, watrye shaads Aurora remooved,
When to her deere sister with woords haulf gyddye she raveth.
"Sister An, I merveyle, what dreams me terrefye napping,
What newcom travayler, what guest in my harborye lighted?
How brave he dooth court yt? what strength and coorrage he carryes?
I beleve yt certeyn (ne yet hold I yt vaynelye reported)
That fro the great linnadge of gods his pettegre shooteth."

(RICHARD STANYHURST: Vergil's _Æneid_, bk. iv. 1582.)

Stanyhurst's _Vergil_ is one of the curiosities of Elizabethan literature, not only from its verse-form but from its spelling and diction. The translator declares himself a disciple of Ascham, in his antipathy to rimed verse; "What Tom Towly is so simple," he asks, "that wyl not attempt too bee a _rithmoure_?" In an address to the Learned Reader he explains his system of English quantitative prosody. In 1593 Stanyhurst's hexameters were severely noticed in a passage by Thomas Nash directed primarily against the classical versifying of Gabriel Harvey. "The hexamiter verse," said Nash, "I graunt to be a gentleman of an auncient house (so is many an English begger), yet this clyme of ours he cannot thrive in; our speech is too craggy for him to set his plough in; hee goes twitching and hopping in our language, like a man running upon quagmiers, up the hill in one syllable and down the dale in another, retaining no part of that stately smooth gate which he vaunts himselfe with among the Greeks and Latins.... Master Stannyhurst (though otherwise learned) trod a foule lumbring boystrous wallowing measure, in his translation of Virgil." (Works of Nash, Grosart edition, vol. ii. pp. 237, 238.)

Stanyhurst was also ridiculed by Joseph Hall, in the Satires of his _Virgidemiarum_ (1597):

"Another scorns the home-spun thread of rhymes,
Match'd with the lofty feet of elder times:
Give me the numbred verse that Virgil sung,
And Virgil's self shall speak the English tongue:
Manhood and garboiles shall he chaunt with chaunged feet
And head-strong dactyls making music meet.
The nimble dactyl striving to out-go,
The drawling spondees pacing it below.
The lingring spondees, labouring to delay,
The breathless dactyls with a sudden stay.
Whoever saw a colt wanton and wild
Yok'd with a slow-foot ox on fallow field,
Can right areed how handsomely besets
Dull spondees with the English dactylets."

(CHALMERS'S _English Poets_, vol. v. p. 266.)

Compare the lines of Chapman, in his _Hymn to Cynthia_, where he says that

"sweet poesy
Will not be clad in her supremacy
With those strange garments (Rome's hexameters)
As she is English; but in right prefers
Our native robes."

See also, in Arber's edition of Stanyhurst in the _English Scholar's Library_, an account of another work in hexameters, published anonymously in 1599: the _First Booke of the Preservation of King Henry the VII_. This writer admired Stanyhurst's effort, but desired "him to refile" his verses into more polished English:

"If the Poet Stanihurst yet live and feedeth on ay-er,
I do request him (as one that wisheth a grace to the meter)
With wordes significant to refile and finely to polishe
Those fower _Æneis_, that he late translated in English."

In the same connection the writer tells us definitely what is to be hoped from the "trew kind of Hexametred and Pentametred verse." "First it will enrich our speach with good and significant wordes: Secondly it will bring a delight and pleasure to the skilfull Reader, when he seeth them formally compyled: And thirdly it will incourage and learne the good and godly Students, that affect Poetry, and are naturally enclyned thereunto, to make the like: Fourthly it will direct a trew Idioma, and will teach trew Orthography."[44]

Tityrus, happilie thou lyste tumbling under a beech tree,
All in a fine oate pipe these sweete songs lustilie chaunting:
We, poore soules goe to wracke, and from these coastes be remooved,
And fro our pastures sweete: thou Tityr, at ease in a shade plott
Makst thicke groves to resound with songes of brave Amarillis.

(WILLIAM WEBBE: Vergil's First Eclogue, in _A Discourse of English Poetrie_. 1586.)

Webbe prefaces his hexameters with a reference to those made by Gabriel Harvey, and says: "I for my part, so farre as those examples would leade me, and mine owne small skyll affoorde me, have blundered upon these fewe; whereinto I have translated the two first Æglogues of Virgill: because I thought no matter of my owne invention, nor any other of antiquitye more fitte for tryal of thys thyng, before there were some more speciall direction, which might leade to a lesse troublesome manner of wryting." (Arber Reprint, p. 72.)

