An Experiment with Horace

Extract

My first attempts at rendering ancient lyric metres in English quantity were made with Greek choruses. I was trying in this way to give boys some idea of the run of the Greek patterns. I found the experiment profitable at least to myself; I began to study and enjoy the shape of the strophes with a new liveliness of interest.

I had used E. A. Sonnenschein's book What is Rhythm? in the teaching of English for some years before it occurred to me that here was the key to the old problem of writing quantitative verse in English. Of all the experiments made by poets and scholars, from the Elizabethans down to Robinson Ellis's Catullus and Robert Bridges's Ibant Obscuri, though some have been read with pleasure, none succeed in keeping the shape and balance of the ancient lines. Sonnenschein used a kymograph, and with most laborious care measured the length of English syllables as they are pronounced, counting the hundredths of a second taken in the pronunciation of each syllable. I have not tested him on any machine, because my ear accepts as valid the rules which emerge from his experiments. To show how this works I give a rendering of Horace, Odes, i. II:

Tu ne quaesieris, scire nefas, quern mihi, quern tibi ….

Ask not thou what the end gods have assigned either to me or thee, Things not lawful to know, Leuconoe. Let Babylonian signs Rest unsearched; better far, just to endure all that shall come to pass.