Hexameter — Chambers's Encyclopaedia

Hexameter, the name applied to the most important form of classical verse. It is the heroic or epic verse of the Greeks and Romans, the grandest examples of which are the Iliad and Odyssey in Greek, and the Aeneid in Latin. It consists, as its name implies, of six feet or measures, the last of which must be a spondee (a measure composed of two long syllables), and the penultimate a dactyl (one long syllable and two short). If the penultimate is also a spondee, the verse is said to be spondaic. Klopstock, Goethe, and Voss have produced admirable specimens of hexameter verse in German; and it has become familiar in English through Longfellow's Evangeline, Kingsley's Andromeda, and Clough's Boothie of Tober-na-Vuolich. The following lines from the last show the only varieties of the hexameter which are endurable to the ear—i.e. those in which the accent on each foot falls on its first syllable:

It will be observed that on whatever syllable here the metrical accent falls, that syllable is precisely the same which the voice naturally accentuates. Whether this was the case in ancient Greek and Latin hexameters we do not know, but, if the present system of Greek accentuation represents the natural accent of Homeric words, it is certain that Homer disregarded the natural accents, or did not observe our rule of always placing the metrical accent on the first syllable of each foot; and we still pronounce Latin hexameters by preserving what we take to be the natural accent of each word, whether that corresponds to the metrical accent or not. Thus in the line

Itāli | am fā | to prōfu | gus La | vīniāque | vēnit we disregard the metrical accent, which should fall on the first syllable of each foot (and actually does so in the fifth and sixth), and in reading the line give effect to the natural accents only, as we conceive them, of the words Italianum, fato, profugus. Professor T. Arnold, in the appendix on metres in his Manual of English Literature, points out that when English hexameters were first written they were constructed in the same manner; they were to be read in the same way as Latin hexameters. The natural accent, except in the last two feet, overruled the metrical. In the following lines from Stanilhurst's translation of the Aeneid it will at once be seen that the effect is absurd if we read the lines as modern English hexameters are read:

If we read by the natural accent the effect is rough and harsh to the ear; if by the modern metrical, ridiculous and absurd. Such are the limitations of the hexameter in English.