morning kasper and poeta,
hope all is well (the latter will hear more from me presently). yes, i reached home at the last midnight after an 11-day spree in Greece, seeing a whole host of sites of variable archaeological interest, most impressive being Ancient Corinth, Mycenae, Epidaurus (Theatre and Asclepion), Delphi and that place called the Acropolis. but enough of ruins.
well done on your elegiacs, K, especially for the poetic vigour and development of the sense. notwithstanding the prosodic problems i will detail briefly below, to put into Latin verse a series of your own thoughts is no small feat and does, i think, set you (along with other versifiers) as men apart from the boys. (you may be a girl? other than a few Germans and Newnhamites of old, and a Swede, I know of no published female versifiers.)
anyhow, these are the things i picked up line by line. i should say at the outset that by far your most prolific error is the (almost e’er wrong) scansion of final -o as short.
-
a hexameter with a word ending with four syllables is not a happy puppy. the problem is the resultant lack of coincidence of metrical ictus with word accent at the inception of the fifth foot, which is unavoidable if the final word be a dis- or trisyllable. Ovid has nine examples of a word of four syllables (of minor ionic [uu–], third paean [uu-u] or molossus shape [—]), all of which, save Aquiloni (Ov.her.11.13), are Greek words. the effect is clearly Graecising, since such a restriction was of course not in force in Greek dactylic hexameter.
-
as mentioned above, final -o is almost always naturally long in Latin. the phenomenon of iambic correption, which i mentioned somewhere above, did occur in early Latin with words such as cito and modo (which in Classical Latin scan as pyrrhics), and in Augustan elegy the phenomen extended to ego, mihi, tibi, parenthetic puto, rogo etc.; this licence should not however be used with tuo, which should scan as the iamb (u-) it is. similarly with cupido which should not scan as the amphibrach necessary in your line but as a bacchius (u–).
-
otio scans as an abominable cretic (-u-), a rhythm intractable in dactylic verse (and the harsh elision of it was also avoided), not as a dactyl. a four syllable word again cheekily ends the line.
-
ardebat scans as a palimbacchius (–u) not as a dactyl. the scansion of pro in Latin, whether the interjection or the preposition scans long, but cf. for the latter the quantity of cognate Grk. πρό and Skt. prá-. pro- compounded in Latin is mostly long and as far as i can tell there does not seem a clear rule for when it scans short other than ‘always consult the dictionary’.
-
leo is an iamb not a pyrrhic, unless of course your knowledge of Ovid includes line 762 of the first book of his ars amatoria:
nunc leo, nunc arbor, nunc erit hirtus aper.
incidentally, leo scanning as the iamb it naturally is does not occur in any of the Augustan elegists, only in the pseudo-Ovidian halieuticon (l.52):
impiger, ecce, leo uenantum sternere pergit.
your lines 5 and 6 were my favourite couplet.
-
first hemiepes of the pentameter should only end in a monosyllable if preceded by a pyrrhic word or a long monosyllable. also, you should try to end the pentameter with a noun or verb, or perhaps a pronoun or pronominal adjective. diu is of course adverbial but is does have some claim to fame as closing the pentameter - eight times in Ovid and four times in Propertius. ita stet.
-
it is curious, by the by, that you here scan mouendo (wrongly) as an amphibrach but tuo (rightly, unlike above) as an iamb. serpenteo should scan as a third epitrite (–u-) not as a major ionic (–uu).
-
the scansion of cito is right!
-
this line brought me the revelation that lupus has a short u, not long, of which i was unaware.
-
as poeta mentioned, ending a pentameter with a trisyllable is not a feature of the polished school of (admittedly Brittish) elegiac composition, with Ovid as the exemplar of refinement. only thrice in some 10,000 pentameters does O. have a trisyllabic close to the line - P.1.1.66, ibid.1.8.20, ibid.4.9.26. the epistulae ex Ponto were all from a very late period of O.'s life - up to 35 years after the amores, and the stress of exile was clearly effecting his skill; either that, or he was bloody bored with finding dissyllabic closes to his pents. (as a side note, the three examples are all of questionable textual standing). Tibullus has twenty (3%) and Propertius thirty (1.5%).
this said, some notably fine versifiers have bucked against the trend. Francis Pember, Warden of All Souls, Oxon., in his 1931 collection of his verses Musa Feriata (Oxford), writes thus:
“In regard to the Latin Elegiacs in the book, I should like to say just one thing: I have always been much attracted by the versification of the earlier Elegists; and any one who looks through these pages will see that I have chosen, in many of my versions, to follow the more flexible and elastic rhythms of those older writers,in preference to Ovid’s more rigidly uniform treatment of the Elegiac couplet. This may be a heresy [too right! DJB]; but I must plead that there is an οἰκεία ἡδονή in every heresy: at any rate for the heretic.”
in the Classics journal Greece and Rome there were repeated pleas by various teachers to bring the focus from Ovid to earlier, i.e. more metrically lax, models so as to make composition easier. if you can’t stand the heat in the kitchen, i say, look at some pots, right poeta?
anyhow, we digress. trisyllabic closes noy good.
-
meis scans as an iamb not a pyrrhic.
-
the middle syllable of acerque is long.
13.as poeta noted, true hiatus (i.e. not interjectional, not Graecising and not correpted) does not, as G. P. Goold proved in his legendary 1958 and ‘69 articles in the journal Phoenix, occur in the elegiacs of Catullus, Propertius, Tibullus and Ovid. luckily you have pointed out that me’ was a depiction of the elision of mea, which does now scan fine. elision however at this point in the pentameter only occurs twice in Ovid*:
ad sata fontanas, nec pudet, addere aquas (P.1.8.46)
quadriiugos cernes saepe resistere equos (tr.4.2.54)
- her.10.86 - quis scit an et saeuas tigridas insula habet - is almost unanimously regarded as corrupt.
it also occurs but once in Tib. (2.4.58 ) and but once in Prop. (3.4.14).
well, those are the things that struck me. however, once you remove false scansions, to which all writers are occasionally prone, then your mistakes are not grave at all but amount to merely an overlooking of certain stylistic features of rhythm. so well done once more.
anyhow, i’m pretty busy over the current holiday so won’t be visiting the board, except perhaps to post up the latest version of my book list as is my seasonal wont.
did you compose straight into Latin or write an English poem then render it into Lat? if the latter I would be interested to see your original. over the last few months some of my elegiac compositions have concerned a not wholly dissimilar subject and I can PM you any if you wish, when i find the time to type some up.
best,
~D
: