Hexameter

The hexameter (Greek ἑξάμετρον, hexámetron, literally "six-measure") is the classical verse measure of epic poetry. In this usage it is therefore often called epic hexameter, to distinguish it from its other classical usage as the first part of the elegiac distich.

The hexameter consists of six dactyls, the last of which is shortened by one syllable; the verse is divided by a caesura, which may occur at different points in the middle of the verse. In the quantizing poems of antiquity the two short syllables of the first four dactyls could be replaced by one long syllable; an ancient hexameter thus consisted of dactyls and spondees, and the last foot could be a trochee or a spondee. In accented poetry, especially in German poetry, the first four dactyls may be replaced by a trochee, which often approaches the spondee by a heavy syllable; true spondees are difficult to form in German, but have been repeatedly attempted within the hexameter.

The metrical representation of the ancient hexameter(da6):

-◡◡ˌ-◡◡ˌ-◡◡ˌ-◠

The metrical representation of the German hexameter:

-◡(◡)ˌ-◡(◡)ˌ-◡(◡)ˌ-◡(◡)ˌ-◡◡ˌ-◡

The metrical form of the hexameter suits its main task, the narration, very well. Jakob Minor states: "The hexameter combines the richest variety and diversity with a uniformly calm and dignified course, which makes it especially suitable for epic narration. The variety is based on the diversity of verse feet, word feet, and caesuras; the regularity on the equal number of measures in the rhythmically precisely delineated verse whole." Ulrich Hötzer aims rather at the effect of the verse: "With always unchanging gesture this verse, endlessly strung, places world before the reader or listener, and the similar but never identical rhythm always addresses the same level of consciousness: from a distance contemplating participation." Or more succinctly, "The hexameter confronts the listener with world as pure, unmixed, and unbroken presence."

The earliest evidence of epic poetry in hexameters are Homer's Iliad and Odyssey, and Hesiod's Theogony and Works and Days (8th century BC). A non-Greek origin of the verse metre is discussed but cannot be proved. Since Ennius, hexameter has been established as epic verse in Latin literature as well. It is not only the meter of Virgil's Aeneid and Ovid's Metamorphoses, but also of Lucretius' didactic poem De rerum natura, Horace's Sermones, and Virgil's Bucolica and Georgica. With Friedrich Gottlieb Klopstock's Messiah, written in hexameters, the hexameter also became a much-used verse in German poetry from the middle of the 18th century.

Ancient poetry

A Greek-Latin hexameter consists of six dactyls (-◡◡), of which the last verse foot is incomplete (catalectic), namely always two syllables; the quantity of the final syllable plays no role (elementum anceps). Each of these dactyls can be realized both by one long followed by two short syllables (-◡◡), and by two long syllables, i.e. as spondeus (--). In the fifth foot of verse, however, spondeus is rare; a hexameter with a spondeus in the fifth foot is therefore specifically called versus spondiacus (Latin) or spondeiazon (Greek). The alternation of dactyls and spondees makes the hexameter a highly variable meter, so that it does not appear monotonous even when used stichically (not combined with other meters). Purely spondeic hexameters ("holospondees") hardly ever occur, but even purely dactylic hexameters ("holodactyls") are rare. In metrical notation, the hexameter has the following scheme:

The hexameter is structured by various possible caesurae and dihärenes, fixed incisions in the verse, which sometimes also mark a sense incision. The earliest caesura is after the third half-foot (Trithemimeres, A4), further caesuras can be after the fifth (Penthemimeres, B1) and after the seventh half-foot (Hephthemimeres, C1). In addition to these "masculine" caesuras (cuts in the middle of a verse foot), hexameter also knows the "feminine" caesura, which is present at the end of a word after the third (imaeginary) trochaíon (Gr. κατὰ τρίτον τροχαῖον, katá tríton trochaíon, B2), i.e., one elementum breve later than in penthemimeres, i.e., after three-quarters of the third verse foot. Between the fourth and fifth verse foot lies another possible incision, the bucolic diheresis (C2).

Generally avoided is the caesura after the fourth trochee (Gr. κατὰ τέταρτον τροχαῖον, katá tétarton trochaíon), that is, between the two shortenings of the fourth dactyl:

—◡◡—◡◡—◡◡—◡⏜◡—◡◡—×

One calls the so developing part after the caesura also Amphibrachienschaukel. This bridge is called Hermann's bridge after the philologist Gottfried Hermann. Other bridges where an end of words is rare or undesirable are the bucolic bridge after the second length in Spondeus in the fourth meter:

—◡◡—◡◡—◡◡——⏜—◡◡—×

as well as the middle diheresis after the end of the third metre:

—◡◡—◡◡—◡◡⏜—◡◡—◡◡—×

Like the other ancient verse measures, the epic hexameter was further developed and refined by later writers. The difference between the hexameters in Homer and those in the Argonautika of Apollonios Rhodios, for example, was worked out by Wilhelm Meyer and presented in the hexameter laws named after him, according to which a large number of Homeric verses would be faulty if one wanted to apply the rules of the poetic philologists of Hellenism to the Homeric early period.

