Today’s Poem: Alcaics
Youth sang the song in years immemorial
Alcaics: To H.F.B.
by Robert Louis Stevenson
Brave lads in olden musical centuries Sang, night by night, adorable choruses, Sat late by alehouse doors in April Chaunting in joy as the moon was rising. Moon-seen and merry, under the trellises, Flush-faced they play’d with old polysyllables Spring scents inspired, old wine diluted: Love and Apollo were there to chorus. Now these, the songs, remain to eternity, Those, only those, the bountiful choristers Gone — those are gone, those unremember’d Sleep and are silent in earth for ever. So man himself appears and evanishes, So smiles and goes; as wanderers halting at Some green-embower’d house, play their music, Play and are gone on the windy highway. Yet dwells the strain enshrined in the memory Long after they departed eternally, Forth-faring tow’rd far mountain summits, Cities of men or the sounding Ocean. Youth sang the song in years immemorial: Brave chanticleer, he sang and was beautiful; Bird-haunted green tree-tops in springtime Heard, and were pleased by the voice of singing. Youth goes and leaves behind him a prodigy — Songs sent by thee afar from Venetian Sea-grey lagunes, sea-paven highways, ◦ lagunes = lagoons Dear to me here in my Alpine exile. ══════════════════════════
The alcaic stanza of Ancient Greek poetry (and then Latin) was born on the island of Lesbos, tradition holds, thanks to the poet Alcaeus (c. 625–580 B.C.). And just as English poets have tried to make our accentual language speak in the quantities of classical hendecasyllabics, elegiac couplets, and sapphics, so English poets have turned their hand to alcaics from time to time.
Not entirely successfully, it has to be said. As always, it was the Victorians — trained as schoolchildren in Latin literature — who made the most concerted effort. Tennyson, for example, produced alcaics in praise of Milton. Arthur Hugh Clough gave us more alcaics. And so, among others, did Robert Louis Stevenson (1850–1894).
The stanza in English consists of two eleven-syllable lines, with those hendecasyllabics followed by two lines with four stresses.
The hendecasyllabic lines in alcaic stanzas, however, differ from such pure hendecasyllabics as, say, Robert Frost’s “For Once, Then, Something” — in ways that, I think, define the strictures of alcaic verse.
What’s amazing about the Frost poems is that it sounds unstrained, but every line is exactly regular, /u/uu/u/u/u, with the pair of unstressed syllables always in the second foot:
Òth-ers tàunt me with hàv-ing knèlt at wèll-curbs
Àl-ways wròng to the lìght, so nèv-er sèe-ing
The key to the alcaic stanza, however, is that its hendecasyllabic lines move the dactyl, with its two unstressed syllables, to the penultimate foot — and push to make us hear the first foot as a spondee, with both syllables stressed, making another dactyl at the end to get the eleventh syllable: //u/u/uu/uu. So, in Today’s Poem, that gives us:
Bràve làds in òld-en mù-si-cal cèn-tur-ies
Sàng, nìght by nìght, a-dòr-a-ble chò-rus-es
This is the pattern of Tennyson’s “Milton: Alcaics” and Arthur Hugh Clough’s “Alcaics.” Edwin Arlington Robinson’s “Late Summer” drops the attempt at opening spondees. It begins:
Còn-fused, he fòund her làv-ish-ing fèm-in-ine
Gòld upon clày, and fòund her in-scrùt-a-ble
And once we have W.H. Auden’s 1940 “In Memory of Sigmund Freud,” nearly any variation of a hendecasyllabic line is allowed in the first two lines, and any arrangement of four stresses in the last two lines.
At an early stage in Greek, those final two lines were probably one nineteen-syllable line, but by the time they reach the Romans, they had become two lines. In the strict English form they run //u/u/u/u and /uu/uu/u/u:
Sprìng scènts in-spìred, old wìne di-lùt-ed:
Lòve and A-pòl-lo were thère to chò-rus.
But Stevenson’s “Alcaics” remains one of the most successful strict examples in English: “Moon-seen and merry, under the trellises, / Flush-faced they play’d with old polysyllables.”
The poem renders its hendecasyllabics with a light heart, and it uses the falling off of the last two lines in the stanza to suggest its theme. Dedicated to the historian Horatio Brown, the 1881 poem is narrated by a man who, sequestered in the Alps, receives a collection of old poetry from a friend in Venice. And he thinks of how the happy singing of youth in alehouses becomes part of the deposit of art, long after the singers are gone.
I am not sure if there is a way of asking this question that does not sound sceptical, wise-guy, and otherwise obnoxious. But it is a sincere question, which comes to mind. How exactly did people know that Stevenson was aiming at Alcaics in Hendacsyllables? Is it just that they look at it, and the cup cap thing is just obvious to people who think in metrics? The number of lines is obvious, but you have to do a bit of counting and sounding to hear the cup-cap ratios. I know to say 'how do you know Stevenson was aiming at that?' sounds like a smart aleck High Schooler, but I just wondered how we know that Stevenson achieved this intentionally or whether it is a 'natural' form that any poet could fall into without deliberately imitating the style of early Greek Lyric poetry. I am not so stupid as to imagine that it could happen without some deliberation. Did he write letters in which he said 'I have tossed off some Alcaics?' I suppose at the back of this unintentionally obnoxious sounding question is the thought that, I can imagine any English speaking poet setting about to write in iambic pentameters, or sonnet form. Because its how we roll. But how does a guy sit down at his desk and decide to write Alcaics in Hendacasyllables?
This is great. You're right that it was because Horace wrote so many of his odes in alcaic metre that English poets in the nineteenth-century so often tried their hand at it. I like this Stevenson poem, though my humourless pedantry doesn't think it works all the way through. prosodically, actually. If you set the rhythm of the line in your head before you read the poem, tap it out with a finger on a tabletop as you read aloud, you can roll the whole poem through the requisite metre; but that's not to say that the pattern of stresses, half-stresses and unstresses of actual English-as-she-is-spoke in the poem really is alcaic throughout. The problem is that English isn't very hospitable to spondees; that English tends towards off-on or on-off patternings, syllabically (it's why iambic verse is so major a feature of English poetry). There are spondees in English of course: dust-grain, rosebloom, call-girl. But they're not common, and in use they tend to devolve into a stressed-unstressed, or unstressed-stressed doublet. For example, in this poem: you *can* squeeze the line "yet dwells the strain enshrined in the memory" into YET DWELLS the STRAIN en SHRINED in the MEMory, but a more natural reading would run it along as iambs until the end, "yet DWELLS the STRAIN enSHRINED ..." (or even, as Browning might write it out, "yet DWELLS the STRAIN enSHRINED i'th MEM'ry". Several of the lines here need lifts in their shoes to reach echt spondeeity: "Songs sent by thee afar" is a trochee and an iamb; so is "Moon seen and merry"; "Now these, the songs, remain" is iambic.
It's not really a criticism of Stevenson to say so: it's a fine poem, and classical metres are hard to transfer from quantity to ictus, from Greek/Latin to English.