decapentasyllavos

[Arcadian]

zip

[HowardM2]

Since English meter is counted in terms of feet, not syllables, such terms as "decapentasyllavos" are largely meaningless when applied to English and are in fact appropriate only to langauges where it's syllables and not feet which are counted. In English, a 15-syllable line could be produced in any number of ways:

acephalous iambic octameter
catalyctic trochaic octameter
anapestic pentameter
dactylic pentameter

Such long lines rarely work well in English and are rarely used for that very reason. An example of the first (or second, depending on how you want to look at it), would be Thomas Hardy's "Friends Beyond" (http://www.theotherpages.org/poems/wessex6.html#beyond), where the first and third lines of each stanza fit that pattern.

I don't off the top of my head recall specific examples of the third and fourth types (which rarely actually have 15 syllables per lines because of the large number of iambic/trochaic substitutions generally required for those meters), but I vaguely recollect Hardy has one of the third type somewhere. Hardy, in fact, was the greatest experimenter with various meters and forms in the history of English poetry. Another example of a Hardy poem which uses long lines (though not specifically 15 syllables) in "In Tenebris III" (http://www.theotherpages.org/poems/hardy01.html#13), which, to my ear, like most of Hardy's efforts in longer lines, seems rather clunky.

W. S. Gilbert was probably the greatest master of long lines, as in the iambic octameter of "I Am the Very Model of a Modern Major-General." Longfellow also employed Homer's dactylic hexameter for his long poem "Evangeline."

[Dunc]

Rudyard Kipling (1865-1936) liked his long lines too, and produced a great deal of iambic heptameter. This often sounds like two lines of ballad metre run together; and (as is common with ballad metre) he substitutes anapaests for iambs at will, so that a fair number of the lines have (in effect by chance) 15 syllables.

Beyond the path of the outmost sun through utter darkness hurled -
Farther than ever comet flared or vagrant star-dust swirled -
Live such as fought and sailed and ruled and loved and made our world.
&nbsp &nbsp &nbsp &nbsp(Dedication from Barrack-Room Ballads

Our brows are bound with spindrift and the weed is on our knees;
Our loins are battered 'neath us by the swinging, smoking seas.
From reef and rock and skerry - over headland, ness and voe -
The Coastwise Lights of England watch the ships of England go!
&nbsp &nbsp &nbsp &nbsp(The Coastwise Lights)

I went into a public-'ouse to get a pint o' beer,
The publican 'e up an' sez, "We serve no red-coats here."
The girls be'ind the bar they laughed an' giggled fit to die,
I outs into the street again an' to myself sez I:
&nbsp &nbsp &nbsp &nbspO it's Tommy this, an' Tommy that, an' "Tommy, go away"
&nbsp &nbsp &nbsp &nbspBut it's "Thank you, Mister Atkins," when the band begins to play -
&nbsp &nbsp &nbsp &nbspThe band begins to play, my boys, the band begins to play,
&nbsp &nbsp &nbsp &nbspO it's "Thank you, Mister Atkins," when the band begins to play.
&nbsp &nbsp &nbsp &nbsp(Tommy)

Now Tomlinson gave up the ghost at his house in Berkeley Square,
And a Spirit came to his bedside and gripped him by the hair -
A Spirit gripped him by the hair and carried him far away,
Till he heard as the roar of a rain-fed ford the roar of the Milky Way:
&nbsp &nbsp &nbsp &nbsp(Tomlinson)

and much more. Regards / Dunc

[Arcadian]

zip

[Dunc]

Arcadian

In that case you may already have seen the bits of Tennyson I posted in this thread (http://www.everypoet.org/pffa/showthread.php?s=&threadid=24103&poems). Regards / Dunc

[Dunc]

Arcadian

Here’s an extract from the once much-admired Hymn to the Sea (1895) by Sir William Watson (1853-1935). Using stressed-unstressed instead of long-short, he alternates dactyllic hexameters with dactyllic pentameters (the indented lines).

