"Underneath the moonlight you'd like me even more / because I'd have a jet pack"

[larryhammer]

Ah, the rose-colored glasses of love poetry:

Not to the rich these rules of love I preach:
He who can give needs nothing I can teach.
"Here's something for you" is the soul of wit,
And all my arts of pleasing yield to it.

— The Art of Love, ii, 161–4, trans. Moore/Melville

This, suddenly, in a passage of Ovid explaining how, once you've got a woman, you'll need to be a smooth talker to keep her -- and I'm just the man to tell you how. On the sliding scale of idealism vs. cynicism, he may not have slid as far over as 1984 or Watchmen, but he'd sit quite comfortably next to Austen. Though she might not be comfortable with Ovid.

---L.

Comments

[movingfinger.livejournal.com]

Reading the TLS today, I thought of you, as I caught the second installment (or maybe I missed earlier salvos) of an argument about alexandrines in the letter column.

[larryhammer]

*blink* *blink*

What about alexandrines were they arguing?

---L.

[movingfinger.livejournal.com]

3 July 2009

Sir, - In her review of the most recent production of Phèdre (Arts, June 19), Maya Slater has made a no doubt uncharacteristic error in her remarks on the metrical construction of the alexandrin. The alexandrin classique does indeed have twelve syllables, but only four stresses, not six. Consequently, the rhythm is not iambic, but, by and large, when perfectly regular, anapestic. In other words, the alexandrin is a tetrameter, not a hexameter, and is in fact also known as the tètramétre. Hence what she considers to be a pointed metrical distortion in the line

Tout m'afflige, et me nuít, et conspíre à me nuíre

is simply an example of the standard construction. (What is unusual about this line is the internal rhyme and near rhyme of nuit/nuire/conspire. [sic]) Confusion arose, perhaps, from the fact that the English iambic hexameter is called -- after the French line, but only on the basis of a syllable count -- an alexandrine.

HAMISH ROBERTSON
86 Golborne Road, London W10.


10 July 2009

Sir - Few subjects seem to provoke as much misunderstanding in speakers of English as French versification. Hamish Robertson (Letters, July 3) is right to correct Maya Slater's erroneous view (Arts, June 19) that the alexandrin classique has six stresses in its twelve syllables (an iambic rhythm), but is wrong in his turn to say that it has, "when perfectly regular", four stresses and an anapestic rhythm. Racine's alexandrin demands a twelve-syllable line with an accent falling at the sixth syllable (caesura) and the line-end. Within this framework many permutations of syllable-groupings are possible (e.g. 4 + 2 | 1 + 5), predominantly with four stresses (hence the loose qualification of the alexandrin as a tétramètre). In the 366 lines of the first act of Phèdre (where the disputed line occurs), only eighty conform to a 3 + 3 | 3 + 3 pattern; in over ninety both hemistichs are composed of 4 + 2 or 2 + 4; and over 150 combine 3 + 3 with either 4 + 2 or 2 + 4. There are only three lines in which neither hemistich contains any of these three basic combinations. The rhythmic patterns thus created are more varied and flexible than Maya Slater's iambic trot, or Hamish Robertson's cantering anapests.

PETER COGMAN
141 Bellemoor Road, Shirley
Southampton.

[larryhammer]

Few subjects seem to provoke as much misunderstanding in speakers of English as French versification.

Indeed.

---L.

[branna.livejournal.com]

*laughs*

Smooth talking, material goods---and of course, it would never have occurred to him given his time, place, and culture that "I'll do the dishes for a week" would likely work better than both of these put together :)

[larryhammer]

He elaborates (for several dozen lines) on how the best way to please her, if you can't afford gifties, is "Yes, dear."

---L.