by Stephen Fry
Tennyson’s dialect poem ‘Northern Farmer’ shows that, as with Browning’s anapaests, a dactyl in English verse, using stressed-weak-weak syllables instead of lo-o-o-ng-short-short, has its place, also here imitating the trot of a horse’s hooves as it sounds out the word ‘property’. (I have stripped it of Tennyson’s attempts at phonetic northern brogue – ‘paäins’, for example.)
Proputty, proputty, proputty – that’s what I ’ears ’em say
Proputty, proputty, proputty – Sam, thou’s an ass for thy pains
The poem ends with the line:
Proputty proputty, proputty – canter an’ canter away.
Five dactyls and a single full stop stress on the ‘way’ of ‘away’. As with anapaests, lines of pure dactyls are rather predictable and uninteresting:
Tum-titty, tum-titty, tum-titty, tum-titty
Just as the anapaest in its rising rhythm, its move from weak to strong, is a ternary version of the iamb, so the dactyl, in its falling rhythm, its move from strong to weak, is a ternary version of the trochee. Furthermore, just as it is rewarding to clip the first weak syllable of an anapaestic line, as we saw Browning do (in other words substitute the first foot with an iamb) so dactylic verse can be highly compelling when you dock the last weak syllable (in other words substitute the final foot with a trochee).
Tum-titty, tum-titty, tum-titty, tum-ti
Or you could use a single beat as Tennyson does above (a docked trochee, if you like):
Tum-titty, tum-titty, tum-titty, tum .
Browning uses this kind of dactylic metre to great effect in ‘The Lost Leader’, his savage attack on Wordsworth. Browning regarded him as a sell-out for accepting the post of Poet Laureate:
Just for a handful of silver he left us
Just for a riband to stick in his coat.
This creates verse with great rhythmic dash and drive. Some poets, however, in their admiration for Homer, attempted to construct quantitative English dactylic hexameters, ending them, as is common in classical verse, with spondees. Edgar Allan Poe had this to say about Longfellow’s stab at translating the Swedish dactyls of a poet called Tegner:
In attempting (what never should be attempted) a literal version of both the words and the metre of this poem, Professor Longfellow has failed to do justice either to his author or himself. He has striven to do what no man ever did well and what, from the nature of the language itself, never can be well done. Unless, for example, we shall come to have an influx of spondees in our English tongue, it will always be impossible to construct an English hexameter. Our spondees, or, we should say, our spondaic words, are rare. In the Swedish they are nearly as abundant as in the Latin and Greek. We have only ‘compound’, ‘context’,‘footfall’, and a few other similar ones.
Longfellow’s Evangeline might be considered a more successful attempt to write English dactylic hexameter in the classical style:
This is the forest primeval. The murmuring pines and the hemlocks.
Poe and modern English metrists might prefer that last foot ‘hemlocks’ not be called a classical spondee but a trochee. Those last two feet, incidentally, dactyl-spondee, or more commonly dactyl-trochee, are often found as a closing rhythm known as an Adonic Line (after Sappho’s lament to Adonis:‘O ton Adonin!’‘Oh, for Adonis!’). The contemporary American poet Michael Heller ends his poem ‘She’ with an excellent Adonic line (or clausula, the classical term for a closing phrase):
And I
am happy, happier even then when her mouth is on me and I gasp at the ceiling.
‘Gasp at the ceiling’ is an exact ‘Oh for Adonis’ Adonic clausula. We shall meet it again when we look at Sapphic Odes in Chapter Three.
Robert Southey (Byron’s enemy) and Arthur Hugh Clough were about the only significant English poets to experiment with consistent dactylic hexameters: one of Clough’s best-known poems ‘The Bothie of Tober Na-Vuolich’ is in a kind of mixed dactylic hexameter. By happy chance, I heard a fine dactylic tetrameter on the BBC’s Shipping Forecast last night:
Dogger, cyclonic becoming north easterly . . .
