PART ONE

ENGLISH VERSE

I. ACCENT AND TIME

A.--KINDS OF ACCENT

The accents of English syllables as appearing in verse are commonly classified in two ways: according to degree of intensity, and according to cause or significance.

Obviously there can be no fixed limits to the number of degrees of intensity recognized in syllabic accent or stress. It is common to speak of three such degrees: syllables having accent (stressed), syllables having secondary accent, and syllables without accent (unstressed). Schipper makes four groups: Principal Accent (_Hauptaccent_ or _Hochton_), Secondary Accent (_Nebenaccent_ or _Tiefton_), No Accent (_Tonlosigkeit_), and Disappearance of Sound (_Stummheit_). In illustration he gives the word _ponderous_, where the first syllable has the chief accent, the last a secondary accent, the second no accent; while in the verse

"Most ponderous and substantial things"

the second syllable is suppressed or silent.

Mr. A. J. Ellis, in like manner, recognized three principal classes of syllables: those stressed in the first degree, those stressed in the second degree, and those unstressed.[1] In the following lines from _Paradise Lost_ he indicated these three degrees, as he recognized them, by the figures 2, 1, 0, written underneath.

Of man's first disobedience, and the fruit 0 2 1 0 0 2 0 0 0 2

Of that forbidden tree, whose mortal taste 0 1 0 2 0 1 0 2 0 2

Brought death into the world, and all our woe, 1 2 0 0 0 2 0 1 0 2

With loss of Eden, till one greater man 0 1 0 2 0 0 0 2 0 2

Restore us, and regain the blissful seat, 0 2 0 0 0 2 0 2 0 2

Sing, heavenly Muse, that, on the secret top 2 2 0 2 1 0 0 2 0 1

Of Horeb or of Sinai, didst inspire 0 2 0 0 0 2 0 1 0 2

That shepherd, who first taught the chosen seed 1 2 0 0 2 2 0 2 0 2

In the beginning, how the heavens and earth 0 0 0 2 0 1 0 2 0 2

Rose out of chaos.[2] 2 0 0 2 0

It is worthy of note that the secondary accent seems originally to have been a more important factor in English verse than it is commonly considered to be in modern periods. In Anglo-Saxon verse the combination of a primary stress, a secondary stress, and an unstressed syllable, is a recognized type. In modern verse the reader is likely to make an effort to reduce all syllables to the type of either stress or no-stress. In such a verse as the following, however (from Matthew Arnold's _Forsaken Merman_),--

"And I lose my poor soul, Merman, here with thee,"--

we may find such a combination as that just referred to as familiar in Anglo-Saxon rhythm. The syllables "_soul, Merman_" are respectively cases of primary stress, secondary stress, and no-stress. On this matter see further the remark of Luick, cited on p. 156, below.

The element of Pitch is not ordinarily included in the treatment of versification, as it is not ordinarily recognized as having any significance peculiar to verse. According to Professor J. W. Bright, however, there is such a thing as a "pitch-accent" which plays an important part in verse where the word-accent conflicts with that of the regular metre. Under certain exigencies, he says, "_un-governed, pre-cisely, re-markable,_ and _Je-rusalem_ ... are naturally pronounced with a pitch-accent upon the first syllables, and with the undisturbed expiratory word-accent upon the second. It will of course be understood that when the word-accent is defined as expiratory this term does not exclude the inherent pitch of English stress. Force, quantity, and pitch are combined in our word-stress (or word-accent), both primary and secondary; but in the secondary stress used as ictus there is a noticeable change in the proportions of these elements, the pitch being relatively increased. An answer is thus won for the question: How do we naturally pronounce two stresses in juxtaposition on the same word, or on adjacent words closely joined grammatically? This is further illustrated in the specially emphasized words of such expressions as 'The idea!'" where Professor Bright marks the pitch-accent on the first syllable of "idea," retaining the stress-accent on the second syllable. In the line

"Of man's first disobedience, and the fruit"

he marks a pitch-accent where the word-stress and metrical stress are in conflict, that is, on the syllables "dis-" and "and." "The rhythmic use of 'disobedience,'" he says, "illustrates with its four syllables (as here used) as many recognizable varieties of stress. The first syllable has a secondary word-accent, raised to a pitch-accent for ictus; the second is wholly unaccented; the third has the chief word-accent, employed as ictus (the accent of the preceding word, "first," is subordinate to the rhythm); the fourth has a secondary word-accent which remains unchanged in the thesis." The conclusion is that "ictus in conflict requires a pitch-accent." (All these quotations are from an article on 'Proper Names in Old English Verse,' in the _Publications of the Modern Language Association_, n.s. vol. vii. No. 3). Professor Bright's theory of pitch-accent is a part of his general theory of opposition to what he calls the "sense-doctrine" of the reading of verse,--that is, the accepted doctrine that the word and sentence accents must ordinarily take precedence of the metrical accent.

According to cause or significance, accents are commonly classed in three groups: Etymological or Word Accent, Syntactical or Rhetorical Accent, and Metrical Accent. Accents of the first class are due to the original stress of the syllable in English speech; those of the second class are due to the importance of the syllable in the sentence; those of the third class are due to the place of the syllable in the metrical scheme. In the verse

"Mary had a little lamb,"

the first syllable may be said to be stressed primarily for etymological reasons, the seventh primarily for syntactical or rhetorical reasons, and the third (which would not be accented in prose) for metrical reasons.

The general law of English verse is that only those syllables which bear the accent of the first class (that is, which are stressed in common speech), together with monosyllables which on occasion are stressed in common speech, shall be placed so as to receive the metrical stress; and that, if the word-stress and the metrical stress apparently conflict, the metrical stress must yield. Less generally, the rhetorical or syntactical accent in the same way takes precedence of the metrical. In both cases exceptions are of course numerous.

The following are examples of verses showing a conflict between the normal prose-accent and the normal verse-accent, where--as commonly read--the prose- (word-) accent triumphs.

The blessed damozel leaned out _From the gold bar_ of heaven.

(ROSSETTI: _The Blessed Damozel._)

_Love is_ a smoke _raised with_ the fume of sighs; Being purged, a fire _sparkling_ in lover's eyes; Being vexed, a sea _nourished_ with lover's tears.

(SHAKSPERE: _Romeo and Juliet_, I. i. 196 ff.)

Art thou so bare and full of wretchedness, And fear'st to die? _famine_ is in thy cheeks, _Need and_ oppression starveth in thine eyes.

(SHAKSPERE: _ib._ V. i. 68 ff.)

_Till, at_ his second bidding, Darkness fled, _Light_ shone, and order from disorder sprung. _Swift to_ their several quarters hasted then The cumbrous elements--_Earth_, Flood, _Air_, Fire; And this ethereal quintessence of Heaven Flew upward, _spirited_ with various forms, That rolled orbicular, and turned to stars _Numberless_, as thou seest, and how they move.

(MILTON: _Paradise Lost_, iii. 712 ff.)

_She was_ a gordian shape of dazzling hue, Vermilion-spotted, golden, green, and blue; _Striped like_ a zebra, freckled like a pard, _Eyed like_ a peacock, and all crimson barred.

(KEATS: _Lamia_, i. 47 ff.)

_"Boys!"_ shriek'd the old king, but vainlier than a hen _To her_ false daughters in the pool; for none Regarded; neither seem'd there more to say. _Back_ rode we to my father's camp, and found He thrice had sent a herald to the gates.

(TENNYSON: _The Princess_, v. 318 ff.)

Sequestered nest!--this kingdom, limited Alone by one old _populous green_ wall; _Tenanted_ by the ever-busy flies, _Gray crickets and shy lizards and quick spiders_; Each family of the silver-threaded moss-- Which, look through near, this way, and it appears A stubble-field _or a cane-brake_, a marsh Of bulrush whitening _in the_ sun: _laugh now_!

(BROWNING: _Paracelsus_, i. 36 ff.)

On the other hand, we find verses showing a conflict between prose and verse accent, where the verse-accent may be regarded as triumphing wholly or in part. Where this triumph is complete, the accent is said to be _wrenched_; as, for example, in old ballad endings like "north countree."[3] Where there is a compromise effected in reading, the accent is said to be _hovering_; as in one of Shakspere's songs,--

"It was a lover and his lass ... That o'er the green _corn-field_ did pass."

I sat with Love upon a woodside well, Leaning across the water, I and he; Nor ever did he speak nor looked at me, But touched his lute wherein was _audible_ The certain secret thing he had to tell: Only our mirrored eyes met _silently_ In the low wave; and that sound came to be The passionate voice I knew; and my tears fell. And at their fall, his eyes beneath grew hers; And with his foot and with his _wing-feathers_ He swept the spring that watered my heart's drouth. Then the dark ripples spread to waving hair, And as I stooped, her own lips rising there Bubbled with brimming kisses at my mouth.

(ROSSETTI: _Willowwood. House of Life_, Sonnet xlix.)

I wish my grave were growing green, A winding-sheet drawn ower my een, And I in Helen's arms _lying,_ On fair Kirconnell lea.

(_Fair Helen_; old ballad.)

For the stars and the winds are unto her As raiment, as songs of the _harp-player._

(SWINBURNE: Chorus in _Atalanta in Calydon._)

Nothing is better, I well think, Than love; the hidden _well-water_ Is not so delicate to drink: This was well seen of me and her.

(SWINBURNE: _The Leper._)

These wrenched accents are characteristic of one phase of the so-called "pre-Raphaelite" poetry of the Victorian period; in part, no doubt, they are due to the influence of the old ballads. My colleague Professor Newcomer has suggested that they are partly due, also, to a dislike for the combative accent which would occur where two heavy syllables came together (accented as commonly) in a compound like "harp-player."

Of special interest are the examples of wrenched and hovering accent found in the verse of Sir Thomas Wyatt and the Earl of Surrey,--more especially in Wyatt. These mark the time when the syllable-counting principle was coming into prominence in English verse, under the new culture of the days of Henry VIII. The first conscious followers of this principle seem to have given it such prominence that a verse seemed good to them if it contained the requisite number of syllables, whether the accents conformed to any regular system or not. In the case of Wyatt we can also compare the original forms of many of his poems, as preserved in manuscript, with the revised forms as printed in Tottel's Miscellany (1557). (See Dr. Flügel's transcriptions from the Wyatt Mss., in _Anglia_, vol. xviii.) The following is the octave of one of the sonnets, as found in the Ms.:

"Avysing the bright bemes of these fayer Iyes where he is that myn oft moisteth and wassheth the werid mynde streght from the hert departeth for to rest in his woroldly paradise And fynde the swete bitter under this gyse what webbes he hath wrought well he parceveth whereby with himselfe on love he playneth that spurreth with fyer: and bridillith with Ise."

(_Anglia,_ xviii. 465.)

Compare this with the revised form in Tottel's edition:

"Avisyng the bright beames of those fayre eyes, Where he abides that mine oft moistes and washeth: The weried mynd streight from the hart departeth, To rest within hys worldly Paradise, And bitter findes the swete, under this gyse. What webbes there he hath wrought, well he preceaveth Whereby then with him self on love he playneth, That spurs wyth fire, and brydleth eke with yse."

(Arber Reprint, p. 40.)

It appears that this revision was the work of the editor, who had a better sense of true English rhythm than the poet himself. Alscher, however, in his work on Wyatt, contends that Wyatt doubtless revised his own verses so as to give them their finished form. (See _Sir Thomas Wyatt und Seine Stellung_, etc., p. 49.) Other lines in Wyatt's verse where the number of syllables is counted but where the accents are faulty, are these:

"The long love that in my thought I harbour."

"And there campeth displaying his banner."

"And there him hideth and not appeareth."

"For good is the life, ending faithfully."

Another large group of hovering accents is that formed by French words with such terminations as _-our_, _-ance_, _-ace_, _-age_, _-ant_, _-ess_. In such cases the original tendency of the word was to accent the final syllable; but the general tendency of English accents being recessive, the words often passed through a transitional period when the accent was variable or "hovering." The first of the four lines just quoted shows us a word of this character.

For an interesting presentation of certain phases of the laws of stress in English verse, see Robert Bridges's _Milton's Prosody_ (ed. 1901), Appendix J, "on the Rules of Stress Rhythms."

B.--TIME-INTERVALS

The fundamental principle of the rhythm of English verse (and indeed of any rhythm) is that _the accents appear at regular time-intervals_. In practice there is of course great freedom in departing from this regularity, the equal time-intervals being at times only a standard of rhythm to which the varying successions of accented and unaccented syllables are mentally referred. Where the equal time-intervals are observed with substantial regularity, two sorts of verse are still to be clearly distinguished: that in which not only the intervals of time but the numbers of syllables between the accents are substantially equal and regular, and that in which the number of syllables varies. The latter class is that of the native Germanic metres; the former is that of the Romance metres, and of modern English verse as influenced by them. With the development of regularity in the counting of syllables there has perhaps also taken place a development of regularity in the regular counting of the time-intervals. In other words, the modern English reader, where the number of syllables between accents is variable, makes the time-intervals as nearly equal as possible by lengthening and shortening the syllables in the manner permitted by the freedom of English speech; in early English verse, where the number of syllables between accents varied very greatly, we cannot be sure that the time-intervals were so accurately felt or preserved in recitation.

i. _Verse showing fairly regular intervals between accents_

Avoid extremes; and shun the fault of such Who still are pleas'd too little or too much. At every trifle scorn to take offence, That always shows great pride, or little sense: Those heads, as stomachs, are not sure the best, Which nauseate all, and nothing can digest. Yet let not each gay turn thy rapture move; For fools admire, but men of sense approve: As things seem large which we through mist descry, Dulness is ever apt to magnify.

(POPE: _Essay on Criticism_, ll. 384-393.)

Louder, louder chant the lay-- Waken, lords and ladies gay! Tell them youth and mirth and glee Run a course as well as we; Time, stern huntsman! who can baulk, Staunch as hound and fleet as hawk; Think of this, and rise with day, Gentle lords and ladies gay!

(SCOTT: _Hunting Song_.)

Larger constellations burning, mellow moons and happy skies, Breadths of tropic shade and palms in cluster, knots of Paradise.

(TENNYSON: _Locksley Hall_.)

Wild April, enkindled to laughter and storm by the kiss of the wildest of winds that blow, Calls loud on his brother for witness; his hands that were laden with blossom are sprinkled with snow.

(SWINBURNE: _March_.)

ii. _Verse showing irregular intervals between accents_

Gegr[=e]tte ð[=a] gumena gehwylcne, hwate helm-berend, hindeman s[=i]ðe, sw[=æ]se ges[=i]ðas: "Nolde ic sweord beran, w[=æ]pen t[=o] wyrme, gif ic wiste h[=u] wið ð[=a]m [=a]gl[=æ]cean elles meahte gylpe wiðgr[=i]pan, sw[=a] ic g[=i]o wið Grendle dyde; ac ic ð[=æ]r heaðu-f[=y]res h[=a]tes w[=e]ne, oreðes ond attres; forðon ic m[=e] on hafu bord ond byrnan. Nelle ic beorges weard oferfl[=e]on f[=o]tes trem, ac unc sceal weorðan æt wealle, sw[=a] unc wyrd get[=e]oð, Metod manna gehwæs. Ic eom on m[=o]de from, þæt ic wið þone g[=u]ð-flogan gylp ofersitte.

(_Beowulf_, ll. 2516-2528. ab. 700.)

Ich herde men upo mold make muche mon, hou he beþ itened of here tilyynge: gode yeres & corn boþe beþ agon, ne kepeþ here no sawe ne no song synge. Nou we mote worche, nis þer non oþer won, mai ich no lengore lyue wiþ mi lesinge. Yet þer is a bitterore bit to þe bon, for euer þe furþe peni mot to þe kynge.[4]

(_The Farmer's Complaint_, ab. 1300; in Böddeker's _Altenglische Dichtungen_, p. 102, and Wright's _Political Songs_, p. 149.)

I will speake out aloude, I care not who heare it: Sirs, see that my harnesse, my tergat and my shield Be made as bright now as when I was last in fielde, As white as I shoulde to warre againe to-morrowe; For sicke shall I be but I worke some folke sorow. Therefore see that all shine as bright as Sainct George, Or as doth a key newly come from the smiths forge.

(N. UDALL: _Ralph Roister Doister_, IV. iii. 13-19. 1566.)

To this, this Oake cast him to replie Well as he couth; but his enemie Had kindled such coles of displeasure, That the good man noulde stay his leasure, But home him hasted with furious heate, Encreasing his wrath with many a threat: His harmefull Hatchet he hent in hand, (Alas! that it so ready should stand!) And to the field alone he speedeth, (Aye little helpe to harme there needeth!) Anger nould let him speake to the tree, Enaunter his rage mought cooled bee; But to the roote bent his sturdie stroake, And made many wounds in the waste Oake.

(SPENSER: _Shepherd's Calendar, February_. 1579.)

Through many a dark and dreary vale They passed, and many a region dolorous, O'er many a frozen, many a fiery Alp, Rocks, caves, lakes, fens, bogs, dens, and shades of death-- A universe of death, which God by curse Created evil, for evil only good; Where all life dies, death lives, and Nature breeds, Perverse, all monstrous, all prodigious things, Abominable, inutterable, and worse Than fables yet have feigned, or fear conceived.

(MILTON: _Paradise Lost_, II. 618 ff. 1667.)

The night is chill; the forest bare; Is it the wind that moaneth bleak? There is not wind enough in the air To move away the ringlet curl From the lovely lady's cheek-- There is not wind enough to twirl The one red leaf, the last of its clan, That dances as often as dance it can, Hanging so light, and hanging so high, On the topmost twig that looks up at the sky.

(COLERIDGE: _Christabel_, Part I. 1816.)

In his Preface to this poem Coleridge said: "The metre of the _Christabel_ is not, properly speaking, irregular, though it may seem so from its being founded on a new principle; namely, that of counting in each line the accents, not the syllables. Though the latter may vary from seven to twelve, yet in each line the accents will be found to be only four. Nevertheless this occasional variation in number of syllables is not introduced wantonly, or for the mere ends of convenience, but in correspondence with some transition, in the nature of the imagery or passion." The verse is accurately described, but it has frequently been pointed out as curious that Coleridge should have spoken of it as "founded on a new principle," when the principle in question was that of native English verse from the earliest times.[5]

For other specimens of verse showing irregularity in the number of syllables between the accents, see Part Two, under Non-syllable-counting Four-stress Verse.

iii. _Silent Time-intervals between Syllables (Pauses)_

(a) Pauses not filling the time of syllables.

Most English verses of more than eight syllables are divided not only into the time-intervals between the accents, but also into two parts (which Schipper calls "rhythmical series") by the _Cesura_. The Cesura is a pause not counted out of the regular time of the rhythm, but corresponding to the pauses between "phrases" in music, and nearly always coinciding with syntactical or rhetorical divisions of the sentence.

The medial cesura is the typical pause of this kind, dividing the verse into two parts of approximately equal length. In much early English verse, and in French verse, this medial cesura is almost universal; in modern English verse (and in that of some early poets, notably Chaucer) there is great freedom in the placing of the cesura, and also in omitting it altogether. The importance of this matter in the history of English decasyllabic verse will appear in Part Two.

In the early Elizabethan period the impression was still general that there should be a regular medial cesura. Spenser seems to have been the first to imitate the greater freedom of Chaucer in this regard. See the Latin dissertation on Spenser's verse of E. Legouis (_Quomodo E. Spenserus_, etc., Paris, 1896), and the summary of its results by Mr. J. B. Fletcher in _Modern Language Notes_ for November, 1898. "Spenser," says Mr. Fletcher, "revived for 'heroic verse' the neglected variety in unity of his self-acknowledged master, Chaucer." In Gascoigne's _Notes of Instruction concerning the making of verse or ryme in English_ (1575), we find: "There are also certayne pauses or restes in a verse whiche may be called Ceasures.... In mine opinion in a verse of eight sillables, the pause will stand best in the middest, in a verse of tenne it will be placed at the ende of the first foure sillables; in a verse of twelve, in the midst.... In Rithme royall, it is at the wryters discretion, and forceth not where the pause be untill the ende of the line." This greater liberty allowed the rime royal is doubtless due to the influence of Chaucer on that form. For Gascoigne's practice in printing his verse with medial cesura, even without regard to rhetorical divisions, see the specimen given below.

Another interesting Elizabethan account of the cesura is found in Puttenham's _Arte of English Poesie_ (1589), where the writer compares the verse-pause to a stop made by a traveler at an inn for rest and refreshment. (Arber's Reprint, p. 88.)

_Specimen of French alexandrine, showing the regular medial cesura:_

Trois fois cinquante jours le général naufrage Dégasta l'univers; en fin d'un tel ravage L'immortel s'émouvant, n'eût pas sonné si tôt La retraite des eaux que soudain flot sur flot Elles gaignent au pied; tous les fleuves s'abaissant. Le mer rentre en prison; les montagnes renaissent.

(DU BARTAS: _La Première Semaine_. 1579.)

See further, on the character of the French alexandrine and its medial cesura, in Part Two, under Six-stress Verse.

_Specimen of early blank verse printed with regular medial cesura:_

O Knights, O Squires, O Gentle blouds yborne, You were not borne, al onely for your selves: Your countrie claymes, some part of al your paines. There should you live, and therein should you toyle, To hold up right, and banish cruel wrong, To helpe the pore, to bridle backe the riche, To punish vice, and vertue to advaunce, To see God servde, and Belzebub supprest. You should not trust, lieftenaunts in your rome, And let them sway, the scepter of your charge, Whiles you (meane while) know scarcely what is don, Nor yet can yeld, accompt if you were callde.

(GASCOIGNE: _The Steel Glass_, ll. 439 ff. 1576.)

For specimens of regular medial cesura, and of variable cesura, in modern verse, see under the Decasyllabic Couplet and Blank Verse, in Part Two.

The Cesura is called _masculine_ when it follows an accented syllable. (For examples, see previous specimen from Gascoigne.) It is called _feminine_ when it follows an unaccented syllable. Two varieties of the feminine cesura are also distinguished: the Lyric, when the pause occurs inside a foot; _e.g._:

"This wicked traitor, whom I thus accuse;"

the Epic, when the pause occurs after an extra (hypermetrical) light syllable; _e.g._:

"To Canterbury with ful devout corage."

"But how of Cawdor? the thane of Cawdor lives."

The "epic" cesura is quite as characteristic of dramatic blank verse as of epic.

The pause occurring at the end of a line is equally regular with the medial pause, and corresponds in the same way to a phrase-pause in music. It is an element of the same character, then, as the cesura, though not bearing the same name. It coincides less closely than the cesura with syntactical and rhetorical pauses. When there is no corresponding syntactical or rhetorical pause at the end of the line (in other words, when the metrical pause marking the end of the verse cannot be prominently represented in reading without interfering with the expression of the sense), the line is said to be "run-on." Such an ending is also called _enjambement_. The importance of this distinction between "end-stopped" and "run-on" lines will appear in the notes on the Decasyllabic Couplet and Blank Verse, in Part Two.

(_b_) Pauses filling the time of syllables.

