WINTER HEAVENS
Sharp is the night, but stars with frost alive
Leap off the rim of earth across the dome.
It is a night to make the heavens our home
More than the nest whereto apace we strive.
Lengths down our road each fir-tree seems a hive,
In swarms outrushing from the golden comb.
They waken waves of thoughts that burst to foam:
The living throb in me, the dead revive.
Yon mantle clothes us: there, past mortal breath,
Life glistens on the river of the death.
It folds us, flesh and dust; and have we knelt,
Or never knelt, or eyed as kine the springs
Of radiance, the radiance enrings:
And this is the soul’s haven to have felt.
NOTES
PHAETHON
The Galliambic Measure
Hermann (Elementa Doctrinae Metricae), after citing lines from the Tragic poet Phrynichus and from the Comic, observes:
Dixi supra, Phrynichorum versus videri puros Ionicos esse. Id si verum est, Galliambi non alia re ab his differunt, quam quod anaclasin, contractionesque et solutiones recipiunt. Itaque versus Galliambicus ex duobus versibus Anacreonteis constat, quorum secundus catalecticus est, hac forma:
The wonderful Attis of Catullus is the one classic example. A few lines have been gathered elsewhere. Lord Tennyson’s Boadicea rides over many difficulties and is a noble poem. Catullus makes general use of the variant second of the above metrical forms:
Mihi januae frequentes, mihi limina tepida:
With stress on the emotion;
Jam, jam dolet quod egi, jam jamque poenitet.
A perfect conquest of the measure is not possible in our tongue. For the sake of an occasional success in the velocity, sweep, volume of the line, it seems worth an effort; and, if to some degree serviceable for narrative verse, it is one of the exercises of a writer which readers may be invited to share.