Golden Words 2 Line

[Faustina Bartsch]

Mylife at the time was chaotic. I was still at the private school, shunned by my classmates. My home life was in turmoil. I had moved twelve times by then. With those golden lines, I was overwhelmed by the beauty of the structure of Latin. The order both comforted and dazzled me. Latin stopped being a course in which I could prove myself and started being a passion. After Catullus, I devoured Horace, Ovid, and Virgil in high school, and went on to get my B.A. in Classics. Five words changed the course of my entire life.

In the episode, we listen to Hayes read the poem at Harvard in 2010. That full reading can be found online here. Or here is another reading that Hayes gives of the poem, and which Chris directed me to, at Andover. (Hayes begins his intro to the poem at around 10:30 in that video.) Fascinating to see Hayes bring this poem to schoolchildren.

Christopher Spaide is a Junior Fellow at the Harvard Society of Fellows, where he focuses on poetry, ecopoetics, American literature, and Asian American literature. His academic writing on poetry (as well as music and comics) appears in American Literary History, The Cambridge Quarterly, College Literature, Contemporary Literature, ELH, The Wallace Stevens Journal, and several edited collections. His essays and reviews and his poems appear in The Boston Globe, Boston Review, Colorado Review, The New Yorker, Ploughshares, Poetry, Slate, The Sewanee Review, The Yale Review, and elsewhere. He has received fellowships and honors from Harvard University, the James Merrill House, and the Keasbey Foundation.

Once again, the episode is available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and Google Podcasts. If you enjoy it, please leave a rating and review, and please share it with someone (perhaps with someone a generation removed from you).

What can we make of what we inherit? From the tendencies of our parents and from their words, from poets, from the words they leave us? I talked to Christopher Spaide, one of my favorite poetry critics, about a poem that addresses these questions and performs its own kind of answer, Terrance Hayes\u2019s \u201CThe Golden Shovel.\u201D You can find the episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and Google Podcasts.

This was a fascinating conversations, which kept giving way to depths upon depths. Part of the reason for that, of course, is that the Hayes poem literally contains another poem within its lines, the great and much-beloved Gwendolyn Brooks poem \u201CWe Real Cool.\u201D Here is an image of the Brooks poem that Chris was kind enough to provide, from Broadside Press in 1966.

In the episode, we listen to Brooks read the poem. That recording is available here. But check out the recording of on the website of the Academy of American Poets as well\u2014she\u2019s incredibly charming in her framing of it, and reads with real verve.

The ending WEs in \u201CWe Real Cool\u201D are tiny, wispy, weakly argumentative \u201CKilroy-is-here\u201D announcements. The boys have no accented sense of themselves, yet they are aware of a semi-defined personal importance. Say the \u201CWe\u201D softly.

As Chris explains it, Hayes\u2019s poem is \u201Cafter\u201D Brooks\u2019s poem in two ways\u2014and \u201Cbefore\u201D it in another: Hayes comes after Brooks in the history of poetry, he writes his poem in homage to hers, but also (this is the \u201Cbefore\u201D) he strings the words of Brooks\u2019s poem down the right hand margin of his poem, which means that his words, line by line, are positioned literally before the words of the poem that his is after.

That canny, ambivalent act of positioning suggests a complex and loving relation between Hayes and Brooks, \u201CThe Golden Shovel\u201D and \u201CWe Real Cool.\u201D Brooks\u2019s poem evinces a kind of heroic skepticism about institutional education\u2014the seven figures at the pool hall are there instead of being in school, and they have opted out of the lives that school is meant to lead us into. Hayes\u2014like his own son, like all of us\u2014has gone to school in the poetry of Gwendolyn Brooks, and he\u2019s learned from her, which means that her articulation of \u201Ccool\u201D has made an impression on him, but also that Hayes is invested (in a way that maybe \u201CWe Real Cool\u201D isn\u2019t) in discovering and describing other kinds of intergenerational handing down, other forms of education.