By all means try writing dactyls, but you will probably discover that they need to end in trochees, iambs or spondees. As a falling rhythm, there is often a pleasingly fugitive quality to dactylics, but they can sound hypnotically dreary without the affirmative closure of stressed beats at line-end.
Bernstein’s Latin rhythms in his song ‘America’ inspired a dactyl-dactyl-spondee combination from his lyricist Stephen Sondheim:
I like the city of San Juan
I know a boat you can get on
And for the chorus:
I like to be in America
Everything’s free in America.
You have to wrench the rhythm to make it work when speaking it, but the lines fit the music exactly as I have marked them. Amérícá, you’ll notice, has three stressed final syllables, a kind of ternary spondee, tum-tum-tum.
THE MOLOSSUS AND TRIBRACH
The tum-tum-tum has the splendid name molossus, like Colossus, and is a foot of three long syllables — — — or, if we were to use it in English poetry, three stressed syllables, . Molossus was a town in Epirus known for its huge mastiffs, so perhaps the name of the foot derives from the dog’s great bow-wow-wow. If a spondee, as Poe remarked, is rare in spoken English, how much rarer still is a molossus. We’ve seen one from Sondheim, and songwriting, where wrenched rhythms are permissible and even desirable, is precisely where we would most expect to find it. W. S. Gilbert found four triumphant examples for his matchless ‘To Sit in Solemn Silence’ from The Mikado.
To sit in solemn silence in a dull dark dock,
In a pestilential prison, with a life-long lock,
Awaiting the sensation of a short, sharp shock,
From a cheap and chippy chopper on a big black block!
The molossus, like its smaller brother the spondee, is clearly impossible for whole lines of poetry, but in combination with a dactyl, for example, it seems to suit not just Gilbert’s and Sondheim’s lyrics as above, but also call and response chants and playful interludes, like this exchange between Luke Skywalker and Darth Vader.
Why do you bother me? Go to hell!
I am your destiny. Can’t you tell?
You’re not my father. Eat my shorts.
Come to the dark side. Feel the force.
As you might have guessed, that isn’t a poem, but a children’s skipping rhyme popular in the eighties. Lines three and four use a trochaic substitution for the dactyl in their second foot, but I wouldn’t recommend going on to a playground and pointing this out.
I suppose Tennyson’s
Break, break, break
At the foot of thy crags, O Sea!
could be said to start with a molossus, followed by two anapaests and a spondee.
If a molossus is the ternary equivalent of the spondee, is there a ternary version of the pyrrhic foot too? Well, you bet your boots there is and it is called a tribrach (literally three short). A molossus you might use, but a tribrach? Unlikely. Of course, it is very possible that a line of your verse would contain three unstressed syllables in a row, as we know from pyrrhic substitution in lines of binary feet, but no one would call such examples tribrachs. I only mention it for completeness and because I care so deeply for your soul.
THE AMPHIBRACH
Another ternary, or triple, foot is the amphibrach, though it is immensely doubtful whether you’ll have cause to use this one a great deal either. Amphi in Greek means ‘on both sides’ (as in an amphitheatre) and brachys means ‘short’, so an amphibrach is short on both sides. All of which means it is a triplet consisting of two short or unstressed syllables either side of a long or stressed one: - — - or, in English verse:. ‘Romantic’ and ‘deluded’ are both amphibrachic words and believe me, you’d have to be romantic and deluded to try and write consistent amphibrachic poetry.
Romantic, deluded, a total disaster.
Don’t do i
t I beg you, self-slaughter is faster
Goethe and later German-language poets like Rilke were fond of it and it can occasionally be found (mixed with other metres) in English verse. Byron experimented with it, but the poet who seemed most taken with the metre was Matthew Prior. This is the opening line of ‘Jinny the Just’.
And this of ‘From my own Monument’:
As doctors give physic by way of prevention
You might think amphibrachs (with the weak ending docked) lurk in this old rhyming proverb:
If wishes were horses then beggars would ride
If turnips were swords I’d wear one by my side.
