NEWS FRONT PAGE

Language, Poetry, Philology and 'The Stateliest Measure'

I spent some time arriving at the title of this talk; and at one point was very strongly urged by my advisor (my lifetime advisor) to drop the word "philology." This is a word certain to chase an audience away--a sure let-down after the expectations raised by those good words 'Language' and 'Poetry.' But I need all these words in the title: they summarize the talk so perfectly that I can almost imagine not needing to give the talk. As it is, I will need about 45 minutes of your time.

First, "language, poetry." What turns language into poetry, at the most basic, physical--really somatic-- level, is rhythm. The human instinctive love of rhythm shows itself very early, in the strong beat of those first verses passed on by oral tradition from parent to child, down the generations. "Patty-cake, patty-cake, baker's man; bake me a cake as fast as you can." "To market to market , to buy a fat pig, home again, home again, jiggedy jig." We all heard such verses early in life, and the base was laid for the repeated human experience that poetic language says more, and more intensely, than ordinary language. One of my concerns tonight is the difference between rhythm and meter, and their interplay. Rhythm can be significant in any kind of language, in prose for example in "The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want"; or in free verse without fixed meter, like "When lilacs last in the dooryard bloomed, and the great star early droop'd in the western sky at night". The word Meter means "measure," and so in poetry it means the frame, the standard or measured length within which rhythmic patterns unfold. A second interest tonight is in the special quality of verse that we can understand only by a formal look at metrical structure; and then I will look at the most important poetic verse-line in both the Greco-Latin tradition and the English language tradition. Combining these approaches will allow us to look in a new way at a famous poem of a great English poet laureate.

This discussion will require some old text-book definitions--like iamb and trochee, dactyl and spondee--that may be all too familiar to some of you, and raise dread memories of classroom experiences best forgotten for others; but I really do love this stuff and I constantly use it in my teaching and research. Meter gives form and musical energy to poetry. And poets work very hard at achieving form. So my main purpose tonight is to show how a little technical knowledge can take you a long way in greater understanding of what a poet is actually doing. And in the nineteenth-century poem I'll be analyzing, applying a formal understanding of metrical structure can lead to a radical re-evaluation of what the poem is really about.

Now, "Philology." This is not an everyday practice or mental universe for most people, yet it is for those of us who specialize in ancient languages and literatures. Everyone knows what Bi-ology, Ge-ology, Anthrop-ology, Soci-ology, and so on represent: the -logy suffix. denotes the logos, the speech or discourse about the item named in the preceding half of the word: so we have the discourse about Life, the Earth, Humankind, Society, and so on. But we have no department of Philology, and few people know what it is.

Well, Philology is also the odd term out in its structure as a compound word: because is not the -logy or study of 'philo,' which its structure would imply, but the love of speech or language: that is, philo- represents a verb, not a noun as in all other "logys." So philology means the loving of logia, of discourse or language itself. And the word philology itself is philologically anomalous!

What philology really means, is the academic study of languages, specifically the study of their grammar, style, and literature in the most stringent technical terms. Thus philology includes historical linguistics; it includes textual criticism, the editing of manuscripts to produce more readable and reliable printed texts; and the study of metrics, stylistics, and dialects. A good philologist should also be able to widen the perspective to describe the form and the transmission of genres, themes and even specific motifs and images through the centuries as later authors inherit and borrow from, and resist, and compete with and in various ways play off against, earlier authors.

Now what is 'the Stateliest Measure'? As you may know, this is a quote from Alfred Tennyson's poem "To Vergil," written in 1882 at the request of the citizens of the Italian town Mantua, Vergil's birthplace, on the nineteenth centenary of the great Roman poet's death. Tennyson's poem will illustrate very well one of the phenomena I just mentioned: a later poet playing off against an earlier poet; here, conspicuously displaying admiration, but actually, I will argue, harboring less generous motives, whether conscious or unconscious. What Tennyson calls the "stateliest measure" is Vergil's verse-form, the dactylic hexameter, which I need a few minutes to explain.

