printed sketches of The Spoon River Anthology. The Mirror of May 29th, 1914, is their record.     

       I take one of the epigrams of Meleager with its sad revealment and touch of irony and turn it from its prose form to a verse form, making verses according to the breath pauses:     

       "The holy night and thou, O Lamp, we took as witness of our vows; and before thee we swore, he that would love me always and I that I would never leave him. We swore, and thou wert witness of our double promise. But now he says that our vows were written on the running waters. And thou, O Lamp, thou seest him in the arms of another."     

       In verse this epigram is as follows:     

   The holy night and thou, O Lamp, We took as witness of our vows; And before thee we swore, He that would love me always And I that I would never leave him. We swore, And thou wert witness of our double promise. But now he says that our vows were written on the running waters. And thou, O Lamp, Thou seest him in the arms of another. 

       It will be observed that iambic feet prevail in this translation. They merely become noticeable and imperative when arranged in verses. But so it is, even in the briefest and starkest rendering of these epigrams from the Greek the humanism and dignity of the original transfer themselves, making something, if less than verse, yet more than prose; as Byron said of Sheridan's speeches, neither poetry nor oratory, but better than either. It was no difficult matter to pass from Chase Henry:     

   "In life I was the town drunkard. When I died the priest denied me burial In holy ground, etc." 

       to the use of standard measures, or rhythmical arrangements of iambics or what not, and so to make a book, which for the first third required a practiced voice or eye to yield the semblance of verse; and for the last two-thirds, or nearly so, accommodated itself to the less sensitive conception of the average reader. The prosody was allowed to take care of itself under the emotional requirements and inspiration of the moment. But there is nothing new in English literature for some hundreds of years in combinations of dactyls, anapests or trochees, and without rhyme. Nor did I discover to the world that an iambic pentameter can be lopped to a tetrameter 

 Prev. P 4/125 next