A second class of silent time-intervals, or pauses, is to be distinguished from the cesural pause by the fact that in this case the time of the pause is counted in the metrical scheme. Pauses of this class correspond to rests in music; and as in the case of such rests, their occurrence is exceptional.

Of fustian he wered a gipoun [^] Al bismotered with his habergeoun.

For him was lever have at his beddes heed [^] Twenty bokes, clad in blak or reed.

(CHAUCER: Prologue to _Canterbury Tales_, 75 f. and 293 f.)

This omission of the first light syllable is characteristic of Chaucer's couplet and of Middle English verse generally. (See Schipper, vol. i. p. 462, and ten Brink's _Chaucer's Sprache und Verskunst_, p. 175.) In modern verse it is not usually permitted.

The time doth pass, [^] yet shall not my love.

(WYATT: _The joy so short, alas!_)

The omitted syllable following the medial pause is closely parallel to that at the beginning of the verse.

Stay! [^] The king hath thrown his warder down.

(_Richard II_, I. iii. 118.)

Kneel thou down, Philip. [^] But rise more great.

(_King John_, I. i. 161.)

In drops of sorrow. [^] Sons, kinsmen, thanes.

(_Macbeth_, I. iv. 35.)

Than the soft myrtle. [^] But man, proud man.

(_Measure for Measure_, II. ii. 117.)

These specimens of pauses in Shakspere's verse indicate the natural varieties of dramatic form. In such cases the pause often occurs between speeches, or where some action is to be understood as filling the time; as in the second instance, where the accolade is given in the middle of the line. (See Abbott's _Shakespearian Grammar_, pp. 413 ff.)

[^] Break, [^] break, [^] break, On thy cold gray stones, O Sea! And I would that my tongue could utter The thoughts that arise in me.

(TENNYSON: _Break, Break, Break._)

In Lanier's _Science of English Verse_, p. 101, this stanza is represented in musical notation, with rests, to show that rhythm "may be dependent on silences."

Should auld acquaintance be forgot, And never brought to mind? Should auld acquaintance be forgot, And auld [^] lang [^] syne?

(BURNS: _Auld Lang Syne._)

Here the syllables "auld" and "lang" may be regarded as lengthened so as to fill the time of the missing light syllables. So in many cases there is a choice between compensatory lengthening and compensatory pause.

Thus [^] said the Lord [^] in the Vault above the Cherubim, Calling to the angels and the souls in their degree: "Lo! Earth has passed away On the smoke of Judgment Day. That Our word may be established shall We gather up the sea?"

Loud [^] sang the souls [^] of the jolly, jolly mariners: "Plague upon the hurricane that made us furl and flee! But the war is done between us, In the deep the Lord hath seen us-- Our bones we'll leave the barracout', and God may sink the sea!"

(KIPLING: _The Last Chantey._)

This is an instance of a pause forming a regular part of the verse-rhythm. Thus in the first verse of each stanza the second and sixth syllables are omitted, and the result gives the characteristic effect of the rhythm. In measures where there is regular catalexis (that is, where the last light syllable of the verse is regularly omitted) the phenomenon is really of the same kind.

These, these will give the world another heart, And other pulses. Hear ye not the hum Of mighty workings?---- Listen awhile, ye nations, and be dumb.

(Keats: _Sonnet to Haydon_.)

Call her once before you go,-- Call once yet! In a voice that she will know,-- "Margaret! Margaret!" Children's voices should be dear (Call once more) to a mother's ear; Children's voices, wild with pain,-- Surely she will come again! Call her once, and come away; This way, this way!...

Come, dear children, come away down: Call no more! One last look at the white-walled town, And the little gray church on the windy shore; Then come down! She will not come, though you call all day; Come away, come away!

(MATTHEW ARNOLD: _The Forsaken Merman_.)

In this specimen no attempt has been made to indicate the pauses, as different readers would interpret the verse variously. It will be found that this whole poem is a study in delicate changes and arrangements of time-intervals. The four stresses characteristic of the rhythm can be accounted for in such short lines as the second and tenth, properly read.

FOOTNOTES:

[1] _Transactions of the Philological Society_, 1875-76.

[2] According to a more elaborate system Mr. Ellis recognized nine varieties of force or stress, which he named in order as follows: subweak, weak, superweak, submean, mean, supermean, substrong, strong, superstrong. In like manner he named nine degrees each of length, pitch, weight, and silence. Length and Silence are both terms of duration of time. The meaning of Weight has not been generally understood, nor is the term ordinarily recognized. Mr. Ellis described it as "due to expression and mental conceptions of importance, resulting partly from expression in delivery, produced by quality of tone and gliding pitch, and partly from the mental effect of the constructional predominance of conceptions." On this whole scheme of Mr. Ellis's, Mr. Mayor remarks interestingly: "Whilst I admire, I with difficulty repress a shudder at the elaborate apparatus he has provided for registering the minutest variations of metrical stress. Not only does he distinguish nine different degrees of force, but there are the same number of degrees of length, pitch, silence, and weight, making altogether forty-five varieties of stress at the disposal of the metrist ... If the analysis of rhythm is so terribly complicated, let us rush into the arms of the intuitivists and trust to our ears only, for life is not long enough to admit of characterizing lines when there are forty-five expressions for each syllable to be considered." (_Chapters on English Metre_, p. 69.)

[3] The term "wrenched" was used originally, it would seem, as one of reprobation. Thus Puttenham, in his _Arte of English Poesie_ (1589), said; "There can not be in a maker a fowler fault, than to falsifie his accent to serve his cadence, or by untrue orthographie to wrench his words to helpe his rime." (Arber ed., p. 94.)

[4] It is interesting to compare with these irregular lines another stanza of similar form, of about the same date, from an Elegy on Edward I., in Böddeker's Collection, p. 140, and Wright's _Political Songs_, p. 246.

Alle þat beoþ of huerte trewe, a stounde herkneþ to my song of duel, þat deþ haþ diht vs newe (þat makeþ me syke ant sorewe among!) of a knyht, þat wes so strong, of wham god haþ don ys wille; me þuncheþ þat deþ haþ don vs wrong, þat he so sone shal ligge stille.

The comparatively great regularity of the measures in this second stanza is due to the fact that it was under the syllable-counting influence of the French, being in fact a translation of a French original.

[5] Leigh Hunt said that "Coleridge saw the mistake which had been made with regard to this measure, and restored it to the beautiful freedom of which it was capable, by calling to mind the liberties allowed its old musical professors the minstrels, and dividing it by _time_ instead of _syllables_." (See the entire passage on _Christabel_, in the Introduction, on "What is Poetry?", to _Imagination and Fancy_. For a criticism of the metrical structure of _Christabel_, see Robert Bridges's _Milton's Prosody_ (ed. 1901, pp. 73-75).)

II. THE FOOT AND THE VERSE

English verse is commonly measured by feet, a determinate number of which go to form a verse or line. The foot is determined by the distance from one accented syllable to another in the regular scheme of the metre. The usual metrical feet are either dissyllabic or trisyllabic. The dissyllabic foot is commonly called an _iambus_ (or _iamb_) if the unaccented syllable precedes the accented, and a _trochee_ if the accented precedes the unaccented. The trisyllabic foot is commonly called an _anapest_ if the two unaccented syllables precede the accented syllable, and a _dactyl_ if they follow the accented syllable.[6] It will be observed that the fundamental rhythm of both iambic and trochaic verse is the same, as is also that of both anapestic and dactylic verse; the distinction belonging only to the metre as measured into regular lines. Iambic and anapestic verse (in which the light syllables commonly open the verse) are sometimes called "ascending rhythm"; trochaic and dactylic verse (in which the accented syllables commonly open the verse) "descending rhythm." Ascending rhythm is very greatly in predominance in English poetry.

The normal verse of any poem is therefore described by indicating the name of the foot and the number of feet in the verse. The number of feet is always indicated by the number of stresses or principal accents in the normal verse. As the light or unaccented syllables may vary from the typical number, it may also be necessary to indicate that the line is longer than its name would imply, by reason of Feminine Ending (a light syllable added at the end) or Anacrusis (a light syllable prefixed); or that it is shorter than its name would indicate by reason of Catalexis or Truncation (the light syllable at the end--or less frequently at the beginning--being omitted).

In like manner, any particular verse or line is fully described by indicating: (1) the typical foot; (2) the number of feet; (3) the place of the cesura; (4) the presence or absence of a final pause ("end-stopped" or "run-on"); (5) the presence of such irregularities as

(_a_) Anacrusis or feminine ending, (_b_) Catalexis (or truncation), (_c_) Substitution of exceptional feet for the typical foot, (_d_) Pauses other than the cesural.

_One-stress iambic_.

Thus I Pass by And die As one Unknown And gone.

(HERRICK: _Upon his Departure Hence_. 1648.)

(In combination with two-stress and three-stress:)

No more I'll vaunt, For now I see Thou only hast the power To find And bind A heart that's free, And slave it in an hour.

(HERRICK: _His Recantation._ 1648.)

_Two-stress iambic_.

Most good, most fair, Or things as rare To call you 's lost; For all the cost Words can bestow So poorly show,...

(DRAYTON: _Amouret Anacreontic._ ab. 1600.)

Because I do Begin to woo, Sweet singing Lark, Be thou the clerk, And know thy when To say Amen.

(HERRICK: _To the Lark._ 1648.)

The raging rocks, And shivering shocks, Shall break the locks Of prison-gates; And Phibbus' car Shall shine from far, And make and mar The foolish Fates.

(SHAKSPERE: Bottom's song in _Midsummer Night's Dream_, I. ii. ab. 1595.)

(In combination with three-stress:)

Only a little more I have to write; Then I'll give o'er, And bid the world good-night.

'Tis but a flying minute That I must stay, Or linger in it; And then I must away.

(HERRICK: _His Poetry his Pillar._ 1648.)

In the second stanza we have the same measure with feminine ending.

(In combination with four-stress:)

Thus let me live, unseen, unknown, Thus unlamented let me die; Steal from the world, and not a stone Tell where I lie.

(POPE: _Ode on Solitude._ ab. 1700.)

_Two-stress trochaic_.

Could I catch that Nimble traitor, Scornful Laura, Swift-foot Laura, Soon then would I Seek avengement.

(CAMPION: Anacreontics, in _Observations in the Art of English Poesie_. 1602.)

(In combination with four-stress:)

Dust that covers Long dead lovers Song blows off with breath that brightens; At its flashes Their white ashes Burst in bloom that lives and lightens.

(SWINBURNE: _Song in Season._)

(Catalectic, and in combination with three-stress:)

Summer's crest Red-gold tressed, Corn-flowers peeping under;-- Idle noons, Lingering moons, Sudden cloud, Lightning's shroud, Sudden rain, Quick again Smiles where late was thunder.

(GEORGE ELIOT: Song from _The Spanish Gypsy_, Bk. i. 1868.)

The trochaic measures in _The Spanish Gypsy_ are in imitation of the similar forms in Spanish poetry. See p. 114, below.

_Two-stress anapestic._

(In combination with three-stress:)

Like a gloomy stain On the emerald main Alpheus rushed behind,-- As an eagle pursuing A dove to its ruin Down the streams of the cloudy wind.

(SHELLEY: _Arethusa._ 1820.)

(With feminine ending:)

He is gone on the mountain, He is lost to the forest, Like a summer-dried fountain, When our need was the sorest. The font, reappearing, From the raindrops shall borrow, But to us comes no cheering, To Duncan no morrow!

(SCOTT: Coronach, from _The Lady of the Lake_, Canto 3. 1810.)

(In combination with four-stress:)

Fear death?--to feel the fog in my throat, The mist in my face. When the snows begin, and the blasts denote I am nearing the place, The power of the night, the press of the storm, The post of the foe; Where he stands, the Arch Fear in a visible form, Yet the strong man must go.

(BROWNING: _Prospice._ 1864.)

These specimens, as is usual in anapestic verse, show considerable freedom in the treatment of the part of the foot containing the light syllables, substituted iambi being very common. Note the iambi in the Shelley stanza, line 1, second foot, and line 5, first foot. In the latter case, however, the first light syllable of line 5 is really supplied by the syllable added to make the feminine ending of line 4. In like manner, in the Scott stanza, the first syllable of line 8 is really supplied by the _-ing_ of line 7; and where we have both feminine ending (in line 1) and a full anapest following, the effect is that of a hypermetrical syllable which must be hurried over in the reading. In the specimen from Browning we find an iambus in the opening foot in lines 2 and 6 (also, of course, in lines 1 and 5).

_Two-stress dactylic._

One more Unfortunate, Weary of breath, Rashly importunate, Gone to her death!

Take her up tenderly, Lift her with care; Fashioned so slenderly, Young, and so fair!

(THOMAS HOOD: _The Bridge of Sighs._ ab. 1830.)

Here the alternate lines are catalectic, both light syllables being wanting.

Cannon to right of them, Cannon to left of them, Cannon in front of them Volley'd and thunder'd; Storm'd at with shot and shell, Boldly they rode and well, Into the jaws of Death, Into the mouth of Hell Rode the six hundred.

(TENNYSON: _Charge of the Light Brigade._ 1854.)

Here the fourth and ninth lines are catalectic.

Loudly the sailors cheered Svend of the Forked Beard, As with his fleet he steered Southward to Vendland; Where with their courses hauled All were together called, Under the Isle of Svald Near to the mainland.

(LONGFELLOW: _Saga of King Olaf_, xvii. 1863.)

In the reading of these stanzas from Tennyson and Longfellow there is so marked a stress on the final syllable as to make the second dactyl (except in the opening lines of the Tennyson stanza) more like a Cretic (in the classical terminology); _i.e._ a foot made up of two heavy syllables with a light syllable between them. But no such foot is generally recognized in English verse.

_Two-stress irregular._

On the ground Sleep sound: I'll apply To your eye, Gentle lover, remedy. When thou wak'st, Thou tak'st True delight In the sight Of thy former lady's eye.

(SHAKSPERE: Puck's Song in _Midsummer Night's Dream_, III. ii. ab. 1595.)

What I hate, Be consecrate To celebrate Thee and Thy state, No mate For Thee; What see For envy In poor me?

(BROWNING: Song in _Caliban upon Setebos_. 1864.)

In the usual printing of _Caliban upon Setebos_ this song is brought into the form of the five-accent lines. It is evidently intended, however, to be read in two-accent groups. Professor Moulton has remarked interestingly that Browning gives the unique figure of Caliban not only a grammar but a prosody of his own.

Though my rime be ragged, Tattered and jagged, Rudely raine-beaten, Rusty and moth-eaten; If ye take wel therewith, It hath in it some pith.

(JOHN SKELTON: _Colyn Cloute_. ab. 1510.)

This is a specimen of what Mr. Churton Collins calls "that headlong voluble breathless doggrel which, rattling and clashing on through quick-recurring rhymes, ... has taken from the name of its author the title of Skeltonical verse." (Ward's _English Poets_, vol. i. p. 185.) The number of accents, as well as the number of syllables, is irregular, being quite as often (perhaps more often) three as two.

_Three-stress iambic._

O let the solid ground Not fail beneath my feet Before my life has found What some have found so sweet; Then let come what come may, What matter if I go mad, I shall have had my day.

(TENNYSON: Song in _Maud_, xi. 1855.)

(In combination with verse of four, five, and six stresses:)

The Oracles are dumb; No voice or hideous hum Runs through the arched roof in words deceiving. Apollo from his shrine Can no more divine, With hollow shriek the steep of Delphos leaving: No nightly trance or breathed spell Inspires the pale-eyed priest from the prophetic cell.

(MILTON: _Ode on the Morning of Christ's Nativity_. 1629.)

Here, in line 5, we have an instance of a verse truncated at the beginning,--rare in modern English poetry.

(With feminine ending:)

The mountain sheep are sweeter, But the valley sheep are fatter; We therefore deemed it meeter To carry off the latter. We made an expedition; We met an host and quelled it; We forced a strong position, And killed the men who held it.

(THOMAS LOVE PEACOCK: War Song of Dinas Vawr, from _The Misfortunes of Elphin_. 1829.)

In line 2 is an instance of anacrusis.

_Three-stress trochaic._

(In combination with iambic:)

Go where glory waits thee, But, while fame elates thee, Oh! still remember me. When the praise thou meetest To thine ear is sweetest, Oh! then remember me.

(THOMAS MOORE: _Go Where Glory Waits Thee_. ab. 1820.)

(In combination with six-stress verses:)

Hail to thee, blithe Spirit! Bird thou never wert, That from heaven, or near it, Pourest thy full heart In profuse strains of unpremeditated art.

Higher still and higher From the earth thou springest, Like a cloud of fire The blue deep thou wingest, And singing still dost soar, and soaring ever singest.

(SHELLEY: _To a Skylark_. 1820.)

Here lines 2 and 4 are catalectic.

_Three-stress anapestic._

I am monarch of all I survey; My right there is none to dispute; From the centre all round to the sea I am lord of the fowl and the brute.

(COWPER: _Verses supposed to be written by Alexander Selkirk._ 1782.)

In this specimen lines 2, 5, 6, and 8 show initial truncation, the first light syllable being missing.

(With two-stress verse:)

His desire is a dureless content, And a trustless joy; He is won with a world of despair And is lost with a toy....

But true love is a durable fire, In the mind ever burning, Never sick, never old, never dead, From itself never turning.

(SIR WALTER RALEIGH (?): _Pilgrim to Pilgrim_. In MS. Rawl. 85; in Schelling's _Elizabethan Lyrics_, p. 3.)

"The metres of the earlier years of Elizabeth's reign are so overwhelmingly iambic," Professor Schelling observes, "that this perfectly metrical, if somewhat irregular, anapæstic movement comes like a surprise. Professor Gummere, of Haverford College, calls my attention to three epigrams--printed among the poems of Raleigh, ed. Hannah, p. 55--all of them in more or less limping anapæsts, but not of this measure. It is quite possible that the time to which these verses were sung may have affected the measure." (Notes to _Elizabethan Lyrics_, pp. 211, 212.)

(With initial truncation:)

She gazed, as I slowly withdrew, My path I could hardly discern; So sweetly she bade me adieu, I thought that she bade me return.

(SHENSTONE: _Pastoral Ballad._ 1743.)

Mr. Saintsbury praises highly the anapests of Shenstone (Ward's _English Poets_, vol. iii. p. 272), saying that he "taught the metre to a greater poet than himself, Cowper, and these two between them have written almost everything that is worth reading in it, if we put avowed parody and burlesque out of the question." But this is probably to be regarded as overstating the case.

(With feminine ending:)

If you go over desert and mountain, Far into the country of sorrow, To-day and to-night and to-morrow, And maybe for months and for years; You shall come, with a heart that is bursting For trouble and toiling and thirsting, You shall certainly come to the fountain At length,--to the Fountain of Tears.

(ARTHUR O'SHAUGHNESSY: _The Fountain of Tears._ 1870.)

Here the extra light syllable at the end of the line is really the initial light syllable of the following line, as in the specimen on p. 29, above.

So this is a psalm of the waters,-- The wavering, wandering waters: With languages learned in the forest, With secrets of earth's lonely caverns, The mystical waters go by me On errands of love and of beauty, On embassies friendly and gentle, With shimmer of brown and of silver.

(S. WEIR MITCHELL: _A Psalm of the Waters._ 1890.)

Here, also, the final light syllable might be said to take the place of the missing initial syllable; but the structure of the verse, with the fact that the initial anapest is always truncated and that the final syllable is never accented, indicates that the verse as it stands is the norm of the poem--three-stress anapestic, with initial truncation and feminine ending.

_Three-stress dactylic._

(Catalectic:)

This is a spray the Bird clung to, Making it blossom with pleasure, Ere the high tree-top she sprung to, Fit for her nest and her treasure.

(BROWNING: _Misconceptions_. 1855.)

_Four-stress iambic._

(For specimens, see Part Two.)

_Four-stress trochaic._

Maiden, crowned with glossy blackness, Lithe as panther forest-roaming, Long-armed naiad, when she dances, On a stream of ether floating.

(GEORGE ELIOT: Song from _The Spanish Gypsy_, Book i. 1868.)

Westward, westward Hiawatha Sailed into the fiery sunset, Sailed into the purple vapors, Sailed into the dusk of evening.

(LONGFELLOW: _Hiawatha_. 1855.)

Honour, riches, marriage-blessing, Long continuance, and increasing, Hourly joys be still upon you! Juno sings her blessings on you.

(SHAKSPERE: Juno's Song in _The Tempest_, IV. i. ab. 1610.)

(Catalectic:)

On a day, alack the day! Love, whose month is ever May, Spied a blossom passing fair Playing in the wanton air: Through the velvet leaves the wind, All unseen, can passage find; That the lover, sick to death, Wish himself the heaven's breath.

(SHAKSPERE: _Love's Labor's Lost_, IV. 3. ab. 1590.)

Haste thee, Nymph, and bring with thee Jest, and youthful jollity, Quips and cranks and wanton wiles, Nods and becks and wreathed smiles, Such as hang on Hebe's cheek, And love to live in dimple sleek.

(MILTON: _L'Allegro_. 1634.)

Souls of Poets dead and gone, What Elysium have ye known, Happy field or mossy cavern, Choicer than the Mermaid Tavern? Have ye tippled drink more fine Than mine host's Canary wine? Or are fruits of Paradise Sweeter than those dainty pies Of venison? O generous food! Drest as though bold Robin Hood Would, with his maid Marian, Sup and bowse from horn and can.

(KEATS: _Lines on the Mermaid Tavern_. 1820.)

_Four-stress anapestic._

What I speak, my fair Chloe, and what I write, shows The difference there is betwixt nature and art: I court others in verse; but I love thee in prose: And they have my whimsies; but thou hast my heart.

(PRIOR: _A Better Answer_. ab. 1710.)

Prior's anapests well illustrate the appropriateness of the measure for light tripping effects, such as are sought _vers de société_. See also the measure of Goldsmith's _Retaliation_, especially the passage beginning--

"Here lies David Garrick, describe me who can; An abridgment of all that was pleasant in man."

The small birds rejoice in the green leaves returning, The murmuring streamlet winds clear through the vale; The hawthorn trees blow in the dews of the morning, And wild scatter'd cowslips bedeck the green dale.

(BURNS: _The Chevalier's Lament_. 1788.)

The Assyrian came down like the wolf on the fold, And his cohorts were gleaming in purple and gold; And the sheen of their spears was like stars on the sea, When the blue wave rolls nightly on deep Galilee.

(BYRON: _The Destruction of Sennacherib_. 1815.)

(With three-stress:)

Believe me, if all those endearing young charms, Which I gaze on so fondly to-day, Were to change by to-morrow, and fleet in my arms, Like fairy-gifts fading away, Thou wouldst still be ador'd, as this moment thou art, Let thy loveliness fade as it will, And around the dear ruin each wish of my heart Would entwine itself verdantly still.

(THOMAS MOORE: _Believe me, if all those endearing young charms._ ab. 1825.)

_four-stress dactylic_.

After the pangs of a desperate lover, When day and night I have sighed all in vain; Ah, what a pleasure it is to discover In her eyes pity, who causes my pain!

(DRYDEN: Song in _An Evening's Love_. 1668.)

