POETS Day! Fourteeners

I was talking about the POETS Day, “Piss Off Early, Tomorrow’s Saturday,” ethos with somebody the other day and she brought up the French and their four-day thirty-five-hour work week as aspirational for the movement. I’m not certain the French four-day work week exists even in the tiny corners of their economy where I suspect it would make its home.

Between headlines about French youth rioting because they won’t get to retire at forty-whatever there are conflicting accounts of what constitutes a job over there. Forbes tells us “France famously has a legally mandated 35-hour work week, enshrined in law since 2000,” but in the Snippets of Paris article “France’s famous Myth: the 35-hour French Work Week” (parsing the capitalization decisions in that headline will keep me up for days) we’re asked “Think the French only work 35 hours a week? Perhaps the French are just not good at keeping track of their hours.”

Whether they do, whether they don’t is unimportant. My well-meaning friend misses the point of POETS Day. It’s not about accumulating time off. It’s about enjoying something illicit.

Eat a peach and you’ll be happy, but eat the first peach of early April stolen from a neighbor’s orchard when twelve-year-old you imagines pitch fork wielding MacGregors lurking behind every tree and you’ll never forget the cool breeze across your chin.

Let the French be French. They can sing the praises of whatever Parliamentary coalition’s disposition they owe their mandated leisure time to. We have fire alarms to pull.

Piss Off Early, Tomorrow’s Saturday.

***

“It should be read as natural spoken language. The metre is, I admit, susceptible to bad reading. A bad reader of fourteeners is almost certain to tub-thump. The reader will be well advised to read according to sense and syntax, keep from thumping, observe the syntactical pause, and not stop for the line ends save where sense requires or a comma indicates. That is the way to get the most out of it, and come nearest to a sense of the time-element in the metrical plan.”
– Ezra Pound, ABC of Reading

“Fourteeners” is what you call iambic heptameter when it’s at home. It’s a fourteen-syllable poetic line divvied up into seven feet of paired syllables, unstressed followed by stressed. It’s not so popular now. Meter’s not so popular now, but among those who value such quaint things in their poetry, fourteeners seem the stuff of barroom narratives.

They are. They have been that stuff. It’s sing-songy if you let it be. Most people will recognize the music when they hear it.

The outlook wasn’t brilliant for the Mudville nine that day;
The score stood four to two with but one inning more to play.
And then when Cooney died at first, and Barrows did the same,
A sickly silence fell upon the patrons of the game.

A straggling few got up to go in deep despair. The rest
Clung to that hope which springs eternal in the human breast;
They thought if only Casey could but get a whack at that—
We’d put up even money now with Casey at the bat.

That’s, I probably don’t have to tell you, from “Casey at the Bat” by Ernest Thayer. I remember first hearing it in second or third grade when one of the nuns read it to the class. It’s a participatory meter. It pulls an audience along and the tub-thump Pound warns of aids in rote recitations. Even boozy bar room performers can put words to music more or less.

I like fourteeners best when the poet dictates pauses with punctuation in places other than line breaks. Meter as an aid to memory is what preserved stories through generations in less literate times. We read poetry more than listen to it now adays and frown on sing-song, but Mnemosyne was the mother of the Muses so it shouldn’t surprise us that fourteeners was a popular choice for early translations of The Iliad, The Aeneid, and other works passed down orally in classical dactylic hexameter.

The mnemonic rhythms are there even when downplayed. In All the Fun’s in How You Say a Thing, Timothy Steele writes,

“Some Renaissance poets who write fourteeners try to avoid the regular tetrameter-plus-trimeter effect of the measure. For instance, in his translation of Homer’s Iliad, George Chapman is careful to enjamb the line now and then and to introduce grammatical pauses at different places within the line, though even in Chapman’s hands, the line often breaks down into the shorter measures.”

This is the scene from Chapman’s Homer where Paris challenges Menelaus to single combat and then thinks better of it. This scene in particular makes me giggle but, as with all of this translation, if you read a little you end up reading more. It’s like when you’re flipping channels and come across Galaxy Quest and can’t help but watch the whole thing (It’s Galaxy Quest for me, but fill in with whichever Tim Allen vehicle you can’t help watching when it’s on and favorably compares to one of Homer’s epics.) The first three lines demand a breath at the end but then the poet moves the breaks around.