The dactylic hexameter is the great verse-form of ancient classical culture. The largest, greatest verse monuments of the Greeks and Romans, their great epic and other narrative poems--Homer's Iliad and Odyssey, Vergil's Aeneid, Apollonius' Argonautica, Ovid's Metamorphoses, were all required to be in this meter.

Dactylic means that the rhythmical unit used--the metron or "foot"-- is "long-short-short", the so-called dactyl. Now English uses stress to create its poetic rhythms whereas ancient languages used length, but you can still hear this dactylic rhythm in English in words like century, happiness, merrily, Haverford. The second term, "hexameter," means six of these metra or units. That actually means the verse consists not of six dactyls but of six dactylic values or equivalents. Human nature and human metrics needs variety; it is therefore crucial for the poet to have the option of many possible rhythmic variations, through substitution, within the same repeated meter or frame. The equivalent of "long-short-short" is "long-long," on the principle that two shorts may be replaced by a long; this "long-long" is called a spondee. We can hear its rhythm in English words like criss-cross, bear-hug, turnstile, Bryn Mawr.

So dactylic hexameter is made up of six dactyls or spondees of which the final sixth foot must always be a spondee. This is part of the rhythmic aesthetic of the verse, and specifically serves an aesthetic of closure: the verse falls into repose with a -uu-- closing rhythm. There are, in addition, special internal rules and qualifications that the reader or listener rarely notices but are surprisingly important.

The most conspicuous rule is that this long line is normally divided into two sub-units by a word ending within the third foot (but never after the third foot). This word-end--called "caesura" or "cut"--often corresponds with the end of a meaningful phrase unit, creating a line composed of a slightly shorter first half and a slightly longer second half, an aesthetically pleasing arrangement: it offers what we might call a delicate imbalance, tilted in the direction of a heavier final section. We have some evidence that in the earliest Greek epic this was the standard line structure, consisting of two separate sense units, and that over the centuries poets grew more sophisticated in achieving variation by covering up this middle "seam", most often by having a unified phrase carry over the cut. Even when this happened, there was always a technical need to observe the cut formally by having a word end at the traditional caesura even though the phrase runs over it. Occasionally this expected caesura is totally ignored--not even a word-end is placed there--often in a verse seeking a special effect--and in such cases the postponed caesura must be placed after the first long of the fourth foot.

Now it is time go from the skeletal structure to the real living organism. All verse forms have power. Poetry is meant to be specially charged language, and I have been arguing that rhythmic movement is a main source of that energy. The dactylic hexameter is a metrical form that immediately strikes any listener as distinctive and attractive: rhythmically rolling and full; long but nicely packaged into sub-sections; stately without being rigid, flexible while keeping tight constraints. You can get a sense of this--and share Tennyson's admiration--without knowing Latin or Greek. I think you can even feel the tension between sameness and variety--same meter, varying rhythm-- just by hearing a good sample. Here is the opening of Homer's Odyssey. Listen for the distinct 6-unit verse lengths--or 6 pulsations-- and hear the way each single line is identical in meter but tends to vary in rhythm: think of rhythm as the particular fulfillment of the general measure, which is the meter.

[Andra moi e[nnepe Mousa, poluvtropon, o{" mavla pollav

plavgcqh, ejpei; Troivh" iJero;n ptoliveqron e[perse.

pollw'n d j ajnqrwvpwn i[den a[stea kai; novon e[gnw,

polla; d j o{ g j ejn povntw/ pavqen a[lgea o}n kata; qumo;n

ajrnuvmeno" h{n te yuch;n kai; novston eJtaivrwn.

ajll j oujd j w}" eJtavrou" ejrruvsato, iJemevnov" per.

aujtw'n ga;r sfetevrh/sin ajtasqalivh/sin o[lonto,

nhvpioi, oi} kata; bou'" JUperivono" jHelivoio

h[sqion, aujta;r oJ toi'sin ajfeivvleto novstimon h\mar.