Of this song Mr. Saintsbury says that it is "one of the rare examples of a real dactylic metre in English, where the dactyls are not, as usual, equally to be scanned as anapests." (_Life of Dryden_, Men of Letters Series, p. 62.) Here, as almost always in English, the measure is catalectic, a final dactyl being instinctively avoided, except in short two-stress lines.

Warriors and chiefs! should the shaft or the sword Pierce me in leading the host of the Lord, Heed not the corse, though a king's, in your path: Bury your steel in the bosoms of Gath!

(BYRON: _Song of Saul before his Last Battle._ 1815.)

Kentish Sir Byng stood for his King, Bidding the crop-headed Parliament swing: And, pressing a troop, unable to stoop And see the rogues flourish and honest folk droop, Marched them along, fifty-score strong, Great-hearted gentlemen, singing this song.

(BROWNING: _Cavalier Tunes._ 1843.)

Here the metre is varied interestingly by pauses. Thus in lines 1 and 5 the light syllables of the second foot are wholly wanting.

_Five-stress iambic._

(For specimens, see Part Two.)

_Five-stress trochaic._

What, there's nothing in the moon noteworthy? Nay: for if that moon could love a mortal, Use, to charm him (so to fit a fancy), All her magic ('tis the old sweet mythos), She would turn a new side to her mortal, Side unseen of herdsman, huntsman, steersman-- Blank to Zoroaster on his terrace, Blind to Galileo on his turret, Dumb to Homer, dumb to Keats--him, even!

(BROWNING: _One Word More._ 1855.)

This is a rare specimen of unrimed verse in other than iambic rhythm.

(Catalectic:)

Then methought I heard a mellow sound, Gathering up from all the lower ground; Narrowing in to where they sat assembled Low voluptuous music winding trembled, Wov'n in circles: they that heard it sighed, Panted, hand-in-hand with faces pale, Swung themselves, and in low tones replied; Till the fountain spouted, showering wide Sleet of diamond-drift and pearly hail.

(TENNYSON: _The Vision of Sin._ 1842.)

_Five-stress anapestic._

As thy Love is discovered almighty, almighty be proved Thy power, that exists with and for it, of being beloved! He who did most, shall bear most; the strongest shall stand the most weak. 'Tis the weakness in strength that I cry for! my flesh, that I seek In the Godhead! I seek and I find it. O Saul, it shall be A Face like my face that receives thee; a Man like to me, Thou shalt love and be loved by, forever: a Hand like this hand Shall throw open the gates of new life to thee! See the Christ stand!

(BROWNING: _Saul._ 1845.)

Let it flame or fade, and the war roll down like a wind, We have proved we have hearts in a cause, we are noble still, And myself have awaked, as it seems, to the better mind; It is better to fight for the good than to rail at the ill; I have felt with my native land, I am one with my kind, I embrace the purpose of God, and the doom assign'd.

(TENNYSON: _Maud_, III. vi. 1855.)

Here frequent iambi are substituted for anapests; as in line 1, second and fourth feet; lines 2 and 3, fifth foot; line 5, third foot.

_Five-stress dactylic._

This form is almost unknown. In the following lines we find five-stress catalectic verse of dactyls and trochees combined:

Surely the thought in a man's heart hopes or fears Now that forgetfulness needs must here have stricken Anguish, and sweetened the sealed-up springs of tears.

(SWINBURNE: _A Century of Roundels._)

_Six-stress iambic._

(For specimens, see Part Two.)

_Six-stress trochaic._

(With alternate lines catalectic:)

Day by day thy shadow shines in heaven beholden, Even the sun, the shining shadow of thy face: King, the ways of heaven before thy feet grow golden; God, the soul of earth is kindled with thy grace.

(SWINBURNE: _The Last Oracle._)

_Six-stress anapestic._

For I trust if an enemy's fleet came yonder round by the hill, And the rushing battle-bolt sang from the three-decker out of the foam, That the smooth-faced snubnosed rogue would leap from his counter and till, And strike, if he could, were it but with his cheating yard-wand, home.

(TENNYSON: _Maud_, I. i. 1855.)

(See note on p. 41.)

All under the deeps of the darkness are glimmering: all over impends An immeasurable infinite flower of the dark that dilates and descends, That exalts and expands in its breathless and blind efflorescence of heart As it broadens and bows to the wave-ward, and breathes not, and hearkens apart.

(SWINBURNE: _The Garden of Cymodoce_, in _Songs of the Springtides_.)

_Six-stress dactylic._

(For this, see chiefly Part Two.)

(Catalectic:)

Dosn't thou 'ear my 'erse's legs, as they canters awaay? Proputty, proputty, proputty--that's what I 'ears 'em saay. Proputty, proputty, proputty--Sam, thou's an ass for thy paains: Theer's moor sense i' one o' 'is legs nor in all thy braains.

(TENNYSON: _Northern Farmer--new style._ ab. 1860.)

Thee I behold as a bird borne in with the wind from the west, Straight from the sunset, across white waves whence rose as a daughter Venus thy mother, in years when the world was a water at rest.

(SWINBURNE: _Hesperia._)

_Seven-stress iambic._

There's not a joy the world can give like that it takes away When the glow of early thought declines in feeling's dull decay; 'Tis not on youth's smooth cheek the blush alone, which fades so fast, But the tender bloom of heart is gone, ere youth itself be past.

(BYRON: _Stanzas for Music._ 1815.)

Here we have anacrusis in lines 2 and 4.

Beyond the path of the outmost sun, through utter darkness hurled-- Further than ever comet flared or vagrant star-dust swirled-- Live such as fought and sailed and ruled and loved and made our world.

(KIPLING: _Wolcott Balestier._)

(See also under Seven-stress Verse, in Part Two.)

_Seven-stress trochaic._

(Catalectic:)

Clear the way, my lords and lackeys, you have had your day. Here you have your answer, England's yea against your nay; Long enough your house has held you: up, and clear the way!

(SWINBURNE: _Clear the Way._)

_Seven-stress anapestic._

(With feminine ending:)

Come on then, ye dwellers by nature in darkness, and like to the leaves' generations, That are little of might, that are moulded of mire, unenduring and shadowlike nations, Poor plumeless ephemerals, comfortless mortals, as visions of creatures fast fleeing, Lift up your mind unto us that are deathless, and dateless the date of our being.

(SWINBURNE: _The Birds_, from Aristophanes.)

Of this translation Mr. Swinburne says that it was undertaken from a consideration of the fact that the "marvellous metrical invention of the anapestic heptameter was almost exactly reproducible in a language to which all variations and combinations of anapestic, iambic, or trochaic metre are as natural and pliable as all dactylic and spondaic forms of verse are unnatural and abhorrent." ... "I have not attempted," he says further, "the impossible and undesirable task of reproducing the rare exceptional effect of a line overcharged on purpose with a preponderance of heavy-footed spondees.... My main desire ... was to renew as far as possible for English ears the music of this resonant and triumphant metre, which goes ringing at full gallop as of horses who

'dance as 'twere to the music Their own hoofs make.'"

(_Studies in Song_, p. 68.)

_Seven-stress dactylic._

This form of verse may be said to be wanting. Schipper quotes as possible examples some lines which (as he remarks) seem to be made merely for the metrical purpose:

"Out of the kingdom of Christ shall be gathered, by angels o'er Satan victorious, All that offendeth, that lieth, that faileth to honor his name ever glorious."

(_Englische Metrik_, vol. ii. p. 419.)

_Eight-stress iambic._

This is almost unknown in English verse, because where conceivably occurring it shows an irresistible tendency to break up into two halves of four stresses each. William Webbe, in his _Discourse of English Poetrie_ (1586), quoted these lines as "the longest verse in length which I have seen used in English":

"Where virtue wants and vice abounds, there wealth is but a baited hook, To make men swallow down their bane, before on danger deep they look."

_Eight-stress trochaic._

(Catalectic:)

Love took up the glass of Time, and turn'd it in his glowing hands; Every moment, lightly shaken, ran itself in golden sands. Love took up the harp of Life, and smote on all the chords with might; Smote the chord of Self, that, trembling, pass'd in music out of sight.

(TENNYSON: _Locksley Hall._ 1842.)

Open then I flung the shutter, when, with many a flirt and flutter, In there stepped a stately raven of the saintly days of yore. Not the least obeisance made he; not an instant stopped or stayed he; But, with mien of lord or lady, perched above my chamber door,-- Perched upon a bust of Pallas, just above my chamber door.

(POE: _The Raven._ 1845.)

Night, in utmost noon forlorn and strong, with heart athirst and fasting, Hungers here, barred up forever, whence as one whom dreams affright, Day recoils before the low-browed lintel threatening doom and casting Night.

(SWINBURNE: _Night in Guernsey._)

In the last line of this specimen we have a nine-accent verse,--very rare in English poetry.

The tendency of all eight-accent lines being to break up into halves of four accents, the distinction between four-stress and eight-stress verse may be at times only a question of printing. Thus, Thackeray's _Sorrows of Werther_ might be regarded as eight-stress trochaic, though commonly printed in short lines:

"Werther had a love for Charlotte Such as words could never utter. Would you know how first he saw her? She was cutting bread and butter."

_Eight-stress anapestic._

Ere frost-flower and snow-blossom faded and fell, and the splendor of winter had passed out of sight, The ways of the woodlands were fairer and stranger than dreams that fulfil us in sleep with delight; The breath of the mouths of the winds had hardened on tree-tops and branches that glittered and swayed Such wonders and glories of blossomlike snow, or of frost that out-lightens all flowers till it fade, That the sea was not lovelier than here was the land, nor the night than the day, nor the day than the night, Nor the winter sublimer with storm than the spring: such mirth had the madness and might in thee made, March, master of winds, bright minstrel and marshal of storms that enkindle the season they smite.

(SWINBURNE: _March._)

_Eight-stress dactylic._

Onward and onward the highway runs to the distant city, impatiently bearing Tidings of human joy and disaster, of love and of hate, of doing and daring.

(LONGFELLOW: _Golden Legend_, iv. 1851.)

The breathlessly continuous character of such long anapestic or dactylic lines may of course be interrupted, by way of relief, by the substitution of iambi or trochees. In the specimen from Swinburne such a resting-place is found in line 3, where a light syllable is omitted after _winds_. In the specimen from Longfellow the words _high-way_, _distant_, _human_, of course, fill the places of complete dactyls.

COMBINATIONS AND SUBSTITUTIONS

i. _Verses in which different sorts of feet are more or less regularly combined_.

In the morning, O so early, my beloved, my beloved, All the birds were singing blithely, as if never they would cease: 'Twas a thrush sang in my garden, "Hear the story, hear the story!" And the lark sang "Give us glory!" and the dove said "Give us peace."

(JEAN INGELOW: _Give us Love and Give us Peace._)

Fair is our lot--O goodly is our heritage! (Humble ye, my people, and be fearful in your mirth!) For the Lord our God Most High He hath made the deep as dry, He hath smote for us a pathway to the ends of all the Earth!

(KIPLING: _A Song of the English._)

In both these specimens the full accent regularly recurs in only the alternate feet. Thus while the first specimen is technically eight-stress trochaic, there are in the normal reading of it only four full accents to the line. In other words the first, third, fifth, and seventh feet are regularly pyrrhics. (See p. 55.) The same thing appears in the specimen from Kipling: _ye_, _and_, _in_ (in line 2) are accented only in a distinctly secondary fashion. Some have suggested, for such rhythms as these, the recognition of a foot made up of one stressed and three unstressed syllables. Lanier represents such measures (in _The Science of English Verse_) in four-eight time.

Fear death?--to feel the fog in my throat, The mist in my face, When the snows begin, and the blasts denote I am nearing the place, The power of the night, the press of the storm, The post of the foe; Where he stands, the Arch Fear in a visible form, Yet the strong man must go.

(BROWNING: _Prospice._)

Here the tendency is to use iambi and anapests in alternate feet; see especially lines 2, 3, and 5.

All we have willed or hoped or dreamed of good, shall exist; Not its semblance, but itself; no beauty, nor good, nor power Whose voice has gone forth, but each survives for the melodist When eternity affirms the conception of an hour.

The high that proved too high, the heroic for earth too hard, The passion that left the ground to lose itself in the sky, Are music sent up to God by the lover and the bard; Enough that He heard it once: we shall hear it by-and-by.

(BROWNING: _Abt Vogler._)

Here we have a hexameter which is neither iambic nor anapestic, but a combination of the two rhythms. So in the following specimens dissyllabic and trisyllabic feet are used interchangeably.

When the lamp is shatter'd The light in the dust lies dead-- When the cloud is scatter'd The rainbow's glory is shed. When the lute is broken, Sweet tones are remember'd not; When the lips have spoken, Loved accents are soon forgot.

(SHELLEY: _The Flight of Love._)

The sea is at ebb, and the sound of her utmost word Is soft at the least wave's lapse in a still small reach. From bay unto bay, on quest of a goal deferred, From headland ever to headland and breach to breach, Where earth gives ear to the message that all days preach.

(SWINBURNE: _The Seaboard._)

England, none that is born thy son, and lives, by grace of thy glory, free, Lives and yearns not at heart and burns with hope to serve as he worships thee; None may sing thee: the sea-bird's wing beats down our songs as it hails the sea.

(SWINBURNE: _The Armada_, vii.)

This life of ours is a wild Æolian harp of many a joyous strain, But under them all there runs a loud perpetual wail, as of souls in pain.

(LONGFELLOW: _The Golden Legend_, iv.)

Come away, come away, Death, And in sad cypress let me be laid; Fly away, fly away, breath; I am slain by a fair cruel maid. My shroud of white, stuck all with yew, O prepare it! My part of death, no one so true Did share it.

(SHAKSPERE: _Twelfth Night_, II. iv.)

The characteristic irregularity in this stanza is the variation from trochaic to iambic rhythm. In this case the variations are in part due, no doubt, to the fact that the words were written for music.

Maud with her exquisite face, And wild voice pealing up to the sunny sky, And feet like sunny gems on an English green, Maud in the light of her youth and her grace, Singing of Death, and of Honor that cannot die, Till I well could weep for a time so sordid and mean And myself so languid and base.

(TENNYSON: _Maud_, I. v.)

In this specimen the characteristic rhythm of lines 1, 4, and 5 is dactylic, that of the remainder anapestic-iambic.

The trumpet's loud clangor Excites us to arms With shrill notes of anger And mortal alarms. The double double double beat Of the thundering drum Cries, hark! the foes come; Charge, charge, 'tis too late to retreat. The soft complaining flute In dying notes discovers The woes of helpless lovers, Whose dirge is whispered by the warbling lute.

(DRYDEN: _Song for St. Cecilia's Day_, 1687.)

In this famous stanza the rhythm changes for obvious purposes of imitative representation.

Children dear, was it yesterday (Call yet once) that she went away? Once she sate with you and me, On a red gold throne in the heart of the sea, And the youngest sate on her knee. She combed its bright hair, and she tended it well, When down swung the sound of a far-off bell. She sighed, she looked up through the clear green sea; She said, "I must go, for my kinsfolk pray In the little gray church on the shore to-day. 'Twill be Easter-time in the world--ah me! And I lose my poor soul, Merman! here with thee." I said, "Go up, dear heart, through the waves; Say thy prayer, and come back to the kind sea-caves!" She smiled, she went up through the surf in the bay. Children dear, was it yesterday?

... Down, down, down! Down to the depths of the sea! She sits at her wheel in the humming town, Singing most joyfully. Hark what she sings: "O joy, O joy, For the humming street, and the child with its toy! For the priest, and the bell, and the holy well; For the wheel where I spun, And the blessed light of the sun!" And so she sings her fill, Singing most joyfully, Till the spindle drops from her hand, And the whizzing wheel stands still. She steals to the window, and looks at the sand, And over the sand at the sea; And her eyes are set in a stare; And anon there breaks a sigh, And anon there drops a tear, From a sorrow-clouded eye, And a heart sorrow-laden, A long, long sigh, For the cold strange eyes of a little mermaiden, And the gleam of her golden hair.

(MATTHEW ARNOLD: _The Forsaken Merman._)

Then the music touch'd the gates and died; Rose again from where it seem'd to fail, Storm'd in orbs of song, a growing gale; Till thronging in and in, to where they waited, As 'twere a hundred-throated nightingale, The strong tempestuous treble throbbed and palpitated; Ran into its giddiest whirl of sound, Caught the sparkles, and in circles, Purple gauzes, golden hazes, liquid mazes, Flung the torrent rainbow round: Then they started from their places, Moved with violence, changed in hue, Caught each other with wild grimaces, Half-invisible to the view, Wheeling with precipitate paces To the melody, till they flew, Hair, and eyes, and limbs, and faces, Twisted hard in fierce embraces, Like to Furies, like to Graces, Dash'd together in blinding dew.

(TENNYSON: _Vision of Sin._)

ii. _Verses in which individual feet are altered from the metrical scheme._

Even in metre exhibiting no marked irregularities, it is of course rather exceptional than otherwise to find all the feet in a verse conforming to the type-foot of the metre. Departures from the typical metre may be conveniently classified in five groups: Deficiency in accent; excess of accent; inversion of accent; light syllable added to dissyllabic foot; light syllable omitted in trisyllabic foot.

Deficiency of accent is the most common of all the variations, if we understand by "accent" such syllabic stress as would be ordinarily appreciable in the reading of the word in question. It would be safe to say that in English five-stress iambic verse, read with only the ordinary etymological and rhetorical accents, twenty-five per cent of the verses lack the full five stresses characteristic of the type. In many cases, too, a foot with deficiency in stress is compensated for by another foot in the same verse showing excess of stress. Feet thus deficient in stress may conveniently be called _pyrrhics_, the pyrrhic being understood as made up of two unstressed syllables. This term has never become fully domesticated in English prosody, and some object to its use on the ground that we have no feet wholly without stress. Its use in the sense just indicated, however, seems to be an unquestionable convenience.

Excess of accent, while less common than deficiency of accent, is even more easily recognizable. The foot containing two stressed syllables, even though one of the stresses may be distinctly stronger than the other, may conveniently be called a _spondee_.

Inversion of accent is exceedingly familiar, especially at the beginning of the verse and after the medial pause. It consists, technically speaking, in the substitution of a trochee for an iambus or an iambus for a trochee (the latter very rarely).

A light syllable inserted in dissyllabic measure is not unusual, though by no means so common as the variations previously enumerated. Such a syllable is frequently spoken of as "hypermetrical"; or, the variation may be considered as the substitution of an anapest for an iambus, in iambic measure, or the substitution of a dactyl for a trochee, in trochaic measure.

The omission of one of the two light syllables from the foot in trisyllabic verse is so common as to make it difficult to find pure anapestic or dactylic verse in English. This fact is due in part to preference for dissyllabic measures, and in part to the usual indifference, in all Germanic verse, to accuracy in the number of light syllables. The variation may frequently be regarded as involving a prolongation of the light syllable of the foot, or a pause equal to the time of the omitted syllable; technically speaking, it consists in the substitution of an iambus for an anapest, or a trochee for a dactyl.

Examples of all these variations may best be found in the specimens of verse included in the preceding pages. A few specimens of detail are added here, for the sake of greater clearness.

_Deficiency in accent (substituted pyrrhic)._

To further this, Achit_ophel_ unites The malcontents of all the Israelites, Whose differing par_ties he_ could wisely join For several ends to serve the same design; The best (_and of_ the princes some were such) Who thought the power of mon_archy_ too much; Mistaken men and patr_iots in_ their hearts, Not wick_ed, but_ seduced by impious arts; By these the springs of prop_erty_ were bent, And wound so high they crack'd the gov_ernment_.

(DRYDEN: _Absalom and Achitophel_, I.)

_Excess of accent (substituted spondee)._

And ten _low words_ oft creep in one _dull line_.

(POPE: _Essay on Criticism._)

_Rocks, caves, lakes, fens, bogs, dens_, and shades of death.

(MILTON: _Paradise Lost_, II. 621.)

_See, see_ where Christ's _blood streams_ in the firmament!

(MARLOWE: _Faustus_, sc. xvi.)

O great, _just, good God! Mis_erable me!

(BROWNING: _The Ring and the Book_, VI.)

A tree's _head snaps_--and there, _there, there, there, there_!

(BROWNING: _Caliban upon Setebos._)

_Inversion of accent (substituted trochee)._

Thou detestable maw, thou womb of death, _Gorged with_ the dearest morsel of the earth.

(SHAKSPERE: _Romeo and Juliet_, V. iii. 45 f.)

Finds tongues in trees, _books in_ the running brooks, _Sermons_ in stones, and good in every thing.

(_As You Like It_, II. i. 16 f.)

The watery kingdom whose ambitious head _Spits in_ the face of heaven.

(_Merchant of Venice_, II. vii. 44 f.)

Long lines of cliff _breaking_ have left a chasm.

(TENNYSON: _Enoch Arden._)

There whirled her white robe like a blossomed branch _Rapt to_ the horrible fall: a glance I gave, No more; but woman-vested as I was _Plunged; and_ the flood _drew; yet_ I caught her; then _Oaring_ one arm,...

(TENNYSON: _The Princess._)

_Stabbed through_ the heart's affections to the heart! _Seethed like_ a kid in its own mother's milk! _Killed with_ a word worse than a life of blows!

(TENNYSON: _Merlin and Vivien._)

He flowed _Right for_ the polar star, past Orgunje, _Brimming_, and bright, and large; then sands begin,...

(MATTHEW ARNOLD: _Sohrab and Rustum._)

_Hypermetrical syllable (substituted anapest)._

_Let me see, let me see_, is not the leaf turn'd down?

(SHAKSPERE: _Julius Cæsar_, IV. iii. 271.)

Leviathan, which God of all his works Created hug_est that swim_ the ocean stream.

(MILTON: _Paradise Lost_, I. 201 f.)

This passage was one of those where Bentley made himself ridiculous in his edition of Milton. "To smooth it" he changed the lines to read--

"Leviathan, whom God the vastest made Of all the kinds that swim the ocean stream,"--

not perceiving, what Cowper pointed out, that Milton had designedly used "the word _hugest_ where it may have the clumsiest effect.... Smoothness was not the thing to be consulted when the Leviathan was in question."

So he with diff_iculty_ and labour hard Moved on, with diff_iculty_ and labour he.

(_ib._ II. 1021 f.)

The sweep Of some precip_itous rivulet to_ the wave.

(TENNYSON: _Enoch Arden._)

The sound of many a heav_ily galloping_ hoof.

(TENNYSON: _Geraint and Enid._)

I wish that somewhere in the ruin'd folds,... Or the dry thickets, I could meet with her _The Abominable_, that uninvited came.

(TENNYSON: _[OE]none._)

_Do you see_ this square old yellow book I toss _I' the air_, and catch again, and twirl about _By the crumpl_ed vellum covers; pure crude fact--

(BROWNING: _The Ring and the Book_, I.)

That plant Shall never wave its tangles light_ly and soft_ly As a queen's languid and imperial arm.

(BROWNING: _Paracelsus_, I.)

