Brilliant, Hannibal. Thanks. I esp. like the country cousin to
Donne's "strong lines." You can make a lot of S and H thump if you
want, but the effect when you sing in a congregation is very
different. Mary Ellen Lamb once had a whole workshop belting them out
and the effect was very stirring. Anne.
On Jun 15, 2009, at 4:00 PM, Hannibal Hamlin wrote:
> A Google Search shows that there are a cluster of references to
> "thumping fourteeners" in the early sixties (Ringler's Sidney
> Poems, Hunter's John Lyly), but Pound seems to have described the
> danger of fourteeners "thumping" back in 1918, though not in the
> precise phrase. Saintsbury (Hist. of Prosody 1908) refers to the
> "unmusical thump thump" of a fifteener. "Thump" was a good
> Renaissance word, and I came across a lovely description of his own
> verse by John Taylor ("A Skeltonical salutation to those that know
> how to read, and not marre the sense with hacking or
> misconstruction"):
>
> "My verses are made, to ride euery Iade, but they are forbidden, of
> Iades to be ridden, they shall not be snaffeled, nor braued nor
> bafflled, weart thou George with thy Naggon, that fought'st with
> the dragon, or were you great Po~pey, my verse should be thumpe ye,
> if you like a Iauel against me dare cauill."
>
> Thumping here seems to be conceived as a kind of country cousin of
> Donne's masculine perswasive force.
>
> Of course, it must be pointed out that Sternhold and Hopkins is not
> all, or even mostly, thumping fourteeners, though in whatever meter
> it does often thump. A number of the SH Psalms are in meters other
> than the Common (what Bottom calls 8 and 6), and it is really only
> Sternhold himself who writes in a broken fourteener. Since he
> rhymes his couplets abcb, he really does seem to be thinking in
> terms of two fourteener lines, broken into shorter half-lines
> either for printing or perhaps because of the phrasing of the
> standard tunes. Hopkins changes the third line to another "a"
> rhyme, which cuts ties more decisively with the fourteener origins.
> So whoever originated the description of "thumping fourteeners" was
> not quite accurate, though there is certainly a kind of cognate
> relationship between Common Meter and the long lines of Chapman or
> Golding.
>
> Hannibal
>
>
>
>
> On 6/15/09, anne prescott <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> Gosh, Joel. I don't recall. I do know that the modern editor (well,
> sort of modern, and I can't recall his name), when writing of the
> fourteener, referred (I hope I have this right) to the "lilt and
> flop of this almost always fatal measure." Fair or not, I like the
> "lilt and flop"--up, up, up, op and then down, down, stop. Yes,
> mean and not always true. Anne.
>
>
> On Jun 15, 2009, at 2:39 PM, Joel Davis wrote:
>
> Who coined the now-ubiquitous term, "thumping fourteeners," to
> describe the Sternhold-Hopkins psalms? Was it CS Lewis or someone
> more recent?
>
> Thanks,
>
> Joel
>
>
>
> --
> Hannibal Hamlin
> Associate Professor of English
> The Ohio State University
> Burkhardt Fellow,
> The Folger Shakespeare Library
> 201 East Capitol Street SE
> Washington, DC 20003
> [log in to unmask]
> [log in to unmask]
