LETTERS ON ENGLISH HEXAMETERS.
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."
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."