The ten “most difficult” books

If you’ve been hanging around the Culture section of the Guardian or any book blogs lately, you might have noticed that Emily Colette Wilkinson and Garth Risk Hallberg at Publisher’s Weekly did their list of the ten most difficult books. Their selections:

Nightwood by Djuna Barnes
A Tale of A Tub by Jonathan Swift
The Phenomenology of the Spirit by G.F. Hegel
To The Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf
Clarissa, Or the History of a Young Lady by Samuel Richardson
Finnegans Wake by James Joyce
Being & Time by Martin Heidegger
The Faerie Queene by Edmund Spenser
Women & Men by Joseph McElroy
The Making of Americans by Gertrude Stein

Personally, I would first make a small semantic suggestion of “challenging” in place of “difficult”. A lot of these books have hefty reputations as it is and, in a time when the world isn’t exactly overflowing with people looking to consume novels more advanced than The Hunger Games, “difficult” makes the experience sound turgid on top of all that. Both terms are implicitly confrontational but, while we stumble at difficulties, we rise to challenges. Making a list of difficult books sounds like a task with spurious loyalties (though in this case it isn’t: Wilkinson and Hallberg’s explanations for each book reveal their enthusiasm for the titles they’ve picked), whereas making a list of challenging books would seem, to me at least, to be nothing more ambiguous than trying to get the works more readers, even if the two lists ended up containing the same titles for the same reasoning.

On the books themselves… well, I’d chuck Clarissa out right away. Compared to the rest, it’s an easy read: just a very, very long one. Which does make it arduous, but there are even longer books that are even psychologically messier.

Hegel and Heidegger stick out like sore thumbs. Yes, they are brutally tough reads. I mean, Heidegger just made up his own words for seemingly increasingly obscure concepts and threw them in there, so if you don’t know your gelassenheit from your geworfenheit you’re going to have a pretty hard time of reading him. But if we’re allowing works of philosophy in, then Immanuel Kant’s ludicrously laborious sentences surely make him as stubborn a customer as Hegel; furthermore, I can think of a few mathematical treatises or scientific publications that are going to make reading Virginia Woolf seem as easy as breathing.

On that note, I never found Woolf particularly opaque. Nor Swift, though they’ve certainly chosen his hardest – due to it being a satire of its specific political context rather than the more universal formulations of his more widely-read works. But then, you could say the same about a lot of the Get Your Own Back! bits of The Inferno (ooh, there’s an idea… replace Virgil with Dave Benson Phillips and brimstone with large quantities of Natrasol and we’re already halfway there to a for-all-ages adaptation of La Commedia). And if The Fairie Queene makes it in presumably for its archaic language as well as its “semiotic promiscuity”, then Dante surely has to figure on that basis within his own context – the reason La Commedia was such a game changer was because it broke the dominance of the Classics (to revive a Swiftian theme) by writing in the Tuscan dialect instead of Latin (making it the Finnegans Wake of Medieval Italy… if the language of Finnegans Wake had caught on and replaced English as the dominant literary language of the literature of the British Isles) and terza rima instead of dactylic hexameter (compare its fortunes to that of Petrarch’s at least technically equal Africa to see what I mean: one has become a literary classic on the level of Homer and the other, far closer to Homer in style, has fallen into obscurity). And on the point about semiotics, you don’t get works more allegorical than Dante.

But, ah, Dante couldn’t possibly make a list like this, because in the context of a 21st centurier reading it in an English translation, it ain’t that difficult. Which may be the distinction between difficult and challenging I neglected before. Dante was difficult; now he is challenging. Kant is more difficult than he is challenging; Schopenhauer more challenging than he is difficult.

Stein and Barnes I aim to have read by the end of the year, if not by the end of summer (I also have a biography of Barnes I’m looking forward to). McElroy stands apart on the page in terms of how little I know about him and his work – I have something to say about every other book except Women and Men, so I’ve duly added it to my Amazon wishlist. Which makes this list a success, I suppose, if it was indeed an attempt at repopularising some works that were never built to be popular. I won’t have a millionth of the audience enjoyed by its authors, but with that in mind I have a few suggestions of my own:

Dhalgren by Samuel R. Delany
A schizoid, dysmetric, amnesiac, shattered-crystalline 800-page prose poem.

