A metrical appendix

This supremely geeky appendix to an already niche post is going out just to paid subscribers as per my usual practice for more technical research findings pendant upon a previous piece. But in the unlikely event that any free subscribers are genuinely champing at the bit to read it (!) please just let me know and I’ll gladly gift you a temporary paid sub so you can access it. There will be a more mainstream piece, as usual, going out on Thursday for all subscribers.

A couple of weeks ago I wrote about a long Latin poem written about the mathematician William Oughtred by Christopher Wase in 1656. (I was delighted to discover from the resulting correspondence that there’s actually an Oughtred Society, devoted to the preservation of slide-rules.) The poem is in short lines of mostly five syllables and in a very unusual and unclassical metre which in that piece I described as “stichic adoneans”. I used this tag because the single most common measure in the poem is an adonean — that is, long and short syllables arranged as such: — uu — x ; and because the metrical label “stichic adonean” is, though very rare, an established term. As I mentioned in the piece, there is one poem by Boethius in this metre, several medieval examples, and then a cluster of compositions in it in the latter part of the sixteenth century, a period of particularly rich metrical experiment in general.

A distinguished Latinist colleague wrote to me about the piece — very politely I may add — to ask wasn’t the metre actually stichic anapests? In Latin or Greek lyric verse a monometric stichic anapest would be: uu — uu — , but, as explained in more detail below, anapestic metres allow for a lot more variation in their basic pattern than dactylic ones.1 I was so delighted that someone else had actually considered the metre that I wrote back much too enthusiastically. To spare him too much further tiresome correspondence, I thought I would follow up his excellent question in more detail here.

The question alerted me in particular to the fact that I had not really commented on or explained that Wase’s poem, though I think it is closer to a stichic adonean than anything else, is different from most of the poems I’ve seen in this very unusual metre. The adonean as it appears as the fourth short line of a sapphic stanza is an invariable measure: it must always scan — uu — x. (Here the final syllable is marked with an x for an anceps, a syllable that can be either long or short, because a short syllable here is conventionally considered lengthened ‘by position’, i.e. because it comes at the end of the line. In practice, this simply means that a poet can use either a naturally short or a naturally long syllable in this position.) When this metrical phrase appears as the final two feet of a hexameter, it must almost always scan — uu — x, though a fifth foot spondee (— — — x) is occasionally permitted.2 In all the examples of stichic adoneans I’ve looked at in sixteenth century manuscripts, these are “strict” adoneans, conforming rigidly to the — uu — x pattern in every line.3