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
0210020002
Of that forbidden tree, whose mortal taste
0102010202
Brought death into the world, and all our woe,
1200020102
With loss of Eden, till one greater man
0102000202
Restore us, and regain the blissful seat,
0200020202
Sing, heavenly Muse, that, on the secret top
2202100201
Of Horeb or of Sinai, didst inspire
0200020102
That shepherd, who first taught the chosen seed
1200220202
In the beginning, how the heavens and earth
0002010202
Rose out of chaos.[2]
20020It 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
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
Gegrette Ðagumena gehwylcne,
hwate helm-berend,hindeman siÐe,
sw?se gesiÐas:"Nolde ic sweord beran,
w?pen to wyrme,gif ic wiste hu
wiÐ Ðam agl?ceanelles meahte
gylpe wiÐgripan,swa ic gio wiÐ Grendle dyde;
ac ic Ð?r heaÐu-f?reshates wene,
oreÐes ond attres;forÐon ic me on hafu
bord ond byrnan.Nelle ic beorges weard
oferfleonfotes trem,
ac unc sceal weorÐan Æt wealle,swa unc wyrd geteoÐ,
Metod manna gehwÆs.Ic eom on mode from,
ÞÆt ic wiÐ Þone guÐ-flogangylp 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.
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.
(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:
(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, Achitophel unites
The malcontents of all the Israelites,
Whose differing parties 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 monarchy too much;
Mistaken men and patriots in their hearts,
Not wicked, but seduced by impious arts;
By these the springs of property were bent,
And wound so high they crack'd the government.
(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! Miserable 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 hugest 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 difficulty and labour hard
Moved on, with difficulty and labour he.
(ib. II. 1021 f.)
The sweep
Of some precipitous rivulet to the wave.
(Tennyson: Enoch Arden.)
The sound of many a heavily 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: Œnone.)
Do you see this square old yellow book I toss
I' the air, and catch again, and twirl about
By the crumpled vellum covers; pure crude fact—
(Browning: The Ring and the Book, I.)
That plant
Shall never wave its tangles lightly and softly
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 message 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.
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 a4b3a4b3.
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 Phoenix 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.
(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?t
Þat is king and ever was,
Mote among us ali?t
And ?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 Phoenix 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?t,
velut maris stella,
Bri?ter than the day is li?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.)
(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?t;
Hit is of wel furre y-brog?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? a clerk a book forÞ bringe,
Þat prikked was in mony a plas;
Faste he sou?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 Phoebus 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
(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 ?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?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 ?e, sores, and God sent an angell
And commawndyd ?ow ?owr chyld to slayn,
Be ?owr trowthe ys ther ony of ?ow
That eyther wold groche or stryve ther-ageyn?
How thyngke ?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-?ens God or to greve ?ow,
For ?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.
