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
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