The Music of Homer's Verse

New Zealand Listener, Volume 3, Issue 69, 18 October 1940, Page 5

The Music of Homer's Verse

WHERE else will you find the musical quality of the euphonious Greek language, with its prevalence of vowels and liquid consonants? Take, for contrast, our clumsy stuttering phrase, "from ships and huts"; that is the translation of Homer’s "neon apo kai klisiaon." In English, Longfellow gives us the same metre as Homer’s, as well as our "ae can reproduce it, in his " Evangeline": "This is the forest primeval. The murmuring pines and the hemlocks... Loud from its rocky caverns the deep-voiced neighbouring ocean Speaks, and in accents disconsolate answers the wail of the forest." And those scholars who gave us the Authorised Version of the Bible occasionally reproduce the Homeric hexameter; for example, "we did esteem him stricken, smitten of God and afflicted": or (what Dean Inge considers the best hexameter in the’ Bible): "Blessed and holy is he that hath part in the first resurrection." Even from these few instances we may gather some impression of "the rise And long roll of the hexameter "’; ; For the general effect by reading aloud any long passage of the Iliad or the Odyssey has often been likened to that made by the waves of the sea. Listen to this one line in which Homer is saying that Achilles in his grief "went silently along the beach of the loud-roaring sea," and, though you may not know one word of the language, you will sense the gathering swell and the breaking of res wave as it hisses along the beach: Be d’ akeon para thina polyphloisboio thalasses, Coleridge has spoken the last word on Homer’s verse: "Strongly it bears us along in swelling and limite lesa billows, Nothing before and nothing behind but the sky and the ocean." (Prof. T. D. Adams, "Homer and the Heroic Age," 4YA, October 1.)