In the hexameter rises the fountain’s silvery column, Samuel Taylor Coleridge demonstrated the sensation of the form in this meta-elegiac couplet: What defines the classical elegy is its missing “foot” while hexameter was for heroes, the elegiac couplet followed a six-five groove – hexameter, followed by pentameter (a line of five feet).įlip and seductive, Ovid’s Elegy shrugs, “I’m frivolous, like my subject”. The focus on feet is crucial, because Elegy, with her coquettish limp, wins Ovid’s election. Tragedy, formidable and unsympathetic, scolds, “Now why not turn my way, make Roman tragedy famous,” as she stomps through an ancient wood in “high Lydian boots”. Ovid statue (1887) by Ettore Ferrari, commemorating Ovid’s exile in Tomis. “Dactyl,” derived from the Greek for finger, metrically indicates one long and two short syllables. Forgotten what a dactyl is? Look at your index finger, formed by one long and two short bones. The vocabulary isn’t merely technical when we examine the intimate connection it maps between the body and mnemonics. Thus, as Milman Parry hypothesised in his many essays, it was possible for the first singers of epic tales to recite long, complex verses to their audiences by heart. In antiquity, metre was central among poetic formulae for fixing words in communal memory. Perhaps this term sounds whimsical to the modern ear, but the original fear it signified was actual, its question urgent: how to stop these beautiful words – these fantasies, these memories – from flying away and disappearing into the air? There was even a term for this fear: epea pteroenta, or “winged word”. The idea of unrecordable, disappearing words represented a singular terror. book 1 does not elide the vowel of the preceding τε.Words like dactyl are Greek, spoken by people who in pre-Homeric times had weak means for recording speech by the written word. Other examples of this remembered sound are the word καλός, scanned with a long first syllable (despite having a short α), and the fact that the word άναξ in line 7 of Il. The sound is gone, but its effect of lengthening the syllable is not. The poet is remembering a sound that had vanished from the dialect of Greek which he was speaking (Old Ionic). The reason you are right is a historical one. It doesn't have a long vowel or diphthong, and it isn't followed by two (or more) consonants. The reason I picked out εὐρυπυ λὲς Ἄϊδος is that you instinctively (and correctly!) marked λὲς as a long syllable even though it isn't. The following vowel (the υ in ὕπο) in effect shortens the preceding diphthong (the -ει in τείχ ει), a process known as 'correption'. What complicates this line is an instance of a diphthong, which would ordinarily be long, followed by a short vowel (τείχ ει ὕπο). ![]() it it is followed by two or more consonants (e.g. ![]() εὐ ηφενέ ων, where the rouge is a diphthong and the bold is a long vowel)Ģ. if it contains a long vowel or diphthong (e.g. ![]() The two basic rules that determine a long syllable are:ġ. When we scan poetry, we're looking at the syllables as they are read, not at the individual morpheme ('word') boundaries, to determine length. (By the way, is there always a "good" solution? Or are there cases when it's up to the taste and artistic interpretation?) The colored-boldened syllables show the beginning of a foot. Are there mistakes? The red parts seem to be problematic. I was unable to find a version of the Greek Iliad that was worked out.
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