This meter originated in early Greece in a tradition of verse-making based on syllable quantity, meaning giving value to whether a syllable is long or short. This quantitative hexameter was created for Greek, but it worked out successfully in Latin too, which also feels long and short syllables distinctly; although it was less natural, because Latin has fewer short syllables than Greek. The Latin poets needed to take more time and wrote and revised; they never improvised easily in the kind of oral style this meter was created to serve. And yet their final product was very successful as poetry. Let's hear Vergil's hexameter, the object of Tennyson's praise. The opening of the Aeneid shows how this six-foot meter sounds in Latin, and you should be able to hear the similarity to the Greek I just read. These words are familair to many: "Arms and the man I sing, who first from the shores of Troy came to Italy, much tossed-about on land and sea. etc"

Arma virumque cano, Troiae qui primus ab oris

Italiam, fato profugus, Laviniaque venit

litora, multum ille et terris iactatus et alto

vi superum, saevae memoris Iunonis ob iram,

multa quoque et bello passus, dum conderet urbem

inferretque deos Latio, genus unde Latinum

Albanique patres et altae moenia Romae.

This dactylic meter has been imitated in English, but almost by definition it has to be mediocre English poetry, because the rhythms that emerge don't lend themselves naturally to English poetic language. Tennyson--and most other English language poets--knew very well not to attempt English dactylic hexameter when writing narrative or epic poetry consciously imitative of the classical tradition. The correct form for being classical in English has always been the 5-beat iambic, actually called "heroic verse," and this is the meter of English epic and long non-epic narrative since Chaucer. (we will take a quick peek at "before Chaucer" in a few minutes, because the contrast is so interesting). But there are revealing exceptions to this regular use of the 5-beat iambic line for English-language epic. The most famous gently ridiculed American epic poem in existence is probably "Evangeline", written by Tennyson's contemporary Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. He did use dactylic hexameter, a mixture of dactyls and spondes, and you can hear the similarity to Homer's and Vergil's verse line. Evangeline's opening verses are inscribed in the memory of every one of us educated in a certain period:

This is the forest primeval. The murmuring pines and the hemlocks,

Bearded with moss, and in garments green, indistinct in the twilight,

Stand like Druids of old, with voices sad and prophetic,

Stand like harpers hoar, with beards that rest on their bosoms.

Loud from its rocky caverns, the deep-voiced neighboring ocean

Speaks, and in accents disconsolate answers the wail of the forest.

I think some of this actually sounds good; but it's impossible to sustain it for many lines without some forcing of the diction, some awkward distribution of the meter's required stress accent in relation to the natural phrase-contours of English. There is something eventually oppressive about the recurring similarity of rhythm. And so in "Evangeline" we find many bad lines like these three (note the really awkward enjambment between the second and third line, and the unnatural accent on "Then" forced by the meter.):

Then Evangeline lighted the brazen lamp on the table,

Filled, till it overflowed, the pewter tankard with home-brewed

Nut-brown ale, that was famed for its strength

in the village of Grand-Prev.

Longfellow's "The Courtship of Miles Standish" is also in this rhythm, and glancing through it I quickly found lines like

Is it to shoot red squirrels you have your howitzer planted

There on the roof of the church, or is it to shoot red devils?

or this, surely one of the worst lines ever written in English:

Shame and confusion of guilt, and abasement and self- condemnation.

So English dactylic hexameter is doomed to be bad. The poet can imitate the classical effects of combining dactyls and spondees; but his long syllables are not always heavy by natural length, and sometimes have to be pronounced artificially slowly, and his quick syllables too often seem to be scurrying. In Greek and Latin, it works, because long vs. short quantities are inherent in the language, not imposed by artificial emphasis.

To manage this long complex verse form exceptionally well is to inspire the admiration and envy of later poets, in whatever language and tradition they composed. Tennyson's praise-poem "To Vergil" is framed overtly as a hymn of admiration for his great predecessor, but there may be a more complex attitude beneath the surface of praise. Here is the Tennyson poem. It is full of obscure allusions to Vergil's themes, and at the end you need to realize that Tennyson addresses Vergil as Mantovano, "man from Mantua." But its general sense of lofty encomium is easy to follow.

