94. Poetry is the most beautiful and attractive form of writing, and in the highest sense is by far the most difficult, since it is not only complicated in form, but is highly emotional and stirs deeply the feelings of the reader. To write real poetry is, therefore, out of the reach of most of us, but to write verse is not so difficult as it is usually thought, and it is an excellent exercise in learning control of words. Verse making gives skill in manipulating language and, because of the need for ingenuity and flexibility in sentence construction and for variety in the choice of words, it helps in writing prose. More than this, you will find that some practice in managing verse-forms yourself will enable you to understand and admire more intelligently the poetry you read.

What is the difference between the sentences in this extract and ordinary prose sentences? If you read them over aloud, you will see that they are constructed on a definite plan. You notice that, as in pronouncing aloud every word of more than one syllable, you accent one of them more than the others (pÁragraph, assÚming), just so you accent some syllables in each line of the verse. Your voice naturally falls four times, thus, "I wÁnder'd lÓnely Ás a cloÚd" and in every line it falls the same number of times. The fact that there is a fixed and regular number of accents in each line makes it verse and not prose, and to write correct verse you must keep to a regular recurrence of accents in your lines. A line to which you naturally give three accents is said to have three feet; four accents, four feet, etc. A foot or pattern of syllables which is repeated to make up the line consists of an accented syllable and one or more unaccented ones. The foot is named according to the arrangement of syllables in it, but it is not necessary for you now to know the names, which come from the Greek and are hard to remember. Four of the best-known feet are mentioned here, with examples. The accented syllable is marked ´ and the unaccented [)].

[)I] wÁnde[)r']d lÓnel[)y] Ás [)a] cloÚd. Iambic [) ´].

TÉll m[)e] nÓt [)in] moÚrnf[)u]l nÚmb[)e]rs. Trochaic [´ )].

B[)u]t [)we] steÁdf[)as]tl[)y] gÁzed [)o]n t[)h]e fÁce th[)a]t w[)a]s dÉad. Anapestic [) ) ´].

BÍrd [)o]f t[)h]e wÍld[)er]n[)e]ss, blÍthes[)o]me a[)n]d cÚmb[)e]rl[)e]ss. Dactylic [´ ) )].

These names refer to the arrangement of syllables in the foot. There are other names that refer to the number of times the foot is repeated in the line. These also come from the Greek and are long and difficult, but are no more necessary for you to learn now than the names of feet. If you can pick out the arrangement of syllables which make up a foot, and the number of feet in a line, you can make a pattern for yourself out of any piece of poetry. The names and examples of the most common meters are here given for reference, however.

1. Three feet to the line, three-accent line or trimeter.

H[)i]s voÍce [)no] mÓre [)is] heÁrd.

2. Four feet to the line, four-accent line or tetrameter.

BuÍld [)me] straÍght, [)O] wÓrth[)y] MÁst[)er].

3. Five feet to the line, five-accent line or pentameter.

[)At] lÁst, w[)i]th hÉad [)e]rect, th[)u]s crÍed [)a]loÚd.

4. Six feet to the line, six-accent line or hexameter.

T[)h]e Ny['m]phs [)in] tÁngl[)e]d shÁdes of t['w]ilig[)ht] thÍck[)et]s mou['r]n.

Turn to any collection of poetry, and see how many of the feet and meters you can recognize. You will find, although the accent gradually recurs after a regular number of syllables, that it does not invariably do so; but you will also notice that this does not affect the accenting of the line. For instance, you give three accents to the line, "And I would that my tongue could utter," where there are ten syllables, but you also give three to the line, "Break, break, break." You must learn, therefore, to distinguish one variety of meter from another by the number of times your voice naturally makes an accent in reading it aloud; but for your own verse making it is a simpler and better rule to arrange your line so that there is the same number of syllables between each accent. You will find this a very general rule in all poetry, and it is a good guide for beginners.

You can take, then, any piece of poetry which you admire and make from it a pattern for yourself. Suppose you wish to write a verse describing a rainy day. You turn to Whittier's Snow-Bound as a suitable model:—

Reading the lines aloud, you see that they have four accents or feet, and each foot has two syllables, the second of which is regularly accented. Marking the accented and unaccented syllables as shown above, and then taking away the words, you have left a pattern by which you can test your own lines, namely u — u — u — u —. Now, if you wish to write in metrical or verse form the statement that the rain resounding on the roof sounded as though a great many little drums were being beaten, you might write,—

Your idea is now completely stated, and if you were writing prose you could stop there; but on consulting your pattern you see that you need one accented syllable to finish the last foot you have written, and one more foot to finish your last line. In your effort to add these three syllables, arranged in words which will complete the picture your lines suggest, you will readily hit upon some such phrase as overhead, on the roof, in a crowd, or noisily.

