Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 60, No. 369, July 1846

Letter I

Dear Mr Editor – I perceive, by your having requested a second specimen of N.N.T.'s English hexameters, that you feel an interest in the question, whether that form of verse can be successfully employed in our language. Certainly the trial has never yet been made under any moderate advantages. Sidney, and the other Elizabethans, in their attempts, hampered themselves with Latin rules of the value of syllables, which the English ear refuses to recognise, and which drive them into intolerable harshness of expression and pronunciation. Stanihurst's Virgil is so laboriously ridiculous in phraseology, that every thing belonging to it is involved in the ridicule. Southey's Vision is a poem so offensive in its scheme, that no measure could have made it acceptable. Yet the beginning of that poem is, as you, Mr Editor, have remarked, a very happy specimen of this kind of verse; and would, I think, by a common English reader, be admired, independently of classical rules and classical recollections. Now, if we can reach this point, and at the same time give a good English imitation of the Epic mode of narration in Homer, we shall have a better image of Homer in our language than we yet possess. Your contributor appears to me to have advanced a good way towards the execution of this kind of work; and I should be glad if he, or you, would allow me, as a reader of English hexameters, to offer a few remarks on his first book of the Iliad, with a view to point out what appear to me the dangers and difficulties of the task. I do not say any thing of my general admiration of N.N.T.'s version, for mere praise you would hardly think worth its room.

I should be glad to discuss with you, Mr Editor, the objections which are usually made to English hexameters. There is one of these objections which I will say a few words about at present. It proceeds upon a misapprehension, now, I hope, pretty generally rectified; I mean the objection that we cannot have hexameters, "because we have so few spondees the language." Southey says we have but one, Egypt; and gives this as a reason why the spondees of classical hexameters are replaced by trochees in German and English. As to Southey's example, Egypt is no more a spondee than precept or rescript; but the fact is, that we have in English spondees in abundance; and these spondees have tended more than any thing else to spoil our hexameters. The universal English feeling of rhythm rejects a spondee at the end of the verse; and if the syllables there placed are such as would, in the natural course of pronunciation, form a spondee, we nevertheless force upon them a trochaic character. This may be worth proving. Read, then, the following lines of Sidney: —

"But yet well do I find each man most wise in his own case."

"And yet neither of ūs great ōr blest deemeth his own self."

"Shall such morning dews be an ease to heat of a love's fire?"

"Tush, tush, said Natūre, this is all but a trifle; a man's self
Gives haps or mishaps, ev'n as he ord'reth his heart."

Now, here you have four endings which are naturally spondees; but the verse compels you to pronounce them as trochees —ōwn căse, ōwn sĕlf, lōve's fĭre, mān's sĕlf. If you still doubt whether the last foot of English hexameters is necessarily a trochee, consider this: – that if you make them rhyme, you must use double rhymes, in order that the rhyme may include the strong syllable. Thus take any of the examples given in Maga for April last: —

"See, O citizens! here old Ennius's image presented.
Honour me not with your tears; by none let my death be lamented."

The ear would not be satisfied with a rhyme of one syllable such as this —

"But yet well do I find each man most wise in his own case:
Wisely let each resolve, and meet the event with a calm face."

Now, so long as men retain the notion that the most perfect English hexameters are those which have spondees in the classical places, they are led to admit such verses as those just quoted; and this being done, the common reader, and indeed every reader, is compelled to do some violence to the language in reading. This, more than any thing else, has made an English hexameter frequently sound forced and unnatural. N.N.T. has a few such in his first Iliad.

"Pressed on the silvery hilt as he spake was the weight of his right hand."

"Two generations complete of the blood of articulate mankind."

"Over the split wood then did the old man burn them, and black wine
Pour'd."

These forms of English hexameter are to be avoided, if you would commend the verse to the common ear. And we may exclude them with a good conscience. Their forced and uneasy movement does not arise from any imperfection in our English spondees; but from the spondee in these cases being so perfect, that it cannot without some violence be made a trochee, which the English verse requires. I do not think you will find this bad trick in Southey. His habitual feeling of English rhythm preserved him from it.

But there is another blemish, which Southey, forgetting his classical rhythm too much, for it ought to have guided his English practice, has often incurred. It is, the writing lines without a cæsura, so that they divide themselves into half lines. Such as these: —

"Washington, said the monarch, | well hast thou spoken and truly."

"Evil they sow, and sorrow | will they reap for their harvest."

"That its tribute of honour, | poor though it was, was witholden."

"Pure it was and diaphanous. | It had no visible lustre."

N.N.T. has a few of these. One is the last line I quoted from him.

The essential point in English hexameters, especially while they are imperfectly naturalized, is, that the rhythm should be unforced. Without this, they will always repel and offend the English reader. And hence, though our rhythm is to be constructed by stress, and not by Latin rules of long and short, still, if it do not destroy it mars the verse, to have, for short syllables, those which have long vowels, clustered consonants, or special emphasis.

Such are the dactyls at the beginning of these lines of Southey: —

"Thōu, tŏo, dĭdst act with upright heart as befitted a sovereign."

"Hēaven ĭn thĕse things fulfilled its wise though inscrutable purpose."

"Heār, Heăv'n! y̆e angels hear! souls of the good and the wicked."

Except you prefer to read it thus —

"Hear, Heav'n! yē ăngĕls hear!"

which is no better. Perhaps the worst of Southey's lines in this way is this —

"Flōw'd thĕ lĭght ūncrēātĕd; lĭght all sufficing, eternal."

And as examples of weak syllables harshly made strong, take these —

"Fabius, Ātrides, and Solon and Epamininondas."

"Here, then, āt the gate of Heaven we are met! said the Spirit."

"Thē desire of my heart hath been alway the good of my people."

N.N.T. has some examples of this. As a slight one, I notice at the end of a line, hārvĕstlĕss ocean. And these, which are spoiled by the violation of emphasis: —

"Trūly Ĭ came not, for one, out of hate for the spearmen of Troja."

"Mightier even than you, yet amōng thĕm Ĭ never was slighted."

Here we have an emphatic I and an emphatic them which are made short in the rhythm.

N.N.T. has one dactyl which I can hardly suppose was intended —

"Under his chāstĭsĭng hand."

It appears to me that we shall never bring the lovers of English poetry to like our hexameters, except we can make the verses so that they read themselves. This the good ones among them do. N.N.T. has whole passages which run off without any violence or distortion.

But the phraseology of English hexameters requires great care, as well as the rhythm, and especially in such a work as the translation of Homer. The measure has the great advantage of freeing us from the habitual chain of "poetical diction." But we must take care that we are not led, by this freedom, either into a modern prose style, or into mean colloquialities; or in translating, into phrases which, though expressive and lively, do not agree with the tone of the poem. The style must be homely, but dignified, like that of our translation of the Old Testament. Perhaps you will allow me, for the sake of example, to notice some of N.N.T.'s expressions: —

"Try not the engine of craft: to come over me thus is beyond thee."

"This the suggestion, forsooth, that thyself being safe with thy booty,
I shall sit down without mine."

The phrase to "come over me" is colloquial, and too low even for a letter. "Your suggestion" is a phrase for a letter, not for an epic poem. "Forsooth" would be good in construing, but not in a poem. Again, is this passage serious English: —

"Opposite rose Agamemnon in wrath, but before he could open?"