The Poems and Fragments of Catullus. Gaius Valerius Catullus

      Say, behold did ye euer her Angelike face, Like to Phoebe fayre? or her heauenly hauour And the princelike grace that in her remaineth? haue yee the like seene?

      Vnto that place Caliope dooth high her, Where my Goddesse shines: to the same the Muser After her with sweete Violines about them cheerefully tracing.

      All ye Sheepheardes maides that about the greene dwell, Speede ye there to her grace, but among ye take heede All be Virgins pure that aproche to deck her, dutie requireth.

      When ye shall present ye before her in place, See ye not your selues doo demeane too rudely: Bynd the fillets: and to be fine the waste gyrt fast with a tawdryne.

      Bring the Pinckes therewith many Gelliflowres sweete, And the Cullambynes: let vs haue the Wynesops, With the Coronation that among the loue laddes wontes to be worne much.

      Daffadowndillies all a long the ground strowe, And the Cowslyppe with a prety paunce let heere lye. Kyngcuppe and Lillies so beloude of all men and the deluce flowre.

      There are many faults in these verses; over quaintnesses of language, constructions impossible in English, quantities of doubtful correctness, harsh elisions, for Webbe has tried even elisions. Yet, if I may trust my judgment, all of them can still be read with pleasure; the sapphics may almost be called a success. This is even more true of metres, where these faults are less perceptible or more easily avoided, for instance, Asclepiads. Take the verses on solitariness, Arcadia, B. II. fin.

      O sweet woods, the delight ōf sŏlĭtāriness! O how much I do like your solitariness! Where man's mind hath a freed consideration Of goodness to receive lovely direction.

      or the hendecasyllables immediately preceding,

      Reason tell me thy minde, if here be reason, In this strange violence, to make resistance, Where sweet graces erect the stately banner.

      It is obvious that a very little more trouble would have converted these into very perfect and very pleasing poems. Had Sir Philip Sidney written every asclepiad on the model of Where man's mind hath a freed consideration, every hendecasyllable like Where sweet graces erect the stately banner, the adjustment of accent and quantity thus attained might, I think, have induced greater poets than he to make the experiment on a larger scale. But neither he nor his contemporaries were permitted to grasp as a principle a regularity which they sometimes secured by chance; nor, so far as I am aware, have the various revivals of ancient metre in this country or Germany in any case consistently carried out the whole theory, without which the reproduction is partial, and cannot look for a more than partial success. Even the four specimens given in the posthumous edition of Clough's poems, two of them elegiac, one alcaic, one in hexameters, though professedly constructed on a quantitative basis, and, in one instance (Trunks the forest yielded, with gums ambrosial oozing, &c.) combining legitimate quantity (in which accent and position are alike observed) with illegitimate (in which position is observed, but accent disregarded) into a not unpleasing rhythm, cannot be considered as more than imperfect realizations of the true positional principle. Tennyson's three specimens are, at least in English, still unique. It is to be hoped that he will not suffer them to remain so. Systems of Glyconics and Asclepiads are, if I mistake not, easily manageable, and are only thought foreign to the genius of our language because they have never been written on strict principles of art by a really great master.

      What, then, are the rules on which such rhythms become possible? They are, briefly, these:—(1) accented syllables, as a general rule, are long, though some syllables which count as long need not be accented, as in

       All that on earth's leas blooms, what blossoms Thessaly nursing,

      blossoms, though only accented on the first syllable, counts for a spondee, the shortness of the second o being partly helped out by the two consonants which follow it; partly by the fact that the syllable is in thesi; (2) the laws of position are to be observed, according to the general rules of classical prosody: (a) dactyls terminating in a consonant like beautiful, bounteous, or ending in a double vowel or a diphthong like all of you, surely may, come to thee, must be followed by a word beginning with a vowel or y or h; dactyls terminating in a vowel or y, like slippery, should be followed, except in rare cases, by words beginning with a consonant; trochees, whether composed of one word or more, should, if ending in a consonant, be followed by a vowel, if ending in the vowel a, by a consonant, thus, planted around not planted beneath, Aurora the sun's not Aurora a sun's (see however, lxiv. 253), but unto a wood, any again, sorry at all, you be amused. (b) Syllables made up of a vowel followed by two or more consonants, each of which is distinctly heard in pronunciation, as long, sins, part, band, waits, souls, ears, must, heart, bright, strength, end, and, rapt, hers, dealt, moment, bosoms, answers, mountains, bearest, tumbling, giving, coming, harbouring, difficult, imminent, stratagems, utterance, happiest, tremblingly, can never rank as short, even if unaccented and followed by a vowel, h or y. Thus, to go back to Longfellow's line,

       This is the forest primeval, the murmuring pines and the hemlocks,

      forĕst, murmurĭng, pines ănd the, are all inadmissible. But where a vowel is followed by two consonants, one of which is unheard or only heard slightly, as in accuse, shall, assemble, dissemble, kindness, compass, affect, appear, annoy, or when the second or third consonant is a liquid, as in betray, beslime, besmear, depress, dethrone, agree, the vowel preceding is so much more short than long as to be regularly admissible as short, rarely admissible as long. On this principle I have allowed disōrdĕrly̆, tēnăntlĕss, heavĕnly̆, to rank as dactyls.

      These rules are after all only an outline, and perhaps can never be made more. It will be observed that they are more negative than positive. The reason of this is not far to seek. The main difference between my verses and those of other contemporary writers—the one point on which I claim for myself the merit of novelty—is the strict observance throughout of the rules of position. But the strict observance of position is in effect the strict avoidance of unclassical collocations of syllables: it is almost wholly negative. To illustrate my meaning I will instance the poems written in pure iambics, the Phaselus ille and Quis hoc potest uidere. Heyse translates the first line of the former of these poems by

       Die Galeotte, die ihr schauet, liebe Herrn,

      and this would be a fair representation of a pure iambic line, according to the views of most German and most English writers. Yet not only is Die no short syllable, but ihr, itself long, is made more hopelessly long by preceding three consonants in schauet, just as the last syllable of schauet, although in itself short, loses its right to stand for a true short in being followed by the first consonant of liebe. My own translation,

       The puny pinnace yonder you, my friends, discern,

      whatever its defects, is at least a pretty exact representation of a pure iambic line. xxix. 6–8, are thus translated by Heyse:—

      Und jener soll in Uebermuthes Ueberfluss Von einem Bett zum andern in die Runde gehn?

      by me thus,

      Shall he in o'er-assumption, o'er-repletion he, Sedately saunter every dainty couch along?

      The difference is purely negative; I have bound myself to avoid certain positions forbidden by the laws of ancient prosody. To some I may seem to have lost in vigour by the process; yet I believe the sense of triumph over the difficulties of our language,