A distinction should be made between these hypermetrical syllables which change the character of the foot from dissyllabic to trisyllabic, and syllables (in a sense hypermetrical) which are slurred or elided in the reading. The word _radiance_, for example, is regarded as trisyllabic in prose, but in the verse--

"Girt with omnipotence, with radiance crowned,"

it is made dissyllabic by instinctive compression, and in no proper sense makes an anapest of the fifth foot. Of the same character are the numerous cases where a vowel is elided before another vowel--especially the vowel of the article _the_.[7] On the elisions of Milton's verse, see Mr. Robert Bridges's _Milton's Prosody_; on those of Shakspere's verse, see Abbott's _Shakespearian Grammar_. In modern verse the use of elision and slurring is ordinarily that found in common speech.

_Omitted syllable (substituted iambus)._

As a vision of heaven from the hollows of ocean, that none but a god _might see_, _Rose out_ of the silence _of things unknown_ of a presence, a form, _a might_, And we heard as a prophet that hears _God's mes_sage against him, and may _not flee_.

(SWINBURNE: _Death of Richard Wagner._)

See also specimens on pp. 42, 43, 48, above.

Mr. Mayor considers the question as to how far substitution of other than the typical foot may be carried in a verse, without destroying the genuineness of the fundamental rhythm. His conclusions are these:

(1) The limit of trochaic substitution is three feet out of five, with the final foot iambic; or two out of five, if the fifth foot is inverted.

(2) A spondee is allowable in any position; the limit is four out of five, with either the fourth or fifth foot remaining iambic.

(3) A pyrrhic may occur in any position; the limit is three out of five, with the other feet preferably spondees.

(4) The limit for trisyllabic substitution is three out of five.

(_Chapters on English Metre_, chap. V.)

Professor Corson discusses the æsthetic effect of these changes from the typical metre: "The true metrical artist ... never indulges in variety for variety's sake.... All metrical effects are to a great extent _relative_--and relativity of effect depends, of course, upon having a standard in the mind or feelings.... Now the more closely the poet adheres to his standard--to the even tenor (modulus) of his verse--so long as there is no logical nor æsthetic motive for departing from it, the more effective do his departures become when they are sufficiently motived. All non-significant departures weaken the significant ones.... The normal tenor of the verse is presumed to represent the normal tenor of the feeling which produces it. And departures from that normal tenor represent, or should represent, variations in the normal tenor of the feeling. Outside of the general law ... of the slurring or suppression of extra light syllables, which do not go for anything in the expression, an exceptional foot must result in emphasis, whether intended or not, either logical or emotional.... A great poet is presumed to have metrical skill; and where ripples occur in the stream of his verse, they will generally be found to justify themselves as organic; _i.e._ they are a part of the expression."

(_Primer of English Verse_, pp. 48-50.)

On the æsthetic symbolism of various metrical movements, see G. L. Raymond's _Poetry as a Representative Art_, pp. 113 ff.

FOOTNOTES:

[6] The names of the several kinds of feet are of course borrowed from classical prosody, where they are used to mark feet made up not of accented and unaccented, but of long and short syllables. The different significance of the terms as applied to the verse of different languages has given rise to some confusion, and it is proposed by some to abandon the classical terms; their use, however, seems to be too well established in English to permit of change. Some would even abandon the attempt to measure English verse by feet, contending that its rhythm is too free to admit of any such measuring process; thus, see Mr. J. M. Robertson, in the Appendix to _New Essays toward a Critical Method_, and Mr. J. A. Symonds in his _Blank Verse_. See also in Mr. Robert Bridges's _Milton's Prosody_, Appendix G "On the Use of Greek Terminology in English Prosody." (1901 ed. p. 77.)

[7] On the historical problem of the distinction between elided and genuinely hypermetrical syllables in the French and English decasyllabic verse, see Motheré: _Les théories du vers héroique anglais et ses relations avec la versification française_ (Havre, 1886).

III. THE STANZA

The stanza, or strophe, is the largest unit of verse-measure ordinarily recognized. It is based not so much on rhythmical divisions as on periods either rhetorical or melodic; that is, a short stanza will roughly correspond to the period of a sentence, and a long one to that of a paragraph, while in lyrical verse the original idea was to conform the stanza to the melody for which it was written. Thus Schipper observes: "The word strophe properly signifies a _turning_, and originally indicated the return of the song, as sung, to the melody with which it began." Schipper defines a stanza as a group of verses of a certain number, so combined that all the stanzas of the same poem will be identical in the number, the length, and the metre of the corresponding verses; in rimed verse, also, the arrangement of the rimes will be identical. (See _Grundriss_, p. 268.)

The form of a stanza, then, is determined and described (the fundamental metre being assumed) by the number of verses, the length of verses, and the arrangement of rimes. The usual and convenient method of indicating these conditions is to represent all the verses that rime together by the same letter, while the number of feet in the verse is written like an algebraic exponent. Thus a quatrain in "common metre" (four-stress and three-stress lines), riming alternately, is represented by the formula _a^{4}b^{3}a^{4}b^{3}_.

* * * * *

The appearance of the stanza in English verse is always the sign of foreign influence. The West Germanic verse, as far back as we have specimens of it, is uniformly _stichic_ (that is, marked by no periods save those of the individual verse), not _stanzaic_.[8] On the other hand, we find the stanza in the Old Norse verse. Sievers's view is that originally the two sorts of verse existed side by side, the stanzaic being preferred for chorus delivery, the stichic for individual recitation; one form at length crowding out the other.

The great organizer of the stanza is, of course, the element of rime. While unrimed stanzas are familiar in classical verse, the two innovations, rime and stanza, were introduced together into English verse, under both Latin and French influences, and have almost invariably been associated. For notes on the history of the beginnings of stanza-forms in English, see therefore under Rime, in the following section.

TERCETS

Truth may seem, but cannot be; Beauty brag, but 'tis not she; Truth and beauty buried be.

(SHAKSPERE: _The Ph[oe]nix and the Turtle._ 1601.)

O praise the Lord, his wonders tell, Whose mercy shines in Israel, At length redeem'd from sin and hell.

(GEORGE SANDYS: _Paraphrase upon Luke i._ ab. 1630.)

Love, making all things else his foes, Like a fierce torrent overflows Whatever doth his course oppose.

(SIR JNO. DENHAM: _Against Love._ ab. 1640.)

Children, keep up that harmless play: Your kindred angels plainly say By God's authority ye may.

(LANDOR: _Children Playing in a Churchyard._ 1858.)

Whoe'er she be, That not impossible She That shall command my heart and me;

Where'er she lie, Lock'd up from mortal eye In shady leaves of destiny:...

--Meet you her, my Wishes, Bespeak her to my blisses, And be ye call'd, my absent kisses.

(CRASHAW: _Wishes for the Supposed Mistress._ 1646.)

I said, "I toil beneath the curse, But, knowing not the universe, I fear to slide from bad to worse.

"And that, in seeking to undo One riddle, and to find the true, I knit a hundred others new."

(TENNYSON: _The Two Voices._ 1833.)

Like the swell of some sweet tune, Morning rises into noon, May glides onward into June.

(LONGFELLOW: _Maidenhood._ 1842.)

Whenas in silks my Julia goes, Then, then (methinks) how sweetly flows That liquefaction of her clothes.

(HERRICK: _To Julia._ 1648)

The fear was on the cattle, for the gale was on the sea, An' the pens broke up on the lower deck an' let the creatures free-- An' the lights went out on the lower deck, an' no one down but me.

(KIPLING: _Mulholland's Contract._)

_Terza rima_ (_aba_, _bcb_, etc.).

A spending hand that alway poureth out Had need to have a bringer in as fast; And on the stone that still doth turn about

There groweth no moss. These proverbs yet do last: Reason hath set them in so sure a place, That length of years their force can never waste.

When I remember this, and eke the case Wherein thou stand'st, I thought forthwith to write, Bryan, to thee. Who knows how great a grace,...

(SIR THOMAS WYATT: _How to use the court and himself therein, written to Sir Francis Bryan._ ab. 1542.)

The _terza rima_ is, strictly speaking, a scheme of continuous verse rather than a stanza, each tercet being united by the rime-scheme to the preceding. Its use in English has always been slight, and always due to conscious imitation of the Italian. No successful attempt has been made to use it for a long poem, as Dante did in the _Divina Commedia_. Wyatt's specimen is the earliest in English; he chose the form for his three satires imitating those of Alamanni.

Once, O sweet once, I saw with dread oppressed Her whom I dread; so that with prostrate lying Her length the earth Love's chiefe clothing dressed. I saw that riches fall, and fell a crying:-- Let not dead earth enjoy so deare a cover, But decke therewith my soule for your sake dying; Lay all your feare upon your fearfull lover: Shine, eyes, on me, that both our lives be guarded: So I your sight, you shall your selves recover.

(SIR PHILIP SIDNEY: _Thyrsis and Dorus_, in the _Countess of Pembroke's Arcadia_. ab. 1580.)

Why do the Gentiles tumult, and the nations Muse a vain thing, the kings of earth upstand With power, and princes in their congregations

Lay deep their plots together through each land Against the Lord and his Messiah dear? "Let us break off," say they, "by strength of hand

Their bonds, and cast from us, no more to wear, Their twisted cords." He who in Heaven doth dwell Shall laugh.

(MILTON: _Psalm II._ 1653.)

O wild West Wind, thou breath of Autumn's being, Thou from whose unseen presence the leaves dead Are driven, like ghosts from an enchanter fleeing, Yellow, and black, and pale, and hectic red, Pestilence-stricken multitudes! O thou Who chariotest to their dark wintry bed The winged seeds, where they lie cold and low, Each like a corpse within its grave, until Thine azure sister of the Spring shall blow Her clarion o'er the dreaming earth, and fill (Driving sweet buds like flocks to feed in air) With living hues and odors plain and hill: Wild Spirit, which art moving everywhere; Destroyer and Preserver; hear, oh hear!

(SHELLEY: _Ode to the West Wind._ 1819.)

In this case the tercets are united in groups of three to form a strophe of fourteen lines together with a final couplet riming with the middle line of the preceding tercet.

The true has no value beyond the sham: As well the counter as coin, I submit, When your table's a hat, and your prize a dram.

Stake your counter as boldly every whit, Venture as warily, use the same skill, Do your best, whether winning or losing it,

If you choose to play!--is my principle. Let a man contend to the uttermost For his life's set prize, be it what it will!

(BROWNING: _The Statue and the Bust._ 1855.)

The effort to translate Dante in the original metre is especially interesting, and marked by great difficulties; to furnish the necessary rimes, without introducing expletive words that mar the simplicity of the original, being a serious problem. The following are interesting specimens of translations where this problem is grappled with; the first is a well-known fragment, the second a portion of a still unpublished translation of the _Inferno_, reproduced here by the courtesy of the author.

Then she to me: "The greatest of all woes Is to remind us of our happy days In misery, and that thy teacher knows. But if to learn our passion's first root preys Upon thy spirit with such sympathy, I will do even as he who weeps and says. We read one day for pastime, seated nigh, Of Lancelot, how love enchained him too. We were alone, quite unsuspiciously. But oft our eyes met, and our cheeks in hue All o'er discolored by that reading were; But one point only wholly us o'erthrew; When we read the long-sighed-for smile of her, To be thus kissed by such devoted lover, He who from me can be divided ne'er Kissed my mouth, trembling in the act all over. Accursed was the book and he who wrote! That day no further leaf did we uncover."

(BYRON: _Francesca of Rimini_, from Dante's _Inferno_, Canto V. 1820.)

"Wherefore for thee I think and deem it well Thou follow me, and I will bring about Thy passage thither where the eternal dwell. There shalt thou hearken the despairing shout, Shalt see the ancient spirits with woe opprest, Who craving for the second death cry out. Then shalt thou those behold who are at rest Amid the flame, because their hopes aspire To come, when it may be, among the blest. If to ascend to these be thy desire, Thereto shall be a soul of worthier strain; Thee shall I leave with her when I retire: Because the Emperor who there doth reign, For I rebellious was to his decree, Wills that his city none by me attain. In all parts ruleth, and there reigneth he,-- There is his city and his lofty throne: O happy they who thereto chosen be!"

(MELVILLE B. ANDERSON: _Dante's Inferno_, Canto i. ll. 112-129.)

QUATRAINS

_aaaa_

Suete iesu, king of blysse, Myn huerte love, min huerte lisse, Þou art suete myd ywisse, Wo is him þat þe shal misse!

(Song from Harleian Ms. 2253--12th century, Böddeker's _Altenglische Dichtungen_, p. 191.)

_aabb_

O Lord, that rul'st our mortal line, How through the world Thy name doth shine; Thou hast of Thy unmatched glory Upon the heavens engrav'd Thy story.

(SIR PHILIP SIDNEY: _Psalm viii._ ab. 1580.)

A Sensitive Plant in a garden grew, And the young winds fed it with silver dew, And it opened its fan-like leaves to the light, And closed them beneath the kisses of night.

(SHELLEY: _The Sensitive Plant._ 1820.)

_abcb_

In somer, when the shawes be sheyne, And leves be large and long, Hit is full mery in feyre foreste To here the foulys song.

(Ballad of _Robin Hood and the Monk_. In Gummere's _English Ballads_, p. 77.)

This is the familiar stanza of the early ballads. The omission of rime in the third line signalizes the fact that the stanza could be (and was) regarded indifferently as made up either of two long lines or four short ones. Thus the famous Chevy Chase ballad is found (Ashmole Ms., of about 1560) written in long lines:

"The yngglyshe men hade ther bowys ybent yer hartes wer good ynoughe The first off arros that the shote off seven skore spear-men the sloughe."

(See in Flügel's _Neuenglisches Lesebuch_, vol. i. p. 199.)

The same thing occurs also where there are two rimes to the stanza. Originally, the extra internal rime was no doubt the cause of the breaking up of the long couplet into two short lines. (See examples in Part Two, in the case of the septenary.)

Ye flowery banks o' bonnie Doon, How can ye bloom sae fair! How can ye chant, ye little birds, And I sae fu' o' care!

(BURNS: _Bonnie Doon._ ab. 1790.)

_abab_

Þe grace of god ful of mi[gh]t Þat is king and ever was, Mote among us ali[gh]t And [gh]ive us alle is swet grace.

(From the Harleian Ms. 913. In Mätzner's _Altenglische Sprachproben_, vol. i. p. 125.)

Furnivall prints this in long lines with internal rime, which of itself seems to form the short-line stanza from the long lines.

Of al this world the wyde compas Hit wol not in myn armes tweyne.-- Who-so mochel wol embrace Litel thereof he shal distreyne.

(CHAUCER: _Proverb._ ab. 1380.)

When youth had led me half the race, That Cupid's scourge me caus'd to run, I looked back to meet the place From whence my weary course begun.

(EARL OF SURREY: _Description of the restless state of a lover._ ab. 1545.)

Weep with me, all you that read This little story; And know, for whom a tear you shed Death's self is sorry.

(BEN JONSON: _Epitaph on Salathiel Pavy._ 1616.)

And now the weary world's great medicine, Sleep, This learned host dispensed to every guest, Which shuts those wounds where injured lovers weep, And flies oppressors to relieve the opprest.

(SIR WILLIAM DAVENANT: _Gondibert_, Bk. i. Canto 6. 1651)

Now like a maiden queen she will behold From her high turrets hourly suitors come; The East with incense and the West with gold Will stand like suppliants to receive her doom.

(DRYDEN: _Annus Mirabilis_, stanza 297. 1667.)

The boast of heraldry, the pomp of power, And all that beauty, all that wealth e'er gave, Await alike the inevitable hour. The paths of glory lead but to the grave.

(GRAY: _Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard._ 1751.)

To Davenant's _Gondibert_ is usually traced the use of this "heroic" stanza (_abab_ in iambic five-stress lines) in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In his preface the author said: "I believed it would be more pleasant to the reader, in a work of length, to give this respite or pause, between every stanza, ... than to run him out of breath with continued couplets. Nor doth alternate rime by any lowliness of cadence make the sound less heroic, but rather adapt it to a plain and stately composing of music." Dryden followed Davenant in using the stanza for his _Annus Mirabilis_, saying in his preface: "I have chosen to write my poem in quatrains, or stanzas of four in alternate rhyme, because I have ever judged them more noble, and of greater dignity, both for the sound and number, than any other verse in use amongst us.... I have always found the couplet verse most easy (though not so proper for this occasion), for there the work is sooner at an end, every two lines concluding the labor of the poet; but in quatrains he is to carry it further on, and not only so, but to bear along in his head the troublesome sense of four lines together." Dryden did not use the stanza again, however, and it is obviously unsuited to a long narrative poem. Saintsbury says: "With regard to the nobility and dignity of this stanza, it may safely be said that _Annus Mirabilis_ itself, the best poem ever written therein, killed it by exposing its faults.... It is chargeable with more than the disjointedness of the couplet, without the possibility of relief; while, on the other hand, the quatrains have not, like the Spenserian stave or the _ottava rima_, sufficient bulk to form units in themselves." (_Life of Dryden_, Men of Letters Series, p. 34.)

It is hard to say what Mr. Saintsbury means in speaking of the _Annus Mirabilis_ as the best poem ever written in the heroic quatrain, when we remember that it is the quatrain of Gray's _Elegy_. On the possible sources of his use of it, see Gosse's _Life of Gray_, in the Men of Letters Series, p. 98 (also his _From Shakespeare to Pope_, p. 140). Mr. Gosse refers to the use of the quatrain by Sir John Davies in the _Nosce Teipsum_ (1599), with which Gray was familiar, and (in addition to Davenant, Dryden, and Hobbes's _Homer_) to the _Love Elegies_ of James Hammond, published 1743. "It is believed that the printing of Hammond's verses incited Gray to begin his _Churchyard Elegy_, and to make the four-line stanza the basis of most of his harmonies.... The measure itself, from first to last, is an attempt to render in English the solemn alternation of passion and reserve, the interchange of imploring and desponding tones, that is found in the Latin elegiac; and Gray gave his poem, when he first published it, an outward resemblance to the text of Tibullus by printing it without any stanzaic pauses." Mr. Gosse neglects the elegies of William Shenstone, which were also in the quatrain, and some of which had apparently been published before the _Churchyard Elegy_. On this matter see Beers's _Romanticism in the Eighteenth Century_, p. 137, where Shenstone is said to have borrowed the stanza from Hammond, and Gray from Shenstone. Shenstone, in his _Prefatory Essay on Elegy_, defended the metrical form and referred to the elegies of Hammond. "Heroic metre, with alternate rhyme, seems well enough adapted to this species of poetry; and, however exceptionable upon other occasions, its inconveniencies appear to lose their weight in shorter elegies, and its advantages seem to acquire an additional importance. The world has an admirable example of its beauty in a collection of elegies not long since published." (Chalmers's _English Poets_, vol. xiii. p. 264.)

For there was Milton like a seraph strong, Beside him Shakespeare bland and mild; And there the world-worn Dante grasped his song, And somewhat grimly smiled.

(TENNYSON: _The Palace of Art._ 1833.)

_abba_

Yet those lips, so sweetly swelling, Do invite a stealing Kiss. Now will I but venture this; Who will read, must first learn spelling.

(SIR PHILIP SIDNEY: _Astrophel and Stella_, Song ii. ab. 1580.)

Let the bird of loudest lay, On the sole Arabian tree, Herald sad and trumpet be, To whose sound chaste wings obey.

(SHAKSPERE: _The Ph[oe]nix and the Turtle_, 1601.)

Though beauty be the mark of praise, And yours of whom I sing, be such As not the world can praise too much, Yet is't your virtue now I raise.

(BEN JONSON: _Elegy_, in _Underwoods_. 1616.)

Lord, in thine anger do not reprehend me, Nor in thy hot displeasure me correct; Pity me, Lord, for I am much deject, And very weak and faint; heal and amend me.

(MILTON: _Psalm vi._ 1653.)

Away, those cloudy looks, that lab'ring sigh, The peevish offspring of a sickly hour! Nor meanly thus complain of fortune's power, When the blind gamester throws a luckless die.

(COLERIDGE: _To a Friend._ ab. 1795.)

Twelve struck. That sound, by dwindling years Heard in each hour, crept off; and then The ruffled silence spread again, Like water that a pebble stirs.

(ROSSETTI: _My Sister's Sleep._ 1850.)

I hold it true, whate'er befall; I feel it when I sorrow most; 'Tis better to have loved and lost Than never to have loved at all.

(TENNYSON: _In Memoriam_, xxvii. 1850.)

Sweet after showers, ambrosial air, That rollest from the gorgeous gloom Of evening over brake and bloom And meadow, slowly breathing bare

The round of space, and rapt below Thro' all the dewy-tasselled wood, And shadowing down the horned flood In ripples, fan my brows and blow

The fever from my cheek, and sigh The full new life that feeds thy breath Throughout my frame, till Doubt and Death, Ill brethren, let the fancy fly

From belt to belt of crimson seas On leagues of odor streaming far, To where in yonder orient star A hundred spirits whisper "Peace."

(TENNYSON: _ibid._, lxxxiv.)

This stanza (_abba_ in four-stress iambics) is commonly known as the "_In Memoriam_ stanza," from its familiar use by Tennyson. Tennyson is indeed said to have invented it for his own use, not knowing of its earlier appearance in the works of Jonson and Rossetti. Professor Corson has an interesting passage on the poetic quality of the stanza: "By the rhyme-scheme of the quatrain, the terminal rhyme-emphasis of the stanza is reduced, the second and third verses being most closely braced by the rhyme. The stanza is thus admirably adapted to that sweet continuity of flow, free from abrupt checks, demanded by the spiritualized sorrow which it bears along. Alternate rhyme would have wrought an entire change in the tone of the poem. To be assured of this, one should read, aloud of course, all the stanzas whose first and second, or third and fourth, verses admit of being transposed without affecting the sense. By such transposition, the rhymes are made alternate, and the concluding rhymes more emphatic." Compare the stanza quoted above from section xxvii. with the transposed form:

"I feel it when I sorrow most; I hold it true, whate'er befall; 'Tis better to have loved and lost Than never to have loved at all."

On the passage quoted from section lxxxiv. Professor Corson also observes: "The four stanzas of which it is composed constitute but one period, the sense being suspended till the close. The rhyme-emphasis is so distributed that any one, hearing the poem read, would hardly be sensible of any of the slightest checks in the continuous and even movement of the verse.... There is no other section of _In Memoriam_ in which the artistic motive of the stanza is so evident." (_Primer of English Verse_, pp. 70-77.)

_aaba_

Doubt you to whom my Muse these notes entendeth, Which now my breast, surcharg'd, to music lendeth! To you, to you, all song of praise is due, Only in you my song begins and endeth.

(SIR PHILIP SIDNEY: _Astrophel and Stella._ Song i, ab. 1580.)

Here the third line (the same in all the stanzas) has an additional internal rime.

Oh, make the most of what we yet may spend, Before we too into the dust descend; Dust into dust, and under dust, to lie, Sans wine, sans song, sans singer, and--sans end!

(EDW. FITZGERALD: _Paraphrase of the Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyam._ 1859.)

For groves of pine on either hand, To break the blast of winter, stand; And further on, the hoary Channel Tumbles a billow on chalk and sand.

