The Poetical Works of Ebenezer Elliott Edited by his Son Edwin Elliott ... A New and Revised Edition: Two Volumes |
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TO THOMAS LISTER. |
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 | The Poetical Works of Ebenezer Elliott |  |
206
TO THOMAS LISTER.
Friend, I return your English Hexameters, thanking you for them.More than forty years since, I constructed such verses,
Choosing a lofty theme, too often worded unsimply.
Even now, I remember one stol'n line of the anthem:
“Thou for ever and ever, God, Omnipotent, reignest!”
Though my verbiage pleased me, long ago did it journey
Whither dead things tend. For Homer's world-famous metre
Cannot in English be pleasing. Saxon may write it in Saxon,
Oft for dactyl and spondee using iambic and trochee,
Pleased—and making a boast of his wasted labour and lost time;
But with grace and simplicity none can write it in our tongue,
Though the sturdy gothic oft runs into it promptly,
As it grandly does in these fine lines from the Bible:
“How art thou fall'n from heav'n, oh, Lucifer, son of the Morn!” and
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Not unpleasing always, mostly 'tis feeble, yet stilted,
Wanting, in wanting ease, the might which is mightiest, beauty.
Yet can it finely paint the beauty of form and of colour;
Skies, and the sea; or mountains cloud-like in distance, and stealing
Azure from heav'n; or the daisy fresh in the dewgleam of dawn; or
Young June's blush-tinted hawthorn, that scatters the snow of its dropp'd flowers
Over the faded cowslip, and roses embraced by the woodbine,
Under the mute, or songful, or thunder-whispering forest;
But from man's heart seldom it brings the tear, which the angels,
Knowing not sorrow, might almost in their blessedness envy.
Slow or rapid, sweet or solemn, in Greek and in Latin,
It is in English undignified, loose, and worse than the worst prose.
One advantage it has—it must be utter'd as prose is;
And as it may be wanted, if only as changes are wanted,
I subjoin the rule for its fitting or modern construction:
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Dactyls and trochees, or dactyls and both: A dactyl the fifth foot
Must be; a spondee or trochee the sixth: Each line must contain not
More than sixteen syllables, and not fewer than thirteen.
| The Poetical Works of Ebenezer Elliott | |