Thou, who roll'st in the firmament, round as the shield of my fathers,
Whence is thy girdle of glory, O Sun! and thy light everlasting?
Forth thou comest in thy awful beauty; the stars at thy rising
Haste to their azure pavilions; the moon sinks pale in the waters;
But thou movest alone; who dareth to wander beside thee?
Oaks of the mountains decay, and the hard oak crumbles asunder;
Ocean shrinks and again grows; lost is the moon from the heavens;
Whilst thou ever remainest the same to rejoice in thy brightness.

(WILLIAM TAYLOR: Paraphrase of _Ossian's Hymn to the Sun_. 1796.)

When English hexameters were revived at the end of the eighteenth century, it was in good part under German influence. Bodmer, Klopstock, and Voss, followed later by Goethe, made the German hexameter popular; and William Taylor of Norwich, who in many ways helped to familiarize his countrymen with German literature, became interested in the form. In 1796, the year of Goethe's _Hermann und Dorothea_, he contributed to the _Monthly Magazine_ an article called "English Hexameters Exemplified," in which occurred the paraphrase from Ossian here quoted. Taylor pointed out that the hexameter of the Germans was purely accentual. They were "obliged, by the scarceness of long vowels and the rifeness of short syllables in their language, to tolerate the frequent substitution of trochees for spondees in their hexameter verse; and they scan, like other modern nations, by emphasis, not by position." (Quoted in J. W. Robberds's _Memoir of William Taylor of Norwich_, vol. i. pp. 157 ff.) Most later writers of English hexameters have followed the line here indicated, and have frankly abandoned the effort to represent the quantities of classical prosody.

Earth! thou mother of numberless children, the nurse and the mother,
Sister thou of the stars, and beloved by the Sun, the rejoicer!
Guardian and friend of the moon, O Earth, whom the comets forget not,
Yea, in the measureless distance wheel round and again they behold thee!
Fadeless and young (and what if the latest birth of creation?)
Bride and consort of Heaven, that looks down upon thee enamoured!

(COLERIDGE: _Hymn to the Earth._ 1799.)

Coleridge made several experiments in hexameters at this time, and planned, together with Southey, a long hexameter poem on Mohammed. To Wordsworth he sent an experiment of the same kind in a lighter vein:

"Smooth out the folds of my letter, and place it on desk or on table;
Place it on table or desk; and your right hands loosely half-closing,
Gently sustain them in air, and extending the digit didactic,
Rest it a moment on each of the forks of the five-forked left hand,
Twice on the breadth of the thumb, and once on the tip of each finger,
Read with a nod of the head in a humoring recitativo;
And, as I live, you will see my hexameters hopping before you.
This is a galloping measure, a hop, and a trot, and a gallop!"

(Wordsworth's _Memoirs_, quoted in Coleridge's Poems, Aldine edition, vol. ii. p. 307.)

Coleridge also translated from Schiller the well-known distich describing and exemplifying the elegiac verse of Ovid:

"In the hexameter rises the fountain's silvery column;
In the pentameter aye falling in melody back."

This distich, it is interesting to find, was revised by Tennyson so as to represent the measure quantitatively rather than accentually:

"Up springs hexameter, with might, as a fountain arising,
Lightly the fountain falls, lightly the pentameter."

Lift up your heads, ye gates; and ye everlasting portals,
Be ye lift up! Behold, the Worthies are there to receive him,--
They who, in later days or in elder ages, ennobled
Britain's dear name. Bede I beheld, who, humble and holy,
Shone like a single star, serene in a night of darkness.
Bacon also was there, the marvellous Friar; and he who
Struck the spark from which the Bohemian kindled his taper;
Thence the flame, long and hardly preserved, was to Luther transmitted,--
Mighty soul; and he lifted his torch, and enlightened the nations.

(SOUTHEY: _A Vision of Judgment_, ix. 1821.)

Southey followed the example of William Taylor in attempting to construct hexameters "which would be perfectly consistent with the character of our language, and capable of great richness, variety and strength," yet which should not profess to follow "rules which are inapplicable to our tongue." (Preface to _Vision of Judgment_, Southey's Works, ed. 1838, vol. x. p. 195.)[45] In the same Preface he briefly reviewed the history of earlier efforts to introduce the classical measures into English. It is to be feared that Southey's hexameters are to be counted among the worst of modern times.