Roman Vergil, thou that singest Ilion's lofty temples robed in fire,

Ilion falling, Rome arising, wars, and filial faith, and Dido's pyre;

Landscape lover, lord of language, more than he who sang the

Works and Days,

All the chosen coin of fancy flashing out from many a golden phrase;

Thou that singest wheat and woodland, tilth and vineyard, hive and

horse and herd;

All the charm of all the Muses often flowering in a lonely word;

Poet of the happy Tityrus piping underneath his beechen bowers;

Poet of the poet-satyr, whom the laughing shepherd bound

with flowers;

Chanter of the Pollio, glorying in the blissful years again to be,

Summers of the snakeless meadow, unlaborious earth and

oarless sea;

Thou that seest Universal Nature moved by Universal Mind;

Thou majestic in thy sadness at the doubtful doom of human kind;

Light among the vanish'd ages; star that gildest yet this

phantom shore;

Golden branch amid the shadows, kings and realms that pass to rise no more;

Now thy Forum roars no longer, fallen every purple Caesar's dome--

Tho' thine ocean-roll of rhythm sound for ever of Imperial Rome--

Now the Rome of slaves has perished, and the Rome of free men holds her place,

I, from out the Northern Island sunder'd once from all the human race,

I salute thee, Mantovano, I that loved thee since my day began,

Wielder of the stateliest measure ever moulded by the lips of man.

The poem has many wonderful and intriguing details. I especially like the way Tennyson achieves his apex of overt admiration and praise, in the final two stanzas:

I from out the Northern Island, sundered once from all the human race,

I salute thee, Mantovano, I that loved thee since my day began

Notice the clever and disingenuous way Tennyson positions himself as a marginal person, in respect of geography, "race" and fame, compared to his great predecessor Vergil. England is a small, marginal island, compared to Italy and the Roman Empire; Englishmen are peripheral, "sundered" from the human race," compared to Italians, who get a flattering reference to their recent identity as a modern nation ("now the Rome of slaves is ended, and the Rome of free men takes her place"); and Tennyson is a minor figure compared to world-famous Vergil--he seems to be tipping his hat as a "Vergil fan," asking for a place in the arena of admirers. That's in the imaginary world created by the poem.

But in the real world immediately outside--whose reality instantly compromises that of the poem-world-- that little island England is a titanic power, ruling a good part of the globe. Tennyson is writing at the pinnacle of the British Empire's influence, while "the Rome of free men"--contemporary Italy-- is a very young nation in considerable disarray after centuries of Balkanized helplessness, a distinct-non-power on the European scene. Imperial Rome, which was a great power, is safely down the tube of history, and it is Tennyson's Imperial England that has actually taken her place. Tennyson is poet laureate of this Empire, and so not only a very worthy successor to Vergil but a rival--one who perhaps feels the rivalry with a bit of pique because he has no national epic to write compared to his Roman predecessor. And finally, there is the form of the poem. It is always printed as if in quatrains, four line stanzas with lines 2 and 4 rhyming; but that is a printer's convenience. After reading it a few times, I realized it must be in ten rhymed couplets, in lines so long--nine beats--that the couplets get obscured in the page layout; but couplets they are in Tennyson's original manuscript. So here too, on metrical grounds, I suspect that Tennyson was covertly competing with Vergil and cleverly attempting to go him one further: to wield an even more ambitious, more complex measure. Now we need a little philology to argue this point.

The classically trained reader--and all readers would have been such in Lord Alfred's day-- cannot fail to notice deliberate references to Vergil's three great masterpieces: Tennyson re-states themes and images from the Aeneid, the Georgics, and the Eclogues: "Ilion burning, Rome arising," "thou that singest wheat and woodland," and "poet of the happy Tityrus piping underneath his beechen bowers"; so that all of Vergil is summed up in this poetic portrait. In the act of conjuring Vergil, Tennyson is in effect enshrining him in a monument of words, a monument built cunningly to show off the powers of the new master-builder.