(Tennyson: _To the Rev. F. D. Maurice._ 1854.)

This delightful stanza (used also by Tennyson in _The Daisy_) seems to be an imitation of the well-known Alcaic stanza of Horace:

"Vides, ut alta stet nive candidum Soracte, nec jam sustineant onus Silvae laborantes, geluque Flumina constiterint acuto."

Ah, yet would God this flesh of mine might be Where air would wash and long leaves cover me, Where tides of grass break into foam of flowers, Or where the wind's feet shine along the sea.

(SWINBURNE: _Laus Veneris._)

REFRAIN STANZAS

In this group of refrain stanzas there is no attempt to make the range of illustrations complete, but only to suggest how the refrain idea has been variously used in forming the structure of the stanza. In some cases, for example, it will be seen that the refrain is a mere appendage or _coda_ to the stanza; in others it is made by rime a part of the organized structure.

Blow, northerne wynd, Sent þou my suetyng! Blow, norþern wynd, Blou! blou! blou!

(Song from Harleian Ms. 2253; Böddeker's _Altenglische Dichtungen_, p. 168.)

I that in heill wes and glaidness, Am trublit now with gret seikness, And feblit with infirmitie; _Timor Mortis conturbat me._

(WILLIAM DUNBAR: _Lament for the Makaris._ ab. 1500.)

Now Simmer blinks on flowery braes, And o'er the crystal streamlets plays; Come, let us spend the lightsome days In the birks of Aberfeldy.

(BURNS: _The Birks of Aberfeldy._ 1787.)

I wish I were where Helen lies; Night and day on me she cries; O that I were where Helen lies On fair Kirconnell lea!

(_Fair Helen_; old ballad.)

O sing unto my roundelay, O drop the briny tear with me, Dance no more at holy-day, Like a running river be. My love is dead, Gone to his death-bed, All under the willow tree.

(CHATTERTON: Minstrel's Roundelay from _Ælla_. ab. 1770.)

The twentieth year is well-nigh past, Since first our sky was overcast; Ah, would that this might be the last! My Mary!

(COWPER: _My Mary._ 1793.)

Duncan Gray cam' here to woo-- Ha, ha, the wooing o't! On blithe Yule night, when we were fou-- Ha, ha, the wooing o't! Maggie coost her head fu' heigh, Looked asklent and unco skeigh, Gart poor Duncan stand abeigh; Ha, ha, the wooing o't!

(BURNS: _Duncan Gray._ ab. 1790.)

My heart is wasted with my woe, Oriana. There is no rest for me below, Oriana. When the long dun wolds are ribb'd with snow, And loud the Norland whirlwinds blow, Oriana, Alone I wander to and fro, Oriana.

(TENNYSON: _Ballad of Oriana._ ab. 1830.)

Oh, the little birds sang east, and the little birds sang west, (Toll slowly) And I smiled to think God's greatness flowed around our incompleteness-- Round our restlessness His rest.

(ELIZABETH B. BROWNING: _Rhyme of the Duchess May._ ab. 1845.)

"Ah! what white thing at the door has cross'd, Sister Helen? Ah! what is this that sighs in the frost?" "A soul that's lost as mine is lost, Little brother!" (O Mother, Mary Mother, Lost, lost, all lost, between Hell and Heaven!)

(ROSSETTI: _Sister Helen._ 1870.)

Laetabundus Exultet fidelis chorus, Alleluia! Egidio psallat coetus Iste laetus, Alleluia!

(ST. BERNARD: _De Nativitate Domini._)

Sermone Marcus Tullius, Fortuna Cesar Julius Tibi non equantur. Tibi summa prudentia, Prefulgens et potentia Celesti dono dantur.

(From a 12th c. MS.: _Regulae de Rhythmis._ In Schipper's _Englische Metrik_, vol. i. p. 354.)

Quant li solleiz conviset en leon En icel tens qu'est ortus pliadon Perunt matin, Une pulcellet odit molt gent plorer Et son ami dolcement regreter, Ex si lli dis.

(Early French version of the _Song of Songs_, quoted in LEWIS's _Foreign Sources of Modern English Versification_, p. 89.)

The special form of refrain stanza appearing in the first of these foreign specimens (the Alleluia hymn form) is generally thought to have been the source of the "tail-rime stanza" illustrated in the other two specimens, and in the several pages which follow. The characteristic feature of this stanza is the presence of two short lines riming together and serving as "tails" to the first and second parts of the body of the stanza. The same name appears in all the languages: "versus caudati" in the mediæval Latin, "rime couée" in the French, and "Schweifreim" in modern German. It is easy to see, what the following specimens illustrate, how stanzas constructed on this fundamental principle might be varied greatly in particular forms, according to the number, length, and rime-arrangement of the longer lines.

Men may merci have, traytour not to save, for luf ne for awe, Atteynt of traytorie, suld haf no mercie, wiþ no maner lawe.

(ROBERT MANNING of Brunne: _Chronicle._ ab. 1330.)

For Edward gode dede Þe Baliol did him mede a wikked bounte. Turne we ageyn to rede and on our geste to spede a Maddok þer left we. (_Ibid._)

Manning's chronicle was a translation of the French chronicle of Pierre de Langtoft. Although the translator designed to avoid the various complicated measures used in the original, and kept pretty closely to alexandrines (see p. 254, below), in the passages here represented he followed the tail-rime of the original. In the first case the stanza form is not represented in the manuscript, though of course implicit in the rimes. The name of the stanza, "rime couée," appears very early in Manning's Prologue, in the famous passage in which he expressed his preference for metrical simplicity:

Als þai haf wrytenn and sayd Haf I alle in myn Inglis layd, In symple speche as I couthe, That is lightest in mannes mouthe. I mad noght for no disours, Ne for no seggers no harpours, Bot for þe luf of symple menn That strange Inglis cann not kenn. For many it ere that strange Inglis In ryme wate never what it is, And bot þai wist what it mente Ellis me thoght it were alle shente.

I made it not for to be praysed, Bot at þe lewed menn were aysed. If it were made in ryme couwee, Or in strangere or entrelace, Þat rede Inglis it ere inowe Þat couthe not haf coppled a kowe, Þat outhere in couwee or in baston Som suld haf ben fordon, So þat fele men þat it herde Suld not witte howe þat it ferde.

... And forsoth I couth noght So strange Inglis as þai wroght, And menn besoght me many a tyme To turne it bot in light ryme. þai sayd, if I in strange it turne, To here it manyon suld skurne. For it ere names fulle selcouthe, þat ere not used now in mouthe. And therfore for the comonalte, þat blythely wild listen to me, On light lange I it begann, For luf of the lewed mann.

(Hearne ed., vol. i. pp. xcix, c.)

Lines 15-22 may be paraphrased thus: "If it were made in _rime couée_, in _rime strangere_, or _rime entrelacée_, there are plenty of those who read English who could not have put the tail-verses together; so that either in the tail-verse or the _baston_ some would have been confused, and many men that heard it would not know how it went." The "interlaced" (alternate) rime was a familiar form. _Baston_ seems usually to be an equivalent for "stanza" or "stave." It seems uncertain whether by _rime strangere_ Manning had in mind any particular form of stanza or rime-arrangement.

Stand wel, moder, under rode, Byholt þy sone wiþ glade mode; Blyþe, moder, myht þou be! Sone, hou shulde y blyþe stonde? Y se þin fet, y se þin honde Nayled to þe harde tre.

(Song from Harleian MS. 3253; Böddeker's _Altenglische Dichtungen_, p. 206.)

Listeth, lordes, in good entent, And I wol telle verrayment Of mirthe and of solas; Al of a knyght was fair and gent In bataille and in tourneyment, His name was sir Thopas ...

An elf-queen wol I love, y-wis, For in this world no womman is Worthy to be my make In toune; Alle othere wommen I forsake, And to an elf-queen I me take By dale and eek by doune!

(CHAUCER: _Sir Thopas_, from _Canterbury Tales_. ab. 1385.)

The tail-rime stanza had become a favorite for the metrical romances of the fourteenth century; but Chaucer evidently saw its inappropriateness for long narrative poems, and ridiculed it--with certain other elements of the romances--in this _Rime of Sir Thopas_. The Host is made to interrupt the story:

"'Myn eres aken of thy drasty speche; Now swiche a rym the devel I beteche! This may wel be rym dogerel', quod he."

My patent pardouns, ye may se, Cum fra the Cane of Tartarei, Weill seald with oster schellis; Thocht ye have na contritioun, Ye sall have full remissioun, With help of buiks and bellis.

(SIR DAVID LINDSAY: _Ane Satyre of the Three Estates._ ab. 1540.)

Seinte Marie! levedi briht, Moder thou art of muchel miht, Quene in hevene of feire ble; Gabriel to the he lihte, Tho he brouhte al wid rihte Then holi gost to lihten in the. Godes word ful wel thou cnewe; Ful mildeliche thereto thou bewe, And saidest, "So it mote be!" Thi thone was studevast ant trewe; For the joye that to was newe, Levedi, thou have merci of me!

(_Quinque Gaudia._ In Mätzner's _Altenglische Sprachproben_, vol. i. p. 51.)

Here the principle of the tail-rime is extended to four tail-verses. See also the specimen on p. 111, below.

All, dear Nature's children sweet, Lie 'fore bride and bridegroom's feet, Blessing their sense! Not an angel of the air, Bird melodious or bird fair, Be absent hence.

(Song from _The Two Noble Kinsmen_, by Shakspere and Fletcher. pub. 1634.)

Fair stood the wind for France, When we our sails advance, Nor now to prove our chance Longer not tarry; But put unto to the main, At Caux, the mouth of Seine, With all his martial train, Landed King Harry.

(DRAYTON: _Agincourt._ ab. 1600.)

I am a man of war and might, And know thus much, that I can fight, Whether I am i' th' wrong or right, Devoutly. No woman under heaven I fear, New oaths I can exactly swear, And forty healths my brains will bear Most stoutly.

(SIR JOHN SUCKLING: _A Soldier._ ab. 1635.)

The stanzas that follow show various combinations and applications of the same principle--the use of shorter verses in connection with longer.

A wayle whyte ase whalles bon, A grein in golde þat goldly shon, A tortle þat min herte is on, In toune trewe; Hire gladshipe nes never gon, Whil y may glewe.

(Song from Harleian MS. 2253; Böddeker's _Altenglische Dichtungen_, p. 161.)

Of on that is so fayr and bri[gh]t, _velut maris stella_, Bri[gh]ter than the day is li[gh]t, _parens et puella_; Ic crie to the, thou se to me, Levedy, preye thi sone for me, _tam pia_, That ic mote come to the _Maria_.

(_Hymn to the Virgin_, from Egerton MS. 613. In Mätzner's _Altenglische Sprachproben_, vol. i. p. 53.)

Oh, wad some power the giftie gie us To see oursel's as ithers see us! It wad frae monie a blunder free us An' foolish notion: What airs in dress an' gait wad lea'e us, An' e'en devotion!

(BURNS: _To a Louse on a Lady's Bonnet._ 1786.)

O goodly hand, Wherein doth stand My heart distract in pain; Dear hand, alas! In little space My life thou dost restrain.

(SIR THOMAS WYATT: In Tottel's _Songs and Sonnets._ pub. 1557.)

Old Ocean's praise Demands my lays; A truly British theme I sing;

A theme so great, I dare compete, And join with Ocean, Ocean's king.

(EDWARD YOUNG: _Ocean, an Ode._ 1728.)

No more, no more This worldly shore Upbraids me with its loud uproar! With dreamful eyes My spirit lies Under the walls of Paradise!

(THOMAS BUCHANAN READ: _Drifting._ ab. 1850.)

In these stanzas a pair of long lines bind together the first and second parts of the composition, just as the short lines do in the original _rime couée_.

Young was and is universally condemned for choosing this form of stanza for his odes. He was led to do so by his admiration for the passage in Dryden's _Ode for St. Cecilia's Day_, running:

"Assumes the god, Affects to nod, And seems to shake the spheres."

Here, said Young, Dryden was expressing "majesty"; hence, since he wished his odes to be majestic, he used the short, choppy measure throughout. (See his Introductory Essay to his Odes, in Chalmers's _English Poets_, vol. xiii.) On the other hand, the stanza as used by Read has been almost universally admired.

Hail, old Patrician Trees, so great and good! Hail, ye Plebeian Underwood! Where the poetic birds rejoice, And for their quiet nests and plenteous food Pay with their grateful voice.

(COWLEY: _Of Solitude._ ab. 1650.)

To-night this sunset spreads two golden wings Cleaving the western sky; Winged too with wind it is, and winnowings Of birds; as if the day's last hour in rings Of strenuous flight must die.

(ROSSETTI: _Sunset Wings._ 1881.)

Ye dainty Nymphs, that in this blessed brook Do bathe your breast, Forsake your watery bowers, and hither look At my request: And eke you Virgins that on Parnasse dwell, Whence floweth Helicon, the learned well, Help me to blaze Her worthy praise, Which in her sex doth all excel.

(SPENSER: _The Shepherd's Calendar, April._ 1579.)

You, that will a wonder know, Go with me, Two suns in a heaven of snow Both burning be; All they fire, that do but eye them, But the snow's unmelted by them.

(CAREW: _In Praise of his Mistress._ ab. 1635.)

Go, lovely Rose! Tell her, that wastes her time and me, That now she knows, When I resemble her to thee, How sweet and fair she seems to be.

(WALLER: _Go, lovely Rose._ ab. 1650.)

The use of short lines somewhat intricately introduced among longer ones, is characteristic of the stanzas of the lyrical poets of the first part of the seventeenth century. It may perhaps be traced in part to the influence of Donne.

Where the quiet-colored end of evening smiles Miles and miles On the solitary pastures where our sheep Half-asleep Tinkle homeward thro' the twilight, stray or stop As they crop.

(BROWNING: _Love among the Ruins._ 1855.)

Compare with this (although it is not divided into stanzas) Herrick's _Thanksgiving to God_:

Lord, thou hast given me a cell Wherein to dwell; A little house, whose humble roof Is weatherproof; Under the spars of which I lie Both soft and dry.

When God at first made Man, Having a glass of blessings standing by, Let us (said He) pour on him all we can: Let the world's riches, which dispersed lie, Contract into a span.

(GEORGE HERBERT: _The Gifts of God._ 1631.)

The following specimens illustrate various forms of stanzas distinguished by arrangement of rime, without reference to the length of lines:

_abccb_

In vain, through every changeful year Did Nature lead him as before; A primrose by a river's brim A yellow primrose was to him, And it was nothing more.

(WORDSWORTH: _Peter Bell._ 1798.)

_ababb_

Survival of the fittest, adaptation, And all their other evolution terms, Seem to omit one small consideration, To wit, that tumblebugs and angleworms Have souls: there's soul in everything that squirms.

(WILLIAM VAUGHN MOODY: _The Menagerie._ 1901.)

_aabbb_

Mary mine that art Mary's Rose, Come in to me from the garden-close. The sun sinks fast with the rising dew, And we marked not how the faint moon grew; But the hidden stars are calling you.

(ROSSETTI: _Rose Mary._ 1881.)

_aabcdd_

Hail seint michel, with the lange sper! Fair beth thi winges: up thi scholder Thou hast a rede kirtil a non to thi fote. Thou ert best angle that ever god makid. This vers is ful wel i-wrog[gh]t; Hit is of wel furre y-brog[gh]t.

(_Satire on the People of Kildare_, from Harleian Ms. 913, in Guest's _English Rhythms_, Skeat ed., p. 616.)

_aaaabb_

What beauty would have lovely styled, What manners pretty, nature mild, What wonder perfect, all were filed Upon record in this blest child. And till the coming of the soul To fetch the flesh, we keep the roll.

(BEN JONSON: _Epitaph; Underwoods, liii._ 1616.)

_ababab_

She walks in beauty, like the night Of cloudless climes and starry skies: And all that's best of dark or bright Meet in her aspect and her eyes; Thus mellowed to that tender light Which heaven to gaudy day denies.

(BYRON: _She Walks in Beauty._ 1815.)

_ababcc_

I wandered lonely as a cloud That floats on high o'er vales and hills, When all at once I saw a crowd, A host, of golden daffodils; Beside the lake, beneath the trees, Fluttering and dancing in the breeze.

(WORDSWORTH: _I wandered lonely as a cloud._ 1804.)

O, how her eyes and tears did lend and borrow! Her eyes seen in her tears, tears in her eye; Both crystals, where they view'd each other's sorrow,-- Sorrow that friendly sighs sought still to dry; But like a stormy day, now wind, now rain, Sighs dry her cheeks, tears make them wet again.

(SHAKSPERE: _Venus and Adonis_, st. 161. 1593.)

_ababbcc_ ("_Rime royal_")

Humblest of herte, hyest of reverence, Benigne flour, coroune of vertues alle, Sheweth unto your rial excellence Your servaunt, if I durste me so calle, His mortal harm, in which he is y-falle, And noght al only for his evel fare, But for your renoun, as he shal declare.

(CHAUCER: _Compleynte unto Pite._ ab. 1370.)

And on the smale grene twistis sat The lytil suete nyghtingale, and song So loud and clere, the ympnis consecrat Of luvis use, now soft now lowd among, That all the gardynis and the wallis rong Ryght of thaire song, and on the copill next Of thaire suete armony, and lo the text.

(JAMES I. of Scotland: _The King's Quhair_, st. 33. ab. 1425.)

For men have marble, women waxen, minds, And therefore are they form'd as marble will; The weak oppress'd, the impression of strange kinds Is form'd in them by force, by fraud, or skill: Then call them not the authors of their ill, No more than wax shall be accounted evil, Wherein is stamp'd the semblance of a devil.

(SHAKSPERE: _The Rape of Lucrece_, st. 178. 1594.)

In a far country that I cannot name, And on a year long ages past away, A King there dwelt in rest and ease and fame, And richer than the Emperor is to-day: The very thought of what this man might say From dusk to dawn kept many a lord awake, For fear of him did many a great man quake.

(WILLIAM MORRIS: _The Earthly Paradise; The Proud King._ 1868.)

The "rime royal" stanza is one of Chaucer's contributions to English verse, and about 14,000 lines of his poetry are in this form. Its use by King James in the _King's Quhair_ was formerly thought to be the source of the name; but it seems more likely that the name, like the form, was of French origin, and is to be connected with such terms as _chant royal_ and _ballat royal_, familiar in the nomenclature of courtly poetry (see Schipper, vol. i. p. 426). The stanza was used by Chaucer with marvellous skill for purposes of continuous narrative, and was a general favorite among his imitators in the fifteenth century, being used by Lydgate, Occleve, Hawes, Dunbar, then by Skelton, and by Barclay in the _Ship of Fooles_. It appears popular as late as the time of Sackville's part of the _Mirror for Magistrates_ (1563).[9] Later than Shakspere's _Rape of Lucrece_ it is rarely found. (But see Milton's unfinished poem on _The Passion_, where he used a form of the rime royal with concluding alexandrine.)

Strictly speaking, the "rime royal" is always in five-stress verse, but in the following specimen the same rime-scheme appears in the irregular six-or-seven-stress verse of one of the Mysteries.

The story sheweth further, that, after man was blyste, The Lord did create woman owte of a ribbe of man, Which woman was deceyvyd with the Serpentes darkned myste; By whose synn ower nature is so weake no good we can; Wherfor they were dejectyd and caste from thence than Unto dolloure and myseri and to traveyle and payne, Untyll Godes spryght renuid; and so we ende certayne.

(Prologue to Norwich Whitsun Play of the Creation and Fall. In Manly's _Specimens of the Pre-Shaksperean Drama_, vol. i p. 5.)

_ababcca_

Dear and great Angel, wouldst thou only leave That child, when thou hast done with him, for me! Let me sit all the day here, that when eve Shall find performed thy special ministry, And time come for departure, thou, suspending Thy flight, may'st see another child for tending, Another still, to quiet and retrieve.

(BROWNING: _The Guardian Angel._ 1855.)

_ababccb_

The City is of Night; perchance of Death, But certainly of Night; for never there Can come the lucid morning's fragrant breath After the dewy dawning's cold grey air; The moon and stars may shine with scorn or pity; The sun has never visited that city, For it dissolveth in the daylight fair.

(JAMES THOMSON: _The City of Dreadful Night._ 1874.)

_abababab_

Trew king, that sittes in trone, Unto the I tell my tale, And unto the I bid a bone, For thou ert bute of all my bale: Als thou made midelerd and the mone, And bestes and fowles grete and smale. Unto me send thi socore sone, And dresce my dedes in this dale.

(LAURENCE MINOT: _Battle of Halidon Hill._ 1352.)

On Minot's lyrics see ten Brink's _History of English Literature_, Kennedy translation, vol. i. p. 323.

_ababbaba_

Since love is such that as ye wot Cannot always be wisely used, I say, therefore, then blame me not, Though I therein have been abused. For as with cause I am accused, Guilty I grant such was my lot; And though it cannot be excused, Yet let such folly be forgot.

(SIR THOMAS WYATT: _That the power of love excuseth the folly of loving_, ab. 1550.)

_ababbcbc_

In a chirche þer i con knel Þis ender day in on morwenynge, Me lyked þe servise wonder wel, For þi þe lengore con i lynge. I sei[gh] a clerk a book forþ bringe, Þat prikked was in mony a plas; Faste he sou[gh]te what he schulde synge, And al was _Deo gracias_!

(From the Vernon and Simeon MSS.; in _Anglia_, vii. 287.)

This Julius to the Capitolie wente Upon a day, as he was wont to goon, And in the Capitolie anon him hente This false Brutus, and his othere foon, And stikede him with boydekins anoon With many a wounde, and thus they lete him lye; But never gronte he at no strook but oon, Or elles at two, but if his storie lye.

(CHAUCER: _The Monk's Tale_, ll. 713-720. ab. 1375.)

This stanza is sometimes called the "_Monk's Tale_ stanza," from its use by Chaucer in that single tale of the Canterbury group. Although it has been little used by later poets, it may have given Spenser a suggestion for his characteristic stanza (see below, p. 102).

Farewell! if ever fondest prayer For other's weal availed on high, Mine will not all be lost in air, But waft thy name beyond the sky. 'Twere vain to speak, to weep, to sigh: Oh! more than tears of blood can tell, When rung from guilt's expiring eye, Are in that word--Farewell!--Farewell!

(BYRON: _Farewell, if ever fondest prayer._ 1808.)

_ababccdd_

Will no one tell me what she sings? Perhaps the plaintive numbers flow For old, unhappy, far-off things, And battles long ago: Or is it some more humble lay, Familiar matter of to-day? Some natural sorrow, loss, or pain, That has been, and may be again!

(WORDSWORTH: _The Solitary Reaper._ 1803.)

_abababcc_ (_ottava rima_)

She sat, and sewed, that hath done me the wrong Whereof I plain, and have done many a day; And, whilst she heard my plaint in piteous song, She wished my heart the sampler, that it lay. The blind master, whom I have served so long, Grudging to hear that he did hear her say, Made her own weapon do her finger bleed, To feel if pricking were so good in deed.

