OTP: Lesson - The Scansion of Poetry - Styles

The Scansion of Poetry - Styles

Common patterns emerged, often based on earlier Greek formulae for poetic meters. These patterns became recognizable as belonging to a specific type of poem, which is why Ovid was able to "play around" with the notion that Amores was an epic poem, because it would be written in dactylic hexameter, only to have Cupid steal a foot, making it a series of elegiac couplets.

Dactylic Hexameter

This formula calls for six feet in each line, with each foot concluding by using a dactyl in foot five and a spondee in foot six. The style arose in Greece, and was most famously used in Homer's epic poems: Iliad and Odyssey. Roman poets, wishing to imitate the Greek style, took the use of dactylic hexameter to be the way to formulate epic poems. The most famous Latin example of dactylic hexameter is Vergil's epic poem Aeneid, about a Trojan warrior tasked with founding a new civilization in Italy (in other words, it is Rome's origin story). The poem's famous first seven lines strongly demonstrate the epic meter:

Arma vi | rumque ca | nō, Trō | iae quī | prīmus ab | ōrīs
Ītali | am fā | tō profu | gus Lā | vīniaque | vēnit
lītora, | multum~il | le~et ter | rīs iac | tātus et | altō
vī supe | rum, sae | vae memo | rem Iū | nōnis ob | īram,
multa quo | que~et bel | lō pas | sus, dum | conderet | urbem
īnfer | retque de | ōs Lati | ō; genus | unde La | tīnum
Albā | nīque pat | rēs at | que~altae | moenia | Rōmae.

Notes: Laviniaque = Lavin(i)a, so that the ia makes a single sound = ya.

It is harder to find examples in English, since we focus less on length and more on accent. This example from the opening line of Evangeline by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow gives you some idea of what dactylic hexameter is like in English:

This is the | forest pri | meval. The | murmuring | pines and the | hemlocks

Elegiac Couplet

The elegiac couplet is made up of pairs of lines, with the first being in hexameter (six feet) and the second in pentameter (five feet), divided into two segments, each with two and a half feet (each segment ends in a long syllable). This style was again borrowed from the Greeks, but in this case, came out of their lyric tradition, including from the poetry of Sappho. The Romans again borrowed this style from the Greeks and used it almost exclusively for lyric poetry.

An example from the poet Catullus, one of Rome's most famous lyric poets:

Ōdi~et a | mō. Quā | re~id faci | am, for | tasse re | quīris?
Nescio, | sed fie | rī || sentio~et | exruci | or.

• Line one scans as: dactyl, spondee, dactyl, spondee, dactyl, spondee
• Line two scans as: dactyl, spondee, long syllable (caesura), dactyl, dactyl, long syllable

The elegiac couplet is not common in English, and in fact is replaced by a form called "heroic", but there are a few examples, like this, from Alfred Lord Tennyson's Leonine Elegiacs ("Leonine" refers to the rhyming pattern: note the rhyming of pines and shines):

Low flowing breezes are roaming the broad valley dimm'd in the gloaming:
Thoro' the black-stemm'd pines only the far river shines.

Hendecasyllabic

The last style we will encounter is called Hendecasyllabic, because the line contains exactly eleven (hendeca) syllables, in five feet. This was a style once again borrowed from the Greeks (and thus the name uses the Greek prefix for eleven) and was most commonly used by Catullus and Martial. There are various different versions of this style (with names like Phalaecian, Alcaic and Sapphic), but the basic rule stands. The first line of Catullus' first poem (Catullus, Poem 1):

cui dō | nō lepi | dum no | vum li | bellum

The line scans: spondee, dactyl, trochee, trochee, spondee

In English, we again find an example from Alfred Lord Tennyson, from his poem Hendecasyllabics:

O you chorus of indolent reviewers,
Irresponsible, indolent reviewers,
Look, I come to the test, a tiny poem
All composed in a metre of Catullus