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.
Having posted yesterday, I believe, in the wrong thread, I try again today, with a rush of thanks for including this poem and these remarks on Alcaics. The questions raised in this thread are good ones! I went through an Alcaics phase, and send you one I wrote, another autumn poem, which Rhina Espaillat was kind enough to translate into Spanish, thus blessing me 'international' for a day. ❤️
Nice, Zara. I'm a little bothered by the two different scansions demanded by "sumac": "sùmac" in the first line and "sùmàc" in the second. This comes too early in the poem, I think, before we've gotten the meter down.
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?
I think if one is brought up to it it is an enjoyable game. I don’t know if you have read the autobiography or biography of Ronald Knox but he enjoyed writing various Greek meters - in Greek. He had a certain kind of logical mind. I would not have said that Ratzinger had that kind of mind but he describes in his memoir how he spent his time in the American prison of war camp as a teenager, writing Greek poetry in a meter or other - from memory it was 8 foot dactylic verse, but a satiric impulse may have added the precision. The reality was pretty close. And then Chesterton and Co as young men enjoyed writing those things - now I can’t remember what they were called - O! Clerihews! It was a chap thing in the early 20th century and I dare say it was a chap thing in the mid 19th century.
I'm reading this several days late--I read all the posts here but not necessarily on the day--and just posted a comment on the Tuesday Oct 29 entry that comes from a somewhat similar position. I don't think your question is the least bit obnoxious or snarky. I'm considerably more interested in poetry than the average reader, but have never had much interest in this kind of experimenting with techniques used in classical languages, and am not sure why anyone except, as Joseph says, those who were soaked in Greek and Latin at school, would want to bother. Unless of course you (the poet) see a way of making it work for you as/in English, doing something that you couldn't otherwise do. But just to be able to say "look, Alcaics" seems a game. Fine if you enjoy it (as writer or reader), like solving a puzzle, but not of great interest in itself.
I suppose that comment implies what is in fact the case, that I don't find this poem a knockout. Good, but not a knockout. If I did, and if Alcaics were the reason--as the repetitions in a villanelle are the reason a villanelle works, if it does--I would sing a different tune. I mean, the ordinary reader doesn't care whether the form was borrowed from the French or whether it follows the definition exactly, or anything except whether it has power as an English poem.
This is good question, I think, Francesca. One of things we might ask about a poem is whether the poet began with a form (as, say, an exercise) or began with a snippet, which was then noticed to be part of, or adaptable to, a particular stanza form. (Or, I suppose, both, when the form is so deeply intuited that poetic ideas naturally blossom that way. I don't think my friend Rhina Espaillat often thinks "I should write a sonnet"; I think instead that in much of her verse the sonnet form is just the path of her thought.)
Tennyson, Clough, and Stevenson all use the word "alcaics" in their poems' titles, from which we might extrapolate to the conclusions that (a) they didn't expect their readers to identify the form without a hint, and (b) the form was deliberate. The 19th century was an era, after all, that saw much playing with different ways of rendering Classical meters in English. (I'm confident they learned the alcaic stanza mostly, or entirely, from Horace's Latin.) But Robinson and Auden don't give us "alcaics" in their titles, so maybe they think the form is now familiar enough that readers can be expected to get the form on their own. Or they're just being snooty. Or they think that we don't need to know the form to read the poem naturally.
I would have thought that Stevenson was in the second camp, building a poem from a good line that had occurred to him (specifically, "Youth sang the song in years immemorial," which is maybe the best line in the poem and encapsulates the poem's theme).
But the editor of Stevenson's letters says that the poem took its form because (a) it was originally a thank-you note for a collection of Venetian songs that Horatio Brown mailed to Stevenson in Davos, and (b) Stevenson had earlier spent a day in Switzerland talking about alcaics with the visiting Brown and John Addington Symonds. So, of course, the thank-you note for the later gift would take that form.
Personally, I find the form easy enough to read, once I get it into my ear.
I agreed this is great! I love the detailed survey of poets who have practiced alcaics. Thanks!
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.
Having posted yesterday, I believe, in the wrong thread, I try again today, with a rush of thanks for including this poem and these remarks on Alcaics. The questions raised in this thread are good ones! I went through an Alcaics phase, and send you one I wrote, another autumn poem, which Rhina Espaillat was kind enough to translate into Spanish, thus blessing me 'international' for a day. ❤️
Autumn
There’s aspen, sumac, alder—as yet in leaf;
sumac’s a fiery red in a stand of birch,
whose spindly foliage undoes bonds
forged with a branch in the summer now past.