Lanark by Alasdair Gray
Took thirty years to write, and would take most of its characters twice as long to read.

The Soft Machine by William S. Burroughs
The experiment has been taken further than in Naked Lunch, and has not yet cohered to the point it would in the superior Western Lands trilogy. I read it as a warm-up for Gravity’s Rainbow, but the latter would only qualify ahead because of Pynchon’s awkward prose style rather than the genuine ballsyness of the Machine.

Under the Volcano by Malcolm Lowry
Surviving an encounter with this novel is all you can really do, and you never recover. It probably doesn’t help that I grew up in the same town as the author. It haunted me again during an alcohol-soaked, heat-abundant trip to Spain in the middle of a local festival last year. Unfriendly, irascible, impenetrable and brilliant.

Molloy by Samuel Beckett
This paragraphless meander through the mind of the most unreliable of unreliable narrators seems to anticipate Dhalgren, but whilst Delany’s book is pregnant with potential meaning, Beckett’s katabasis of humanity is home only to a kenosis, the void that’s left once the smoke of the modern world has cleared.

Tetraology of Elements by Rikki Ducornet
If criteria for inclusion are either that the book is challenging on a thematic or linguistic level, then Ducornet’s cycle ticks both boxes. In fact, it scratches them through the page.

On a final note, I haven’t slept in 48 hours.

In Defence of Twilight

I understand that this is a work that has been somewhat neglected by the Anglophonic literary establishment. I hate to break from popular wisdom, but I feel this is an oversight, partially based out of snobbery. Twilight is a fine piece of writing, displaying the author’s capability to deal with poetic imagery and high romantic themes with aplomb. So why the relative lack of respect? 

 

That the writer, and indeed the work specifically, deal with super- or praeter-natural themes is most likely the first reason for the well-read population turning their nose up in the direction of Twilight. But this elitism displayed towards an artist concerning themselves with fantastic situations is a relatively recent intellectual development – did not Homer operate in the transcendant realm? Is the Divine Comedy not metaphysically abnormal? 

 

Perhaps it is the effect of the Enlightenment: rationalism and empiricism are our gods, now, and we tell ourselves that anything outside of that limited sphere of directly-observed existence is not worth the time of day. White, middle-class writers like Ian McEwan, writing almost solely about the banalities of everyday existence, are decorated with praise and awards, whilst a far superior stylist and imagination like Samuel R. Delany is, at best, patronised as being “good for a science fiction writer”. The idea that fantastic fiction cannot be relevant is one we must shed if our literature is not to turn stale. 

 

The second cause for Twilight’s relative lack of acclaim in the literary world, as far as I can identify, is that it has been tainted by association with a completely seperate work. I need not name the book I mean, as the reader will no doubt be familiar with the scandalous coverage of its publication. 

 

Rather than pure snobbery, the problem here is an older, virulent strain of puritanism. If fantasy and science fiction are excluded from the literary canon, then erotica is exiled, outcast, treated with nothing more polite than utter disdain. Of course, this novel wasn’t merely guilty of describing (gasp!) sex, but sex again external to the white, middle class norm. The fact that this puts it in a tradition extending back through the Marquis de Sade to Rabelais, writers that no serious critic would dare to doubt the greatness of, has fallen on deaf ears. 

 

What I am saying is these works consisting of vampirism and sado-masochism make them transgressive to the modern establishment as surely as De Sade was to the Ancien Regime. This transgressive nature is the sole reason why they have not been widely accepted, the sole reason why those who have read them don’t seem to have understood their power. 

