Swinburne, ‘Choriambics’ (1878); Horace, ‘Odes 1:11’
This poem, ‘Choriambics’, first appeared in Swinburne’s Poems and Ballads: Second Series (1878). It’s a little wrongfooting, or can be, on a first go-through: I would recommend that, as you read (read it aloud, why don’t you?) be ready to pause briefly on a stressed love, and also on a stressed what, and also on stressed ailed, and then to let the rhythm of the line run along the natural courses of English articulation (stressing leave, life, made, love-, thought). And then to do the same thing again for lines 2, 3, 4 and so on:
Love, what ailed thee to leave life that was made lovely, we thought, with love?
What sweet visions of sleep lured thee away, down from the light above?What strange faces of dreams, voices that called, hands that were raised to wave,
Lured or led thee, alas, out of the sun, down to the sunless grave?Ah, thy luminous eyes! once was their light fed with the fire of day;
Now their shadowy lids cover them close, hush them and hide away.Ah, thy snow-coloured hands! once were they chains, mighty to bind me fast;
Now no blood in them burns, mindless of love, senseless of passion past.Ah, thy beautiful hair! so was it once braided for me, for me;
Now for death is it crowned, only for death, lover and lord of thee.Sweet, the kisses of death set on thy lips, colder are they than mine;
Colder surely than past kisses that love poured for thy lips as wine.Lov’st thou death? is his face fairer than love’s, brighter to look upon?
Seest thou light in his eyes, light by which love’s pales and is overshone?Lo the roses of death, grey as the dust, chiller of leaf than snow!
Why let fall from thy hand love’s that were thine, roses that loved thee so?Large red lilies of love, sceptral and tall, lovely for eyes to see;
Thornless blossom of love, full of the sun, fruits that were reared for thee.Now death’s poppies alone circle thy hair, girdle thy breasts as white;
Bloodless blossoms of death, leaves that have sprung never against the light.Nay then, sleep if thou wilt; love is content; what should he do to weep?
Sweet was love to thee once; now in thine eyes sweeter than love is sleep.
It’s an elegy: the speaker addressing his dead beloved, asking why she has left him, lamenting his loss, and finally accepting that she has chosen a rival over him in death and sleep. The metre here is flagged up by the title, a choriamb being a metrical foot that welds a trochee (choreus is another word for trochee) to an iamb. So: each choriambic foot is: long-short-short-long, or in terms of ictus, stressed-unstressed-unstressed-stressed: ( — ‿ ‿ — ). Choriambs crop up all over the place — for instance, in the naming of famous duos: Morecambe and Wise, Watson and Crick, Oryx and Crake, Starsky and Hutch. Put together into a metrical line the effect, in English, can be of a rocking back-and-forth: foolish Ramón, laughed at the troll, under the bridge, what a mistake. Or it can be subtler, more fluent, as in Swinburne’s poem, with its exquisite balance of long-short pulses and stressed-unstressed syllables, of a sighing, or sobbing.
Swinburne’s poem is not made solely of choriambs. Each line opens with a spondee — two stressed syllables — and each ends with an iamb.
This is a specific verse form, technically known as ‘major Asclepiadean’, or sometimes ‘fifth Asclepiadean’, named after the obscure third-century BC Greek poet Asclepiades of Samos, who — confusingly, given that the prosody we’re looking at is often called the ‘fifth Asclepiadean’, wrought three different kinds of lines of verse bracketing choriambs:
Swinburne’s poem is in the third of these metres, of course:
This is not random. He has taken it from Horace, three of whose Odes are composed to this rhythm (1.11, 1.18 and 4.10). Actually Horace very often writes choriambic verse: thirty-four of his odes are in various Asclepiadean metres. But the specific pattern of the fifth Asclepiadean, which Swinburne has copied here, is associated particularly with 1.11, the poem from which we get the tag carpe diem: ‘seize the day’:
Tu ne quaesieris, scire nefas, quem mihi, quem tibi
finem di dederint, Leuconoë, nec Babylonios
temptaris numeros. ut melius, quidquid erit, pati.
