After trying to search online for the restraints of alcaic verse, I realized that there is literally nothing on the internet that describes the form – which meant that even my earlier post mocking Google’s suggestion for the  phrase “alcaic meter” turned up when I tried again. No good.

Therefore: a short public service announcement seemed in order. Let me know if I miss anything, and I’ll gladly correct or add it.

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Greek meters like sapphic verse and alcaic verse are based in a prosodic system called quantitative verse, which measures the length of syllables rather than the stress pattern. However, in English, it’s proven – at best – to be very hard to replicate the quantitative system: English poets tend to hear stress patterns rather than the length of syllables.

Partially due to this, even the best information on the internet about alcaic verse simply describes it as a syllabic form, which has the pattern of eleven syllables in the first two lines, nine in the third and ten in the fourth. This isn’t an unprecedented approach to writing in alcaics. W.H. Auden’s poem “In Memory of Sigmund Freud” is a good example of this particular pattern. Below, you’ll find the first two stanzas:

When there are so many we shall have to mourn,
when grief has been made so public, and exposed
to the critique of a whole epoch
the frailty of our conscience and anguish,

of whom shall we speak? For every day they die
among us, those who were doing us some good,
who knew it was never enough but
hoped to improve a little by living.

As you can see, the third line is typically indented a little more than the fourth while the first two are flush with the left-hand margin. This is another aspect of the form that’s usually preserved, if only to signal that the lines are different lengths, but this isn’t always the case.

Strict alcaic verse, though, is slightly more complicated. In this approach, stressed syllables are substituted for what would be long syllables in quantitative verse, effectively using an accentual-syllabic prosodic system in order to imitate a quantitative one. The pattern is delineated below, where “x” signifies a stressed syllable and “-” signifies an unstressed syllable:

xx-x-x–x–
xx-x-x–x–
xx-x-x-x-
x–x–x-x-

“Alcaic Figure” by Sidney Wade is a solid example of this approach. I’ve included the whole poem as an example, but the link will take you to the original version, which I found on Google Books.

ALCAIC FIGURE

I’m sweating. Tossing. Sleep is impossible.
Damn blankets. Ankles caught in the undertow.
Hot breath of sttentive mosquitoes. A swelling of
doubt and the whining of tiny woodwinds.

Bad day. I didn’t do it the way that I
should have. This heat is brazen. I think of my
two beautiful daughters. I’m never the mother I
want to be. Barking. It sounds like oboes.

No. Horns. I could get up and continue to
read Death in Rome. I won’t. All the characters
repel me. I’m breathing the one thousand two thousand
three thousand laurel tree where the hell is

that dog? There’s sand awash in the bed sheets, I
hold off the weight, the terrible slowness of
tides. Nine thousand ten I am sinking now, classical,
shifting impurities, reedy, stranded.

Pale waves, the sea is scrambling to climb up the
beach foaming notes like Morpheus muttering -
shades, white and sublunary, washing ashore to those
masses of children with pale blue faces.

Enjoy – and good luck!