On Quantitative Metre 361Dawn in her journey eternal compelling the labour of mortals,
Dawn the beginner of things with the night for their rest or their ending,
Pallid and bright-lipped arrived from the mists and the chill of the
Euxine —in the first line the stressed long vowels predominate, in the
second the stressed short vowels, in the third there is an equal
distribution; in each case there is a suiting of the choices of sound
to a different shade of movement-sense. In another passage —
Doffing his mantle
Started to run at the bidding a swift-footed youth of the Trojans
First in the race and the battle, Thrasymachus son of Aretes,we can see that the predominance of short stresses amounting
to an almost unbroken succession of natural short-vowel sylla-
bles creates a long running swiftness of the rhythm which fits
in exactly with the action. All these minutiae are part of the
technique and the possibilities of the hexameter and, if they are
neglected or ineffectively used, the fault does not lie with the
metre. The natural resources of the true quantitative hexameter
are so great that even a long series of end-stopped lines would
not necessarily create a monotone.
Finally, there is the resource of modulation, and in the
quantitative hexameter this can be used with great effect, either
sparingly or in abundance, best sparing perhaps in epic or high
narrative, abundant in poems of complex thinking and emotion.
There is only one possible modulation in place of the spondee
and that is the trochee. In the quantitative hexameter the trochee,
unless unskilfully used, does not break or hurt the flow; it mod-
ifies the total rhythm so as to give it an expressive turn and it
can easily make itself a part of the general dactylic streaming.
For example —
High over all that a nation had built and its love and its laughter,
Lighting the last time highway and homestead, market and temple,
Looking on men who must|die_
a ̆nd|wo_
me ̆n|destined to sorrow,
Looking on|beau_
ty ̆|fi_
re mu ̆st la_
y|low and the sickle of slaughter.