The Ode Less Travelled: Unlocking The Poet Within

Just as the anapaest in its rising rhythm, its move from weak to strong, is a ternary version of the iamb, so the dactyl, in its falling rhythm, its move from strong to weak, is a ternary version of the trochee. Furthermore, just as it is rewarding to clip the first weak syllable of an anapaestic line, as we saw Browning do (in other words substitute the first foot with an iamb) so dactylic verse can be highly compelling when you dock the last weak syllable (in other words substitute the final foot with a trochee).Tum-titty, tum-titty, tum-titty, tum-ti

Or you could use a single beat as Tennyson does above (a docked trochee, if you like):Tum-titty, tum-titty, tum-titty, tum.

Browning uses this kind of dactylic metre to great effect in ‘The Lost Leader’, his savage attack on Wordsworth. Browning regarded him as a sell-out for accepting the post of Poet Laureate:

Just for a handful of silver he left usJust for a riband to stick in his coat.

This creates verse with great rhythmic dash and drive. Some poets, however, in their admiration for Homer, attempted to construct quantitative English dactylic hexameters, ending them, as is common in classical verse, with spondees. Edgar Allan Poe had this to say about Longfellow’s stab at translating the Swedish dactyls of a poet called Tegner:In attempting (what never should be attempted) a literal version of both the words and the metre of this poem, Professor Longfellow has failed to do justice either to his author or himself. He has striven to do what no man ever did well and what, from the nature of the language itself, never can be well done. Unless, for example, we shall come to have an influx of spondees in our English tongue, it will always be impossible to construct an English hexameter. Our spondees, or, we should say, our spondaic words, are rare. In the Swedish they are nearly as abundant as in the Latin and Greek. We have only ‘compound’, ‘context’, ‘footfall’, and a few other similar ones.

Longfellow’s Evangeline might be considered a more successful attempt to write English dactylic hexameter in the classical style:This is the forest primeval. The murmuring pines and the hemlocks.

Poe and modern English metrists might prefer that last foot ‘hemlocks’ not be called a classical spondee but a trochee. Those last two feet, incidentally, dactyl-spondee, or more commonly dactyl-trochee, are often found as a closing rhythm known as an Adonic Line

(after Sappho’s lament to Adonis: ‘O ton Adonin!’ ‘Oh, for Adonis!’). The contemporary American poet Michael Heller ends his poem ‘She’ with an excellent Adonic line (or clausula, the classical term for a closing phrase): AndI am happy, happier even then when her mouth is on me and I gasp at the ceiling.

‘Gasp at the ceiling’ is an exact ‘Oh for Adonis’ Adonic clausula. We shall meet it again when we look at Sapphic Odes in Chapter Three.

Robert Southey (Byron’s enemy) and Arthur Hugh Clough were about the only significant English poets to experiment with consistent dactylic hexameters: one of Clough’s best-known poems ‘The Bothie of Tober Na-Vuolich’ is in a kind of mixed dactylic hexameter. By happy chance, I heard a fine dactylic tetrameter on the BBC’s Shipping Forecast last night:

Dogger, cyclonic becoming northeasterly…

By all means try writing dactyls, but you will probably discover that they need to end in trochees, iambs or spondees. As a falling rhythm, there is often a pleasingly fugitive quality to dactylics, but they can sound hypnotically dreary without the affirmative closure of stressed beats at line-end.

Bernstein’s Latin rhythms in his song ‘America’ inspired a dactyl-dactyl-spondee combination from his lyricist Stephen Sondheim:

I like the city of San Juan

I know a boat you can get on

And for the chorus:

I like to be in America

Everything’s free in America.

You have to wrench the rhythm to make it work when speaking it, but the lines fit the music exactly as I have marked them. Amérícá, you’ll notice, has three stressed final syllables, a kind of ternary spondee, tum-tum-tum.

THE MOLOSSUS AND TRIBRACH