Tennyson did not attempt an English dactylic hexameter--he may well have read "Evangeline" and "The Courtship of Miles Standish." And he did not use the 6-beat roughly anapestic line or the 8-beat trochaic line he successfully employed in other poems like "Rizpah" and "Locksley Hall"--lines which have a length and allow a rhetorical complexity within the verse comparable to dactylic hexameter. And he did not use the classic English meter for everything from sonnets to long narrative poetry, the five-beat iambic, the so-called "heroic" meter, used by Chaucer and brought to a great pinnacle by Milton in Paradise Lost. For some reason Tennyson doesn't want this, even though he found it natural for his classicizing poem "Ulysses." And in his poem "The Lotus Eaters," similarly inspired by Homer's Odyssey ("There is sweet music here that softer falls/than petals from blown roses on the grass"), he uses the 5-beat line--the pentameter--for the first part, then feels free in the closing choral section to mix in 6-, 7-, and 8-beat iambic lines. So he had all these long lines available in his arsenal, if he wanted. If his goal had been to praise and echo Vergil, he might have done well using the 7-beat iambic line that made Chapman's Homer such a successful translation in the very classical tradition he is so closely identifying himself with. The reason he didn't, I suspect, is that the 6- or 7 foot lines would have given him an epic sweep or grandeur of poetic form approximating or matching Vergil's hexameter. But England's poet laureate was after something more ambitious: he didn't want to match Vergil, he wanted to surpass him.

Let me point out that translating Greek into English always requires about 10-20% more words--a fact deriving from the more grammatically compact nature of Greek. Therefore Chapman's 7-beat English line was arguably the best attempt to capture in English the length, architecture, and complexity of expression of the Greek hexameter. But I believe Tennyson made a calculated bold decision here to try something new and rare, a 9-beat line, which would give him ample scope to sound epic and sweeping, like a hexameter, but on a still grander scale; praising Vergil by in a sense imitating his very verse form but at the same time blowing it up to larger proportions. I've looked through lots of Tennyson and found no other 9-beat verse structure. This long 9-beat line divides most often into a 4-beat unit and a 5-beat unit, observing a classical caesura most of the time but sometimes overrunning it, just like Homer and Vergil. The proportion of first half to second half yields a ratio of 8 syllables to 9, similar to the typical Greek or Latin ratio of 6 to 8 syllables in the first half followed by 8 to 10 in the second half. Alfred Lord Tennyson was, I believe, consciously or unconsciously, manifestly doing homage to a great predecessor but at the same time more subtly seeking to show he is not just a worthy successor--as the British Empire was successor to the Roman--but an even more ambitious and grand-scale versifier, as the British Empire was an even more ambitious and grand-scale world power than the Roman.

Let me go sideways for a few minutes here to give some attention to the 5-beat iambic, the standard epic heroic English line, because this will become relevant to my argument. It is an interesting development that this line became for the English epic tradition what the dactylic hexameter was for the classical tradition, the standard stately long line. How did this approximate equivalence come about?

We know this iambic line is a foreign import into English from the Continent. The native metrical form for verse-narrative in the English language started out as a relatively short line depending on four heavy stresses, two to each half, with no fixed number of syllables. A strong caesura, which could never be overrun, kept the half-lines distinctly apart, while strong alliteration between the two halves bound them together.

And so the opening of Beowulf, the great epic of the Old English tradition, sounds like this.

This verse-form did not survive for "serious" poetry. But it is so fundamentally native to English that it survived in the folk or "low" tradition, and we hear its descendants in many places. Children chant

and adults intone

or proverbs like

But from the 14th century on the learned and classicizing influence of Continental poetry took over, which had already developed a 10-to-11 syllable iambic line, very likely a conscious adaptation of the non-epic, iambic traditions of Greek and Latin poetry.

In settling upon this five-beat, 10- to 11-syllable line, the Western mainstream tradition was echoing the kind of choice made by the Greeks and Romans many thousands of year earlier. Each language tradition developed the kind of "long line" that was ideally suited to its linguistic and rhetorical needs; and the feeling instinctive to both traditions was that verse narrative requires a long line of constant length.

It is interesting why this should be so. When you are doing lengthy poetic performance a steady long line offers a wonderful packaging, sustaining and restraining at the same time. It is psychologically important not to change the metrical form from one line to another, as you do more naturally in lyric poetry in both ancient and modern traditions.

I think this constancy is a way of representing ongoing extended storytelling by what the linguist Roman Jakobson called the iconic function of language, the useof language to represent concretely what it is communicating. In this case, a verse form whose repeated consistency and extension gives the illusion that story-reality is regulated, under control. We have a verse-line of considerable length, and predictable in admitting no substantial variation. There are to be no great surprises in the physical medium of narration, because attention should not be diverted away from the content to anything that would call too much attention to itself in the form. (so we cannot alternate 5-beat with 4- or 3-beat lines).

