Alcaic stanzas

Picture credit: Philologia

I’ve decided to experiment with Classical poetry and approximate Horatian alcaic stanzas.  I don’t pretend to know much about it, but the basic pattern seems to be this.  A stanza is alcaic if:

1. it has four lines of 11, 11, 9 and 10 syllables, respectively
2. the first two lines are divided into two parts by a complete pause after the fifth syllable
3. it has a rhythmic pattern of long and short (rather than stressed and unstressed) syllables.

The rhythmic pattern is:

1. long long short long long [complete pause] long short short long short long
2. long long short long long [complete pause] long short short long short long
3. long long short long long long short long long
4. long short short long short short long short long long

An oft-cited example written in English is W H Auden’s In Memory of Sigmund Freud.

I’d be interested to know what you consider to be the positive and negative qualities of alcaics.  Lord Tennyson is reported to have described the Horatian Alcaic as ‘perhaps the stateliest metre in the world except the Virgilian hexameter at its best’.