Poem of the Day: ‘Alcaics’

On Wednesday, in this week of classical meters in English poetry, we noted that the sapphic stanza was born on the island of Lesbos around 600 B.C., thanks to the poet Sappho. The alcaic stanza of Ancient Greek and Latin poetry was born on the same island around the same time, thanks (tradition holds) to the poet Alcaeus. And just as English poets have tried to make our half-German, half-French accentual language speak in the quantities of hendecasyllabics, dactylic hexameter, and sapphics, so English poets have turned their hand to alcaics.

As always, it was the Victorians — trained as schoolchildren in Latin literature — who made the most concerted effort. Tennyson, for example, produced alcaics in praise of Milton: “O mighty-mouth’d inventor of harmonies, / O skill’d to sing of Time or Eternity.” Arthur Hugh Clough gave us more alcaics, and so, among others, did Robert Louis Stevenson (1850–1894).

The alcaic stanza, as the English poets developed it (following Horace’s Latin more than Alcaeus’ Greek), consists of four lines. The first two hendecasyllabic lines open with a spondee (two stong syllables in a row), with a dactyl in the penultimate foot: DUM DUM da DUM da DUM da da DUM da. And then the alcaic stanza adds a nine-syllable line and a ten-syllable line, the whole thing measured in accents rather than the length of the vowels.

Stevenson’s “Alcaics” is one of the most successful examples in English: “Brave lads in olden musical centuries / Sang, night by night, adorable choruses.” It’s hendecasyllabic with a twist, and it uses the falling off of the last two lines in the stanza to suggest its theme. The poem’s narrator, sequestered in the Alps, receives from a friend copies of old poetry, and he imagines how the happy singing of youth in alehouses becomes part of the deposit of art, long after the poets have faded away.