 

I say we must end this snobbery, this sophism, this soporific and sycophantic appraisal of literature that doesn’t dare to venture beyond the norm at the expense of genuinely imaginative works. Twilight, no matter what you may have heard, is one of Guillaume Apollinaire’s finest poems, a highlight of Alcools, and his Eleven Thousand Rods is the equal at least of Rétif, de Nerciat or even Aretino as a piece of literate pornography. We do ourselves a disservice not to recognise them.

Terza Rima

The Story So Far

1. Foot, Metrics, Prosody and Scansion

1.1 General Overview

1.2 Anglophonic metrics

1.3 Romance languages

1.4 Classical languages

2. Verse Forms

2.1 Sestina

2.2 Villanelle

2.3 Pantoum

2.4 English Sonnet

2.5 Rondelet

2.6 Italian Sonnet

2.7 Pushkin Sonnet

Experimental Intermission

1.1. Iambic pentameter stanzas

The terza rima is a rhyming verse stanza form that consists of an interlocking three-line scheme, first used by Dante. The scheme runs thus:

A-B-A B-C-B C-D-C D-E-D

There is no limit to the number of lines, but a poem written in terza rima typically ends with either a single line or couplet repeating the rhyme of the middle line of the final tercet. So, the above model would end either E or EE.

Example

I have been one acquainted with the night.
I have walked out in the rain – and back in rain.
I have outwalked the furthest city light.

I have looked down the saddest city lane.
I have passed the watchman on his beat
And dropped my eyes, unwilling to explain.

I have stood still and stopped the sound of feet
When far away an interrupted cry
Came over houses from another street,

But not to call me back or say good-bye;
And further still at an unearthly height
One luminary clock against the sky

Proclaimed the time was neither wrong nor right.
I have been one acquainted with the night.

Acquainted With the Night by Robert Frost

 

Let’s give it a go!

Across shredded wallpaper that impels
The years to be weighed by stains, comes the night;
Alongside the ghosts of cigarette smells

And beer that’s stale as ozone, all that shite
Accumulated in the heart of rooms
That lived, died; long since gave up the fight,

Their carcasses becoming stately tombs
Where light of day can happily decay,
Where darkness incubates, the evening’s wombs.

Through council terrace windows, (an array
Of Edwardian folly that matches
The country’s repugnant 80s display…

Last decade’s children yet rage at Thatcher’s
Silly car boot sale, while to Brown and Blair
For going further, no blame attaches)

The street lamps’ flickering filaments flare,
Gifting those strange rooms an unearthly dream
Like small electric candles, lit in prayer.

But, true, more akin to a wrecker’s scheme:
Like lawless Leasowe pirates long ago
Brought ships to rocks with a deceptive beam,

The midnight’s artificial amber glow
Attempts to draw the dusty ghosts on out
And to them its luminous pleasures show.

But to solitude, spirits are devout:
External torment, I could do without.

Closing thoughts

Another dud, I’m afraid. I need to get back to whatever I was doing right before. It might just be a case of uninspired subject matter – I haven’t been laid in days, so I’ve resorted to writing pretentious homages to rooms that smell funny in Dante’s form. The political bit is downright bloody awful, a complete non-sequitur.

Urgh at the alliteration in this poem, too. “Filament’s flickering flare,” my fat fucking arse.

On the plus side, I like “Where light of day can happily decay,” and the couplet isn’t too bad either. I think it’s just that the closer I try to stick to accentual rather than just syllabic measurement, the more I do the sort of Yoda-esque archaic speak to get it to fit. I’m considering just writing my next poem in French alexandrines or something, though I fear I’ll miss the rhythm when reading it back.

Also, I’m trying too hard to be consciously “urban,” to create a modern texture, and it comes across as artifice. I don’t care at all about how old buildings smell or druggies dying on a lad’s night out; I care about love and fucking. I like a poem being like a letter to someone, and both the Spenserian variations and the terza rima are too narrative. I’m not ready to tell stories in verse.

