Note: I wrote some time in October during the semester I took LATN 504: Horace at Carolina. Poetic meters in English are typically qualitative. That is, they establish a rhythm by arranging syllables based on their quality (stressed or unstressed). They do this because stress accent is a primary characteristic of all English syllables. (Compare “hunger” and “afloat”; both are two syllable words, but they have opposite stress accent.) Classical Greek and Latin poetic meters by contract are typically quantitative. They establish a rhythm by arranging syllables based on their length in time–how long they take to say. They can do this because their long vowels literally take twice as long to say as their short ones. Because quantitative meter is time-based, it’s much more a proper, music-like rhythm than quantitative meter. Many poets have tried to replicate quantitative meter in English, but because there’s no true time-based distinction between our long and short syllables, it’s hard to do. This is in an Alcaic stanza. (DL, Dec. 10, 2022)
Boy, sound your hornsong clearly across the field.
Man, raise your swordblade high and your brilliant shield.
Fix fast your bright helms; fierce your might wield.
Stand in the breech for your homes and don’t yield.
—David Jackson Lohnes
2004
Notes:
Writing these lines convinced me that quantitative meter in English only works if the reader wants it to work. The best that can be said for these lines is that they lend themselves very well to being read quantitatively if the reader is included to do so (and willing to ignore the fact that there’s no caesuras in the first two lines while there is a caesura in the third line where isn’t supposed to be one.)
The Alcaic is a four-line stanza with the following pattern:
– – u – – : – u u – u – – – u – – : – u u – u – – – u – – – u – – – u u – u u – u – – – long u short : caesura (a pause)
Fix fast your bright helms – This was originally “Grasp firm your great heart.” I hated the phrase at the time, but I didn’t try too hard to fix it because I was just experimenting. When going through my old poems, I found this one, remembered it, remembered the hateful phrase existed, and rediscovered my hate for it. I couldn’t let it stand when I posted it.
fierce your might wield – “Fierce” is an adjective. But it’s serving as an adverb and should by all rights be “fiercely.” But “fiercely” has an extra syllable and breaks the meter. I hate having to twist out of natural language for the sake of the form I’m trying to solve for. The inverted word order in the phrase to line up the rhyme is bad enough.