Sri Aurobindo

Letters of Sri Aurobindo

Third Series

Fragment ID: 21027

Lines from “Ilion”, an unfinished poem in English hexameter (quantitative):

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Triumph and agony changing hands in a desperate

measure

Paced and turned, as a man and a maiden

trampling the grasses

Face and turn and they laugh for their joy in the

dance and each other.

These were gods and they trampled lives. But

though Time is immortal,

Mortal his works are and ways and the anguish

ends like the rapture.

Artisans satisfied now with their works in the

plan of the transience,

Beautiful, wordless, august, the Olympians turned

from the carnage.

Vast and unmoved they rose up mighty as eagles

ascending,

Fanning the world with their wings. In the bliss

of a sorrowless ether

Calm they reposed from their deeds and their

hearts were inclined to the Stillness.

Less now the burden laid on our race by their

star-white presence,

There was a respite from height; the winds

breathed freer, delivered.

But their immortal content from the struggle

titanic departed.

Vacant the noise of the battle roared like a sea

on the shingles;

Wearily hunted the spears their quarry, strength

was disheartened;

Silence increased with the march of the months

on the tents of the leaguer.

The principle is a line of six feet, preponderantly dactylic, but anywhere the dactyl can be replaced by a spondee; but in English hexameter a trochee can be substituted, as the spondee comes in rarely in English rhythm. The line is divided by a caesura, and the variations of the caesura are essential to the harmony of the verse.

An example of Alcaics from the “Jivanmukta” (Alcaics is a Greek, metre invented by the poet Alcaeus):

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But in English, variations (modulations) are allowed, only one has to keep to the general plan.

Swinburne’s Sapphics are to be scanned thus:

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Two trochees at the beginning, two trochees at the end, a dactyl separating the two trochaic parts of the line – that is the Sapphics in its first three lines, then a fourth line composed of a dactyl and a trochaic.