English poetry has attempted purely quantitative verse. Share not the cunning of Hermes, nor list to the songs of Apollo,įearing the stars of the sky, and the roll of the blue salt water.īut one of the things that helps this along are the substitutions and the general lining-up of long vowels in the accentually stressed positions. Teacher of wisdom to heroes, bestower of might in the battle Lovers of men neither broad-browed Zeus, not Pallas Athene, Skilful, but feeble of heart for they know not the lords of Olympus, Skilful with needle and loom, and the arts of the dyer and carver, Over the sea, past Crete, on the Syrian shore to the southward,ĭwells in the well-tilled lowland a dark-haired Aethiop people, Took great / Care of his Mother, / Though he was only three.Ī surprising successful English hexameter is Charles Kingsley’s "Andromeda": James James / Morrison Morrison / Weatherby George Dupree Milne openly embraced in the hilarious hexameters of his "Disobedience": 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. (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.") Hexameters no worse than daring Germany gave us,īarbarous experiment, barbarous hexameters. When did a frog coarser croak upon our Helicon? When was a harsher sound ever heard, ye Muses, in England? No-but a most burlesque barbarous experiment. These lame hexameters the strong-wing’d music of Homer! 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": Longfellow’s "Evangeline" is an example, often used by classics teachers to introduce students to hexameter: "This is the forest primeval. Poets have attempted purely accentual representations. 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." It may be safely prophesied that we shall never do this and thus we shall never admit English hexameters. In short, the ancients were content to read as they scanned, or nearly so. 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. This rhythm demands, for English ears, a preponderance of natural spondees. "We maintain that the hexameter can never be introduced into our language, from the nature of that language itself. Poe, in a famous attack on Longfellow, denied that it could be done: I thought others might like to join in the discussion Chris Childers and I have been having about representing classical meters in English.
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