(SIR THOMAS WYATT: _Of his love that pricked her finger with a needle_, in Tottel's _Songs and Sonnets_. pub. 1557.)

This _ottava rima_ is a familiar Italian stanza made classic by Ariosto and Tasso, and introduced into England by Wyatt, together with the sonnet and other Italian forms. Professor Corson says, "Such a rhyme-scheme, especially in the Italian, with its great similarity of endings, is too 'monotonously iterative'; and the rhyming couplet at the close seems, as James Russell Lowell expresses it, 'to put on the brakes with a jar.'" (_Primer of English Verse_, pp. 89 f.)

O! who can lead, then, a more happie life Than he that with cleane minde, and heart sincere, No greedy riches knowes nor bloudie strife, No deadly fight of warlick fleete doth feare; Ne runs in perill of foes cruell knife, That in the sacred temples he may reare A trophee of his glittering spoyles and treasure, Or may abound in riches above measure.

(SPENSER: _Virgil's Gnat_, ll. 121-128. 1591.)

For as with equal rage, and equal might, Two adverse winds combat, with billows proud, And neither yield (seas, skies maintain like fight, Wave against wave oppos'd, and cloud to cloud); So war both sides with obstinate despite, With like revenge; and neither party bow'd: Fronting each other with confounding blows, No wound one sword unto the other owes.

(DANIEL: _History of the Civil War_, bk. vi. ab. 1600.)

Thus sang the uncouth swain to the oaks and rills, While the still morn went out with sandals gray; He touch'd the tender stops of various quills, With eager thought warbling his Doric lay: And now the sun had stretch'd out all the hills, And now was dropt into the western bay: At last he rose, and twitch'd his mantle blue: To-morrow to fresh woods, and pastures new.

(MILTON: _Lycidas_; Epilogue. 1638.)

This is a single stave of the _ottava rima_, at the close of the varying metrical forms of _Lycidas_. Professor Corson says: "The Elegy having come to an end, the _ottava rima_ is employed, with an admirable artistic effect, to mark off the Epilogue in which Milton ... speaks in his own person."

They looked a manly, generous generation; Beards, shoulders, eyebrows, broad, and square, and thick, Their accents firm and loud in conversation, Their eyes and gestures eager, sharp, and quick, Showed them prepared, on proper provocation, To give the lie, pull noses, stab and kick; And for that very reason, it is said, They were so very courteous and well-bred.

(JOHN HOOKHAM FRERE: _The Monks and the Giants._ 1817.)

With every morn their love grew tenderer, With every eve deeper and tenderer still; He might not in house, field, or garden stir, But her full shape would all his seeing fill; And his continual voice was pleasanter To her, than noise of trees or hidden rill; Her lute-string gave an echo of his name, She spoilt her half-done broidery with the same.

(KEATS: _Isabella._ 1820.)

As boy, I thought myself a clever fellow, And wished that others held the same opinion; They took it up when my days grew more mellow, And other minds acknowledged my dominion: Now my sere fancy "falls into the yellow Leaf," and Imagination droops her pinion, And the sad truth which hovers o'er my desk Turns what was once romantic to burlesque.

(BYRON: _Don Juan_, canto iv. st. 3. 1821.)

Of the _ottava rima_, as used by Frere and Byron, Austin Dobson says: "It had already been used by Harrington, Drayton, Fairfax, and (as we have seen) in later times by Gay; it had even been used by Frere's contemporary, William Tennant; but to Frere belongs the honor of giving it the special characteristics which Byron afterward popularised in _Beppo_ and _Don Juan_. Structurally the _ottava rima_ of Frere singularly resembles that of Byron, who admitted that _Whistlecraft_ was his 'immediate model.' ... Byron, taking up the stanza with equal skill and greater genius, filled it with the vigor of his personality, and made it a measure of his own, which it has ever since been hazardous for inferior poets to attempt." (Ward's _English Poets_, vol. iv. p. 240.) Byron may indeed be said--in the words of the present specimen--to have turned what was commonly a romantic stanza "to burlesque."

_aabaabbab_

O hie honour, sweit hevinlie flour degest, Gem verteous, maist precious, gudliest. For hie renoun thow art guerdoun conding, Of worschip kend the glorious end and rest, But quhome in richt na worthie wicht may lest. Thy greit puissance may maist avance all thing, And poverall to mekill availl sone bring. I the require sen thow but peir art best, That efter this in thy hie blis we ring.

(GAWAIN DOUGLAS: _The Palace of Honour._ ab. 1500.)

_ababcccdd_

My love is like unto th' eternal fire, And I as those which therein do remain; Whose grievous pains is but their great desire To see the sight which they may not attain: So in hell's heat myself I feel to be, That am restrained by great extremity, The sight of her which is so dear to me. O! puissant love! and power of great avail! By whom hell may be felt e'er death assail!

(SIR THOMAS WYATT: _Of the extreme torment endured by the unhappy lover._ ab. 1550.)

_ababbcbcc_ ("_Spenserian stanza_")

By this the Northerne wagoner had set His sevenfold teme behind the stedfast starre That was in Ocean waves yet never wet, But firme is fixt, and sendeth light from farre To all that in the wide deepe wandring arre; And chearefull Chaunticlere with his note shrill Had warned once, that Ph[oe]bus fiery carre In hast was climbing up the Easterne hill, Full envious that night so long his roome did fill.

(SPENSER: _The Faerie Queene_, bk. i. canto 2, st. 1. 1590.)

And more to lulle him in his slumber soft, A trickling streame from high rock tumbling downe, And ever-drizling raine upon the loft, Mixt with a murmuring winde, much like the sowne Of swarming Bees, did cast him in a swowne. No other noyse, nor peoples troublous cryes, As still are wont t'annoy the walled towne, Might there be heard; but carelesse Quiet lyes Wrapt in eternall silence farre from enimyes.

(SPENSER: _ib._ bk. i. canto 1, st. 41.)

This stanza, which Spenser invented for his own use and to which his name is always given, was apparently formed by adding an alexandrine to the _ababbcbc_ stanza of Chaucer. In it Spenser wrote the greater part of his poetry, and its use marks the Spenserian influence wherever found, especially among the poets of the eighteenth century,--Thomson, Shenstone, Beattie, and the like.

James Russell Lowell, in his Essay on Spenser, comments as follows: "He found the _ottava rima_ ... not roomy enough, so first ran it over into another line, and then ran that added line over into an alexandrine, in which the melody of one stanza seems forever longing and feeling forward after that which is to follow.... Wave follows wave with equable gainings and recessions, the one sliding back in fluent music to be mingled with and carried forward by the next. In all this there is soothingness, indeed, but no slumberous monotony; for Spenser was no mere metrist, but a great composer. By the variety of his pauses--now at the close of the first or second foot, now of the third, and again of the fourth--he gives spirit and energy to a measure whose tendency it certainly is to become languorous." (_Works_, vol. iv. pp. 328, 329.)

See also the chapters on the Spenserian stanza in Corson's _Primer of English Verse_, where its use for pictorial effects is interestingly discussed.

A pleasing land of drowsy-head it was, Of dreams that wave before the half-shut eye, And of gay castles in the clouds that pass, Forever flushing round a summer sky: There eke the soft delights, that witchingly Instil a wanton sweetness through the breast, And the calm pleasures always hovered nigh; But whate'er smacked of noyaunce, or unrest, Was far far off expelled from this delicious nest.

(THOMSON: _The Castle of Indolence_, canto i. 1748.)

Her cap, far whiter than the driven snow, Emblem right meet of decency does yield: Her apron dyed in grain, as blue, I trowe, As is the hare-bell that adorns the field: And in her hand, for sceptre, she does wield Tway birchen sprays, with anxious fear entwined, With dark distrust and sad repentance filled, And stedfast hate, and sharp affliction joined, And fury uncontrolled and chastisement unkind.

(SHENSTONE: _The Schoolmistress._ 1742.)

Thomson's _Castle of Indolence_, although not published till 1748, seems to have been written and circulated before Shenstone's _Schoolmistress_. Thomson caught the spirit of Spenser and his stanza better than any other imitator until the days of Keats. On the revival of the stanza at this period, see Beers's _English Romanticism in the Eighteenth Century_, chap. iii., on "the Spenserians." Earliest of the group, according to Mr. Gosse, was Akenside's _Virtuoso_ (1737. See _Eighteenth Century Literature_, p. 311).

O Scotia! my dear, my native soil! For whom my warmest wish to Heaven is sent, Long may thy hardy sons of rustic toil Be blest with health, and peace, and sweet content! And oh, may Heaven their simple lives prevent From luxury's contagion, weak and vile! Then, howe'er crowns and coronets be rent, A virtuous populace may rise the while, And stand a wall of fire around their much-loved Isle.

(BURNS: _The Cotter's Saturday Night._ 1785.)

I stood in Venice, on the Bridge of Sighs; A palace and a prison on each hand: I saw from out the wave her structures rise As from the stroke of the enchanter's wand: A thousand years their cloudy wings expand Around me, and a dying glory smiles O'er the far times, when many a subject land Looked to the winged Lion's marble piles, Where Venice sate in state, throned on her hundred isles.

(BYRON: _Childe Harold's Pilgrimage_, canto iv, st. i. 1818.)

A casement high and triple-arch'd there was, All garlanded with carven imag'ries Of fruits, and flowers, and bunches of knot-grass, And diamonded with panes of quaint device, Innumerable of stains and splendid dyes, As are the tiger-moth's deep-damask'd wings; And in the midst, 'mong thousand heraldries, And twilight saints, and dim emblazonings, A shielded scutcheon blush'd with blood of queens and kings.

(KEATS: _Eve of St. Agnes._ 1820.)

Professor Corson remarks: "Probably no English poet who has used the Spenserian stanza, first assimilated so fully the spirit of Spenser, ... as did Keats; and to this fact may be partly attributed his effective use of it as an organ for his imagination in its 'lingering, loving,

## particularizing mood.'" (_Primer of English Verse_, p. 124.)

The splendors of the firmament of time May be eclips'd, but are extinguish'd not; Like stars to their appointed height they climb, And death is a low mist which cannot blot The brightness it may veil. When lofty thought Lifts a young heart above its mortal lair, And love and life contend in it for what Shall be its earthly doom, the dead live there And move like winds of light on dark and stormy air.

(SHELLEY: _Adonais_, st. 44. 1821.)

With reference to his use of this stanza Shelley remarked, in the Preface to _The Revolt of Islam_: "I have adopted the stanza of Spenser (a measure inexpressibly beautiful), not because I consider it a finer model of poetical harmony than the blank verse of Shakespeare and Milton, but because in the latter there is no shelter for mediocrity: you must either succeed or fail.... But I was enticed also by the brilliancy and magnificence of sound which a mind that has been nourished upon musical thoughts can produce by a just and harmonious arrangement of the pauses of this measure." Professor Corson (_Primer of English Verse_, p. 112) quotes Mr. Todhunter as saying: "Compare the impetuous rapidity and pale intensity of Shelley's verse with the lulling harmony, the lingering cadence, the voluptuous color of Spenser's, or with the grandiose majesty of Byron's.... In _Adonais_, indeed, a poem on which he bestowed much labor, he handles the stanza in a masterly manner, and endows it with an individual music beautiful and new."

"Courage!" he said, and pointed toward the land, "This mounting wave will roll us shoreward soon." In the afternoon they came unto a land In which it seemed always afternoon. All round the coast the languid air did swoon, Breathing like one that hath a weary dream. Full-faced above the valley stood the moon; And like a downward smoke, the slender stream Along the cliff to fall and pause and fall did seem.

(TENNYSON: _The Lotos-Eaters._ 1833.)

_abababccc_

A fisher boy, that never knew his peer In dainty songs, the gentle Thomalin, With folded arms, deep sighs, and heavy cheer, Where hundred nymphs, and hundred muses in, Sunk down by Chamus' brinks; with him his dear Dear Thyrsil lay; oft times would he begin To cure his grief, and better way advise; But still his words, when his sad friend he spies, Forsook his silent tongue, to speak in watry eyes.

(PHINEAS FLETCHER: _Piscatory Eclogues._ ab. 1630.)

Fletcher was an imitator of Spenser, and here devises a stanza differing little from his master's. The final alexandrine is used with the same effect. For other instances of final alexandrines, doubtless used under the general influence of the Spenserian stanza, see the following specimens.

_aabaabcc_

Ring out, ye crystal spheres! Once bless our human ears, If ye have power to touch our senses so; And let your silver chime Move in melodious time; And let the bass of heaven's deep organ blow; And with your ninefold harmony, Make up full consort to the angelic symphony.

(MILTON: _On the Morning of Christ's Nativity._ 1629.)

_ababbcbcdd_

What? Ælla dead? and Bertha dying too? So fall the fairest flowrets of the plain. Who can unfold the works that heaven can do, Or who untwist the roll of fate in twain? Ælla, thy glory was thy only gain; For that, thy pleasure and thy joy was lost. Thy countrymen shall rear thee on the plain A pile of stones, as any grave can boast. Further, a just reward to thee to be, In heaven thou sing of God, on earth we'll sing of thee.

(CHATTERTON: _Ælla,_ st. 147. 1768.)

This is the ten-line "Chatterton stanza," a variant of the Spenserian stanza, devised by Chatterton, which he claimed ante-dated Spenser by one or two centuries. His claim for it was of course purely fictitious.

_aabbbcc_

Build thee more stately mansions, O my soul, As the swift seasons roll! Leave thy low-vaulted past! Let each new temple, nobler than the last, Shut thee from heaven with a dome more vast, Till thou at length art free, Leaving thine outgrown shell by life's unresting sea!

(OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES: _The Chambered Nautilus._ 1858.)

See also the notable use of the alexandrine in Shelley's _Skylark_, p. 34, above.

_ababababbcbc_

The dubbement dere of doun and dalez, Of wod and water and wlonke playnez, Bylde in me blys, abated my balez, Fordidde my stresse, dystryed my paynez. Doun after a strem that dryghly halez, I bowed in blys, bred-ful my braynez; The fyrre I folghed those floty valez, The more strenghthe of joye myn herte straynez, As fortune fares theras ho fraynez, Whether solace ho sende other ellez sore, The wygh, to wham her wylle ho waynez, Hyttez to have ay more and more.

(_The Pearl_, st. xi. Fourteenth century.)

Mr. Israel Gollancz says, in his Introduction to this poem: "I can point to no direct source to which the poet of _Pearl_ was indebted for his measure; that it ultimately belongs to Romance poetry I have little doubt. These twelve-line verses seem to me to resemble the earliest form of the sonnet more than anything else I have as yet discovered.... Be this as it may, all will, I hope, recognize that there is a distinct gain in giving to the 101 stanzas of the poem the appearance of a sonnet sequence, marking clearly the break between the initial octave and the closing quatrain.... The refrain, the repetition of the catch-word of each verse, the trammels of alliteration, all seem to have offered no difficulty to our poet; and if power over technical difficulties constitutes in any way a poet's greatness, the author of _Pearl_, from this point of view alone, must take high rank among English poets." (Introduction, pp. xxiv, xxv.)

Other examples of intricate stanza structure are found in _Sir Gawain and the Green Knight_, supposed to be by the author of _Pearl_. See in Part Two, p. 156.

_aabccbddbeebffgggf_

Ne mai no lewed lued libben in londe, be he never in hyrt so haver of honde, So lerede us biledes. [gh]ef ich on molde mote wiþ a mai, y shal falle hem byfore & lurnen huere lay, ant rewen alle huere redes. ah bote y be þe furme day on folde hem byfore, ne shaly nout so skere scapen of huere score; so grimly he on me gredes, þat y ne mot me lede þer wiþ mi lawe; on alle maner oþes [þat] heo me wulleþ awe, heore boc ase on bredes. heo wendeþ bokes on brad, ant makeþ men a moneþ a mad; of scaþe y wol me skere, ant fleo from my fere; ne rohte hem whet yt were, boten heo hit had.[10]

(Song from Harleian MS. 2253. Böddeker's _Altenglische Dichtungen_, p. 109.)

This and the two following specimens, together with some included earlier under the head of Tail-Rime, illustrate the interest in complex lyrical measures characteristic of the period of French influence in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. In 1152 Henry of Normandy (who ascended the throne in 1154) married Eleanor of Poitou, and in her train there came to England the great troubadour Bernart de Ventadorn. On the poems of this troubadour and others of the same school, see ten Brink's _English Literature_, Kennedy translation, vol. i. pp. 159-164. Other troubadours followed, and found a home in the court of Richard the Lion-Hearted, who himself entered the ranks of the poets. The result was a great mass of Norman French lyrical poetry, often in intricate forms, and a smaller mass of imitative lyrics in Middle English. As Schipper observes, the elaborate lyrical forms were inconsistent with English taste, and it was only the simpler ones which were widely adopted. On the general character of the Romance stanza-forms, and their influence in England, see Schipper, vol. i. pp. 309 ff.

_ababccdeed_

Iesu, for þi muchele miht þou [gh]ef us of þi grace, þat we mowe dai & nyht þenken o þi face. in myn herte hit doþ me god, when y þenke on iesu blod, þat ran doun bi ys syde, from is herte doun to is fot; for ous he spradde is herte blod, his wondes were so wyde.

(Song from Harleian MS. 2253; in Böddeker's _Altenglische Dichtungen_, p. 208.)

_aabccbddbeeb_

Lenten ys come wiþ love to toune, wiþ blosmen & wiþ briddes roune, þat al þis blisse bryngeþ; dayes e[gh]es in þis dales, notes suete of nyhtegales, uch foul song singeþ. þe þrestelcoc him þreteþ oo; away is huere wynter woo, when woderove springeþ. þis foules singeþ ferly fele, ant wlyteþ on huere wynter wele, þat al þe wode ryngeþ.

(Song from Harleian MS. 2253; Böddeker's _Altenglische Dichtungen_, p. 164.)

_abcbdcdceccce_

Trowe [gh]e, sores, and God sent an angell And commawndyd [gh]ow [gh]owr chyld to slayn, Be [gh]owr trowthe ys ther ony of [gh]ow That eyther wold groche or stryve ther-ageyn? How thyngke [gh]e now, sorys, ther-by? I trow ther be iii or iiii or moo. And thys women that wepe so sorowfully Whan that hyr chyldryn dey them froo, As nater woll and kynd,-- Yt ys but folly, I may well awooe, To groche a-[gh]ens God or to greve [gh]ow, For [gh]e schall never se hym myschevyd, wyll I know, Be lond nor watyr, have thys in mynd.

(Epilogue of Brome Play of Abraham and Isaac. In Manly's _Specimens of the Pre-Shaksperean Drama_, vol. i. p. 56.)

This verse of the early Mystery Plays and connected forms of the drama shows an extraordinary variety of measures. In general, the effort of the writers seems to have been to show some artistic ingenuity of structure, and at the same time keep to the free popular dialogue verse which was associated with the plays. We find, therefore, tumbling verse, alexandrines, septenaries, and intricate strophic forms, all commonly written with slight regard for syllable-counting principles.

FOOTNOTES:

[8] There is a single well-known exception: the Anglo-Saxon poem known as _Deor's Lament_, which is divided into irregularly varying strophes, all ending with the same refrain. (See ten Brink's _English Literature_, Kennedy translation, vol. i, p. 60.) See also on the strophic formation of the First Riddle of Cynewulf, an article by W. W. Lawrence, in _Publications of the Mod. Lang. Assoc._, N.S. vol. x. p. 247.

[9] Gascoigne, in his _Notes of Instruction_ (1575), mentions this form of stanza as "a royall kinde of verse, serving best for grave discourses," a statement in which he is followed by King James in his _Reulis and Cautelis_ (1585). Puttenham, in the _Arte of English Poesie_ (1589), speaks of the stanza as "the chiefe of our ancient proportions used by any rimer writing any thing of historical or grave poeme, as ye may see in Chaucer and Lidgate." (Arber Reprint, p. 80.)

[10] The appendage to a stanza, based on one or more short lines, is sometimes called a "bob-wheel." See Guest's _History of English Rhythms_, Skeat ed., pp. 621 ff., for an account of various forms of these "wheels."

IV. TONE-QUALITY

The quality of the sounds of the words used in verse, although in no way concerned in the rhythm, is an element of some importance. The sound-quality may be used in either of two ways: as a regular coördinating element in the structure of the verse, or as a sporadic element in the beauty or melody of the verse.

A. AS A STRUCTURAL ELEMENT

In this capacity, similar qualities of sound indicate coördinated parts of the verse-structure, thus emphasizing the idea of similarity (corresponding to that of symmetry in arts expressed in space) which is at the very basis of rhythmical composition.

Obviously, the similarity may exist between vowel sounds, consonant sounds, or both; more specifically, it is found either in initial consonants, in accented vowels, or in accented vowels plus final consonants. Properly speaking, the term Rime is applicable to all three cases; the first being distinguished as initial rime or Alliteration (German _Anreim_ or _Stabreim_); the second as Assonance (_Stimmreim_), the third as complete Rime (_Vollreim_). English usage commonly reserves the term Rime for the third class.

i. _Assonance_

Assonance was the characteristic coördinating element in the verse of the early Romance languages, the Provençal, Old French, and Spanish. Thus in the _Chanson de Roland_ (eleventh century) we find the verses of each _laisse_, or strophe, bound together by assonance. Frequently this develops into full rime by chance or convenience. The following is a characteristic group of verses from the _Roland_:

Li reis Marsilies esteit en Sarragoce. Alez en est un vergier soz l'ombre; Sor un pedron de marbre bloi se colchet: Environ lui at plus de vint milie homes. Il en apelet et ses dus et ses contes: "Odez, seignor, quels pechiez nos encombret. Li emperedre Charles de France dolce En cest pais nos est venuz confondre."

The following specimen of Old Spanish verse shows the nature of assonance as regularly used in that language:

Fablo myo Çid bien e tan mesurado: "Grado a ti, señor padre, que estas en alto! Esto me han buelto myos enemigos malos." Alli pieussan de aguijar, alli sueltan las rriendas. A la exida de Bivar ovieron la corneja diestra, E entrando a Burgos ovieron la siniestra. Meçio myo Çid los ombros e engrameo la tiesta: "Albricia, Albarffanez, ca echados somos de tierra!"

(_Poema del Cid._ Twelfth century.)

Maiden, crowned with glossy blackness, Lithe as panther forest-roaming, Long-armed naiad, when she dances, On a stream of ether floating,-- Bright, O bright Fedalma!

Form all curves like softness drifted, Wave-kissed marble roundly dimpling, Far-off music slowly winged, Gently rising, gently sinking,-- Bright, O bright Fedalma!

(GEORGE ELIOT: Song from _The Spanish Gypsy_, book i.)

This song was written in avowed imitation of the Spanish verse, illustrating its prevailingly trochaic rhythm as well as alliteration. Elsewhere verse bound together only by assonance is almost unknown in English poetry. In the _Contemporary Review_ for November, 1894, Mr. William Larminie has an interesting article giving a favorable account of the use of assonance in Celtic (Irish) verse, and proposing its larger use in English poetry, as a relief from the--to him--almost cloying elaborateness of rime.

In the following specimen, assonance seems in some measure to take the place of rime.

