Today’s Poem: Hendecasyllabics

Summer leaves are falser than winter’s frost blossoms

Zhao Mengjian, The Three Friends of Winter: Pine, Plum, and Bamboo, 13th century (Wikimedia Commons)

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Hendecasyllabics

by Algernon Charles Swinburne

In the month of the long decline of roses
I, beholding the summer dead before me,
Set my face to the sea and journeyed silent,
Gazing eagerly where above the sea-mark
Flame as fierce as the fervid eyes of lions
Half divided the eyelids of the sunset;
Till I heard as it were a noise of waters
Moving tremulous under feet of angels
Multitudinous, out of all the heavens;
Knew the fluttering wind, the fluttered foliage,
Shaken fitfully, full of sound and shadow;
And saw, trodden upon by noiseless angels,
Long mysterious reaches fed with moonlight,
Sweet sad straits in a soft subsiding channel,
Blown about by the lips of winds I knew not,
Winds not born in the north nor any quarter,
Winds not warm with the south nor any sunshine;
Heard between them a voice of exultation,
“Lo, the summer is dead, the sun is faded,
Even like as a leaf the year is withered,
All the fruits of the day from all her branches
Gathered, neither is any left to gather.
All the flowers are dead, the tender blossoms,
All are taken away; the season wasted,
Like an ember among the fallen ashes.
Now with light of the winter days, with moonlight,
Light of snow, and the bitter light of hoarfrost,
We bring flowers that fade not after autumn,
Pale white chaplets and crowns of latter seasons,
Fair false leaves (but the summer leaves were falser),
Woven under the eyes of stars and planets
When low light was upon the windy reaches
Where the flower of foam was blown, a lily
Dropt among the sonorous fruitless furrows
And green fields of the sea that make no pasture:
Since the winter begins, the weeping winter,
All whose flowers are tears, and round his temples
Iron blossom of frost is bound for ever.”
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Here at Poems Ancient and Modern we have an abiding interest in classical meters — which is to say, the various attempts poets have made to recreate in English the metrical patterns of Greek and Latin verse.

Hard to figure exactly why. Of all the side currents and small oceanic tides, lost in some distant lagoon of English versification, the history of classical meters probably has one of the smallest audiences. Its very existence is a historical artifact, born of the centuries of Western schooling in which the learning of Latin was the center of education of the young. If we take all those schoolboy exercises, and add in a few centuries of English poets’ more mature efforts, the rendering of Horace’s Latin into English might be the translation act most attempted in the history of mankind.

Still, those latinated days are long gone from our schools, and for teachers over the past fifty years the culture’s historical link with the classical world has grown so weak that ancient meter feels as alien as Asian or Polynesian poetic forms. Less interesting than those forms, too, and certainly less hip.

But there it is. Dedicated to the history of English verse, the effort that Sally Thomas and I have made over the past two years sometimes seems deliberately perverse: an effort to deny the current age. Not exactly to stand athwart history, yelling stop, but rather to ignore the current, as much as possible — to wander, blithely and happily, through history’s gardens, plucking a posy.

As we wrote in the manifesto with which we began Poems Ancient and Modern,

Art must be revived in our time, and so we have begun this new poetry publication to examine the great tradition of English verse in the terms of English verse. And we will present these poems to the reading public as still alive, still powerful, and still worth holding on to — permanent gifts to our shared sense of language, the inner life of the psyche, the natural world, and the numinous that lies beyond.

As far as classical meters go, I think they interest us in part because they are so hard to recreate. As we’ve noted before,

The difficulty is that classical meters run on what’s called quantity, the long and short length of vowels, while natural English meters run on accentual stress, the ictus that makes us pronounce, say, “vapid, mushy, sloppy goo” as VÀPid, MÙSHy, SLÒPpy GÒO. And the two systems of prosody don’t go together naturally.

The best-sounding solution is to line up the stresses and the long vowels — which has as high a degree of difficulty as anything in English poetry. Another solution, however, is just to ignore the quantity, recreating such classical forms as hexameters with stresses instead of vowel lengths

The Victorians — all those poets who’d swotted away at Latin as schoolchildren — made some of the most determined attempts. And so we’ve looked Stevenson’s “Alcaics,” Swinburne’s “Choriambics,” and Thackeray’s “Ad Ministram” — along with such earlier Englishing of Greek and Latin as Cowley’s “Drinking” and Milton’s “Pyrrha Ode” and such later sapphics as “In Refusal of Politics.”

In Today’s Poem, we return to Algernon Charles Swinburne (1837–1909). His “Hendecasyllabics” appeared in his 1866 Poems and Ballads, First Series, a book that caused some sensation on its appearance. The meter is simple and constant: eleven syllables per line, in a falling rhythm of five feet — four trochees with a dactyl, an extra syllable, in the second foot, BÀM ba / BÀM ba ba / BÀM ba / BÀM ba / BÀM ba. So, for example,

Ìn the / mònth of the / lòng de- / clìne of / rò-ses
Ì, be- / hòld-ing the / sùm-mer / dèad be- / fòre me,

We can find this pattern in other poems — notably in Robert Frost’s “For Once, Then, Something.” And what’s amazing about the Frost poem is that it sounds unstrained, but every line is exactly regular in its hendecasyllabics, BÀM ba / BÀM ba ba / BÀM ba / BÀM ba / BÀM ba, 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

Swinburne, however, draws attention to the hendecasyllabics. He wants us to notice the alien meter, to feel its strangeness as exemplifying, or at least helping, the strangeness of the mood of the poem, as he often matches long vowels to the stresses:

Wòv-en / ùn-der the / èyes of / stàrs and / plàn-ets
Whèn low / lìght was up- / òn the / wìn-dy / rèach-es

The key to that mood may be the parenthetical in the line “Fair false leaves (but the summer leaves were falser).” The autumn reveals the falsity of exuberant life, the lie that summer tells. Only winter is solid, and the only true flower is an “Iron blossom of frost.”

Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s 1861 portrait of Swinburne (Wikimedia Commons)

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