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Once more in Aen. xii. 725: "Quem damnet labor, aut quo vergat pondere letum," This feature in Virgil's verse, which might be illustrated at far greater length, reappears under another form in the Ovidian elegiac. There the pentameter answers to the second half of Virgil's hexameter verse, and rings the changes on the line that has preceded in a very similar way.
Thou art successful in both; ne'er has the Gaul had success. When the happy appear, I forget the gods in the heavens; But before me they stand, when I the suffering see. Giddily onward it bears thee with resistless impetuous billows; Naught but the ocean and air seest thou before or behind. In the hexameter rises the fountain's watery column, In the pentameter sweet falling in melody down.
The word elegeion means nothing more than the combination of a hexameter and a pentameter, making together a distich, and an elegy is a poem of such verses. It was usually sung at the Symposia or literary festivals of the Greeks; in most cases its main subject was political; it afterwards assumed a plaintive or amatory tone.
In the most highly finished of Ovid's compositions this structure is carried to such a point that the syntax is rarely altogether continuous throughout the couplet; there is generally a break either natural or rhetorical at the conclusion of the hexameter or within the first few syllables of the pentameter.
He has the air of a parvenu, parading his intellectual wares, and lacking the courteous self-restraint which dignifies their style. But he is a genuine poet, and a generous, warm-hearted man, and in our opinion by far the greatest master of the pentameter that Rome ever produced. Its rhythm in his hands rises at times almost into grandeur.
And so with "trochee," "dactyl," "anapest" and the rest; if we knew that accent and not quantity was what we really had in mind, it was proper enough to speak of Paradise Lost as written in "iambic pentameter," and Evangeline in "dactylic hexameter," etc.
Another thing which the reader will note with interest in Restoration literature is the adoption of the heroic couplet; that is, two iambic pentameter lines which rime together, as the most suitable form of poetry. Waller, who began to use it in 1623, is generally regarded as the father of the couplet, for he is the first poet to use it consistently in the bulk of his poetry.
Now, certainly, it is very true that a man deserved a cudgelling for writing Leviathan; and two or three cudgellings for writing a pentameter ending so villanously as "terror ubique aderat!" But no man ever thought him worthy of anything beyond cudgelling. And, in fact, the whole story is a bounce of his own.
The dialogue is not written in classical trimeters, but in the modern pentameter; while the speaking chorus, divided into two warring factions and going about here and there as the scene changes, has little resemblance to anything found in the Greek drama. On the other hand, there is a chorus, and there are dreams which take the place of oracles.
Strongly it tilts us along, o'er leaping and limitless billows, Nothing before, and nothing behind, but the sky and the ocean. In the Hexameter rises the fountain's silvery column In the Pentameter still, falling melodious down. This consists of two dactyls, and three trochees; the two dactyls first; and the trochees following.
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