Haply, the river of Time-- As it grows, as the towns on its marge Fling their wavering lights On a wider, statelier stream-- May acquire, if not the calm Of its early mountainous shore, Yet a solemn peace of its own.

And the width of the waters, the hush Of the gray expanse where he floats, Freshening its current and spotted with foam As it draws to the ocean, may strike Peace to the soul of the man on its breast,-- As the pale waste widens around him, As the banks fade dimmer away, As the stars come out, and the night-wind Brings up the stream Murmurs and scents of the infinite sea.

(MATTHEW ARNOLD: _The Future._)

ii. _Alliteration_

Alliteration appears sporadically in the verse of all literary languages, but as a means for the coördination of verse it is characteristic of the primitive Germanic tongues.

Hwæt! we nu gehyrdan, hu þæt hælubearn Þurh his hydercyme hals eft forgeaf, Gefreode ond gefreoþade folc under wolcnum Mære meotudes sunu, þæt nu monna gehwylc, Cwic þendan her wunað, geceosan mot Swa helle hienþu swa heofones mærþu, Swa þæt leohte leoht swa ða laþan niht, Swa þrymmes þræce swa þystra wræce, Swa mid dryhten dream swa mid deoflum hream, Swa wite mid wraþum swa wuldor mid arum, Swa lif swa deað, swa him leofre bið To gefremmanne, þenden flæsc ond gæst Wuniað in worulde. Wuldor þæs age Þrynysse þrym, þonc butan ende!

(CYNEWULF: _Crist._ ll. 586-599. Eighth century.)

This specimen represents the use of alliteration in the most regularly constructed Anglo-Saxon verse. The two half-lines are united into the long line by the same initial consonant in the important syllables. In the first half-line the alliteration is on the two principally stressed syllables, or on one of them alone (most frequently the first); in the second half-line it is commonly found only on the first. Alliterating unstressed syllables are usually regarded as merely accidental. Any initial vowel sound alliterates with any other vowel sound.

The most regular verse appears in Anglo-Saxon poetry of what may be called the classical period,--700 A.D. and for a century following,--represented by _Beowulf_ and the poems of Cynewulf. By the time of Ælfric, who wrote about 1000 A.D., there appear signs of a breaking in the regular verse-form. (See Schipper, vol. i. pp. 60 ff.) For example, two alliterative syllables often appear in the second half-line; one half-line may be without alliteration; alliteration may bind different long-lines together; or alliteration may be altogether wanting. There are also additions of many light syllables, resulting almost, as Schipper observes, in rhythmical prose. These tendencies resulted in the wholly irregular use of alliteration appearing in much of the verse of the early Middle English period, illustrated in the specimens that follow.

* * * * *

The origins of alliteration in Germanic verse are lost in the general mass of Germanic origins. It is almost universally regarded as a purely native development, although M. Kawczynski (_Essai Comparatif sur l'Origine et l'Histoire des Rythmes_; Paris, 1889) sets forth the remarkable opinion that the Germans derived their alliteration from the Romans. "We must remember," he says, "the schools of rhetoric existing in Gaul in the sixth and seventh centuries, where alliteration seems to have been held in esteem.... It became more and more frequent in the Latin poetry of the Carlovingian period, and it will suffice to cite here the following verses from Milo of Saint Amand:

'Pastores pecum primi pressique pavore Conspicuos cives carmen caeleste canentes Audivere astris arrectis auribus; auctor Ad terras ...'

It early passed to Ireland, and the Irish made use of it in their Latin poetry and in their national poetry. The example of the Irish was followed by the Anglo-Saxons, although these last had derived the same rules from the Latin writers.... The Anglo-Saxons, who sent the second series of apostles to the Germans, taught them the use of alliteration in poetry. The Scandinavians, on their side, learned it also from the Anglo-Saxons." This theory has found no adherents among scholars, and M. Kawczynski's illustrations are probably most useful in emphasizing the natural pleasure in similarity of sound found among all peoples. See below, on the related question of the origin of end-rime.

ðe leun stant on hille, and he man hunten here, oðer ðurg his nese smel, smake that he negge, bi wilc weie so he wile to dele niðer wenden, alle hise fet steppes after him he filleð, drageð dust wið his stert ðer he steppeð, oðer dust oðer deu, ðat he ne cunne is finden, driveð dun to his den ðar he him bergen wille.

(_The Bestiary_, from MS. Arundel. In Mätzner's _Altenglische Sprachproben_, vol. i. p. 57.)

See also the specimen from Böddeker, p. 14, above.

Cristes milde moder, seynte Marie, mines lives leome, mi leove lefdi, to þe ich buwe and mine kneon ich beie, and al min heorte blod to ðe ich offrie.

(_On God Ureisun of ure Lefdi._ In Morris's _Old English Homilies_, first series, p. 191. Zupitza's _Alt-und Mittelenglisches Übungsbuch_, p. 76.)

Kaer Leir hehte þe burh: leof heo wes þan kinge. þa we an ure leod-quide: Leirchestre cleþiað. [gh]eare a þan holde dawen: heo wes swiðe aðel burh. & seoððen þer seh toward: swiðe muchel seorwe. þat heo wes al for-faren: þurh þere leodene væl. Sixti winter hefde Leir: þis lond al to welden. þe king hefde þreo dohtren: bi his drihliche quen. nefde he nenne sune: þer fore he warð sari. his manscipe to holden: buten þa þreo dohtren. þa ældeste dohter haihte Gornoille: þa oðer Ragau. þa þridde Cordoille.

(LAYAMON: _Brut_, ll. 2912-2931. Madden ed., vol. i. p. 123. ab. 1200.)

The _Brut_ of Layamon represents typically the transition period, when alliteration and end-rime were struggling for the mastery in English verse. Schipper points out that we find in the poem four kinds of lines:

1. Simple alliterative lines in more or less strict adherence to the old rules.

2. Lines combining alliteration and rime or alliteration and assonance.

3. Lines showing rime or assonance, without alliteration.

4. Four-stress lines with neither rime nor alliteration.

The present specimen shows the preference for alliteration; that on p. 127, below, represents the introduction of rime.

In a somer seson . whan soft was the sonne, I shope me in shroudes . as I a shepe were, In habite as an heremite . unholy of workes, Went wyde in this world . wondres to here. Ac on a May mornynge . on Malverne hulles Me byfel a ferly . of fairy me thou[gh]te; I was wery forwandred . and went me to reste Under a brode banke . bi a bornes side, And as I lay and lened . and loked in the wateres, I slombred in a slepyng . it sweyved so merye.

(WILLIAM LANGLAND (?): _Piers the Plowman_, Prologue, ll. 1-10. B-text. Fourteenth century.)

_Piers the Plowman_ represents the revival of the alliterative long line, with fairly strict adherence to the old rules, by contemporaries of Chaucer, in the fourteenth century. For this verse, see further in Part Two, pp. 155, 156.

Apon the Midsumer evin, mirrest of nichtis, I muvit furth allane, neir as midnicht wes past, Besyd ane gudlie grene garth, full of gay flouris, Hegeit, of ane huge hicht, with hawthorne treis; Quhairon ane bird, on ane bransche, so birst out hir notis That never ane blythfullar bird was on the beuche harde: Quhat throw the sugarat sound of hir sang glaid, And throw the savar sanative of the sueit flouris; I drew in derne to the dyk to dirkin eftir myrthis; The dew donkit the daill, and dynarit the foulis.

(WILLIAM DUNBAR: _The Tua Mariit Wemen and the Wedo_, ll. 1-10. Ed. Scottish Text Society, vol ii. p. 30.)

See notes on Dunbar as a metrist, in this edition, vol. i. pp. cxlix and clxxii, and T. F. Henderson's _Scottish Vernacular Literature_, pp. 153-164.

Alliteration as an organic element of verse was especially favored in the North country, and its popularity in Scotland--illustrated in the present specimen from Dunbar--considerably outlasted its use in England. The famous words of Chaucer's Parson will be recalled:

"But trusteth wel, I am a Southren man, I can nat geste--rum, ram, ruf--by lettre."

We find King James, as late as 1585 (_Reulis and Cautelis_), giving the following instructions: "Let all your verse be Literall, sa far as may be, ... bot speciallie Tumbling verse for flyting. By Literall I meane, that the maist part of your lyne sall rynne upon a letter, as this tumbling lyne rynnis upon F:

_Fetching fude for to feid it fast furth of the Farie._"

The following specimen is one of the latest examples of fairly regular alliterative verse, written in England, that has come down to us. It is from a ballad of the battle of Flodden Field (1513).

Archers uttered out their arrowes, and egerlie they shotten. They proched us with speares, and put many over, That the blood outbrast at there broken harnish. There was swinging out of swords, and swapping of headds; We blanked them with bills through all their bright armor, That all the dale dunned of their derfe strokes.

(_Scotishe Ffielde_, from Percy's Folio MS. In FLÜGEL'S _Neuenglisches Lesebuch_, vol. i. p. 156.)

iii. _Rime_ (_i.e. end-rime_)

Full rime, or end-rime, involves the principally stressed vowel in the riming word, and all that follows that vowel. When there is an entire unstressed syllable following, the rime is called double, or feminine. Triple rime is also recognized, though rare.[11] End-rime being a stranger to the early Germanic languages, its appearance in any of them may commonly be taken as a sign of foreign influence. In general, of course, rime and the stanza were introduced together into English verse, under the influence of Latin hymns and French lyrics.

The functions of rime in English verse may perhaps be grouped under three heads: the function of emphasis, the function of forming beautiful or pleasurable sounds, and the function of combining or organizing the verses. It is with reference to the first of these that Professor Corson speaks of rime as "an enforcing agency of the individual verse." Under the second head rime is considered simply as a form of tone-color, and as furnishing a part of the melody of verse. The third function, by which individual verses are bound into stanzas, is, in a sense, the most important.

On the subject of the æsthetic values of rime, see the chapter on "poetic unities" in Corson's _Primer of English Verse_, and Ehrenfeld's _Studien zur Theorie des Reims_ (Zürich, 1897). The problem of the relative values of rimed and unrimed verse will come up in connection with the history of the heroic couplet and of blank verse. The objection always urged against rime is that its demands are likely to turn the poet aside from the normal order of his ideas. Herder, as Ehrenfeld points out, thought that this was particularly true of English verse, the uninflected language not providing so naturally for cases where thought and sound are parallel. A recent protest against the tyranny of rime is found in the article by Mr. Larminie, cited on page 115, where it is claimed that undue attention to form is thinning out the substance of modern poetry, and that the demands of rime should be relaxed. See also Ben Jonson's "Fit of Rhyme against Rhyme," for a humorous complaint against the requirements of rime upon the poet.

The origin of rime has been a subject of prolonged controversy. See the monograph by Ehrenfeld already cited; Meyer's _Anfang und Ursprung der rythmischen Dichtung_ (Munich, 1884); W. Grimm's _Geschichte des Reims_ (1851); Norden's _Antike Kunstprosa_ (Leipzig, 1898; _Anhang ueber die Geschichte des Reims_); Kluge's article, _Zur Geschichte des Reimes im Altgermanischen_, in Paul u. Braune's _Beiträge_, vol. ix. p. 422; and Schipper, vol. i. pp. 34 ff. Meyer's work is an exposition of the theory that rime was an importation from the Orient. In like manner, it has been held by many that the poetry of Otfried (the first regularly rimed German verse) was produced under Latin influence wholly, and that rime was introduced by him to the Germans (see the work by Kawczynski, cited p. 117). Herder (see Ehrenfeld's monograph) regarded rime as a natural growth of the instinct for symmetry in all human taste, closely connected with dance-rhythms, all forms of parallelism, and the like. Similarity of inflectional endings in similar clauses, he pointed out, would naturally develop rime in any inflected language. This view is in line with the tendency of recent opinion. Schipper says, in effect: "Is rime to be regarded as the invention of a special people, like the Arabian, or is it a form of art which developed in the poetic language of the Aryan peoples, separately in the several nations? In the opinion of the principal scholars the latter opinion is the correct one. The chief support of this opinion is the fact that traces of rime, in greater or less number, appear in the oldest poetry of almost all the partially civilized peoples. 'It is,' says C. F. Meyer, 'something inborn, original, universally human, like poetry and music, and no more than these the special invention of a single people or a particular time.' In fact, traces of rime may be noticed in the poetry of the Greeks, in Homer, Æschylus, Sophocles, Aristophanes, as also in the poetry of the Romans; in a more developed form it appears in the late middle Latin clerical poetry. In the Celtic languages, moreover, rime is the indispensable mark of the poetic form, even in the oldest extant specimens. The Latin poetry just referred to gives interesting evidence that rime is a characteristic sign of popular poetry. While the quantitative system became dominant, with the artistic verse-forms of the Greeks, in the Golden Age of Roman literature, the early Saturnian verses, written in free rhythms, already showed the popular taste for similarity of sound in the form of alliteration; and in the post-classical time, with the fall of the quantitative metres, rime again came to the front in songs intended for the people. The same element was made so essential a characteristic in the organization of verse in the mediæval Latin, that 'carmen rhythmicum' came to signify a rimed poem, and the later Latinists used the word 'rhythmus' precisely in the sense of 'rime.'"

Schipper goes on to inquire whether this mediæval Latin poetry was the means of introducing rime to the Germanic peoples. Wackernagel held it as certain that Otfried learned his rimes from Latin poems; but as Otfried declares that his poetry is intended to take the place of useless popular songs, it seems probable that he was not using an innovation, and that rime was already popular in Old High German. Indeed, it appears sporadically in the _Hildebrandslied_ and the _Heliand_. Grimm observes that it is theoretically unlikely that alliteration should have vanished suddenly and rime as suddenly have taken its place. The gradual development of rime from assonance among the Romance peoples suggests the same thing. The early appearance of rime by the side of alliteration is illustrated by C. F. Meyer (_Historische Studien_, Leipzig, 1851) from the Norse _Edda_, from _Beowulf_, Cædmon, etc. In the later Anglo-Saxon period rime was evidently securing a considerable though uncertain hold. The Riming Poem suggests what development rime might have had in English without the incoming of Romance influences. Grimm observes that, while to his mind alliteration was a finer and nobler quality than rime, there was need of a stronger sound-likeness which should hold the attention more firmly by its unchanging place at the end of the line. Schipper remarks, finally, that the fact that the use of rime in connection with alliteration was especially popular in the southern half of England, where the Romance influence was strongest, may suggest why in the more purely Germanic northern half alliteration remained the single support of the poetic form well into the fifteenth century.

The appendix to the work of Norden, cited above, is a fuller development of ideas frequently suggested by the sporadic appearance of rime in early Greek and Latin literature. Norden gives many examples of this "rhetorical rime," as well as of rime arising naturally from parallelism of sentence structure found in primitive charms, incantations, and the like. In particular he emphasizes the influence of the figure of _hom[oe]oteleuton_ as used in the literary prose of the classical languages. His conclusion is as follows: "Rime, then, was potentially as truly present in the Greek and Latin languages, from the earliest times, as in every other language; but in the metrical (quantitative) poetry it had no regular place, and appeared there in general only sporadically and by chance, being used by only a few poets as a rhetorical ornament. It became actual by the transition from the metrical poetry to the rhythmical (that is, the syllable-counting, in which--in the Latin--the chief consideration is still for the word-accent); and this transition was consummated by the aid of the highly poetic prose, already used for centuries, which was constructed according to the laws of rhythm, and in which the rhetorical hom[oe]oteleuton had gained an ever-increasing significance. In particular, rime found an entrance through sermons composed in such prose, and delivered in a voice closely approaching that of singing, into the hymn-poetry which was intimately related to such sermons. From the Latin hymn-poetry it was carried into other languages, from the ninth century onward. It is self-evident that in these languages also rime was potentially present before it became actual through the influence of foreign poetry; for in this region also there operates the highest immanent law of every being and every form of development,--that in the whole field of life nothing absolutely new is invented, but merely slumbering germs are awakened to active life." (_Antike Kunstprosa_, vol. ii. pp. 867 ff.)

Me lifes onlah. se þis leoht onwrah. and þæt torhte geteoh. tillice onwrah. glæd wæs ic gliwum. glenged hiwum. blissa bleoum. blostma hiwum. Secgas mec segon. symbel ne alegon. feorh-gife gefegon. frætwed wægon. wic ofer wongum. wennan gongum. lisse mid longum. leoma getongum.

(From the "Riming Poem" of the _Codex Exoniensis_.)

This puzzlingly early appearance of rime in Anglo-Saxon verse, in conjunction with fairly regular alliteration, is of especial interest.[12] "It is supposed," says Schipper, "that this new form has for its foundation the Scandinavian _Runhenda_, and that this was known to the Anglo-Saxons through the Old Norse poet, Egil Skalagrimsson, who was living in England in the tenth century, and who stayed twice in England at Athelstan's court, writing a poem in Northumbria in the same form." He also observes that the attempt to attain something like equality of feet and half-lines suggests the Norse models.

Sainte Marie, Cristes bur, Maidenes clenhad, moderes flur, Dilie mine sinne, rixe in min mod, Bring me to winne with self god.

(Verses attributed to St. Godric. ab. 1100.)

Godric, the hermit of Norfolk, lived about 1065-1170. These verses seem to give the earliest extant appearance of end-rime in Middle English. The Romance words in the hymn indicate the presence of French influence. (On this hymn see article in _Englische Studien_, vol. xi. p. 401.)

Woden hehde þa hæhste la[gh]e: an ure ælderne dæ[gh]en. he heom wes leof: æfne al swa heore lif. he wes heore walden: and heom wurðscipe duden. þene feorðe dæi i þere wike: heo [gh]iven him to wurðscipe. þa Þunre heo [gh]iven þures dæi: for þi þat heo heom helpen mæi. Freon heore læfdi: heo [gh]iven hire fridæi. Saturnus heo [gh]iven sætterdæi: þene Sunne heo [gh]iven sonedæi. Monenen heo [gh]ivenen monedæi: Tidea heo [gh]even tisdæi. þus seide Hængest: cnihten alre hendest.

(LAYAMON: _Brut_, ll. 13921-13938. Madden ed., vol. ii. p. 158. ab. 1200.)

On the verse of the _Brut_ see above, p. 119.

Ich æm elder þen ich wes · a wintre and alore. Ic wælde more þaune ic dude · mi wit ah to ben more. Wel lange ic habbe child ibeon · a weorde end ech adede. Þeh ic beo awintre eald · tu [gh]yng i eom a rede.... Mest al þat ic habbe ydon · ys idelnesse and chilce. Wel late ic habbe me bi þoht · bute me god do milce.

(_Poema Morale_, ll. 1-4, 7, 8. In Zupitza's _Alt-und Mittelenglisches Übungsbuch_, p. 58. ab. 1200.)

The _Poema Morale_, evidently one of the most popular poems of the early Middle English period, seems to be the earliest one of any considerable length in which end-rime was used regularly.

For other early examples of rime introduced into English under foreign influence, see above, in the section on the Stanza.

_Double and triple rime._

To our theme.--The man who has stood on the Acropolis, And looked down over Attica; or he Who has sailed where picturesque Constantinople is, Or seen Timbuctoo, or hath taken tea In small-eyed China's crockery-ware metropolis, Or sat amidst the bricks of Nineveh, May not think much of London's first appearance-- But ask him what he thinks of it a year hence?

(BYRON: _Don Juan_, canto xi. st. vii.)

'Tis pity learned virgins ever wed, With persons of no sort of education, Or gentlemen, who, though well born and bred, Grow tired of scientific conversation; I don't choose to say much upon this head, I'm a plain man, and in a single station, But--oh! ye lords of ladies intellectual, Inform us truly, have they not hen-pecked you all?

(_Ib._, canto i. st. xxii.)

So the painter Pacchiarotto Constructed himself a grotto In the quarter of Stalloreggi-- As authors of note allege ye. And on each of the whitewashed sides of it He painted--(none far and wide so fit As he to perform in fresco)-- He painted nor cried _quiesco_ Till he peopled its every square foot With Man--from the Beggar barefoot To the Noble in cap and feather; All sorts and conditions together. The Soldier in breastplate and helmet Stood frowningly--hail fellow well met-- By the Priest armed with bell, book, and candle. Nor did he omit to handle The Fair Sex, our brave distemperer: Not merely King, Clown, Pope, Emperor-- He diversified too his Hades Of all forms, pinched Labor and paid Ease, With as mixed an assemblage of Ladies.

(BROWNING: _Pacchiarotto_, v.)

What's a man's age? He must hurry more, that's all; Cram in a day, what his youth took a year to hold: When we mind labor, then only, we're too old-- What age had Methusalem when he begat Saul? And at last, as its haven some buffeted ship sees (Come all the way from the north-parts with sperm oil), I hope to get safely out of the turmoil And arrive one day at the land of the Gypsies, And find my lady, or hear the last news of her From some old thief and son of Lucifer, His forehead chapleted green with wreathy hop, Sunburned all over like an Æthiop.

(BROWNING: _The Flight of the Duchess_, xvii.)

These passages illustrate sufficiently the grotesque effects of double and triple rime in English verse,--effects of which Byron and Browning are the unquestioned masters. Professor Corson observes that the double rime is to be regarded as the means of "some special emphasis," whether serious or humorous. More commonly the effect is humorous, of course, as in _Don Juan_, where the rimes indicate "the lowering of the poetic key--the reduction of true poetic seriousness." The rimes in the _Flight of the Duchess_ Mr. Edmund Gurney has said sometimes "produce the effect of jokes made during the performance of a symphony." The specimen which follows illustrates the use of these double and triple rimes for a wholly serious purpose. Professor Corson remarks that in this case the rime serves "as a most effective foil to the melancholy theme. It is not unlike the laughter of frenzied grief." It is interesting to note that in the Italian language, where double rimes are almost constant, masculine rimes are sometimes used for grotesque effect in the same way that English poets use the feminine.

Perishing gloomily, Spurred by contumely, Cold inhumanity, Burning insanity, Into her rest.-- Cross her hands humbly, As if praying dumbly, Over her breast. Owning her weakness, Her evil behaviour, And leaving, with meekness, Her sins to her Saviour!

(THOMAS HOOD: _The Bridge of Sighs._)

Roll the strong stream of it Up, till the scream of it Wake from a dream of it Children that sleep, Seamen that fare for them Forth, with a prayer for them; Shall not God care for them, Angels not keep? Spare not the surges Thy stormy scourges; Spare us the dirges Of wives that weep. Turn back the waves for us: Dig no fresh graves for us, Wind, in the manifold gulfs of the deep.

(SWINBURNE: _Winter in Northumberland_, xiv.)

Into the woods my Master went, Clean forspent, forspent. Into the woods my Master came, Forspent with love and shame. But the olives they were not blind to Him, The little gray leaves were kind to Him: The thorn-tree had a mind to Him When into the woods he came.

(SIDNEY LANIER: _A Ballad of Trees and the Master._)

_Broken rime._

There first for thee my passion grew, Sweet, sweet Matilda Pottingen! Thou wast the daughter of my tu- tor, law-professor at the U- niversity of Gottingen.

Sun, moon, and thou, vain world, adieu! That kings and priests are plotting in; Here doomed to starve on water gru- el, never shall I see the U- niversity of Gottingen.