seu pluris hiemes seu tribuit Iuppiter ultimam,
quae nunc oppositis debilitat pumicibus mare
Tyrrhenum: sapias, vina liques et spatio brevi
spem longam reseces. Dum loquimur, fugerit invida
aetas: carpe diem quam minimum credula postero.Do not ask, Leuconoë, since the knowledge is forbidden, what end will come for me, for you, since it is set by the gods; do not attempt to cast Babylonian horoscopes. It is much better to accept whatever comes, whether Jupiter assigns us future winters or whether this one is last, as it now grinds out the Tyrrhenian Sea against the barrier of these cliffs. Be wise. Strain the wine so it is clear; and since life is brief, abbreviate your far-reaching hopes. Even as we speak, envious Time is moving faster. Seize the day, putting as little trust as you can in tomorrow.
Live in the now, the poem tells us. But the speaker of Swinburne’s poem is living a miserable now. Horace tells his Leuconoe to accept the moment, to strain the wine so as to enjoy drinking it right now, to take this very day, and not think about the future. For Horace, our future, and our deaths, are not up to us: they are allotted us by the gods. But Swinburne’s poem implies that his Leuconoe actively chose death: lured away by the soporific vision of oblivion death represents.
Swinburne’s loved-one is white: ‘light, luminous eyes’; ‘snow-coloured hands’, ‘beautiful braided (blonde?) hair’, ‘white breasts’; where death is darkness, shadow, redness: ‘the roses of death, grey as the dust’; ‘large red lilies of love’ ‘death’s poppies’. Horace’s Leuconoe is also white (that’s what her name means: Λευκονόη, from λευκός, leukós, ‘bright, shining, gleaming’, ‘ light in colour, white’), though given the tasks Horace sets her in the poem— straining the wine prior to pouring it would be a job for a slave — and her faith in ‘Babylonian’ horoscopes, she may be a Greek or Persian slave-girl. We know where the poem is located, too: since the speaker draws our attention to waves from the Tyrrhenian sea battering the Italian cliffs.
Those winter cliffs are interesting. Maria Marsilio thinks Horace chooses the name Leuconoe by way of ‘associating’ her ‘with poetry and death’, in allusion to ‘Menander’s Leukadia, which survives in fragmentary condition. The setting of the Leukadia is Cape Leucatas on the island of Leucas in the Ionian Sea. Menander recounts how Sappho threw herself from the cliff at Cape Leucatas in frenzied desire after Phaon rejected her love’ [Maria S. Marsilio, ‘Two Notes on Horace, Odes 1:11’ Quaderni Urbinati di Cultura Classica 96:3 (2010), 119]. Lots of whiteness there: Leuconoe, Leukadia, Cape Leucatas, the island of Leucas.
I don’t know how Sapphic-tragic the tenor of Horace’s brief ode is: rather, though it’s not stated explicitly, it’s surely a prelude-to-sex poem — not necessarily a seduction poem, but an urging to stop worrying about the to-come and enjoy the pounding pleasures of the now, as waves beat at the cliff — as the choriambs thrust and withdraw, thrust and withdraw, over and over.
Carpe diem is poorly translated as ‘seize the day’, although that phrase is probably too embedded in English usage now to be supplanted. Actually carpo means ‘to harvest, to pluck, to pick’, as well as ‘to tear off, tear out, separate a whole into parts, to cut to pieces, divide’: the word derives from the Greek κείρω (keírō, ‘to cut off’; related is καρπός, karpós, ‘fruit’): from which root English derived harvest, sharp, shear, scythe. Some translators go with ‘pluck the day’; David West has ‘harvest the day’, nobody has suggested ‘scythe the day’, though I quite like it. Swinburne’s poem picks-up on this sense of flowers and fruits being harvested — rose-blooms, red lilies, poppies, strewn over the dead body of the beloved — as Swinburne’s white lady has been cut down by Death’s scythe. And here I think the pulse of the choriambs has a different quality to them.
