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I don't believe he ever was a boy. He must have been like Pallas Athenæ. Wasn't she the lady that sprang full-fledged from the brain of Zeus? Well, I've a notion that Splinter yelled in Greek when he was a baby. That is, if he ever was an infant, and called for his bottle in dactylic hexameter. Oh, I know lots about Greek, pop," laughed Will as his father smiled.

The time of pronunciation was in the dactylic measures of the learned languages capable of considerable variety; but that variety could be accommodated only to motion or duration, and different degrees of motion were perhaps expressed by verses rapid or slow, without much attention of the writer, when the image had full possession of his fancy: but our language having little flexibility, our verses can differ very little in their cadence.

But when we are taught in school that Longfellow's Evangeline is also written in "dactylic hexameters," trouble begins for the few inquisitive, since it is certain that if you close your eyes and listen carefully to a dozen lines of Homer's Greek, and then to a dozen lines of Longfellow's English, each written in so-called "hexameters," you are listening to two very different arrangements of time-intervals, so different, in fact, that the two poems are really not in the same "measure" or "metre" at all.

Aristophanes, in the "Clouds," says: SOCRATES: First they will help you to be pleasant in company, and to know what is meant by OEnoplian rhythm and what by the Dactylic. I know that quite well. SOCRATES: What is it then? STREPSIADES: Why, 'tis this finger; formerly, when a child, I used this one.

For we were now told that the Greek and Roman habits of daily speech in prose had something to do with their instinctive choice of verse-rhythms: that at the very time when the Greek heroic hexameters were being composed, there was a natural dactylic roll in spoken prose; that Roman daily speech had a stronger stress than Greek, so that Horace, in imitating Greek lyric measures, had stubborn natural word-accents to reconcile with his quantitative measures; that the Roman poets, who had originally allowed normal word-accent and verse-pulse to coincide for the most part, came gradually to enjoy a certain clash between them, keeping all the while the quantitative principle dominant; so that when Virgil and Horace read their verses aloud, and word-accent and verse-pulse fell upon different syllables, the verse-pulse yielded slightly to the word-accent, thus adding something of the charm of conversational prose to the normal time-values of the rhythm.

I used to keep this old volume close to my pillow; and I amused myself when I awoke in the morning by reciting its jingling contrasts of iambic and trochaic and dactylic metre, and thinking what a charming occupation it must be to "make up" verses. I made my first rhymes when I was about seven years old.

It is of importance to record my precocity in the use of measured language, from the point of view of the growth of my mind. Here is the Invocation to the Muses which served as an Introduction to my little book. It will be noted that I have here tried my hand at my favourite measure, the dactylic. Towards anapaests I have always felt a certain coldness, if not indeed repulsion.

That the "multiform" poet executed all these tasks with equal neatness, that he elaborated hexameters out of a language of by no means dactylic structure, and that without checking the natural flow of his style he moved with confidence and freedom amidst unwonted measures and forms are so many evidences of his extraordinary plastic talent, which was in fact more Greek than Roman; where he offends us, the offence is owing much more frequently to Greek alliteration than to Roman ruggedness.

Neither did the stressed "dactylic" hexameters of Longfellow, written though they were by a skilful versifier, quite conform to "the nature of the language." The Analogy with Music One other attempt to explain the difficulties of English rhythm and metre must at least be mentioned here, namely the "musical" theory of the American poet and musician, Sidney Lanier.

In one sense "yes." No one doubts that the Odyssey is written in "dactylic hexameters," i.e., in lines made up of six "feet," each one of which is normally composed of a long syllable plus two short syllables, or of an acceptable equivalent for that particular combination.