Meanwhile apart, in the twilight gloom of a window's embrasure,
Sat the lovers and whispered together, beholding the moon rise
Over the pallid sea and the silvery mist of the meadows.
Silently one by one, in the infinite meadows of heaven,
Blossomed the lovely stars, the forget-me-nots of the angels.
Thus was the evening passed. Anon the bell from the belfry
Rang out the hour of nine, the village curfew, and straightway
Rose the guests and departed; and silence reigned in the household.

(LONGFELLOW: _Evangeline_, Part. I. 1847.)

_Evangeline_ is undoubtedly the most popular and widely read poem in English hexameters, and may be said to have revived the vogue of the measure in the middle of the nineteenth century. Yet its metrical qualities have not pleased most careful critics. Matthew Arnold said that the reception which the poem met with indicated that the dislike for the metre "is rather among professional critics than among the general public. Yet," he went on to say, "a version of Homer in hexameters of the _Evangeline_ type would not satisfy the judicious, nor is the definite establishment of this type to be desired." (_On Translating Homer_, Macmillan ed., p. 284.) Mr. Arnold had previously suggested that the "lumbering effect" of such hexameters as Longfellow's is "caused by their being much too dactylic"; more spondees should be introduced.

The editor of the Riverside edition of _Evangeline_ remarks interestingly: "The measure lends itself easily to the lingering melancholy which marks the greater part of the poem. The fall of the verse at the end of the line and the sharp recovery at the beginning of the next will be snares to the reader, who must beware of a jerking style of delivery.... A little practice will enable one to acquire that habit of reading the hexameter which we may liken, roughly, to the climbing of a hill, resting a moment on the summit, and then descending the other side."

Longfellow's hexameters were criticised most severely by his countryman, Edgar Poe. Poe denied the possibility of any adequate representation of the classical hexameter in English, largely because of the impossibility of using English spondees. The only genuine hexameters he knew, he declared, were some he had himself made, running:

"Do tell! when may we hope to make men of sense out of the Pundits,
Born and brought up with their snouts deep down in the mud of the
Frog-pond?"

(See Poe's Works, ed. Stedman and Woodberry, vol. vi. p. 104.)

Another interesting American experiment in hexameters is found in the _Home Pastorals_ of Bayard Taylor (1869-1874). Taylor modeled his verses after those of the Germans, particularly Goethe's in _Hermann und Dorothea_. See, for example, the opening lines of _November_:

"Wrapped in his sad-colored cloak, the Day, like a Puritan, standeth
Stern in the joyless fields, rebuking the lingering color,--
Dying hectic of leaves and the chilly blue of the asters,--
Hearing, perchance, the croak of a crow on the desolate tree-top,
Breathing the reek of withered reeds, or the drifted and sodden
Splendors of woodland, as whoso piously groaneth in spirit:
'Vanity, verily; yea, it is vanity, let me forsake it!'"
But as the light of day enters some populous city,
Shaming away, ere it come, by the chilly day-streak signal,
High and low, the misusers of night, shaming out the gas-lamps--
All the great empty streets are flooded with broadening clearness
Which, withal, by inscrutable simultaneous access
Permeates far and pierces to the very cellars lying in
Narrow high back-lane, and court, and alley of alleys:--
He that goes forth to his walks, while speeding to the suburb,
Sees sights only peaceful and pure; as laborers settling
Slowly to work, in their limbs the lingering sweetness of slumber;
Humble market-carts, coming in, bringing in, not only
Flower, fruit, farm-store, but sounds and sights of the country
Dwelling yet on the sense of the dreamy drivers; soon after
Half-awake servant-maids unfastening drowsy shutters
Up at the windows, or down, letting in the air by the doorway,
School-boys, school-girls soon, with slate, portfolio, satchel,
Hampered as they haste, those running, these others maidenly tripping;...
Meantime above purer air untarnished of new-lit fires;
So that the whole great wicked artificial civilised fabric--
All its unfinished houses, lots for sale, and railway out-works--
Seems reaccepted, resumed to Primal Nature and Beauty.

(ARTHUR HUGH CLOUGH: _The Bothie of Tober-na-Vuolich_. 1848.)

Clough's hexameters are quite unlike any others in English poetry, both in their metrical quality and in their use for serio-comic verse. As Matthew Arnold observed, they are "excessively, needlessly rough," but their free, garrulous effect has a charm of its own. Clough also wrote some hexameters intended to be strictly quantitative. (For a detailed criticism of the verse of the _Bothie_, see Robert Bridges's _Milton's Prosody_, 1901 ed., Appendix J.)

