364 The Future Poetry
correctness in the process; these metres must submit to the nat-
ural law of English poetry, to movements and liberties which
the classical rhythms do not admit, to modulation, to slight
facilitating changes of form, to the creation of different models
of itself, as there are different models of the sonnet. The Alcaic is
the most attractive and manageable of the ancient lyrical metres,
but in English even the Alcaic cannot easily be the same in all
respects as the original verse form of its creator. The original
model can indeed be reproduced; but modulations have to be
brought in to help the difficulties experienced by English speech
in taking a foreign metre into itself; trochees have very usually
to be substituted for the not easily found spondee, an occasional
anapaest, a paeon lengthening out the orthodox dactyl should
not be excluded; the omission of the first syllable in the opening
line of the stanza can be admitted as an occasional licence. Oth-
erwise the full harmonic possibilities of this rhythmic measure in
its new tongue cannot be richly exploited. The Horatian form in
which the two opening lines very commonly end in a cretic doing
duty for the theoretic dactyl, is more manageable in English, in
which a constant dactylic close to the line is not easily handled:
this change gives a less melodious, a graver and more sculptural
turn to the outlines of the stanza. Finally, to this Horatian form
it is possible to give a greater amplitude by admitting a feminine
ending in these two lines, the cretic turning into a double trochee.
That does not break or destroy the spirit and character of the
Alcaic verse; it gives it more largeness and resonance.
Other lyrical forms may be less amenable to change; there is
sometimes too close an identity between the body and the spirit.
It is so with the Sapphic, an alluring metre but, as experimenters
have found, difficult to change and anglicise: here only slight
modulations are admissible, the trochee for the spondee, the
antibacchius or light cretic for the dactyl. Still others would
need the minute and scrupulous art of a goldsmith or the force
of a giant to make anything of them; yet they are worth trying,
for one never knows whether the difficulty may not be the way
to a triumph or atrouvaille. In any case, the hexameter, half
a dozen of the greater or more beautiful lyrical forms and the