Dactylic Hexameter

Hello.

My name is Armand D'Angour.

I'm an associate professor of classics

at Jesus College, Oxford, and I'm

going to be giving a series of talks

about different systems of Greek and Latin meter,

beginning with the dactylic hexameter.

So dactylic hexameter is the meter

that is represented by the earliest poetry

that we have from the ancient world, the ethics of Homer.

And it was considered to be called

by Aristotle the stateliest and weightiest of the meters

because, of course, it was associated

with the story of the Iliad, the story of Achilles.

It is a regular meter, so what you have is verse following

verse in exactly the same pattern

with a few small changes and permutations

within the pattern.

And despite it's rather off-putting name,

dactylic hexameter, it is very simple to learn and to hear.

And it's a dreadful shame that a lot of students

will read the great epics of Homer and of course,

Virgil after him who wrote in the same meter

without hearing the effect of that hexameter rhythm

and without being able to read it in that rhythm

and appreciate the effects and the beauties

that emerge once you hear it as poetry that is sung in rhythm.

Which, of course, originate would have been, in the case

of homer, he would have had a melody as well.

That's another story.

But what is left for us in the textual evidence

is the meter inscribed in the words of Greek.

So a few basic ideas here.

Greek meter consists of either long or short syllables,

a long syllable the equivalent of a musical crochet,

a short one equivalent to a quaver, in other words,

a long syllable taking twice as long as the short one.

So if you think about it just in terms of sound,

a short syllables, dah, a long syllable, dah, double the time.

Actually, people who talk about meter in England

tend to use what I call two technical term dum for long

and dee for short.

So a long syllable followed by two shorts is dum, dee, dee.

Now, that's how we would hear it, dum, dee, dee--

long syllable taking twice as long as each of the shorts.

But of course, when we say dumb, dee, dee, we

tend to go dum, dee, dee as if there

are three short syllables, but we just

put an extra stress on the dum.

So we say dum, dee, dee, dum, dee, dee, dum.

Really, the meter should be heard as dah, da, da, dah, da,

da, dah.

So that is long; short, short long; short, short, long.

But that basic binary helps us to understand

each in very simple terms.

The syllables of Greek and subsequently of Latin

are either long or short.

There's nothing actually intermediate

though in practice, of course, there are

lots of intermediate lengths.

Now, the fact that we're talking about lengths,

musical durations, quantities means

that we are thinking of meter differently

from the way we do in English.

So in English, we talk about stress,

as I just said, whereas in Greek and Latin,

we talk about quantity, and we measure out the quantities.

To give you an example of how important that is,

if we take the basic meter of the sonnet,

the so-called iambic pentameter where in English,

an iambic is dee, dum, then the meter-- dee, dum, dee, dum,

dee dum, dee dum, dee dum--

is the basis of a sonnet such as "Shall I compare

thee to a summer's day."

But we are never going to say that line in a metrical way.

We're never going to say, shall I

compare thee to a summer's day, because that sounds ridiculous.

So what we do is we stress, shall

I compare this to a summer's day.

Thou art more lovely and more temperate.

So we have the underlying dee, dum, dee dum,

but we don't have those lengths, and that

is very different from Greek and Latin meter

because there it's very important

to preserve the lengths.

So they don't just stress the long syllable--

dee, dah, dee, dah, dee, dah--

they actually expect to take time

twice as long over that long syllable

as they would over a short.

So that is the essential difference

between our metrical system and that of the ancients.

Ancient meter is quantitative.

It's about lengths of syllables.

So the dactylic hexameter consists of six dactyls.

That's what hexameter, means--

hex, six; metron, a measure.

Now, in some countries, the word bar

is used to mean a unit or meter.

So in English, we might say a hexameter consists of six bars.

We might say it consists of six measures,

and that's what the Greeks said hex, hexametron; six, metra.

So each of those measures consists of a dactyl.

That's why it's a dactylic hexameter,

and a dactyl is a term that was invented

by a very clever man called Damone in the 5th century BC

because he recognized that the word dactylos, which means

a finger, represents in visual terms

a long bit followed by two short bits.

And those two short bits add up to the same length

as the long bit.

So a dactyl is either a dum, dee, dee; long short, short,

or it's too long, dum, dum.

And those are the two systems that we

find used in each bar of the dactylic hexameter,

so six measures, six bars, also called feet by the ancients.

Six feet because it was originally

thought of as danced meter.

May well have been a danced meter,

so in Homer, we hear about the dancing to the hexameter.

Six feet or six measures each consisting

of either a long, short, short rhythm or a long, long rhythm.

And invariably, the very last of those six bars is long, long.

So you could have five measures consisting

of what's called an uncontracted dactyl, in other words

dum, dee, dee, followed by the last measure, the last foot

consisting of a contracted dactyl.