The two stressed syllables at the start of each line interrupt the otherwise onward moving flow of the choriambs. It gives each line a base, at the beginning, from which three dropping and reascending choriambs follow, upticked at the final iamb.
[Love] [What] [Ailed thee to leave] [Life that was made] [Lovely we thought] [with love?]
[Lovst] [Thou] [Death is his face] [Fairer than love’s] [Brighter to look] [upon]
… and so on. Some lines dip down into a trochee in the first two syllables (spondees are hard in English: easier in Latin): ‘Sweet, the kisses of death…’; ‘Colder surely …’ And some of the lines are a little too compartmentalised, with phrases fitting the feet too neatly.
[Now] [For] [Death is it crowned], [Only for death] [Lover and lord] [of thee]
[Lo] [The] [Roses of death], [Grey as the dust], [Chiller of leaf] [than snow!]
I’m not persuaded by the repetition of ‘for me’, which reads like metrical filler, in: ‘Ah, thy beautiful hair! so was it once braided for me, for me’. But otherwise this is a beautifully modulated set of major Asclepiadeans.
The Doctor Who theme isn’t quite choriambic — the main rhythm is perhaps based around the paeon, three unstressed followed by one stressed beats (duh-duh-duh-DUM) but the way the theme throws in slower consecutive stressed syllables, one at the end of the phrasal line (DUM!) and one at the beginning of the new line (DUM DUM), before galloping on with three geet that at least approximate to DUM-duh-duh-DUM, means we could almost take it as a rhythmic inheritor of a Asclepiadean. Played at speed, with drumming accentuating the sharpness of the beat, it is an immensely insistent piece of music. But if we imagine the drums removed, and everything slowed down, then it starts to give us a sense of the shape of these lines. It breaks the flow into these swooping units, something Swinburne reinforces with his tendency towards separating clauses within the main sentence, parentheses that further deliquesce the rhythm into discretions (the ‘we thought’ in ‘life that was made lovely, we thought, with love?’, the alas in line 4, the for me at the end of line 9 and so on). Above I suggest that this pulse perhaps evokes weeping or sobbing; or perhaps the sense of a catch in the throat interrupting the smoother flow of happier discourse.
A coda: one of my favourite Squeeze songs (though it’s perhaps not among their most famous works) is ‘Hourglass’ (2010). A great track, whose chorus actualises a type of super-choriambic rhythm: ( — ‿ ‿ ‿ — )
Take it to the bridge, throw it overboard
See if it can swim, back up to the shore
No one’s in the house, everyone is out
All the lights are on and the blinds are down.
The video for this song (Wikipedia: ‘an optical illusion-filled music video directed by Ade Edmondson, it received substantial airplay on MTV) manifests a kind of shrugged-shoulders arbitrariness. ‘The lyrics are kind of, well, weird — shall we call it surrealism? Yeah, let’s do a surrealist video, why not?’ But though the divine Difford and Tilbrook disavowed meaningfulness in their composition — (Difford: ‘I went to Glenn’s house and within an hour we’d written “Hourglass”. Glenn counteracted some lyrical ideas and I added some musical ideas, then he demoed it and made some changes, and finally the band got hold of it and changed it some more … the song doesn’t mean much lyrically’; Tilbrook described the chorus’s lyrics as ‘nonsense words’) — luckily for us the Author(s) is(are) Dead. This is a song about time, and its depredations: the ‘hourglass’. The text does not specify what the ‘it’ is, that is carried to the bridge and thrown into the river, except that the expectation is clearly not that ‘we’ will rid ourselves of it, but rather that it will return, as it does: swim back to the shore, come back to the house, although said house is now vacant. It is not a stretch to link this fort-da trajectory to the [duh, duh] duh-de-de-duh, down and up again, rhythm of the choriamb itself.
