THE STUDENTh Appendix B METERS Poetry is rhythmic sound married to meaning. Without sound, poetry ceases to exist as such, In written form it is like sheet music, waiting to come to life in performance. This means, of course, that Qitullus should be read out loud (the ancient Romans did not read silently), and the sound should be naturally rhythmic. Catullus Meter is the “measure” or rhythm of poetry. It is as old as language itself; the actual meters used by atullus are believed to be prehistoric Indo-European rhythms developed and handed down by the Greek poets. For our purposes, lines of poetry are best understood as a sequence of metrical feet. Each foot is a series of two, three, or four syllables that combine to form a metrical building block. The commonest such building blocks in Catullus are: —the dactyl, as in ,eni’, Tsbic’. —the spondee, as in13 qiii A7i —the iamb, as in cano,,__.,____su,s, meae.‘,— —the trochee, as in qTiaeils, i’s, iThs. —the choriamb, as in p-;ig As the last example shows, a foot does not necessarily begin or end with a single word. In fact, word divisions and foot divisions are more or less independent of each other, as in this line made up of six iambs: sl_v_. — S1_S _%1 Phaselus ille, quem videtis, hospites When a meter does call for word ending at the end of a foot, that pause in the line is a diaeresis. There is a strongly felt diaeresis in the middle of the elegiac pentameter: _v_ v_ — vV—., ‘— cogit amare magis, sed hene velle minus In scansion, feet may be marked by single vertical lines; a regular pause (diaeresis or c’esura) is indicated by double lines (II). The rhythm of poetic language is also independent of its regular prose accent, C’ano, for example, is accented on the penult, but its natural rhythm is iambic. Syllables have quantity or length as well as accent. Because a long syllable takes more time to pronounce than a short one, every word has a built-in quantitative rhythm as well as a stress accent. Quantity is the basis of meter in Latin poetry. In poetry, the regular stress accent of words is subordinated to the metrical rhythm set up by the patterns of long and short syllables. Latin poetry is thus different from English because our poetic rhythms arc felt in the beat of word- accent. Hence in the meter of Longfellow’s Evangeline / / / F / This is the forest primval, the murmuring pine and the hemlock the natural accent of the words falls into a rhythmic heat of six dactyls that we recognize as a dactylic hexameter. A corresponding line of Homeric, Catullan, or Virgilian hexameter carries its rhythms more by musically, in a sequence of long and short syllables that strike the ear like half notes and quarter notes: — V — _v V— V— Daniel H. Vesper adest, iuvenes, consurgitc: Vesper Olympo 171 Garrison J The Students Catullus Appendix B: Meters More often than not, the caesura D sense the difference between long “half-note” syllables (marked and short quarter-note” syllables in dactylic hexameter is neither strongly felt nor mai ked by a pause in ) phrasing; in this respect it is quite different from the diaercsis in the pentameter of elegiac verse, aarked ), it is necessary to keep in mind two basic rules of quantity. Hexameter tends to observe line end with a break in the phrasing. When that break is strong enough A syllable is long if it contains a vowel that is long by nature, like the ablative singular ending in the to be punctuated by a semicolon, colon, period, or question mark, the line is end stopped. At the other first declension puella, or the dative and ablative plurals of the first and second declensions (e.g., extreme, when the absence of a break is conspicuous, the resulting run-on is called enjamhrnent: pueris). The lexicon in this book indicates naturally long vowels with a macron (e.g.,progenies). Sueh vowels are long because they take longer to pronounce. Diphthongs, because they contain two Certe ‘ago teTnisnn vowels, also take longer to pronounce and are therefore long by nature: aequor, coepi, aurum, de jade (ei as in deign), and Eurnenides all begin with a long syllable containing a diphthong. eripul, et potius germanum anutterc crevi A syllable is long if it contains a vowel that is long by position, that is, if it is followed by two Here Catullus has held back consonants. These consonants have the effect of slowing down pronunciation of the syllable, the verb enui, forcing us to hurry on to the next line to complete the sense. This gives dramatic force whether or not they are technically part of that syllable. For example, in the phrase Iepidurn novurn to the verb