That which . . . for others: The apparent quantitative scansion of these hexameter lines is
At SC Maye gloss 49-56, E.K. quotes, without attribution, a slightly different, but no less opaque version of the distich; both versions awkwardly translate what Cicero describes (in Tusc. Disp. 5.35.101) as his own translation of the epitaph at the tomb of Sardanapalus, the sense of which is that the speaker has enjoyed his self-indulgence–before death, in the case of Sardanapalus.
Harvey’s ‘A New Yeeres Gift’, to which he refers as nos Trinitatem (‘our Trinity’) at 2.687 above, may be scanned thus:
Some observations on the scansions may be useful here, especially since Harvey’s procedure often seems less than systematic. There are some odd irregularities: he usually treats ‘and’ as long, save when followed by ‘h’. His ear for accentual patterning may similarly dictate scanning ‘Not the like’ (9) as a dactyl, despite the fact that ‘like’ should be long by position, according to Latin rules of scansion.
Harvey elides‘-ie’ followed by a vowel three times (at 9 and 15), treating each compounded syllable as a short syllable. Inconsistently, having treated the first syllable of ‘againe’ elided with the last syllable of ‘Trinitie’ as short in 9, he treats the first syllable of ‘against’ as long in 12.
It is unclear whether ‘Gewe-’ of ‘Gewegawes’ comprises one long syllable or two short ones. The scansion of 19 seems especially uncertain.
L’Envoy: For the envoy as genre, see SC, ‘To His Booke’, headnote.
The scansion of the first line here is uncertain, but it appears to witness an instance in which, for Harvey, stress-patterning expresses quantity more decisively than orthography does.
Encomium Lauri: ‘In Praise of the Laurel’. This poem, in quantitative hexameters, may be scanned as follows:
Speculum Tuscanismi: ‘The Mirror of Tuscanism’ or perhaps ‘Tuscanismo’s Mirror’. Although Harvey and John Lyly had been friends, Lyly (among others) apparently brought the poem to the attention of his patron, the Earl of Oxford, suggesting that the poem was meant as a personal satire on the Earl, which it surely was, although Harvey denied it (Foure Letters, 1592, C4). For troubles that the various provocations of the Letters brought on Harvey, see the Introduction, p. [cross-ref].
Harvey’s grip on the regularities of dactylic hexameter is especially loose here. 15, indeed, seems to require so much latitude—‘ly’ treated as a long syllable, ‘guyses’ treated as bisyllabic, with a long second syllable—that one might suspect a transmissional problem. The final lines suggest that he continues to treat ‘and’ before ‘h’ as short and, if he means to respect this rule throughout, then ‘Tongue, and’ in 18 must be regarded as a dactyl.
The last line deserves special notice, given Harvey’s special attention to the proper scansion of ‘Travailer’ at 471-480 below (and the thematic focus on travel in Letter 5). As Harvey makes clear in that later discussion, he expects a high degree of coincidence between stress and length and if we take the pattern of quantity as an orchestration of stress, the line has droll force. The constraints of the hexameter would promote the second syllable of ‘Travaile’ and thence an awareness of both the French origins of the word and of the etymological sense of the laboriousness of travel, rendered an oxymoron by the epithets ‘Blessed and happy’. As for ‘Travailer’, which Harvey will later insist should not be scanned with its second syllable as long, despite the Latin rules of orthographic quantity, the regularities of the hexameter require that its second syllable be treated in the present line as short. Yet, while Harvey’s line effectively rejects any lengthening (by orthography) of the second syllable, the requisite lengthening (by position) of the final syllable effectively gallicizes the ‘Travailer’, capitulating to the estrangement of the Englishman that the poem deplores throughout.
The poem is marked by a heavier use of elision than in the other quantitative verses in Letters.
John Harvey’s hexameter may be scanned thus:
It is worth noting that because of orthographic rules and the rule of length by position, Spenser would probably have regarded ‘like’ and the second syllable of ‘Majestie’ as long in these lines. But John Harvey seems to be disregarding such rules here and instead organizes his hexameters according to accentual patterns.
Iambicum trimetrum: Spenser is adapting the rules of classical iambic trimeter, the most widely used meter in spoken passages of classical drama. Greek iambic trimeter consists of three dipodies, or pairs of feet, each pair composed of either two iambs or a spondee and an iamb (thus, x-‿-); substitutions of paired short syllables for a single long one are allowed in all but the final syllable of the line. The Latin adaptation of the iambic trimeter, often called the senarius, was widely used in Roman comedy and tragedy (with slightly different rules for each genre). The senarius is organized in feet rather than in metra and while the sixth foot is always an iamb, the preceding five feet often feature even greater freedom of substitution than was allowed in Greek trimeter. Spenser has chosen a form that allows considerable metrical latitude for his earliest surviving effort in quantitative versifying.
Although he claims that his practice here is ‘precisely perfecte for the feete’ and in other ways strictly regular, it has not seemed so to those readers who have attempted to scan his lines. Davison, presumably regarding the second line as defective and the third as hypermetrical, transposed ‘Thought’ in his reprinting of the poem in A Poetical Rhapsody; Attridge solved the same problem by treating ‘fluttring’ as a misprint for ‘fluttering’ and by scanning the fifth foot of the third line as a dactyl, a substitution allowable in the senarius. (A more elegant solution to the difficulty of the second line might be to emend by interpolating ‘for’ as the second word in the line.) Harvey is the most explicitly critical: at 5.59-76 below, he notes the inconsistent quantities of l. 2 (though not its defective character) and the hypermetrical character of l. 3, and chides Spenser for spelling that carelessly obscures what Harvey imagines to be his intended scansions, for the overuse of spondees, and for a reliance on initial trochaic substitutions that undermines the iambic character of the verse.
In Davison’s edition of 1602, the poem is arranged into three line strophes, which gives visual prominence to its triple rhetorical structures.
Harvey and Spenser argue below about the metrics of this poem, so the following scansion must be regarded as especially uncertain:
Harvey seems to have scanned lines 87/3 and 90/6 differently. His discussion at 5.59-65 suggests that he regards their scansion, with some disappointment, as
and
At 5.65-9 Harvey considers whether the last foot of the last line—‘merito’—should be scanned as an anapaest or a spondee, but he is disapprovingly confident that it cannot be iambic. For Harvey’s solution to the problem of the hypermetricality he attributes to 90/6, see 5.61-63 and 5.63n.
Syncopes: Syncope is the metrical suppression of a short vowel between two consonants within a word, as in the treatment of Virginals as Virg’nals in the alternate scansion of 4.90.6 that Harvey here facetiously proposes:
Etymologically derived from κόπτειν koptein (Gk ‘to cut off, to strike’), syncope is here imagined as surgically correcting the deformity of the hypermetric sixth line of Spenser’s senarius.
Tetrasticon: quatrain. In this case, the quatrain is in elegiacs, alternating pairs of (quantitative) hexameters and pentameters. For the conventions governing the classical hexameter, see the Introduction. The classical pentameter is a bipartite line comprising two feet of either dactyls or spondees, a long syllable followed by a caesura, and then two dactylic feet, followed in turn by a long syllable—in effect, two half-lines containing two-and-a-half feet, and thus, in this particular sense, a pentameter. Here is a proposed scansion
For Harvey’s effort in the same metre, ‘Encomium Lauri’, and for his metrical criticism of these lines, see, 3.109-142 below.