But that’s just plain silly:27 it is actually more like the metre of Browning’s ‘Ghent to Aix’: anapaests with the opening syllable docked.
If wishes were horses then beggars would ride
I sprang to the saddle and Joris and he.
Just as my amphibrachic doggerel could be called a clipped anapaestic line with a weak ending:
Romantic, deluded, a total disaster.
Don’t do it I beg you, self-slaughter is faster
Some metrists claim the amphibrach can be found in English poetry. You will see it and hear it in perhaps the most popular of all verse forms extant, they say. I wonder if you can tell what this form is, just by READING OUT THE RHYTHM?
Ti-tum-ti ti-tum-ti ti-tum-ti
Ti-tum-ti ti-tum-ti ti-tum-ti
Ti-tum-ti ti-tum
Ti-tum-ti ti-tum
Ti-tum-ti ti-tum-ti ti-tum-ti
It is, of course, the limerick.
There was a young man from Australia
Who painted his arse like a dahlia.
Just tuppence a smell
Was all very well,
But fourpence a lick was a failure.
So, next time someone tells you a limerick you can inform them that it is verse made up of three lines of amphibrachic trimeter with two internal lines of catalectic amphibrachic dimeter. You would be punched very hard in the face for pointing this out, but you could do it. Anyway, the whole thing falls down if your limerick involves a monosyllabic hero:
There was a young chaplain from King’s,
Who discoursed about God and such things:
But his deepest desire
Was a boy in the choir
With a bottom like jelly on springs.
Ti-tum titty-tum titty-tum
Titty-tum titty-tum titty- tum
Titty-tum titty-tum
Titty-tum titty-tum
Titty-tum titty-tum titty-tum
You don’t get much more anapaestic than that. A pederastic anapaestic quintain,28 in fact. Most people would say that limericks are certainly anapaestic in nature and that amphibrachs belong only in classical quantitative verse. Most people, for once, would be right. The trouble is, if you vary an amphibrachic line even slightly (which you’d certainly want to do whether it was limerick or any other kind of poem), the metre then becomes impossible to distinguish from any anapaestic or dactylic metre or a mixture of all the feet we’ve already come to know and love. Simpler in verse of triple feet to talk only of rising three-stress rhythms (anapaests) and falling three-stress rhythms (dactyls). But by all means try writing with amphibrachs as an exercise to help flex your metric muscles, much as a piano student rattles out arpeggios or a golfer practises approach shots.
THE AMPHIMACER
It follows that if there is a name for a three-syllable foot with the beat in the middle (romantic, despondent, unyielding) there will be a name for a three-syllable foot with a beat either side of an unstressed middle (tamperproof, hand to mouth, Oxford Road).29 Sure enough: the amphimacer (macro, or long, on both sides) also known as the cretic foot (after the Cretan poet Thaletas) goes tum-ti-tum in answer to the amphibrach’s ti-tum-ti. Tennyson’s ‘The Oak’, which is short enough to reproduce here in full, is written in amphimacers and is also an example of that rare breed, a poem written in monometer, lines of just one foot. It could also be regarded as a pattern or shaped poem (of which more later) inasmuch as its layout suggests its subject, an oak tree.
Live thy life,
Young and old,
Like yon oak,
Bright in spring,
Living gold;
Summer-rich
Then; and then
Autumn-changed,
Soberer hued
Gold again.
All his leaves
Fall’n at length,
Look, he stands,
Trunk and bough,
Naked strength.
Alexander Pope a century earlier had written something similar as a tribute to his friend Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels:
In amaze
Lost I gaze
Can our eyes
Reach thy size?
. . . and so on. Tennyson’s is more successful, I think. You won’t find too many other amphimacers on your poetic travels: once again, English poets, prosodists and metrists don’t really believe in them. Maybe you will be the one to change their minds.