in a speech filled with emotion (the words are Ariadne’s, seduced and abandoned by libellurn, the otherwise short last syllable of lepidum becomes long because it is followed by the Theseus on a desert island). The passionate rush of the first line in this pair is enhanced by elision, which makes the consonant beginning novum. It takes longer to pronounce urn-n than to say urn. By the same token, words stream together: cert-ego tein medio. In Latin verse, a word ending in a vowel elides with the end of novurn becomes long by position because of the duration of the urn-I sound. Finally, the the next word if it begins with a vowel. In scansion, elision is marked by a connecting symbol beneath the e of libellum is phonetically short, but the foot is metrically long because it precedes two i’s that are line: certejgo, Q,in. A final rn in Latin is so weak that it is ignored as a phonetic element and elided: note the pronounced individually: Iibel-Iurn, Exceptions: x = cs and counts as a double consonant: a elision of germanum above and the resultant pronunciation: german-arnittere. Likewise, an initial h is weak preceding vowel therefore makes position.” The combination of a mute (b, c, c4 f g p, and t) with enough to be elided: a following liquid (I, rn, n, and r) makes a blended consonant before which a vowel may or may not qiTr solum iiicc ‘ “make position.” This is the “tnuta corn liquida” rule, TcT cgnitmrrnh’mb In the above line both final rn’s and initial h’s are lost Reading Latin meter, like riding a bicycle, is more complicated to explain than to do. The commonest in elision: soloc died .w cogrutabere. ‘1 hese rules of elision apply in all Latin meters. Actual practice atullan meters, such as the hendecasyllabic verse and the elegiac couplet, can be read instinctively after in pronouncing elided words varies. Some readers prefer to pronounce all elided sounds, reducing one little practice because the rhythm will come naturally. of the two to a kind of grace note: te in would thus become tein. Elisions in Dante and Italian opera are usually treated in this way. The other method is to omit the first of the elided syllables, for example reading solurn hoc above as robe, There is no hard and fast rule, actylic hexameter, the traditional meter of epic since Homer, is used in poems 62 and 64. It also forms Elegiac couplets, named after the meter te first line of every elegiac couplet. Rapid and flexible, it avoids monotony by permitting the substitution used in Archaic Greek elegy and Ilellenistic epigram, are Gatullus’ 1 favorite meter, used in poems 65—116. In this meter, the ‘a spondee for a dactyl in any of the first four feet. “Spondaic lines” (with a spondee in the fifth foot) rapid dactylic hexameter (see above) alternates with a rather slower pentameter, so called because e exceptional, though they appear more often in Catullus than in Virgil or Ovid, some 30 times in poem of its two and a half dactyls on either side of a strongly felt diaeresis. Diaeresis is cancelled by elision only alone, The final syllable, marked with the x, is syllaba anceps, either long or short. The metrical schema eighteen times in a total of 323 pcntametcrs, almost always for pictorial or emotional effect. No substitution is permitted in the last half of the pentameter, written as follows: imposing a f predictability and restraint on the line as well as a sense of closure on the couplet as a whole, — z:-z — — — — .. — The alternation of lines and the divided pentameter give poems in this meter an ebb and flow that is adaptable to many moods. ilowable substitutions or resolutions are indicated by superscripted long or short marks in the schema. he fifth foot of the hexameter is regularly a dactyl; the exceptional line, where a spondee is substituted the fifth foot, is called a spandaic line, even if there are no other spondees in the line. Catullus admits ore spondaic lines than Virgil in his hexameters. This meter usually has a caesura near the middle, so ---I!---x lIed because it cuts the third foot in two. When a word ends immediately after the first syllable of the ird foot, it makes a ,nasculine caesura, also called the principal caesura because most hexameter lines iuse at this point: Galliambic, cum lecti iuvn, rTv r’bi iibis, a one-purpose meter invented for poems about C)’belc and her Galli or casti ated priests, is better suited to the more frequent short syllables of Greek. (‘atullus uses it only in poem 63, where its metimes, as in this and the next example, the caesura is reinforced by a break in the phrasing, marked usual pattern is a comma.