Just now, in gazing long at their silhouettes,
wind-torn and misted over by fog, I seek
a mastery, a proper knowledge:
Woman in molt, in these days of autumn.
These trees, ramifying in spring anew,
in fall undress when throwing away the old.
How shorn of all possessions I’ll be,
winter arriving to shed my born days.
Zara Raab
Nice, Zara. I'm a little bothered by the two different scansions demanded by "sumac": "sùmac" in the first line and "sùmàc" in the second. This comes too early in the poem, I think, before we've gotten the meter down.
I was nudged about the sumac at the time, but didn’t take the cue. Have done so now. Thank you, again!
I knew I had come to the right place. Thank you so much! I'll work on it.
Thanks, too, for that "nice".
Z
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?
I think if one is brought up to it it is an enjoyable game. I don’t know if you have read the autobiography or biography of Ronald Knox but he enjoyed writing various Greek meters - in Greek. He had a certain kind of logical mind. I would not have said that Ratzinger had that kind of mind but he describes in his memoir how he spent his time in the American prison of war camp as a teenager, writing Greek poetry in a meter or other - from memory it was 8 foot dactylic verse, but a satiric impulse may have added the precision. The reality was pretty close. And then Chesterton and Co as young men enjoyed writing those things - now I can’t remember what they were called - O! Clerihews! It was a chap thing in the early 20th century and I dare say it was a chap thing in the mid 19th century.
Clerihews were invented by Chesterton's close school friend E.C. Bentley in 1891. We ran some in May: https://poemsancientandmodern.substack.com/p/todays-poem-clerihews
I'm reading this several days late--I read all the posts here but not necessarily on the day--and just posted a comment on the Tuesday Oct 29 entry that comes from a somewhat similar position. I don't think your question is the least bit obnoxious or snarky. I'm considerably more interested in poetry than the average reader, but have never had much interest in this kind of experimenting with techniques used in classical languages, and am not sure why anyone except, as Joseph says, those who were soaked in Greek and Latin at school, would want to bother. Unless of course you (the poet) see a way of making it work for you as/in English, doing something that you couldn't otherwise do. But just to be able to say "look, Alcaics" seems a game. Fine if you enjoy it (as writer or reader), like solving a puzzle, but not of great interest in itself.
I suppose that comment implies what is in fact the case, that I don't find this poem a knockout. Good, but not a knockout. If I did, and if Alcaics were the reason--as the repetitions in a villanelle are the reason a villanelle works, if it does--I would sing a different tune. I mean, the ordinary reader doesn't care whether the form was borrowed from the French or whether it follows the definition exactly, or anything except whether it has power as an English poem.
This is good question, I think, Francesca. One of things we might ask about a poem is whether the poet began with a form (as, say, an exercise) or began with a snippet, which was then noticed to be part of, or adaptable to, a particular stanza form. (Or, I suppose, both, when the form is so deeply intuited that poetic ideas naturally blossom that way. I don't think my friend Rhina Espaillat often thinks "I should write a sonnet"; I think instead that in much of her verse the sonnet form is just the path of her thought.)
Tennyson, Clough, and Stevenson all use the word "alcaics" in their poems' titles, from which we might extrapolate to the conclusions that (a) they didn't expect their readers to identify the form without a hint, and (b) the form was deliberate. The 19th century was an era, after all, that saw much playing with different ways of rendering Classical meters in English. (I'm confident they learned the alcaic stanza mostly, or entirely, from Horace's Latin.) But Robinson and Auden don't give us "alcaics" in their titles, so maybe they think the form is now familiar enough that readers can be expected to get the form on their own. Or they're just being snooty. Or they think that we don't need to know the form to read the poem naturally.
I would have thought that Stevenson was in the second camp, building a poem from a good line that had occurred to him (specifically, "Youth sang the song in years immemorial," which is maybe the best line in the poem and encapsulates the poem's theme).
But the editor of Stevenson's letters says that the poem took its form because (a) it was originally a thank-you note for a collection of Venetian songs that Horatio Brown mailed to Stevenson in Davos, and (b) Stevenson had earlier spent a day in Switzerland talking about alcaics with the visiting Brown and John Addington Symonds. So, of course, the thank-you note for the later gift would take that form.
Personally, I find the form easy enough to read, once I get it into my ear.