(GEORGE CANNING: Song in _The Rovers; Anti-Jacobin_, June 4, 1798.[13])

Winter and summer, night and morn, I languish at this table dark; My office-window has a corn- er looks into St. James's Park.

(THACKERAY: Ballads, _What Makes my Heart to Thrill and Glow?_)

_Internal rime._

Internal rime may be regarded on the one side as only a matter of the division of the verse, since if it occurs regularly at the medial cesura, it practically breaks the verse into two parts. On the other side, if used only sporadically, it is a matter of tone-color. It sometimes appears, however, in forms which entitle it to recognition by itself. The earliest of these forms is the "Leonine rime," which is said to have taken its name from Leoninus of St. Victor, who in the twelfth century wrote elegiacs (hexameters and pentameters) in which the syllable preceding the cesura regularly rimed with the final syllable. Obviously lines of this kind would easily break up into riming half-lines. Similarly, in septenary verse internal rime was often used together with end-rime, with a resulting resolution into short-line stanzas riming either _aabb_ or _abab_.[14] The following specimen from a celebrated ballad shows the popular use of a somewhat complex system of internal rime.

Be it right or wrong, these men among on women do complaine, Affirming this, how that it is a labour spent in vaine, To love them wele, for never a dele they love a man agayne. For lete a man do what he can, ther favour to attayne, Yet yf a newe to them pursue, ther furst trew lover than Laboureth for nought, and from her thought he is a bannisshed man.

(_Ye Nutbrowne Maide._ From Arnold's Chronicle, printed ab. 1502. In Flügel's _Neuenglisches Lesebuch_, vol. i. p. 167.)

Haill rois maist chois till clois thy fois greit micht, Haill stone quhilk schone upon the throne of licht, Vertew, quhais trew sweit dew ouirthrew al vice, Was ay ilk day gar say the way of licht; Amend, offend, and send our end ay richt. Thow stant, ordant as sanct, of grant maist wise, Till be supplie, and the hie gre of price. Delite the tite me quite of site to dicht, For I apply schortlie to thy devise.

(GAWAIN DOUGLAS: _A ballade in the commendation of honour and verteu_; at the end of the _Palace of Honor_.)

Douglas, like his countryman Dunbar, was something of a metrical virtuoso, and his use of internal rime in this ballade is one of his most remarkable achievements. In the first stanza there are two internal rimes in each line, in the second three, and in the third (here quoted) four.

I cannot eat but little meat, My stomach is not good, But sure I think that I can drink With him that wears a hood. Though I go bare, take ye no care, I nothing am a-cold, I stuff my skin so full within Of jolly good ale and old.

(Drinking Song in _Gammer Gurton's Needle_.)

The fair breeze blew, the white foam flew, The furrow stream'd off free; We were the first that ever burst Into that silent sea.

(COLERIDGE: _Rime of the Ancient Mariner._)

The splendor falls on castle walls, And snowy summits old in story; The long light shakes across the lakes, And the wild cataract leaps in glory.

(TENNYSON: Song in _The Princess_, iv.)

England, queen of the waves whose green inviolate girdle enrings thee round, Mother fair as the morning, where is now the place of thy foemen found? Still the sea that salutes us free proclaims them stricken, acclaims thee crowned .... England, none that is born thy son, and lives, by grace of thy glory, free, Lives and yearns not at heart and burns with hope to serve as he worships thee; None may sing thee: the sea-wind's wing beats down our songs as it hails the sea.

(SWINBURNE: _The Armada_, vii.)

Here the third and eighth syllables of each verse rime, giving the effect of a separate melody only half heard under that of the main rime-scheme. This is especially subtle where there is no possible pause after the riming word, as in the "sing" of the last line quoted.

Ah, broken is the golden bowl! the spirit flown forever! Let the bell toll!--a saintly soul floats on the Stygian river; And, Guy de Vere, hast thou no tear?--weep now or nevermore! See on yon drear and rigid bier low lies thy love, Lenore! Come, let the burial rite be read--the funeral song be sung: An anthem for the queenliest dead that ever died so young, A dirge for her the doubly dead in that she died so young.

(POE: _Lenore._)

I did not take her by the hand, (Though little was to understand From touch of hand all friends might take,) Because it should not prove a flake Burnt in my palm to boil and ache.

I did not listen to her voice, (Though none had noted, where at choice All might rejoice in listening,) Because no such a thing should cling In the wood's moan at evening.

(ROSSETTI: _Penumbra._)

(See also _Love's Nocturn_, p. 146, below.)

B. AS A SPORADIC ELEMENT (TONE-COLOR)

This division includes the use made of the qualities of sound for the purpose of adding to the melodiousness of verse, or of expressing in some measure the ideas to be conveyed by means of the very sounds employed. Sometimes this takes the form of alliteration, differing from that of early English verse only in that it follows no regular structural laws. On the other hand, it may take the form of _onomatop[oe]ia_, the figure of speech in which sound and sense are closely related,--as in descriptive words like _buzz_, _hiss_, _murmur_, _splash_, and the like. The term Tone-color is formed by analogy with the German _Klangfarbe_, an expression apparently due to the feeling that the sound-qualities of speech have somewhat the same function as the various colors in a picture. It is unquestionably true that the selection of sounds, whether vowel or consonantal, has much to do with the melodious effect of very much poetry. The poet may choose the different sound-qualities (so far as the sense permits) just as the musician may choose the varying qualities of the different instruments in the orchestra or the different stops in the organ.

Strictly speaking, this matter of Tone-color is not a part of verse-form in the same sense as matters of rhythm, rime, and the like; for it may appear in prose as well as in verse, and is not in any case reducible to formal principles or laws. Yet its use in actual verse is so important, and it is so closely related to the use of sound-quality in the form of rime and alliteration, that it seems well to include it here.[15]

Dr. Guest treats sounds as having in themselves the suggestion of more or less definite ideas, this suggestiveness being explainable by physical causes. Thus the trembling character of _l_ suggests trepidation, as in "Double, double, toil and trouble." _R_ suggests harsh, grating, or rattling noises; the sibilants are appropriate to the expression of shrieks, screams, and the like; _b_ and _p_, because of the compression of the lips, suggest muscular effort; _st_, from a sudden stopping of the _s_, suggests fear or surprise; _f_ and _h_ also fear, because of their whispering quality. Hollow sounds (_au_, _ow_, _o_, and the like) suggest depth and fulness. Guest quotes in this connection an interesting passage from Bacon's _Natural History_ (ii. 200): "There is found a similitude between the sound that is made by inanimate bodies, or by animate bodies that have no voice articulate, and divers letters of articulate voices; and commonly men have given such names to those sounds as do allude unto the articulate letters; as trembling of hot water hath resemblance unto the letter _l_; quenching of hot metals with the letter _z_; snarling of dogs with the letter _r_; the noise of screech-owls with the letter _sh_; voice of cats with the diphthong _eu_; voice of cuckoos with the diphthong _ou_; sounds of strings with the diphthong _ng_.

A. W. Schlegel went even farther in suggesting a subtle symbolism in sounds apart from descriptive qualities. Thus he regarded _a_ as suggestive of bright red, and as symbolizing youth, joy, or brightness (as in the words _Strahl_, _Klang_, _Glans_); _i_ as suggestive of sky-blue, symbolic of intimacy or love; and so with other vowel sounds. (See Ehrenfeld's monograph, p. 57.) In general it may be said that it is dangerous to attempt to explain the special effects of tone-color in verse, except where it is obviously descriptive, the appreciation of such effects being a subtle and a more or less individual matter. On this subject Mr. Gurney makes some interesting observations, in the essays cited above. He believes that the pleasurable effect of the sound-qualities in verse can never be dissociated from the sense of the words; that the most melodious verse cannot be appreciated if in a foreign language, unless read with particular expressiveness; and that the pleasure derived from what we roughly call melodious or harmonious verses is always due to the mystical combination of the appropriate sound with the poetic content.

Dr. Johnson ridiculed the idea of tone-color, as appearing in Pope's teaching that the sound should be "an echo to the sense." See his _Life of Pope_, and especially the _Idler_ for June 9, 1759, in which he describes Minim the critic as reading "all our poets with particular attention to this delicacy of versification." Such a critic discovers wonders in these lines from _Hudibras_:

"Honor is like the glossy bubble, Which cost philosophers such trouble; Where, one part crack'd, the whole does fly, And wits are crack'd to find out why."

"In these verses, says Minim, we have two striking accommodations of the sound to the sense. It is impossible to utter the first two lines emphatically without an act like that which they describe; _bubble_ and _trouble_ causing a momentary inflation of the cheeks by the retention of the breath, which is afterwards forcibly emitted, as in the practice of _blowing bubbles_. But the greatest excellence is in the third line, which is _crack'd_ in the middle to express a crack, and then shivers into monosyllables."

In an article on "Some Technical Elements of Style in Literature" (originally published in the _Contemporary Review_, April, 1885; reprinted in the Scribner edition of Stevenson's Works, vol. xxii. p. 243) Robert Louis Stevenson discussed some of the more subtle effects of vowel and consonant color, as appearing in both prose and verse. The combination and repetition of the consonants PVF he found to be

## particularly frequent. The pervading sound-elements in the two following

passages he analyzed by means of the key-letters in the margin:

"In Xanadu did Kubla Khan (KANDL) A stately pleasure-dome decree, (KDLSR) Where Alph the sacred river ran (KANDLSR) Through caverns measureless to man, (KANLSR) Down to a sunless sea." (NDLS)

(COLERIDGE.)

"But in the wind and tempest of her frown, W.P.V.F. (st) (ow) Distinction with a loud and powerful fan, W.P.F. (st) (ow) L. Puffing at all, winnows the light away; W.P.F.L. And what hath mass and matter by itself W.F.L.M.A. Lies rich in virtue and unmingled." V.L.M.

(SHAKSPERE: _Troilus and Cressida._)

No attempt has been made to classify the specimens that follow. Nor does comment seem necessary, in order to make clear the particular qualities of the sounds of the verse.

The heraudes lefte hir priking up and doun; Now ringen trompes loude and clarioun; There is namore to seyn, but west and est In goon the speres ful sadly in arest; In goth the sharpe spore in-to the syde. Ther seen men who can juste, and who can ryde; Ther shiveren shaftes up-on sheeldes thikke; He feeleth thurgh the herte-spoon the prikke. Up springen speres twenty foot on highte; Out goon the swerdes as the silver brighte. The helmes they to-hewen and to-shrede; Out brest the blood, with sterne stremes rede. With mighty maces the bones they to-breste. He thurgh the thikkeste of the throng gan threste. Ther stomblen stedes stronge, and doun goth al.

(CHAUCER: _Knight's Tale_, ll. 1741-1755.)

And in his house heap pearls like pebble-stones, Receive them free, and sell them by the weight; Bags of fiery opals, sapphires, amethysts, Jacinths, hard topaz, grass-green emeralds, Beauteous rubies, sparkling diamonds, And seld-seen costly stones of so great price, As one of them indifferently rated, And of a carat of this quantity, May serve in peril of calamity.

(MARLOWE: _The Jew of Malta_, I. i.)

Be kind and courteous to this gentleman; Hop in his walks and gambol in his eyes; Feed him with apricocks and dewberries, With purple grapes, green figs and mulberries; The honey-bags steal from the humble-bees, And for night-tapers crop their waxen thighs, And light them at the fiery glow-worm's eyes, To have my love to bed and to arise; And pluck the wings from painted butterflies, To fan the moonbeams from his sleeping eyes: Nod to him, elves, and do him courtesies.

(SHAKSPERE: _Midsummer Night's Dream_, III. i. 167-177.)

Now entertain conjecture of a time When creeping murmur and the poring dark Fills the wide vessel of the universe. From camp to camp, through the foul womb of night, The hum of either army stilly sounds, That the fix'd sentinels almost receive The secret whispers of each other's watch: Fire answers fire; and through their paly flames Each battle sees the other's umber'd face: Steed threatens steed, in high and boastful neighs Piercing the night's dull ear; and from the tents The armourers, accomplishing the knights, With busy hammers closing rivets up, Give dreadful note of preparation. The country cocks do crow, the clocks do toll, And the third hour of drowsy morning name.

(SHAKSPERE: _Henry V._, Chorus to Act IV.)

Forthwith the sounds and seas, each creek and bay, With fry innumerable swarm, and shoals Of fish that, with their fins and shining scales, Glide under the green wave in sculls that oft Bank the mid-sea. Part, single or with mate, Graze the sea-weed, their pasture, and through groves Of coral stray, or, sporting with quick glance, Show to the sun their wav'd coats dropt with gold, Or, in their pearly shells at ease, attend Moist nutriment, or under rocks their food In jointed armor watch; on smooth the seal And bended dolphins play: part, huge of bulk, Wallowing unwieldy, enormous in their gait, Tempest the ocean. There leviathan, Hugest of living creatures, on the deep Stretch'd like a promontory, sleeps or swims, And seems a moving land, and at his gills Draws in, and at his trunk spouts out, a sea.

(MILTON: _Paradise Lost_, VII. 399-416.)

Then in the key-hole turns The intricate wards, and every bolt and bar Of massy iron or solid rock with ease Unfastens. On a sudden open fly, With impetuous recoil and jarring sound, The infernal doors, and on their hinges grate Harsh thunder, that the lowest bottom shook Of Erebus.

(_Ib._, II. 876-883.)

Avenge, O Lord, thy slaughtered saints, whose bones Lie scattered on the Alpine mountains cold; Even them who kept thy truth so pure of old, When all our fathers worshipped stocks and stones, Forget not: in thy book record their groans Who were thy sheep, and in their ancient fold Slain by the bloody Piemontese, that rolled Mother with infant down the rocks. Their moans The vales redoubled to the hills, and they To heaven. Their martyred blood and ashes sow O'er all the Italian fields, where still doth sway The triple Tyrant; that from these may grow A hundredfold, who, having learnt thy way, Early may fly the Babylonian woe.

(MILTON: _Sonnet on the Late Massacre in Piedmont._)

And when they list, their lean and flashy songs Grate on their scrannel pipes of wretched straw; The hungry sheep look up, and are not fed, But, swoln with wind and the rank mist they draw, Rot inwardly, and foul contagion spread; Besides what the grim wolf with privy paw Daily devours apace, and nothing said.

(MILTON: _Lycidas_, ll. 123-129.)

The soft complaining flute In dying notes discovers The woes of helpless lovers, Whose dirge is whispered by the warbling lute. Sharp violins proclaim Their jealous pangs and desperation, Fury, frantic indignation, Depth of pains and height of passion, For the fair, disdainful dame.

(DRYDEN: _Song for St. Cecilia's Day_, 1687.)

Soft is the strain when Zephyr gently blows, And the smooth stream in smoother numbers flows; But when loud surges lash the sounding shore, The hoarse, rough verse should like the torrent roar: When Ajax strives some rock's vast weight to throw, The line too labors, and the words move slow; Not so, when swift Camilla scours the plain, Flies o'er th' unbending corn, and skims along the main.

(POPE: _Essay on Criticism_, ll. 366-373.)

Was nought around but images of rest: Sleep-soothing groves, and quiet lawns between; And flowery beds that slumberous influence kest, From poppies breath'd: and beds of pleasant green, Where never yet was creeping creature seen. Meantime unnumber'd glittering streamlets played, And hurled everywhere their waters' sheen; That, as they bickered through the sunny shade, Though restless still themselves, a lulling murmur made.

(THOMSON: _Castle of Indolence_, canto i. st. 3.)

Yes, I will be thy priest, and build a fane In some untrodden region of my mind, Where branched thoughts, new grown with pleasant pain, Instead of pines shall murmur in the wind: Far, far around shall those dark-cluster'd trees Fledge the wild-ridged mountains steep by steep; And there by zephyrs, streams, and birds, and bees, The moss-lain Dryads shall be lull'd to sleep; And in the midst of this wide quietness A rosy sanctuary will I dress With the wreath'd trellis of a working brain, With buds, and bells, and stars without a name, With all the gardener Fancy e'er could feign, Who breeding flowers will never breed the same.

(KEATS: _Ode to Psyche._)

Strike for the King and die! and if thou diest, The King is King, and ever wills the highest. Clang battleaxe, and clash brand! Let the King reign.

(TENNYSON: _The Coming of Arthur._)

He could not see the kindly human face, Nor ever hear a kindly voice, but heard The myriad shriek of wheeling ocean-fowl, The league-long roller thundering on the reef, The moving whisper of huge trees that branch'd And blossom'd in the zenith, or the sweep Of some precipitous rivulet to the wave, As down the shore he ranged, or all day long Sat often in the seaward-gazing gorge, A shipwreck'd sailor, waiting for a sail: No sail from day to day, but every day The sunrise broken into scarlet shafts Among the palms and ferns and precipices; The blaze upon the waters to the east; The blaze upon his island overhead; The blaze upon the waters to the west; Then the great stars that globed themselves in heaven, The hollower-bellowing ocean, and again The scarlet shafts of sunrise--but no sail.

(TENNYSON: _Enoch Arden_, ll. 577-595.)

But follow; let the torrent dance thee down To find him in the valley; let the wild Lean-headed eagles yelp alone, and leave The monstrous ledges there to slope, and spill Their thousand wreaths of dangling water-smoke, That like a broken purpose waste in air: So waste not thou; but come; for all the vales Await thee; azure pillars of the hearth Arise to thee; the children call, and I Thy shepherd pipe, and sweet is every sound, Sweeter thy voice, but every sound is sweet; Myriads of rivulets hurrying through the lawn, The moan of doves in immemorial elms, And murmurings of innumerable bees.

(TENNYSON: _The Princess_, VII.)

Heap cassia, sandal-buds and stripes Of labdanum, and aloe-balls, Smeared with dull nard an Indian wipes From out her hair: such balsam falls Down sea-side mountain pedestals, From tree-tops where tired winds are fain, Spent with the vast and howling main, To treasure half their island-gain.

(BROWNING: _Paracelsus_, IV.)

Good sappy bavins that kindle forthwith; Billets that blaze substantial and slow; Pine-stump split deftly, dry as pith; Larch-heart that chars to a chalk-white glow; Then up they hoist me John in a chafe, Sling him fast like a hog to scorch, Spit in his face, then leap back safe, Sing 'Laudes' and bid clap-to the torch.

(BROWNING: _The Heretic's Tragedy._)

'Will sprawl, now that the heat of day is best, Flat on his belly in the pit's much mire, With elbows wide, fists clenched to prop his chin. And, while he kicks both feet in the cool slush, And feels about his spine small eft-things course, Run in and out each arm, and make him laugh:... He looks out o'er yon sea which sunbeams cross And recross till they weave a spider-web.

(BROWNING: _Caliban upon Setebos._)

Master of the murmuring courts Where the shapes of sleep convene! Lo! my spirit here exhorts All the powers of thy demesne For their aid to move my queen. What reports Yield thy jealous courts unseen?

Vaporous, unaccountable, Dreamland lies forlorn of light, Hollow like a breathing shell. Ah! that from all dreams I might Choose one dream and guide its flight! I know well What her sleep should tell to-night.

(ROSSETTI: _Love's Nocturn._)

When the hounds of spring are on winter's traces, The mother of months, in meadow or plain, Fills the shadows and windy places With lisp of leaves and ripple of rain.

(SWINBURNE: Chorus in _Atalanta in Calydon._)

Till, as with clamor Of axe and hammer, Chained streams that stammer and struggle in straits, Burst bonds that shiver, And thaws deliver The roaring river in stormy spates.

(SWINBURNE: _Winter in Northumberland._)

But, oh! that deep romantic chasm which slanted Down the green hill athwart a cedarn cover! A savage place! as holy and enchanted As e'er beneath a waning moon was haunted By woman wailing for her demon-lover! And from this chasm, with ceaseless turmoil seething, As if this earth in fast thick pants were breathing, A mighty fountain momently was forced: Amid whose swift half-intermitted burst Huge fragments vaulted like rebounding hail, Or chaffy grain beneath the thresher's flail; And 'mid these dancing rocks at once and ever It flung up momently the sacred river. Five miles meandering, with a mazy motion, Through wood and dale the sacred river ran, Then reach'd the caverns measureless to man, And sank in tumult to a lifeless ocean.

(COLERIDGE: _Kubla Khan._)

FOOTNOTES:

[11] "Perfect rime" is a term applied to rimes between two words identical in form, but different in meaning. It is inadmissible in modern English verse, although it was considered entirely proper in Middle English times (compare Chaucer's--

"The holy blisful martir for to _seke_, That hem hath holpen, whan that they were _seke_."),

and is still common in French verse.

Schipper gives a separate paragraph also to "unaccented rime," where the similarity of sound belongs wholly to final, unstressed syllables. Generally speaking, this is inadmissible in English verse. Schipper quotes from Thomas Moore:

"Down in yon summervale Where the rill flows, Thus said the Nightingale To his loved Rose."

It might be said, however, that the final syllables of "summervale" and "nightingale" are not wholly unstressed; moreover, they are in the first and third verses of the stanza, where rime is not indispensable. Unaccented rime is most noticeable in some of the verse of the transition period in the sixteenth century, when the syllable-counting principle was so emphasized as to admit any license of accent so long as the proper number of syllables was observed. Thus, in the verse of Wyatt we find such rimes as "dreadeth" and "seeketh," "beginning" and "eclipsing," etc. See p. 10, above.

Imperfect rime, occurring where the vowel sounds are only similar, not identical, or where the consonants following them are not identical, is commonly regarded as an imperfection in verse form. The most common of these imperfect rimes are in cases where the spelling would indicate perfect rime (hence where, in many cases, the words rimed originally, but have separated in the changes of pronunciation), such as _love_ and _move_, _broad_ and _load_, and the like. For a defence of these "rimes to the eye," and other imperfect rimes, with a study of their use by English poets, see articles by Prof. A. G. Newcomer in the _Nation_ for January 26 and February 2, 1899.

[12] Rime also appears in a short passage in Cynewulf's _Elene_. Some have thought it a later interpolation, but Schipper thinks it indicates that Cynewulf was a Northumbrian. Grein believes him to have been the author also of the Riming Poem, but, as Rieger points out, the rimes of Cynewulf are of a much less systematic character. (On this see Wülcker's _Grundriss zur Geschichte der Angelsächsischen Literatur_, pp. 216, 217.)

[13] The second of these stanzas is said to have been added to Canning's song by Willian Pitt.

[14] See notes on the Septenary, in Part Two, p. 259.

[15] On the subject of Tone-color in English verse, see Guest's _English Rhythms_, chap. ii.; Lanier's _Science of English Verse_, part iii. ("Colors of English Verse"); Corson's _Primer of English Verse_ (chapter on "Poetic Unities"); Edmund Gurney's _Tertium Quid_ (essays on "Poets, Critics, and Class-Lists" and "The Appreciation of Poetry"); Professor J. J. Sylvester's _Laws of Verse_ (London, 1870); G. L. Raymond's _Poetry as a Representative Art_ and _Rhythm and Harmony in Poetry and Music_; and Ehrenfeld's _Studien zur Theorie des Reims_.