A Guide to Poetry #2: Verse Forms #4: Shakespearean sonnet

The Story So Far

1. Foot, Metrics, Prosody and Scansion

1.1 General Overview

1.2 Anglophonic metrics

1.3 Romance languages

1.4 Classical languages

2. Verse Forms

2.1 Sestina

2.2 Villanelle

2.3 Pantoum

This was going to be a post about rondelets, a Medieval French lyrical style, but considering my disillusionment with our cousins across the channel after Le Pen’s success in the elections, I was overcome with a sudden St George’s Day burst of patriotism and decided to celebrate Shakespeare’s birthday by jumping ahead to the English sonnet.

The sonnet, at its most basic, is a 14 line poem. There are two main versions, the English (Shakespearean) and the Italian (Petrarchan), with a more esoteric Russian variation by Alexander Pushkin called the Onegin Stanza.

There is also the Occitan stanza, a single poem by Paolo Lanfranchi da Pistoia, employing the rhyme scheme abab, abab, cdccdc; and the Spenserian, in which the rhyme scheme is abab, bcbc, cdcd, ee. The latter differs from, say, the Petrarchan in that it does not seem to require the octave set up a problem to be answered by the sestet, but instead the form is treated as three quatrains connected by an interlocking rhyme scheme followed by a couplet, not dissimilar from a terza rima.

A sonnet sequence is a number of sonnets on the same theme, creating a longer work, like Dante’s La Vita Nuova. A crown of sonnets, or a sonnet corona, is a sequence of sonnets, usually addressed to one person, and/or connected by a single theme, where the last line of the first sonnet is the first line of the succeeding sonnet, and the first line of the first sonnet is the final line of the final sonnet. The sonnet redoublé is more complex still, the 15^th (there is no set amount in a normal sonnet corona) and final sonnet being made up of all of the first lines of the preceding 14.

English Sonnet

The English sonnet must be four stanzas, the first being three quatrains and the last a couplet. The rhyme scheme for the first three is A-B-A-B and the final couplet rhymes.

Although it is not specified by the form, most English sonnets, and indeed most English poetry, are written in iambic pentameter. It’s unsurprising that Shakespeare, the most celebrated sonneteer in English, would provide an example:

Let me not the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments, love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove.
O no, it is an ever fixed mark
That looks on tempests and is never shaken;
It is the star to every wand’ring bark,
Whose worth’s unknown although his height be taken.
Love’s not time’s fool, though rosy lips and cheeks
Within his bending sickle’s compass come,
Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,
But bears it out even to the edge of doom:
If this be error and upon me proved,
I never writ, nor no man ever loved.
- Sonnet 16

 

Let’s give it a go!

The sleep of cats, so unlike the slumber
That men enjoy, or suffer silently;
Against storms, inside your psychic thunder
We make our love, and make it violently

As I, a dreamer without cause to dream
Listen as you purr, as the weather purrs;
Wonder what I, when I say love, can mean:
What weighs man next to marble claws, black furs,

A hunter’s teeth, borne in your lover’s growl?
Your passion shreds sheets as lightning shreds skies.
Had I your passion, you would hear my howl
But powerless, I run from feline eyes

A cat would envy, a landscape so deep

My thoughts it kills, and haunts me when I sleep.

Laurence Thompson, 16^th December 2011

Closing thoughts

I’m quite pleased with this sonnet, as it’s the first I’ve attempted since high school. Some of the lines appear tawdry and predictable to me, though (5 year olds know that ‘silent’ rhymes with ‘violent’, for god’s sake) – hopefully that will translate into a necessary flow in the eyes of a reader.

I didn’t have much difficulty with the pentameter, as I quickly realised the key was the second foot in the line. As long as that is recognisably iambic, so is the line, so I gave myself the freedom to piss about a bit.

As you can see, I divided up the stanzas for the sake of keeping my place. In the final version I’ve reformatted it, and I’ve called it “The Sleep of Cats.” I’m not sure whether sonnets typically have titles – perhaps I can number them once I have more of them. I also changed the last line to “It hunts my thoughts, and haunts me when I sleep.” I like the idea of a landscape hunting, rather than the other way around, and it recalls the first line of the third stanza. The predatory nature of the narrator’s lover’s beauty should seem relentless. This also works better than, say, “It haunts my thoughts, and hunts me when I sleep,” because that would set up an awkward near-rhyme between haunt and thought, and make the final clause too literal an image: imagine a dream where you’re being chased by a giant pair of cats eyes or something. Daft.

