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_.)
In like manner Mr. Swinburne says: "I must say how inexplicable it seems
to me that Mr. Arnold, of all men, should be a patron of English
hexameters. His own I have tried in vain to reduce by scansion into any
metrical feet at all; they look like nothing on earth, and sound like
anapests broken up and driven wrong.... And at best what ugly bastards
of verse are these self-styled hexameters! how human tongues or hands
could utter or could write them except by way of burlesque improvisation
I could never imagine, and never shall." (_Essays and Studies_, p. 163.)
From this condemnation Mr. Swinburne excepts only the hexameters of Dr.
Hawtrey, "but that is simply a graceful interlude of pastime."
See also the essay called "Remarks on English Hexameters," in the _Horæ
Hellenicæ_ of Professor John Stuart Blackie.
Hovering over the water he came, upon glittering pinions,
Living, a wonder, outgrown from the tight-laced fold of his sandals;
Bounding from billow to billow, and sweeping the crests like a sea-gull;
Leaping the gulfs of the surge, as he laughed in the joy of his leaping.
Fair and majestic he sprang to the rock; and the maiden in wonder
Gazed for a while, and then hid in the dark-rolling wave of her tresses,
Fearful, the light of her eyes; while the boy (for her sorrow had awed
him)
Blushed at her blushes, and vanished, like mist on the cliffs at the
sunrise.
Fearful at length she looked forth: he was gone: she, wild with amazement,
Wailed for her mother aloud: but the wail of the wind only answered.
(CHARLES KINGSLEY: _Andromeda_. 1858.)
Kingsley believed in the possibility of representing the quantitative
verse of classical poetry in English, and at the same time holding to
genuinely English rhythm.[46] Thus he tried to introduce more real
spondees into his hexameters than Longfellow and others had done.
Compare such a line as Longfellow's--
"Man is unjust, but God is just; and finally justice"--
with Kingsley's--
"Then as a pine upon Ida when south-west winds blow landward."
In the former the dissyllabic feet are in no sense spondees; in the
latter there is an effort to fill them with genuinely long syllables.
Lover whose vehement kisses on lips irresponsive are squandered,
Lover that wooest in vain Earth's imperturbable heart;
Athlete mightily frustrate, who pittest thy thews against legions,
Locked with fantastical hosts, bodiless arms of the sky;
Sea that breakest for ever, that breakest and never art broken,
Like unto thine, from of old, springeth the spirit of man,--
Nature's wooer and fighter, whose years are a suit and a wrestling,
All their hours, from his birth, hot with desire and with fray.
(WILLIAM WATSON: _Hymn to the Sea_, ii.)
Here the alternate lines represent the "pentameter" of the Latin elegiac
verse, where the light syllables were omitted at the cesura and the end
of the line.
When they came to the fair-flowing river and to the places
Where stood pools in plenty prepared, and water abundant
Gushed up, a cure for things manifold uncleanly, the mules were
Unyoked from the waggons, driven off to the bindweed pastures
By the rushing swirling river, and the women set about it
Unloading the waggons, carrying clothes down to the water,
One with other striving, stepping hastily into the wash-troughs.
When washing and rinsing were done, they brought the linen down
On to the sea-shore, and set it all out thereupon in rows
Where the pebbles thrown up by the waves most thickly abounded.
(WILLIAM JOHNSON STONE: Translation of _Odyssey_, vi. 85 ff., in _The
Use of Classical Measures in English_. 1899.)
Mr. Stone, like the Elizabethan classical versifiers, seeks to write
purely quantitative verse in English, and, so far from aiming at the
same time to preserve the rhythm of the usual English hexameter, he
regards the clash between accent and quantity as a beauty rather than a
defect. The verses he intends to be read "with the natural accent
unimpaired," the reader listening for the regular quantities at the same
time.
The views of Mr. Stone on the nature of English accent and quantity
are perhaps unique among modern writers on the subject. "The
ordinary unemphatic English accent is exactly a raising of pitch,
and nothing more," as in Greek. "The accent of emphasis is
something quite different in character from the ordinary accent."
To those who insist that to them the second syllable of
_carpenter_ is distinctly short, Mr. Stone replies: "You are
associating yourselves by such an admission with the vulgar actors
of Plautus rather than the educated readers of Virgil;"--a truly
terrible charge! Mr. Stone gives an interesting critical history of
earlier efforts to introduce classical measures into English. His
monograph is reprinted, but without the specimen translation, as
the second part of the 1901 edition of Robert Bridges's _Milton's
Prosody_.
For further discussion of the relations of classical and English
prosody, and of accent and quantity in English, see Schipper, vol.
i. pp. 21-27; A. J. Ellis: article in the _Transactions of the
Philological Society_, 1875-1876; T. D. Goodell: article on
"Quantity in English Verse," in the _Proceedings of the American
Philological Society_, 1885; Edmund Gurney: _The Power of Sound_,
pp. 429-439; J. M. Robertson: Appendix to _New Essays towards a
Critical Method_, 1897; and the discussion in Part Three of the
present volume.