Now let us come back to Tennyson. Any gifted English poet would have been well aware that his classic long line fell significantly short of the ancients'. A distinctive feature of the dactylic hexameter, we have seen, is that its ample length creates a tendency towards expression in two half-lines, allowing the poet to play subtle games of phrase structure, rhythm and rhetoric around the mid-line caesura. He will alternate strict observance with mild observance, and with occasional bold overrun of this dividing point. The 5-beat iambic line, by contrast, is simply too short to have a meaningful, regular caesura. Look at the opening lines of Milton's Paradise Lost, the greatest English epic. There are many commas, and they occur in several different places. There is no expected divide or "cut" in this repeated 10-syllable flow. Instead, the lesser length combined with the highly wrought sentence structure leads to a lot more enjambment than in the classical hexameter. That offers excellent but different opportunities for rich interaction between rhetoric and line structure; but it tends to underplay the weight of the line itself as a normative unit of meaning.

Of man's first disobedience, and the fruit

Of that forbidden tree, whose mortal taste

Brought Death into the world, and all our woe,

With loss of Eden, till one greater Man

Restore us, and regain the blissful seat,

Sing Heav'nly Muse, that on the secret top. . .

So this is the great line of the English poet's classical tradition, but not one to load your rifle with when you're hunting for bear; that is, when you are England's poet Laureate and asked to write a poem of admiration for your greatest predecessor in the high Western Tradition, and want to really show them what you can do as a verse-builder. Tennyson uses admirable rhetoric: calls Vergil "lord of language," and "wielder of the stateliest measure." Instead, as we have seen, it is Tennyson's measure that has been specially constructed to be fuller and statelier, an inflation almost to the point of parody of a long line with a well-marked caesura. So is Tennyson really completely surrendering the title "wielder of the stateliest measure" to Vergil? Let's look again at his final three lines.

I, from out the Northern Island, sund'red once from all the human race

I salute thee, Mantovano, I who loved thee since my day began,

Wielder of the stateliest measure. . .

Tennyson knew Latin; he knew a grammatical antecedent when he saw one; and he surely knew a clear one from an ambiguous one. (whether he "knew" with the conscious or unconscious part of his mind, I do not know). If he were writing in Latin, he'd have had to show whether the word "wielder" refers back to the "I" or the "thee" in the preceding line: wielder would have been in either the subject or object case. In English, the grammar is ambiguous; so it allows us at least to entertain, even if only playfully, the question who IS Tennyson calling the wielder of the stateliest measure? Well. . . since the "I"s are placed more prominently at verse-beginning and after the caesura, and there are three I's and only two thee's-- I'd have to say the I's have it.

Let me close by saying that what this talk has been all about is verse-making. We have had a close look at two great traditions and seen how their noble long verse-lines were comparable to a limited extent, and how this limitation may have driven England's great poet to push beyond the norm and go, metrically, where "no man has gone before"--a nine-beat line. Verse-making is simultaneously technical and artistic; it combines calculation and instinct. As does the study of it. There is something wonderful about the fullness, body and completeness of the well conceived line of verse. Alexander Pope said it well in his Essay on Criticism: (in heroic couplets, let it be noted)

True ease in writing comes from art, not chance;

As those move easiest who have learned to dance.

'Tis not enough no harshness gives offense,

The sound must seem an echo to the sense.

I've tried to give language, poetry, philology, and "the stateliest measure" each a fair share of attention. The scholar and philologist have special tools for elucidating aspects of craft and technique; but it takes a poet to understand best what makes poetry work. Here are the words of the contemporary poet Charles Simic, speaking of the value of the poetic line.

"To see the world for what it is, one needs the line. . . For me the sense of the line is the most instinctive aspect of the entire process of writing. The content imposes a time scale: I have to say x in x amount of time. The other considerations are dramatic and visual. I want the line to stop in such a way that its break and the accompanying pause may bring out the image and the resonance of the words to the fullest."