Identifying meter in the wild

I'm studying a group of local gravestone verses. Most are in familiar hymn meters: "eights and eights" or "eights and sixes" (cf. "O God our help in ages past" for eights and sixes).

But here's one my poor ear can't parse:

Happy the babe who privileged by fate
To shorter labor and a lighter weight
Receiv'd but yesterday ye gift of breath
Ordered tomorrow to return to death.

They seem to be 10-syllable lines. But what is the meter?

Try reading it as clunky four-foot lines, sort of rough-hewn iambic tetrameter, with accents as follows:

Háppy th' bábe who prív'leg'd by fáte
To shórter lábor 'nd a líghter wéight
Recéiv'd but yést'day ye gíft of bréath
Órd'red t'mórr'w t' retúrn to déath.

Not every verse in English has a regular meter. Here lines one and four are missing an initial syllable. This is a village versifier doing his best. Johnson said we're not on oath writing epitaphs. The Fogies would add we're not vying for the Bollingen either.

(We would take "lighter weight" here to mean "lighter burden of sorrows in life".)

Your study sounds interesting to a couple of inveterate graveyard-prowlers. What are you looking for and how measuring it?

>1 rjohara: of course you know this:

This is the metre Columbian. The soft-flowing trochees and dactyls,
Blended with fragments spondaic, and here and there an iambus,
Syllables often sixteen, or more or less, as it happens,
Difficult always to scan, and depending greatly on accent,
Being a close imitation, in English, of Latin hexameters --
Fluent in sound and avoiding the stiffness of blank verse,
Having the grandeur and flow of America's mountains and rivers,
Such as no bard could achieve in a mean little island like England;
Oft, at the end of a line, the sentence dividing abruptly
Breaks, and in accents mellifluous, follows the thoughts of the author.

-- Anon.

The metre Columbian always seems

Súited to lífe in the fórest priméval.

(Although that's pretty pure dactylic.)

Yes, my ear certainly hears my example above as a four-beat line; there just don't seem to be regular feet. Would "irregular tetrameter" be an appropriate term of characterizaton?

I'm working on a study of a small local cemetery, 1764 on, including an attempt to track down the sources of the various verses on the stones (project of the week). Some are biblical, some identifiable hymns, etc. But some look like they must have a definite origin (rather than being circulating folk compositions). The one above I've traced to an 18th century work Meditations and Contemplations by James Hervey, who quotes it in a footnote and himself attributes it to "Prior's Sol." I haven't yet been able to determine what Prior's Sol. is. Perhaps a commentary on the Song of Solomon, predating, say, 1770?

Here's another interesting one, from an 1804 stone, that appears almost to be an easter-wings-ish shape poem:

The young man faileth,
his strength ceaseth,
he dieth,
and is no more,
but his hope is in God.

Thoughts on it are most welcome. (And I have more.)

Lots of those minor verses circulated in the early 19th C in the form of compilations that people gave as presents. A well-known one is Friendship's Offering, which we've never seen, only heard of. Mark Twain, we think, mentions it in his critique of the literary shortcomings of Fenimore Cooper. We'd bet those compilations were the proximate source of some epitaphs.

WRT "Prior" your best first choice might be Matthew Prior.

Later--bingo! Just Googled Prior & found reference to a work we'd entirely forgotten:

Solomon, and other Poems on several Occasions

You can locate a copy at WorldCat.

Excellent! I thank you indeed. I was sure it was going to be a Puritan biblical commentary that would be very hard to track down. A copy is now on its way to me by ILL.

You're quite right that there will be proximate and ultimate sources for many of these gravestone verses. I'm betting the Prior verse mostly came in by way of Hervey's Meditations and Contemplations, which went through many editions in England and New England. I just came across a citation in the Victorian preacher Charles Spurgeon, quoting "Happy the babe" and attributing it to Hervey rather than Prior.