QUATERNARY FEET
Can one have metrical units of four syllables? Quaternary feet? Well, in classical poetry they certainly existed, but in English verse they are scarce indeed. Suppose we wrote this:
That’s a hexameter of alternating pyrrhic and spondaic feet and might make a variant closing or opening line to a verse, but would be hard to keep up for a whole poem. However, you could look at it as a trimeter:
The name for this titty-tum-tum foot is a double iamb, sometimes called an ionic minor. Again, these are incredibly rare in English poetry. One such foot might be used for emphasis, variation or the capturing of a specific speech pattern, but it is never going to form the metrical pattern for a whole poem, save for the purposes of a prosodic equivalent of a Chopin étude, in other words as a kind of training exercise. Whether you call the above line an ionic minor or double iambic trimeter, a pyrrhic spondaic hexameter or any other damned thing really doesn’t matter. Rather insanely there is a quaternary foot called a diamb, which goes ti-tum-ti tum, but for our purposes that is not a foot of four, it is simply two standard iambic feet. Frankly my dear, I don’t give a diamb. Some people, including a couple of modern practising poets I have come across, like the double iamb, however, and would argue that the Wilfred Owen line I scanned as a pyrrhic earlier:
Should properly be called a double iamb or ionic minor since ‘good-bye’ is double-stressed:
Well, hours of lively debate down the pub over that one. We will tiptoe away and leave them to it.
You may have guessed that if a double iamb or ionic minor goes titty-tum-tum, then an ionic major might well do the opposite: tum-tum-titty, tum-tum-titty: :‘make much of it’, that sort of rhythm:
Lee Harvey the lone gunman, did cold heartedly
Shoot fatally John Kennedy: poor Jacqueline.
You’d be right to think it ought to be called a double trochee too, but so far as I am aware this term isn’t used for such a foot, just ionic major.
For the record, you’ll find the other quaternary feet in the table at the end of this chapter: they include the antispast, the choriamb and the epitrite and paeon families. Again, good for name-dropping at parties, but like the other measures of four, vestiges of Greek poetry that really don’t have a useful place in the garden of English verse. Rupert Brooke experimented with accentual versions of choriambs, which go tum-titty-tum: Billy the Kid. True classical choriambic verse lines should start with a spondee followed by choriambs and a pyrrhic:
Brooke came up with lines like:
Light-foot dance in the woods, whisper of life, woo me to wayfaring
To make the last two syllables a pyrrhic foot you have to read the word as ‘wafering’, which is not quite what Brooke means. He, of course, was classically educated to a degree unimaginable today and would from his early teens have written Greek and Latin poems scanned according to quantitative vowel length, not stress. The vast bulk of successful English vers
e is, as we know, accentual-syllabic. Nonetheless, he shows that all the metres lie in readiness, waiting for someone to experiment with them. The problem comes when a form is so specific as to cause you to cast about for what fits the metre rather than what fits the true sense of what you want to say. How far the meaning and feeling drives you and how far, as a poet, you allow form and metre to guide you where you never expected to go is for a later section of the book.
There is another kind of native metre, however, the accentual, at which we will take a look when you have completed one more drill.
Poetry Exercise 6
Write some anapaestic hexameters describing how to get to your house.
Just as far as the motorway takes you then straight past the Lakenheath bend.
Take a left on the Narborough Road then a right when you come to the end.
It’s the house with the shutters all closed and a garden that’s frankly a slum.
When you’re there, why not park round the back or just hoot on your horn till I come?
And some dactylic pentameter on the subject of cows. For fun these should be in the classical manner: four dactyls and a spondee: try to make the spondee as spondaic as the English tongue will allow – two solid bovine stressed syllables.
Standing in randomly curious huddles in long grass
Patient as statues, but twitching and steaming like stopped trains
Pensively waiting for something to happen that just won’t
Probably thinking we’re nervous and skittish as new calves.
Your turn now. You have forty minutes for your two verses.