Poem of the Day: ‘The Day of Judgment’

A year ago, we spent a week looking at efforts to use classical meters in English poetry, here in the Poem of the Day feature of The New York Sun. As we noted at the time, in a handful of eras (notably the Victorian) poets made an attempt to remodel English verse with classical meter — the system, used by the ancient Greeks and Romans, that understood poetic lines as patterns of long and short syllables (called “quantity”), rather than the patterns of stressed and unstressed syllables that English typically uses. What can we say of it, except that it was a noble endeavor, high minded and born of serious classical education? And, of course, that it was doomed.

We used all of last week’s Poem of the Day features to think about the English hymn tradition, considered as poetry — opening the week with “Lord, in the morning” by Isaac Watts (1674–1748). As it happens, what may be Watts’s most accomplished poem is an Englishing of classical meter, called “The Day of Judgment” with the subtitle “An Ode Attempted in English Sapphic.” And that mention of Watts prompted today’s revisiting of classic meters.

As we mentioned before, sapphics are an ancient Greek form, eventually borrowed into Latin, that were named for the poet Sappho and originally composed of long and short syllables. In English meter it typically becomes a pattern of accents. And so the Victorian Algernon Charles Swinburne wrote in sapphics. Rudyard Kipling turned his hand to sapphics. Allen Ginsburg experimented with sapphics. Timothy Steele’s “Sapphics Against Anger” is a fine example of the stanza in contemporary verse.

Sometimes using spondees to force three stressed syllables in a row (“Fierce North wind”) and sometimes substituting dactyls for the Latin spondees, Watts gives us something that can be read aloud in English with verve and a communicable steady meter. The poem takes a storm at sea as an image for the apocalypse, which Watts turns into the speaker’s prayer for redemption. And, as in all sapphics, the shortness of the fourth line gives the stanzas a feeling of closure and an opportunity for powerful phrasings: “Quick to devour them” or “Shakes the Creation.”