As you doubtless know, in dactyllic hexameter there are six feet, and each of the first four may be either dactyl or spondee. The fifth must be a dactyl and the sixth a spondee (or trochee). There must be a caesura, typically after the first syllable of the third or fourth foot. (It’s frowned on, but not unknown, to put the caesura between the short syllables of a dactyl.) It’s also frowned on, but not unknown, to end the line with a monosyllabic word.

In the pentameter, you have two half-lines. Each of the first two feet can be dactyl or spondee, then there’s a single long syllable and the caesura. The second half has two dactyls, then another long syllable.

Regards / Dunc

III

Miser whose coffered recesses the spoils of the ages cumber,
&nbsp &nbsp &nbsp &nbspSpendthrift foaming thy soul wildly in fury away -
We, self-amorous mortals, our own multitudinous image
&nbsp &nbsp &nbsp &nbspSeeking in all we behold, seek it and find it in thee:
Seek it and find it when o'er us the exquisite fabric of Silence
&nbsp &nbsp &nbsp &nbspPerilous-turreted hangs, trembles and dulcetly falls;
When the aerial armies engage amid orgies of music,
&nbsp &nbsp &nbsp &nbspBraying of arrogant brass, whimper o£ querulous reeds;
When, at his banquet, the Summer is languid and drowsed with repletion;
&nbsp &nbsp &nbsp &nbspWhen, to his anchorite board, taciturn Winter repairs;
When by the tempest are scattered magnificent ashes of Autumn;
&nbsp &nbsp &nbsp &nbspWhen, upon orchard and lane, breaks the white foam of the Spring:
When, in extravagant revel, the Dawn, a bacchante up-leaping,
&nbsp &nbsp &nbsp &nbspSpills, on the tresses of Night, vintages golden and red;
When, as a token at parting, munificent Day, for remembrance,
&nbsp &nbsp &nbsp &nbspGives, unto men that forget, Ophirs of fabulous ore;
When irresistibly rushing, in luminous palpitant deluge,
&nbsp &nbsp &nbsp &nbspHot from the summits of Life, poured is the lava of noon;
When, as up yonder, thy mistress, at height of her mutable glories,
&nbsp &nbsp &nbsp &nbspWise from the magical East, comes like a sorceress pale.
Ah, she comes, she arises - impassive, emotionless, bloodless,
&nbsp &nbsp &nbsp &nbspWasted and ashen of cheek, zoning her ruins with pearl.
Once she was warm, she was joyous, desire in her pulses abounding:
&nbsp &nbsp &nbsp &nbspSurely thou lovedst her well, then, in her conquering youth!
Surely not all unimpassioned, at sound of thy rough serenading,
&nbsp &nbsp &nbsp &nbspShe, from the balconied night, unto her melodist leaned -
Leaned unto thee, her bondsman, who keepest to-day her commandments,
&nbsp &nbsp &nbsp &nbspAll for the sake of old love, dead at thy heart though it lie.

[Arcadian]

zip

[HowardM2]

Swinburne also experimented with long lines, in pieces such as "Hertha (http://www.bartleby.com/101/809.html) and "A Channel Crossing" (http://www.farid-hajji.net/books/en/Swinburne_Algernon_Charles/po-ccrossing.html), but probably no where more successfully than in his self-parody "Nephelidia." (http://www.theotherpages.org/poems/swine01.html#8)

[Arcadian]

zip

[HowardM2]

Actually, what most of these examples should communicate is why such long lines work very poorly in English.

[Arcadian]

zip

[HowardM2]

Long lines per se have never been in vogue in English, for narration or any other purpose, for a number of very sound reasons:

Long lines almost inevitably contain large numbers of substitutions that can cause such lines easily to lose rhythmic coherence.

Long lines often contain large quantities of inconsequential and distracting "filler" to pad out the lines to the chosen length.

Long lines rarely have the precise structure of meaning that is normally characteristic of shorter lines and their linebreaks.

Long lines don't reflect the actual nature of spoken English as shorter lines do, and invariably end up sounding contrived, strained, and--to be blunt--unnatural to an ear attuned to the rhythms of English speech.