What\u2019s so touching about the Hayes poem\u2014or rather one of the incredibly touching things about it\u2014is the tender relationship in it between father and son. Chris is just brilliant in this episode at picking up on all the ways in which the father\u2019s words, his stance, his way of being have infiltrated his son\u2019s consciousness, offering not only a model of coolness to the boy in the poem but a way of talking and thinking and being to the poet that boy grew into, sitting at his desk and writing this poem.

Listen to the episode, and you\u2019ll hear Chris talk about how Hayes wants always to read\u2014to read other poems, but also to read the world\u2014in a way that sees into its core but also preserves its potentiality:

Hayes is someone who writes\u2014particularly response poems, particularly a poem like this that looks at another poet and poem\u2014to imagine alternate ways things could have gone, to imagine a multiplicity of forms of Black life and Black poetry.

One thing I wish we\u2019d had time to discuss in the episode\u2014which already was our longest ever!\u2014is the influence that Hayes\u2019s poem has already had. If you want to learn more about that influence, I highly recommend The Golden Shovel Anthology, to which Hayes has contributed a Foreword.

The golden line is a type of Latin dactylic hexameter frequently mentioned in Latin classrooms and in contemporary scholarship about Latin poetry, but which apparently began as a verse-composition exercise in schools in early modern Britain.[1]

The term "golden line" and its form originated in Britain, where it was an exercise for composing Latin verses.[4] The first known use, as aureus versus, is by the Welsh epigrammatist John Owen in a footnote to his own Latin poem in 1612.[5] The definition quoted above is in an obscure Latin textbook published in England in 1652, which never sold well and of which only four copies are extant today. It appeared in about a dozen citations between 1612 and 1900, including in some American and British Latin Grammars in the 19th and early 20th century.[6] Scholars outside the English-speaking world have only mentioned the golden line since 1955. It is not found in any current handbooks on Latin grammar or metrics except for Mahoney's online Overview of Latin Syntax[7] and Panhuis's Latin Grammar.[8]

The term "golden line" did not exist in Classical antiquity. Classical poets probably did not strive to produce them (but see the teres versus in the history section below). S. E. Winbolt,[9] the most thorough commentator on the golden line, described the form as a natural combination of obvious tendencies in Latin hexameter, such as the preference for putting adjectives towards the beginning of the line and nouns at the emphatic end. The golden line is an extreme form of hyperbaton.

There are about ten different definitions of the "golden line". Often scholars do not explicitly offer a definition, but instead present statistics or lists of golden lines, from which one must extrapolate their criteria for deeming a verse golden.

Perhaps this more inclusive definition is based upon the famous definition offered by the poet John Dryden in his introduction to the Silvae, "That Verse commonly which they call golden, or two Substantives and two Adjectives with a Verb betwixt them to keep the peace." Wilkinson[10] offered the humorous definition "silver line" for this variant. Wilkinson also offered another humorous distinction, the "bronze line", but this term has rarely been used since.[11]

Statistics illuminate some long-term trends in the use of the golden line. The following statistical tables are based on one scholar's definitions of golden and "silver" lines (the tables are from Mayer (2002)).[14] with additions of Juvenal, Calpurnius, and Nemesianus from Heikkinen[15]). Table 1 gives the totals for the golden and silver lines in classical poetry, listed in approximate chronological order from Catullus to Statius. Table 2 gives similar figures for a few poets in late antiquity, while Table 3 gives figures for a selection of early medieval poems from the fifth to tenth centuries.

In all three tables, the first column is the total number of verses in the work in question, followed by the number of "golden lines" and "silver lines" in the work. The last three columns give the percentage of golden and silver lines in respect to the total number of verses. Aside from a few exceptions, only poems with more than 200 lines are included, since in shorter poems the percentage figures are arbitrary and can be quite high. See, for example, the combined percentage of 14.29 in the Apocolocyntosis. Other short poems that are not included on the tables, such as the Copa, Moretum, Lydia, and Einsiedeln Eclogues, have rather high combined percentages between 3.45 and 5.26.

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