German poetry

The Greco-Roman hexameter is quantitative, i.e., the sequence of long and short syllables constitutes the verse. Because of the word accent on the root syllable, which is fixed in Germanic languages, and a lesser importance of the length of vowels (see accented language), the verse form is realized in the German language by the sequence of stressed and unstressed syllables. In classical languages, ictational - accented - reading did not appear until late antiquity. An example of stressing is the first line of the Odyssey:

Ándra moi énnepe, Moúsa, polýtropon, hós mala pólla

Earlier attempts at epic form in the 16th and 17th centuries by Martin Opitz, Andreas Gryphius and others did not yet use hexameters, but the Romanic verse metre of the Old French Alexander romance, the (heroic) Alexandrine. Friedrich Gottlieb Klopstock was the first to orientate himself on the ancient form of the hexametric epic with his successful epic Messiah (1748-1773), which was conceived as a work of equal rank to the great epic poems of antiquity such as the Iliad and the Odyssey and accordingly also used the epic hexameter as a verse metre.

As an example of Klopstockian hexameter, here is the first verse of the work, which borrows heavily from pagan models:

-ˌ- ◡◡ˌ- ◡◡ˌ- ◡◡ˌ-◡

With the immense popularity of the work in its time, dactylic verse became popular at the same time, and heroic hexameter became the dominant epic verse form for a long time. Klopstock was not the first author of hexameters in German; Johann Christoph Gottsched and Carl Gustav Heraeus had written them before him, and according to Lessing the earliest example of German hexameters is to be found in Johann Fischart's translation of Rabelais - but these scattered attempts cannot be compared with the ambition and scope of Klopstock's enterprise (the work comprises 19,458 verses in 20 cantos).

On the basis of Klopstock's hexameter, the poets and metricians who followed Klopstock further developed German verse, often in bitter dispute. A major point of contention was the question of the extent to which it was possible to imitate the ancient spondee in German. Klopstock allowed the substitution of the dactyl for both the spondee and the trochee; for example, in the Messiah verse presented above, the first foot, "Sing, un-," is a trochee. (Such verses are called mixed-dactylic. Verses consisting only of dactyls are called holodactylic). At the same time, he very clearly opposed efforts or requirements to faithfully reproduce the ancient Greek verse metre: "A completely Greek hexameter in German is an absurdity. No German poet has ever made, or wanted to make, such hexameters."

In contrast, Johann Heinrich Voß, the translator of Homer and of Virgil's Georgica, also written in hexameters, took the position that the regular distribution of long and short syllables underlying the quantizing ancient hexameter should be reproduced as closely as possible in the German, actually accentuating hexameter; the verse metre in Klopstock's Messiah was therefore not a hexameter, but "a free verse similar to the hexameter". Even more radically than Voß, August Wilhelm Schlegel insisted that the verse metre, which he virtually idolized, should by no means be adapted to German in such a way that its quantitative foundations were lost. In his poem Der Hexameter he writes:

Note here the imitation of spondees, for example, in "So kann ernst bald ruhn, bald flüchtiger wieder enteilen". This example clearly shows the difficulty of appropriately reproducing spondees in German.

With regard to the question of which verse in German poetry was suitable for epic representation in general and for translating Homer in particular, Klopstock defended his form of hexameter against Gottfried August Bürger, who had postulated that the iambus was "the only, true, genuine, natural, heroic metre of our language". He insisted that the form of hexameter he used was, by its flexibility, the most appropriate verse metre for epic poetry in German.

Among Klopstock's notable successors was Goethe, who, inspired by the success of Voß's Luise, an idyllic poem in hexameters, wrote two verse epics in hexameters, Hermann und Dorothea and Reineke Fuchs, as well as the fragmentary Achilleis. As an example of Goethe's hexameter, the first verses of Reineke Fuchs:

Here, too, a relatively frequent substitution of the dactyl for the trochee, e.g. at the beginning of the second verse, which gives the poem a certain unheroic buoyancy.

With the epic poems of Goethe and Schiller's philosophical poetry, Klopstock's understanding of hexameter essentially prevailed. In the 19th century, for example, Friedrich Hebbel wrote his verse epic Mutter und Kind (1859) and Jonas Breitenstein his dialect idylls Der Her Ehrli (1863) and S Vreneli us der Bluemmatt (1864) in hexameters. Modern translations of the great ancient epics also generally reproduce the ancient verse metre. Occasionally, prose poetry also approximates hexameter in rhythm (for example, in Hölderlin's Hyperion or in Thomas Mann). Probably unintentionally, § 923 para. 1 of the German Civil Code was drafted in hexameter around 1896.