Odes and Carmen Saeculare | Page 5

considerations. I did
not attempt a third until I had proceeded sufficiently far in my
undertaking to see that I should probably continue to the end. Then I
had to consider the question of a uniform metre to answer to the Latin.
Both of those which I had already tried were rendered impracticable by
a double rhyme, which, however manageable in one or two Odes, is
unmanageable, as I have before intimated, in the case of a large number.
The former of the two measures, divested of the double rhyme, would, I
think, lose most of its attractiveness; the latter suffers much less from
the privation: the latter accordingly I chose. The trochaic character of
the first line seems to me to give it an advantage over any metre
composed of pure iambics, if it were only that it discriminates it from
those alternate ten-syllable and eight-syllable iambics into which it
would be natural to render many of the Epodes. At the same time, it did
not appear worth while to rewrite the two Odes already translated,
merely for the sake of uniformity, as the principle of correspondence to
the Latin, the alternation of longer and shorter lines, is really the same
in all three cases. Nay, so tentative has been my treatment of the whole
matter, that I have even translated one Ode, the third of Book I, into
successive rather than into alternate rhymes, so that readers may judge
of the comparative effect of the two varieties. After this confession of
irregularity, I need scarcely mention that on coming to the Ode which
had suggested the metre in its unmutilated state, I translated it into the
mutilated form, not caring either to encounter the inconvenience of the
double rhymes, or to make confusion worse confounded by giving it,
what it has in the Latin, a separate form of its own.
The remaining metres may be dismissed in a very few words. As a
general rule, I have avoided couplets of any sort, and chosen some kind

of stanza. As a German critic has pointed out, all the Odes of Horace,
with one doubtful exception, may be reduced to quatrains; and though
this peculiarity does not, so far as we can see, affect the character of
any of the Horatian metres (except, of course, those that are written in
stanzas), or influence the structure of the Latin, it must be considered as
a happy circumstance for those who wish to render Horace into English.
In respect of restraint, indeed, the English couplet may sometimes be
less inconvenient than the quatrain, as it is, on the whole, easier to run
couplet into couplet than to run quatrain into quatrain; but the couplet
seems hardly suitable for an English lyrical poem of any length, the
very notion of lyrical poetry apparently involving a complexity which
can only be represented by rhymes recurring at intervals. In the case of
one of the three poems written by Horace in the measure called the
greater Asclepiad, ("Tu ne quoesieris,") I have adopted the couplet; in
another ("Nullam, Vare,") the quatrain, the determining reason in the
two cases being the length of the two Odes, the former of which
consists but of eight lines, the latter of sixteen. The metre which I
selected for each is the thirteensyllable trochaic of "Locksley Hall;" and
it is curious to observe the different effect of the metre according as it
is written in two lines or in four. In the "Locksley Hall" couplet its
movement is undoubtedly trochaic; but when it is expanded into a
quatrain, as in Mrs. Browning's poem of "Lady Geraldine's Courtship,"
the movement changes, and instead of a more or less equal stress on the
alternate syllables, the full ictus is only felt in one syllable out of every
four; in ancient metrical language the metre becomes Ionic a minore.
This very Ionic a minore is itself, I need not say, the metre of a single
Ode in the Third Book, the "Miserarum est," and I have devised a
stanza for it, taking much more pains with the apportionment of the
ictus than in the case of the trochaic quatrain, which is better able to
modulate itself. I have also ventured to invent a metre for that
technically known as the Fourth Archilochian, the "Solvitur acris
hiems," by combining the fourteen-syllable with the ten-syllable iambic
in an alternately rhyming stanza. [Footnote: I may be permitted to
mention that Lord Derby, in a volume of Translations printed privately
before the appearance of this work, has employed the same measure in
rendering the same Ode, the only difference being that his rhymes are
not alternate, but successive.] The First Archilochian, "Diffugere

nives," I have represented by a combination of the ten-syllable with the
foursyllable iambic. For the so-called