It was Clough's hexameters, together with some "English Hexameter Translations" by Dr. Hawtrey and Mr. Lockhart (1847), that chiefly encouraged Matthew Arnold to believe that the measure might be well adapted to a translation of Homer. "The hexameter, whether alone or with the pentameter, possesses a movement, an expression, which no metre hitherto in common use amongst us possesses, and which I am convinced English poetry, as our mental wants multiply, will not always be content to forego." (_Ib._, p. 210.) Mr. James Spedding replied to Mr. Arnold's suggestion, from the point of view of the classical scholar, urging that only hexameters purely quantitative could properly represent those of Vergil. He illustrated his views by an amusing "hexametrical dialogue," conducted alternately in Vergilian measure and "in that of Longfellow." Of the former are the lines:

"Verses so modulate, so tuned, so varied in accent,
Rich with unexpected changes, smooth, stately, sonorous,
Rolling ever forward, tidelike, with thunder, in endless
Procession, complex melodies--pause, quantity, accent,
After Virgilian precedent and practice, in order
Distributed--could these gratify th' Etonian ear-drum?"

(JAMES SPEDDING: _Reviews and Discussions_, 1879. p. 327.)

Arnold, however, wisely declined to be led into a discussion of the relations of accent and quantity in English. "All we are here concerned with," he said, "is the imitation, by the English hexameter, of the ancient hexameter _in its effect upon us moderns_.... The received English type, in its general outlines, is, for England, the necessary given type of this metre; it is by rendering the metrical beat of its pattern, not by rendering the accentual beat of it, that the English language has adapted the Greek hexameter.... I look with hope towards continued attempts at perfecting and employing this rhythm; but my belief in the immediate success of such attempts is far less confident than has been supposed." (See the whole passage, _On Translating Homer_, pp. 275-284.)

The hexameters of Dr. Hawtrey, quoted by Arnold, are these:

Clearly the rest I behold of the dark-eyed sons of Achaia;
Known to me well are the faces of all; their names I remember;
Two, two only remain, whom I see not among the commanders,
Kastor fleet in the car,--Polydeukes brave with the cestus,--
Own dear brethren of mine,--one parent loved us as infants.
Are they not here in the host, from the shores of loved Lakedaimon,
Or, though they came with the rest in ships that bound through the waters,
Dare they not enter the fight or stand in the council of heroes,
All for fear of the shame and the taunts my crime has awakened?
--So said she. They long since in Earth's soft arms were reposing,
There, in their own dear land, their fatherland, Lakedaimon.

(From _English Hexameter Translations_, p. 242.)

Arnold also illustrated his doctrine in some hexameters of his own, which have not usually been regarded as a happy experiment. They run in part as follows:

"Truly, yet this time will we save thee, mighty Achilles!
But thy day of death is at hand; nor shall we be the reason--
No, but the will of heaven, and Fate's invincible power.
For by no slow pace nor want of swiftness of ours
Did the Trojans obtain to strip the arms from Patroclus;
But that prince among gods, the son of the lovely-haired Leto,
Slew him fighting in front of the fray, and glorified Hector.
But, for us, we vie in speed with the breath of the West-Wind,
Which, men say, is the fleetest of winds; 'tis thou who art fated
To lie low in death, by the hand of a god and a mortal."

(_Ib._, p. 234.)

Tennyson evidently viewed with small respect these various efforts to render Homer in English hexameters. See his lines beginning:

"These lame hexameters the strong-wing'd music of Homer!
No--but a most burlesque barbarous experiment."

(_In Quantity: Hexameters and Pentameters_.)

Compare the amusing lines of Walter Savage Landor:

"Askest thou if in my youth I have mounted, as others have mounted,
Galloping Hexameter, Pentameter cantering after,
English by dam and by sire; bit, bridle, and saddlery, English;
English the girths and the shoes; all English from snaffle to crupper;
Everything English about, excepting the tune of the jockey?....
Seldom my goosequill, of goose from Germany, fatted in England,
(Frolicsome though I have been) have I tried on Hexameter, knowing
Latin and Greek are alone its languages. We have a measure
Fashioned by Milton's own hand, a fuller, a deeper, a louder.
.... Peace be with all! but afar be ambition to follow the Roman,
Led by the German uncombed and jigging in dactyl and spondee,
Lumbering shapeless jackboots which nothing can polish or supple.
Much as old metres delight me, 'tis only where first they were nurtured,
In their own clime, their own speech: than pamper them here, I would rather
Tie up my Pegasus tight to the scanty-fed rack of a sonnet."

(_English Hexameters_, in _The Last Fruit off an Old Tree_.)