Sri Aurobindo

Letters on Poetry and Art

SABCL - Volume 27

Part 1. Poetry and its Creation
Section 3. Poetic Technique
Greek and Latin Classical Metres

Hexameters, Alcaics, Sapphics

Lines from [an early version of] Ilion, an unfinished poem in English hexameter (quantitative):

Ida | rose with her | god-haunted | peaks ˡˡ into | diamond | lustres, |

Ida, | first of the | hills, ˡˡ with the | ranges | silent be|yond her |

Watching the | dawn in their | giant | ˡˡ companies, | as since the | ages |

First be|gan they had | watched her, ˡˡ up|bearing | Time on their | summits. |

Triumph and agony changing hands in a desperate measure

Faced and turned, as a man and a maiden trampling the grasses

Face and turn and they laugh for their joy in the dance and each other.

These were gods and they trampled lives. But though Time is immortal,

Mortal his works are and ways and the anguish ends like the rapture.

Artisans satisfied now with their works in the plan of the transience,

Beautiful, wordless, august, the Olympians turned from the carnage.

Vast and unmoved they rose up mighty as eagles ascending,

Fanning the world with their wings. In the bliss of a sorrowless ether

Calm they reposed from their deeds and their hearts were inclined to the Stillness.

Less now the burden laid on our race by their star-white presence,

There was a respite from height; the winds breathed freer, delivered.

But their immortal content from the struggle titanic departed.

Vacant the noise of the battle roared like a sea on the shingles;

Wearily hunted the spears their quarry, strength was disheartened;

Silence increased with the march of the months on the tents of the leaguer.

The principle is a line of six feet, preponderantly dactylic, but anywhere the dactyl can be replaced by a spondee; but in English hexameter a trochee can be substituted, as the spondee comes in rarely in English rhythm. The line is divided by a caesura, and the variations of the caesura are essential to the harmony of the verse.

An example of Alcaics from the Jivanmukta (Alcaics is a Greek metre invented by the poet Alcaeus):

There is | a si|lence | greater than | any | known|

To earth’s | dumb spi|rit, | motionless | in the | soul |

That has | become | eter|nity’s foot|hold

Touched by the | infini|tudes for | ever . |

In the Latin it is:

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But in English, variations (modulations) are allowed, only one has to keep to the general plan.

Swinburne’s Sapphics are to be scanned thus:

All the | night sleep | came not u|pon my | eyelids, |

Shed not | dew, nor | shook nor un|closed a | feather, |

Yet with | lips shut | close and with | eyes of | iron

Stood and be|held me. |

Two trochees at the beginning, two trochees at the end, a dactyl separating the two trochaic parts of the line — that is the Sapphics in its first three lines, then a fourth line composed of a dactyl and a trochee.

May 1934