But, ere stern conflict mix’d both strengths, fair Paris stept before
The Trojan host; athwart his back a panther’s hide he wore,
A crookéd bow, and sword, and shook two brazen-headed darts;
With which well-arm’d, his tongue provok’d the best of Grecian hearts
To stand with him in single fight. Whom when the man, wrong’d most
Of all the Greeks, so gloriously saw stalk before the host;
As when a lion is rejoic’d, (with hunger half forlorn,)
That finds some sweet prey, as a hart, whose grace lies in his horn,
Or sylvan goat, which he devours, though never so pursu’d
With dogs and men; so Sparta’s king exulted, when he viewed
The fair-fac’d Paris so expos’d to his so thirsted wreak,
Whereof his good cause made him sure. The Grecian front did break,
And forth he rush’d, at all parts arm’d, leapt from his chariot,
And royally prepar’d for charge. Which seen, cold terror shot
The heart of Paris, who retir’d as headlong from the king
As in him he had shunn’d his death. And as a hilly spring
Presents a serpent to a man, full underneath his feet,
Her blue neck, swoln with poison, rais’d, and her sting out, to greet
His heedless entry, suddenly his walk he altereth,
Starts back amaz’d, is shook with fear, and looks as pale as death;
So Menelaus Paris scar’d; so that divine-fac’d foe
Shrunk in his beauties.

I’m not sure why I’m impressed with this meter more when the poet tries to hide its natural rhythm. I suspect that it’s because I’m steeped in the “language of the common man.” I imagine I want Provencal troubadours singing about all the fair bosomed ladies a’dancin’ at the fair to a catchy ditty, but Robert Graves’s unadorned precision is what I’m drawn to.

The ballad stanza is pretty much a fourteener with different lineation. Rather than Steele’s “regular tetrameter-plus-trimeter effect” occurring in the line, writers of a ballad stanza assume the cesura, or pause, in the middle of a line of iambic heptameter and break it into two. It’s a fourteener couplet in four lines. Four stresses fall each on the first and third lines and three each on the second and fourth with the evens rhyming.

A good example is found in Yeats’s “The Ballad of Father Gilligan” (Not to be confused with Gilligan of the “Sit right back and hear a tale, a tale of a fateful ship” fourteener.) From Yeats’s poem:

The old priest Peter Gilligan
Was weary night and day
For half his flock were in their beds
Or under green sods lay.

Once, while he nodded in a chair
At the moth-hour of the eve
Another poor man sent for him,
And he began to grieve.

It’s not a giant leap from one to the other. Here’s two lines as set in Wordsworth’s “Star-Gazers”:

Long is it as a barber’s pole, or mast of little boat,
Some little pleasure-skiff, that doth on Thames’s waters float.

Throughout the poem he’s got that mid-line caesura. No one would blink an eye if instead he set those fourteeners as a stanza.

Long is it as a barber’s pole,
or mast of little boat,
Some little pleasure-skiff, that doth
on Thames’s waters float.

The syllabic split isn’t perfect, but the stresses fall 4-3, 4-3. There are still fourteeners written, just not that often.

I’ll leave you with Arthur Golding’s translation of the epilogue from Ovid’s Metamorphoses. This work is often cited as an influence on Shakespeare’s writings. English poetry didn’t so much as adopt iambic pentameter as its unofficial meter as allow a transition from classical models to one fitting the mechanics of the language as the culture grew in confidence, no doubt spurred by the prowess of figures like Spenser and Shakespeare. There’s a progression from Ovid’s Latin hexameter to Golding’s translation with classically inspired fourteeners to Shakespeare’s body of pentameter announcing the arrival of an independent English composition.

Pound called Golding’s The Metamorphoses “the most beautiful book in the English language,” and added parenthetically, “my opinion and I suspect it was Shakespeare’s.” From the epilogue:

I pray
Let that same day bee slowe to comme and after I am dead,
In which Augustus (whoo as now of all the world is head)
Quyght giving up the care therof ascend to heaven for ay,
There (absent hence) to favour such as unto him shall pray.
Now have I brought a woork to end which neither Joves feerce wrath,
Nor swoord, nor fyre, nor freating age with all the force it hath
Are able to abolish quyght. Let comme that fatall howre
Which (saving of this brittle flesh) hath over mee no powre,
And at his pleasure make an end of myne uncerteyne tyme.
Yit shall the better part of mee assured bee to clime
Aloft above the starry skye. And all the world shall never
Be able for to quench my name. For looke how farre so ever
The Romane Empyre by the ryght of conquest shall extend,
So farre shall all folke reade this woork. And tyme without all end
(If Poets as by prophesie about the truth may ame)
My lyfe shall everlastingly bee lengthened still by fame.