The relationship between man and nature was probably inspired by the Ted Hughes I’ve been reading lately. I hope it doesn’t sound dodgy that the poem is probably a synthesis of me thinking about a woman and my house-mate’s cat constantly waking me up. The weather is a current obsession all my own, however. Probably because, adjoined to my bedroom, there is a glass conservatory upon which the rain and snow and sleet likes to beat.

Happy St George’s Day! And, incidentally, Cervantes’ death day (depending on whether you’re using the Gregorian or Julian calendars). I think I’ll now go and kick off on Bidston windmill in his honour.

A Guide to Poetry #1: On Metrics #4: Classical prosody

Greek and Latin

As previously mentioned, classical metres counted metre quantitatively, the length of time it took to say a syllable defining whether it was heavy or light. This is comparable to a musical measure, the long and short syllables being analogous to whole and half notes.

The basic unit in Greek and Latin poetry is a mora, which is defined as a single short syllable. A long syllable is equivalent to two moras. A long syllable contains either a long vowel, a diphthong, or a short vowel followed by two or more consonants (elision and correption could mix things up a bit though).

Hexameter

The most important Classical metre, used by Homer and Virgil both (as well as in Horace’s satires and Ovid’s Metamorphoses) and supposedly invented by the god Hermes. The classical hexameters are lines of six feet, the feet in the line arranged thus:

1. dactyl(/spondee) 2. dactyl(/spondee) 3. dactyl(/spondee) 4. dactyl(/spondee) 5. dactyl 6. spondee(/trochee)

The dactylic hexameter, also known as the heroic hexameter,is easily the most frequently used and famous form of Classical hexameter and is considered the ultimate metric measurement, really. Hence why the spondees above are in parenthesis, though it enjoys preference in the sixth foot, and would have been far more common in Latin than Greek in the first four feet, due to the higher percentage of long syllables and hence more spondaic nature of Latin. The fifth foot was very, very rarely a spondee in Homer, but later hexameter poets never used anything but a dactyl.

The initial syllable of each foot is called the ictus, the basic “beat” of the verse. There is usually a caesura after the ictus of the third foot. The opening line of the Aeneid is a typical line of dactylic hexameter:

Armă vĭ | rumquĕ că | nō,|| Troi | ae quī | prīmŭs ăb | ōrīs

(“I sing of arms and the man, who first from the shores of Troy…”)

Six feet, with the third foot split by the caesura after the masculine ictus. The caesura can also appear after the feminine second syllable in the third foot, if the third foot is a dactyl. Alternatively, you might see it after the first syllable of the fourth foot or after the first syllable of the second foot, these two often occurring together in a line (with the first being considered the main caesura), which breaks it into three separate units.

As the Greek epics grew out of an oral tradition, the dactylic hexameter probably evolved from song styles. The Homeric poems arrange words in the line so there is interplay between the metrical ictus and the natural, spoken accent of words, which in the hands of a lesser poet (everyone?) might result in the poem becoming too sing-songy. But the poem should have a natural rhythm, so reinforcement is necessary. Balancing these concerns is what led to the aforementioned rules concerning the correct placement of the caesura and breaks between words – in general, word breaks occur in the middle of metrical feet, while accent and ictus coincide only near the end of the line. (Obviously this is all primarily useful to you as a devourer of information, but might provide you as an English language poet with both context and ideas.)

