Adonean

The meter Dobson uses, though an eight-line rather than four-line stanza, plainly recalls the Sapphic stanza of the Odes by echoing the length and rhythm of its short last line in the short third and sixth line: "Commodious villas" is a good English stressed equivalent of that adonean line, terruit urbem (Odes 1.2.4).

In this poem Calverley, who was a considerable classical scholar and a master of meter in Latin, Greek, and English verse, and who had earlier published translations of a number of Horace's Odes, (25) matches Dobson in adopting a meter that recalls Horace's Sapphic stanza, this time in Horatian quatrains with a short last line again close to the adonean. The topic is Horatian, too: the man of contentment whom mishaps do not disturb is a comic version of the indifference of the Stoic sage to external disaster famously promoted in Odes 1.22 (integer vitae scelerisque purus) and 3.3 (iustum et tenacem propositi virum).