Glyconics

This board is a composition workshop, like a writers' workshop: post your work with questions about style or vocabulary, comment on other people's work, post composition challenges on some topic or form, or just dazzle us with your inventive use of galliambics.
Post Reply
auctor
Textkit Member
Posts: 142
Joined: Thu Oct 31, 2002 6:35 pm
Location: Eastbourne, East Sussex
Contact:

Glyconics

Post by auctor »

I am tempted to spread my pencil further afield from hexameter & iambics, have found a DH Lawrence WW1 poem [Service of All the Dead] that looks like it would work in Greek, mebbe even Latin too if I get on a roll. Can someone fill out some details on glyconics please... I only know what is in OCD and Goodwin's Greek Grammar.

Paul McK

whiteoctave
Textkit Enthusiast
Posts: 603
Joined: Tue Sep 23, 2003 11:42 pm
Location: Cambridge

Post by whiteoctave »

glyconics consist of a choriambic base (-uu-) preceeded by a trochee, spondee or iamb (a preceding pyrrhic is quite rare) and followed by an iamb: therefore u/- u/- - u u - u - (the / means not caesura here but, rather crudely, 'or'). The initial syllable, when a true long, can be resolved into a pyrrhic, giving uuu-uu-u-. there is no regular caesura.
enjoy. i have done very little in Glyconics, only composing them, in fact, in Latin.

~D

auctor
Textkit Member
Posts: 142
Joined: Thu Oct 31, 2002 6:35 pm
Location: Eastbourne, East Sussex
Contact:

Post by auctor »

Rightho ~D,

OCD says that they are interspersed with an occasional 'pherecratean' (??)
X X - u u - -
just to vary the tempo I assume. But what sort of poems do they suit? Happy, sad, story-telling, or what?

Renewed translating activity due to completion of Thucydides essay (returned with goodish mark), six weeks till next is due and finished writing clues to next Independent mag crossword.

P

Skylax
Textkit Enthusiast
Posts: 672
Joined: Fri Jun 06, 2003 8:18 am
Location: Belgium

Post by Skylax »

I know poems by Anacreon made up of strophes comprising two glyconics followed by a pherecratean, which appears as a conclusive verse.

γουνοῦμαί σ’ ἐλαφηβόλε, ξανθὴ παῖ διὸς ἀγρίων δέσποιν’ )/αρτεμι θηρῶν

and so on.

annis
Textkit Zealot
Posts: 3399
Joined: Fri Jan 03, 2003 4:55 pm
Location: Madison, WI, USA
Contact:

Re: Glyconics

Post by annis »

auctor wrote: I only know what is in OCD and Goodwin's Greek Grammar.
Eek! Beware Goodwin's meter discussion! Especially on non-symmetrical meters (i.e., glyconics) it reflects a theory of Greek meter which it is best left peacefully dead.

I have an entire section on the aeolic meters in my introduction to meter (12 pages of PDF), pp.9-11. Horace will be your best model for the Latin use of these meters.
William S. Annis — http://www.aoidoi.org/http://www.scholiastae.org/
τίς πατέρ' αἰνήσει εἰ μὴ κακοδαίμονες υἱοί;

auctor
Textkit Member
Posts: 142
Joined: Thu Oct 31, 2002 6:35 pm
Location: Eastbourne, East Sussex
Contact:

Post by auctor »

Thanks Will,

I'm glad that you say that about Goodwin - I have to say I was rather more confused after reading his account than beforehand! It did occur to me to look in your pages since my original posting. I think I know in which direction I'm heading now. Ditched DHL in favour of Housman - a superb poet in English, and no little classical poet.

P

Post Reply