Hexameters came to Latin via imitation and translation of Homer, long after the practice of singing the epics had faded, so the properties of the metre were learned as “rules” rather than as a natural result of musical expression as in the Greek. It was, as mentioned, more spondaic, too; all of which contributed to a more recognisably Latin hexameter. By the time of Virgil, the influence of the great Republican rhetoricians like Lucretius, Catullus and even Cicero, all of whom used hexameter, caused Augustan poets to approach the metre looking for effects that could be exploited in skilled recitation. Get onto this line from the Aeneid, lad:

quadrupedante putrem sonitu quatit ungula campum

That means “a hoof shakes the crumbling field with a galloping sound,” and the five dactyls followed by a closing spondee imitates the action described.

The form survived well into the Latin Silver Age, but by the Medieval period it had become regarded as little more than an academic exercise. Petrach’s Africa, composed in dactylic hexameter, is borderline pretentious and fairly obscure, whereas Dante’s Divine Comedy, which he chose to write in Italian, in terza rima and in hendecasyllable, was and is the real deal.

As it relies on the regular timing of phonetic sounds, dactylic hexameter has never enjoyed any revivals as English, a stress-timed language that condenses vowels and consonants between stressed syllables, and likewise Romance languages, became predominant. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Arthur Hugh Clough and a few others in the 19^th century did try to bring it back, without much success. An example of an English imitation of dactylic hexameter from Longfellow’s Evangeline (marking the feet in the first line):

/ ˘ ˘ / ˘˘ / ˘˘ / ˘˘ / ˘˘ / /

This is the | for-est pri | me-val. The | mur-muring | pines and the | hem-locks

(dum diddy | dum diddy | dum diddy | dum diddy | dum diddy | dumdum

dactyl dactyl dactyl dactyl dactyl spondee

Bearded with moss, and in garments green, indistinct in the twilight,

Stand like Druids of old, with voices sad and prophetic,

Stand like harpers hoar, with beards that rest on their bosoms.

Iambic hexameter, also known as the English alexandrine, enjoyed more success in English, especially in the 16^th and 17^th centuries, the latter seeing it as a substitution in the heroic couplet and as one of the types of permissible lines in lyrical stanzas and in the Pindaric odes of Cowley and Dryden. Here’s Michael Drayton’s Poly-Olbion (1612), written in couplets of iambic hexameter:

Nor any | other | world like | Cotswold | ever | sped,

So rich | and fair | a vale | in for | tuning | to wed.

Late in the 18^th century, the hexameter was adopted by Kristijonas Donelaitis for his Lithuanian language poem Metai (The Seasons). William Butler Yeats used a loose ballad-like six foot line with a strong medial pause. The 20^th century also saw Sri Aurobindo make use of hexameter for his Savitri. An accentual six foot line is often used in Latin translations into English.

Dactylic pentameter

This was a line of verse made up of two equal parts. Each part contains two dactyls followed by a long syllable (also known as a longum, a long syllable that isn’t part of a metrical foot), which counts as half a foot. So, the number of feet add up to five in total (though they at first appear to add up to six – compare with grammatical vs poetic syllables in Italian and Spanish poetry). Spondees can take the place of the dactyl in the first half, but never the second, and the long syllable at the close of the first half ends a word, giving rise to a caesura. So:

Dactyl(/spondee) dactyl(/spondee) long-syllable || dactyl dactyl long-syllable

Dactylic pentameter was never used in isolation and always followed a line of dactylic hexameter in an elegiac distich or an elegiac couplet, forms of verse used for elegies and other tragic or solemn Greek verses. It was also used in love poetry, which was even sometimes light or cheerful.

Hendecasyllable (again! Again!!)