If such long lines were genuinely effective in English, they would have been discovered and and long since become the established norm of English poets; there are sound reasons why lines of the length of iambic pentameter are, instead, the English norm. Don't confuse the fact that while such lines work well in other languages such as classical Greek and Latin, their success there portends nothing for their success in English. Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, Pope, Wordsworth, Keats, Tennyson, Eliot, Stevens, Williams, Auden, Hughes, Nemerov, Merrill, and countless others knew exactly what they were doing in not writing regularly in iambic decameter and dactylic heptameter.

[Arcadian]

zip

[Dunc]

It occurs to me that I wrote this on 1 March last in dactyllic hex (using long-short rather than - or as well as - stressed-unstressed) for the Terse Verse thread in Challenges. Regards / Dunc

Homer
THE ILIAD

Great-armoured Greeks, you that have oared this wine-coloured ocean,
Now we’re here, let’s screw Troy - in slow sepia motion.

[Arcadian]

zip

[BrianIsSmilingAtYou]

I seem to recall that Dunc has done a number of pieces with long lines, although more of these seem to be the reimagined alexandrines he has tried a couple of times, including his recent effort in Love.

Ogygia (http://www.everypoet.org/pffa/showthread.php?s=&threadid=17808)
Music (http://www.everypoet.org/pffa/showthread.php?s=&threadid=6705)

In both of these cases, as in his recent Love entry, he is using an adapted form of the French alexandrine, which does not rely on stress as in traditional English scansion.

For example, from "Ogygia":

Imagine. A traveller striding along the quay
tells grizzled Odysseus, ‘Kalypso sends regards,’
and hurries on. Such words! Islands lost in the sea,
names unlearnt and erased, leap back on ancient charts;

This is not quite as long as the fifteener.

Likewise, Scavella's original version of The Midwife Deliver Lily's Son (1926) (http://www.everypoet.org/pffa/showthread.php?s=&threadid=11450) interleaved short lines of iambic tetrameter with strophes of extremely long lines, which led some critters to view those sections as prose.

For example:

The day dawned clean. Kahizah pulled wash-water from the well,
unwound green lines of cerasee that strangled walls of backyard huts,
then cut and baled fresh fever grass on salt-bleached headkerchieves.
Later, after limeleaf tea and fish-and-grits and shepherd needle smoked along the shore,
she bundled baygerina in hard wind and told the headland: silt the ocean's gut.

and

Kahizah called her children: Yinna batten down this house now mind,
collected sage and gumalemi, and fought the whirlwind air to Lily's home.
Kahizah boiled the bush-tea, pulled the ocean, called the child.

To me, the iambic meter and phrasing were sufficient to see these as other than prose, but it is easy to see how the metrical effect could be lost in such a long line.

Recently, Jee Leong posted , which featured extremely long lines:

When you asked me out to watch a musical, I thought, ‘How gay can you get?’
Your childhood hero was a singing barber whose wife was raped: Sweeney Todd
flicked his blade, his mistress baked the men in pies and delayed his revenge, not yet, no-o-ot yet.

I've tried a couple of pieces with long lines out on the board, such as in [url=http://www.everypoet.org/pffa/showthread.php?s=&threadid=22799]Winter Dreams (]Delayed Gratification[/url) which has lines that extend to as many as sixteen syllables.

I attempted to mitigate the effect of the long line by placing a typographical caesura, as is common in Anglo-Saxon alliterative forms (though this piece is not in that form), or by splitting the line, effectively making it into two shorter lines.

I did something similar at the end of No More Weave the Reed (http://www.everypoet.org/pffa/showthread.php?s=&threadid=1884), which ends with 2 lines of 15 and 14 syllables respectively, with iambic meter. Again, there is a strong caesura (IMO) after the eighth syllable of each line.

Yet, reeds that weave in desert wind may loose the seeds of Eden,
to seek two rivers, ringed in mist, that meet the rising sun.

Does anyone know of any other attempts with long lines at PFFA?

BrianIs:)AtYou