It always will be dum, dum; long, long.

That would sound like this in terms of dum and dee.

Dum, dee, dee, dum, dee, dee, dum. dee, dee, dum, dee, dee,

dum, dee, dee, dum.

So that's the sort of fully dactylic rhythm

that you might get.

However, each of the first five feet can consist of two long

syllables-- dum, dum--

as well as a fully expanded dactylic sound, which is dum,

dee, dee.

So you can have a permutation between a dum, dee, dee,

and a dum, dum.

The tendency of composers in this meter

is to create a penultimate foot, which

is a full dactyl dum, dee, dee because that gives

a kind of build up to the end of the verse,

which is always, as I said, the last bar

is going to be dum, dum.

So you have the penultimate one dum, dee, dee; dum, dum, dum.

And that's this standard ending of your dactylic hexameter.

Sometimes people use the mnemonic,

the helpful way of remembering that, strawberry jam pot.

So the strawberry jam pot-- dah, dah, dah, dah,

dah tends to be in over 80% of the lines

that we have of Greek and Latin hexameter

tends to be that form.

Well, occasionally, you do get the last two

feet of the dactylic hexameter being all long--

dum, dum, dum, dum.

And in that case, the term that the ancients gave to two longs

was a spondee, and that would be called a spondaizing ending.

You get that a lot more in Greek hexameters

than you do in Latin.

By the time you get to the Latin hexameter,

they rather like the dum, dee, dee, dum,

dum at the end of the dactylic hexameter verse.

So you have various different permutations

of those longs and shorts within the dactylic hexameter.

I think it's always very helpful to have mnemonics

to try and remember the sound even if they don't exactly

replicate the quantities, the dah, da, da, dah, et cetera

of the Latin and Greek.

So one of the mnemonics that I use

is, everyone knows that "Survive"

is a song by Gloria Gaynor, which

I think everybody does know.

If you want an animal-sounding mnemonic,

I created one that goes, High on the branch of a tree

sat a woodpecker munching a beetle.

Doesn't really matter.

Make up your own mnemonics I recommend.

You'll still get a sense of the dum, dee, dee, dum, dee, dee,

dum.

Once you have that in your ear and even if we say it wrong

because we just stress the dum of each of those

feet, we get dum, dee, dee, dum, dee, dee

instead of dah, da, da, dah, da, da rhythmically incorrect time.

Doesn't matter because you'll get the idea once you

have that in your ears, and then you can approach the text.

And that's when you start to learn the beauties of what's

going on, you'll get the beginning

of Virgil's Aeneid in Latin, Arma virum que cano.

Troiae qui primus ab oris.

And then the next line, Italiam, fato profugus,

Laviniaque venit.

And then that actually runs over into the third line, Litora,

multum ill et terris iactatus et alto.

So that's the basic explanation of your dactylic hexameter.

Get that rhythm into your ears, learn

some of these rules of prosody just by reading a lot

and fitting the words of Homer and Virgil and Ovid and others

into those six feet.

And that way you'll learn to appreciate

all kinds of wonderful things about how these great poets use

the permutations of the dactylic hexameter

to do different things.

So a nice example I always think is

in Aeneid, 1, where you have the great storm in which Aeneas

and his comrades have been thrown into this whirling

vortex of water.

You have a lot of dactylic sounding line-- dah, da, da,

dah, da, da, dah-- to describe that storm

and the swelling of the sea.

And then what you suddenly have is a line consisting

of just longs spondees as they're called,

in which Virgil says they appear.

This is this the sailors who have

been thrown into the ocean.

They appear here and there, swimming on the vast ocean.

And in Latin, that's apparent rari nantes in gurgite vasto.

So you can see how that consisting

of just long syllables, each dactylic

foots consisting of two longs rather

than a long, short, short apart from the penultimate one,

gurgite vasto.

You can see how that gives a slowing down.

After all the fury and sound of the storm,

you have this image almost if a camera pans back

and you see here and there, you have the sailors

and the comrades of Aeneas appearing

on this vast ocean, a fantastic sound effect that Virgil uses.

In just the same way as he, copying an earlier pose,

Aeneas, when he wants to talk about a horse galloping

across the plain, he uses a fully dactylic line,

quadrupedante putrem sonitu quatit ungula campum.

There's more to be said about that because actually,

in Latin, the natural stress of the word

would probably be on quadrupedante putrem, so

the first syllable putrem.

So there's a kind of conflict quadrupedante putrem

sonitu quatit ungula campum.

You've got kind of interchange displacement

of different accents going on as well as

the natural dactylic motoric sound of dum, dee, dee, dum,

dee, dee, dum.

That's your horse galloping across the plains.

So you get a lot of sound effect if you

start to understand how dactylic hexameter actually

works in practice.