Poem of the Day: ‘Drinking’

For someone classically educated — and a cryptographer, to boot — Abraham Cowley (1618–1667) ought to have gotten right the count of ancient meters, the patterns of long and short syllables that form the prosody of Greek and Latin poetry. But he didn’t. His importing of the Pindaric ode into English would influence poets down to Wordsworth and Coleridge, but it was decidedly unlike anything Pindar (c. 518–438 B.C.) would have written. 

And then there are his Anacreontics — a term introduced into English by Cowley to signal a kinship with fragments we have from the ancient poet Anacreon (c. 575– 495 B.C.). On the choice of topics, maybe: Cowley meant them to be short and light lyrics typically about love and wine. On the choice of meter, though: Whew. Where Anacreon used uu – u – u – – (lines with short, short, long, short, long, short, long, long syllables), Cowley transfers that to English verse that has four stresses in its mostly iambic lines, with vague gestures toward the quantity of long and short syllables. And that’s the form, as with his Pindaric odes, that Cowley handed down to English poetry.

Yet if we don’t get hung up on the inaccuracy of the name “Anacreontics,” Cowley gives us some fun wine-and-women verses in his Anacreontics. Well known as a child prodigy, publishing poetry even before he attended Westminster School and Trinity College, Cambridge, Cowley was caught up in the Civil War, spending ten years in exile in Paris as secretary to Queen Henrietta Maria. Though famous in his lifetime — and buried in the Poets’ Corner in Westminster Abbey — he never lived up to his early promise, perhaps because his prime was lost in the busywork of the encrypted correspondence of royals in exile. His popularity faded quickly after his death.