The eleven-syllable hendecasyllable was used in scolia, in Aeolic verse such as the Sapphic stanza,and later by Catullus. It was always composed of four trochees with a dactyl in the middle. The heart of the line was the choriamb (a foot that goes long, short, short, long; in other words, a dactyl and the first syllable of the third trochee). Here is the hendecasyllabic line:

Long + short | long + short | long + short + short | long + short | long + short

And here it is again, with the choriamb emboldened:

Long + short | long + short | long + short + short | long + short | long + short

Sapphic stanza

The Sapphic stanza is composed of three hendecasyllabic lines followed by an “Adonic” line, which is made up of a dactyl and a trochee. The second foot in the hendecasyllable can also be spondaic, meaning the forth syllable, the one immediately prior to the choriamb, is an ancep, or a free syllable. Here is the hendecasyllabic once more, with the ancep emboldened, in a Sapphic stanza:

Long + short | long + short | long + short + short | long + short | long + short

Long + short | long + short | long + short + short | long + short | long + short

Long + short | long + short | long + short + short | long + short | long + short

Long + short + short | long + short

It has been adapted to English more successfully than, say, the dactylic hexameter. Algernon Charles Swinburne imitated it in a poem he simply called Sapphics:

So the | goddess | fled from her | place with | awful

Sound of feet and thunder of wings around her;

While behind a clamour of singing women

Severed the twilight.

Swinburne, notice, hasn’t attempted to maintain the quantitative measurement, like Tennyson did in his “indolent reviewers” (see the Spanish hendecasyllable section above). He also isn’t using the “English hendecasyllable,” the iambic pentameter with a short final syllable, of, say, Keats, which would be marked thus:

A thing | of beaut | y is | a joy | for-ev | er

So… there are sort of at least three hendecasyllabic attempts in English*. Here is an experimentation in Sapphic stanza by Allen Ginsberg:

Red cheeked boyfriends tenderly kissed me sweet mouthed

under Boulder coverlets winter springtime

hug me naked laughing & telling girl friends

gossip til autumn

It doesn’t quite work though, unless you stress the second syllable of the word “cheeked.” The dactyl isn’t bad, though – “friends tender.” I’m sort of new at this, though.

* Remember Shakespeare doing sex changes on his lines by adding an extra unstressed syllable to a line of iambic pentameter, rendering it female? Sure you do:

To be | or not | to be || that is | the ques | tion.

Is this also a hendecasyllable? It would be if it were the norm, rather than a variation on iambic pentameter.

Asclepiad

Another form of Aeolic metre, like the Sapphic stanza, in that it is built around a choriamb. It may be described as a glyconic (look this up!) that has been expanded with one (Lesser Asclepiad) or two (Greater Asclepiad) further choriambs. Using x to denote an anceps (free syllable):

x x - ˘ ˘ - - ˘ ˘ - ˘ - (Lesser Asclepiad)

x x - ˘ ˘ - - ˘ ˘ - - ˘ ˘ - ˘ - (Greater Asclepiad)

It is named after and attributed to Asclepiades of Samos. Asclepiads were used in Latin by Horace, Catullus and Seneca, and examples in English verse would include parts of Sir Philip Sidney's Arcadia:

Here wrong's name is unheard, slander a monster is;

Keep thy sprite from abuse, here no abuse doth haunt

What man grafts in a tree dissimulation?

...and WH Auden's In Due Season:

Springtime, Summer and Fall: days to behold a world

Alcmanian verse

This is a verse consisting of dactylic tetrameter, or four dactyls, named for the Archaic Greek poet Alcman.

In English (and German), it is sometimes used to refer to dactylic tetrameters counted qualitatively, or to poems that strictly imitate Horace, who wrote some poems in the Alcmanian strophe, a couplet consisting of dactylic hexameter followed by a dactylic tetrameter a posteriore; so called because it ends with a spondee, thus resembling the last four feet of the hexameter, distinguishing it from the dactylic tetrameter a priore, where a spondee substitutes for a dactyl in the first line.

An example of dactylic tetrameter in English would be The Beatles’ Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds:

/ ˘ ˘ / ˘ ˘ / ˘ ˘ /˘ ˘

Picture yourself in a boat on a river with

tangerine trees and marmalade ski-ii-es

Bastard Scouse cheats, wish I could carry half an iamb through an entire dactyl! Which is a sentence I wouldn’t know how to begin a week ago, so I think we’re making progress.

Next: Now we’ve thoroughly covered Western types of metrics and prosody, we’ll start looking at verse forms. I try to write a sestina!