"Yes, but it took me fifty years to learn how to draw that in thirty seconds."

[larryhammer]

It's been a long time since I've had a chance to use this tag, and now I've got two reasons to. I'll deal with them one at a time, because like a good cheese, they they need room to breathe.

So first off, generous thanks to rushthatspeaks, from whom I learned about Thomas Hobbes's translations of Homer. Yes, that Hobbes, author of Leviathan. Apparently, in his 80s, after Parliament basically outlawed his publishing any more philosophy, he turned to poetry, starting with an autobiography in Latin hexameters. This was followed a few years later by the complete Iliad and Odyssey.

Here's the opening of the Iliad:

O goddess sing what woe the discontent
    Of Thetis’ son brought to the Greeks; what souls
Of heroes down to Erebus it sent,
    Leaving their bodies unto dogs and fowls;
Whilst the two princes of the army strove,
    King Agamemnon and Achilles stout.
That so it should be was the will of Jove,
    But who was he that made them first fall out?
Apollo; who incensed by the wrong
    To his priest Chryses by Atrides done,
Sent a great pestilence the Greeks among;
    Apace they died, and remedy was none.

Hobbes translating Greek? Okay, sure, fine -- it's not like he hadn't done Thucydides early in his career. But translating Greek poetry? ... not so much with the good. I mean, where on earth did he get the idea that dogtrot quatrains are equivalent to Homeric hexameters? It's not like he was an unintelligent man, either. (Notate bene: read "incensed" as three syllables -- he would have written the modern pronunciation as "insens'd" -- which adds to his beat's pounding insistence.)

But enough, you say, surely it gets better -- maybe it was only the invocation's high strain that made him ignore the possibilities of mid-line pauses, or any other ways of varying the meter. A plausible argument -- so how about this famous passage from book XXII:

Then Hector durst no longer stay, but fled:
    Fear nimbly made his feet and knees to move;
Achilles no less swiftly followed.
    As when a hawk is flying at a dove,
The dove flies out aside, herself to save;
    But by the hawk again is followed,
That gives not over till the prey he have;
    Achilles so pursu’d and Hector fled,

The reuse of the fled/followed rhyme in successive quatrains is nothing short of inspired, as is focusing on those moving knees. Just what your epic similes need to make them take flight is to look down.

Not.

In short, the WHOLE THING is of a piece, every passage like every other, in style, in tone, in prosody. I leave the touching scene of Hector and wee Astyanax on the walls of Troy to the interested to look up, for you can -- the entirety is digitized and available in a variety of e-formats, thus proving that the internets are working as designed. Instead, I leave you with the conclusion of the Iliad (the Odysseys's being too boring):

And o’er his grave, in haste, they raise a tomb.
    This done, away they went, and by-and-bye
To Priam’s house they came again, and there
    He made a splendid supper for them all.
Then home they went, well pleased with their cheer.
    Thus ended noble Hector’s funeral.

The vision of the warriors of Troy toddling home through the streets like aldermen after a guildhall banquet, pleased enough with the meal that they've forgotten that it was, yanno, the funeral of their best champion, is one to set on a pedastal -- a very tall one very far away from anyone impressionable enough to be influenced by it.

Go. Read. Laugh yourself to sleep. You'll thank me in the morning.

---L.

Comments

[stillnotbored.livejournal.com]

That...could be the baddest of bad poetry. It's so bad, it's painful. Wow...

[larryhammer]

Thanks to another another recent discovery, I know for a truth that it is not the worst. It is indeed bad enough to be painful.

---L.

[daedala.livejournal.com]

There are not that many English meters that work well in the long form. Iambic pentameter and Old English alliterative meter are the main ones I can think of. (I did my undergrad thesis on the latter. It's usually defined wrong. The verse written with the most common definitions -- which require more alliteration than the form actually had -- tends to be painful.)

[larryhammer]

Indeed, about the incorrect definitions. (Though the wrongness is of long standing -- see Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.) Doing it by the rules actually used by the Old English poets is hard, though -- the alliteration tends to take over the line, making it chime too insistently. The only post-medieval long alliterative verse I can think of is Auden's The Age of Anxiety.

But with Hobbes, it's not just the meter that's the problem, but the rhyme scheme.

---L.

[daedala.livejournal.com]

Well, it's that excessive alliterating that I'm talking about exactly. Most of the modern definitions that I saw at the time required three or four alliterations. But axax or xaax were by far the most common lines in Beowulf, with three much less common and four very rare indeed, even in later OE poetry.

I'm now pretty pissed at my undergraduate self for not clearly citing that tidbit; while I did cite, there are so many citation in that section I'm not sure which applies. *facepalm* Anyway, somebody went through and counted. It may have been Cable or Bliss or Creed; it may be been cited by Stanley; it may have been someone quoting Klaeber.

Auden also did "City Without Walls" (which went totally crazycakes with the alliteration, imo) and Eberhart' wrote "Brotherhood of Men." There are a number of shorter pieces by Wilbur, Lewis, Chappell ("My Grandfather's Church Goes Up" is pretty awesome), and Merrill. There's also Tolkien's response to Maldon. I really liked Rebsamen's imitative translation of Beowulf.

[larryhammer]

Even the Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics claims aaax is the most common. Feh. Now I'm trying to track down where I saw the analysis that axax and xaax were indeed the more common lines. (My poetry library is Too Danged Big for the one bookcase -- disorder is the result.)

I should track down that Eberhart.

---L.

[daedala.livejournal.com]

I've looked for references, and I think the source of my claim is Bliss' The Metre of Beowulf; someone citing him listed about 62% of the lines as having single alliteration (i.e. xaax or axax) and 38% double (aaax), which sounds about right -- about 2/3 to 1/3. Which is very different from the sources that suggest three or four alliterations.

Anyway, when I analyzed the form in my thesis, I found that the less alliteration (as long as you alliterated one of the first two beats with the head stave, i.e. the first beat after the caesura), the better it worked, and trying to alliterate too much made things go downhill rapidly.

"Junk" by Wilbur is probably my favorite poem, as much as I have a favorite.

[larryhammer]

♥ Wilbur

Tho' checking "Junk," he alliterates three of the beats about half the time. And has the chops to pull it off despite this.

I'm wanting to read this thesis of yours.

---L.

[rushthatspeaks.livejournal.com]

Oh god, I hadn't read the ending. Well, that's bathetic.

I cannot tell whether, on any level, Hobbes knew how bad this is.

Have been avoiding, from terror, the scene of Hera seducing Zeus.

[larryhammer]

Oh gods -- you had to make me think of that scene.

I was going to say that "bathic" is an understatement, but no, sinking is exactly what it does. Like a stone dropped into the Mariana Trench, but bathetic still encompasses that.

What little I've read of the introduction doesn't indicate any self-consciousness, but I haven't gotten very far.

---L.