You will then have written two lines of correct verse; but in comparing them with the first two lines of Snow-Bound, your model, you will notice one difference. Of the last words in each pair of lines from Snow-Bound all but the first consonants are the same and have the same sound. These are called rhyming words. Nearly all verse rhymes. Words are considered to rhyme when they have the same accented vowel sound, different consonants preceding the accented vowel sound, and the same sounds following the accented vowel sound. One stumbling-block in the way of beginners in verse making is the fact that English words are spelled so differently from the way they are pronounced. Do not be misled by this. Remember that it is the accented vowel sound that must be the same in both words, and test your rhymes by saying them aloud. Thus vessel and wrestle, despair and bare, gaze and bays, bird and heard, rhyme perfectly, although they look so very different, but door and boor are not good rhymes, although they look just alike, nor are trough and bough, and through and plough. Rhymes usually occur at the end of lines, but not always, as in Snow-Bound, at the end of each pair of lines.

Just as syllables are arranged in feet and feet are arranged in lines, so lines are arranged in stanzas. The shortest stanza is two lines rhymed. This is called a couplet.

Somewhat more rarely, there are stanzas of three lines, called triplets, with all the lines rhyming.

The most common form of English verse is written in stanzas of four lines each. The rhymes may be arranged in all the combinations possible. The first and third and the second and fourth may rhyme, as in ballads:—

Or the first and fourth lines and the second and third may rhyme:—

Or the second and fourth lines may be the only ones to rhyme:—

In longer stanzas the rhymes may be arranged in almost any way, provided that they follow some regular plan. Notice, for instance, the arrangement of rhymes in Browning's well-known song:—

A convenient way of indicating briefly how the rhymes in a stanza are arranged is by the use of the letters of the alphabet: thus, a couplet would be said to have its rhymes arranged a a; a quatrain like the Brignal banks, a b a b; the stanza Now rings, a b b a.

There are, of course, many other combinations of syllables in feet, of feet in lines, and of lines in stanzas than have been given here, but these are the most common forms and those that you will be most likely to see in your reading and to use in your verse making.

Exercise 142.—I. Arrange the following in stanza form, letting yourself be guided by the recurrence of a regular number of feet in each line and by the rhyme.

1. Tiger, tiger, burning bright in the forests of the night, what immortal hand or eye could frame thy fearful symmetry?

2. The ship was cheer'd, the harbor clear'd, merrily did we drop below the kirk, below the hill, below the light-house top. The sun came up upon the left, out of the sea came he, and he shone bright and on the right went down into the sea.

3. We watched her breathing through the night, her breathing soft and low, as in her breast the wave of life kept heaving to and fro. Our very hopes belied our fears, our fears our hopes belied—we thought her dying when she slept and sleeping when she died.

4. Where the bee sucks, there suck I; in a cowslip's bell I lie; there I crouch when owls do cry. On the bat's wing I do fly after summer merrily. Merrily, merrily, shall I live now under the blossom that hangs on the bough.

5. I loved the brimming wave that swam through quiet meadows round the mill, the sleeping pool above the dam, the pools beneath it never still, the meal sacks on the whiten'd floor, the dark round of the dripping wheel, the very air around the door made misty with the floating meal.

II. Complete the rhymes in the following:—

When I was sick and lay a-bed
I had two pillows at my ——
And all my toys beside me lay
To keep me happy all the ——

How do you like to go up in a swing
Up in the air so blue!
Oh, I do think it's the pleasantest ——
Ever a child can ——

Through all the pleasant meadow-side
The grass grew shoulder high
Till the shining scythes went far and ——
And cut it down to ——.

The fight did last from break of day
Till setting of the ——
For when they rang the evening bell
The battle was scarce ——

In summer time in Breton
The bells they sound so clear.
Round both the shires they ring them
In steeples far and ——
A happy noise to ——

An excellent exercise for training your ear is to have some one read verse aloud to you, leaving you to complete the rhymed lines.

You have now learned a few simple rules about the construction of two or three of the most common forms of verse, and you may ask yourself what use you can make of them.

One way in which you can employ verse is in writing a short story or incident. The simplest anecdote is often so set off by telling it in verse that its interest is doubled; and you will find this sort of familiar, conversational verse unexpectedly easy to write. One very good variety of story to tell in verse is the fable:—

Exercise 143.—See if you can complete The Hare and the Tortoise from the beginning and the skeleton given below.

How everybody laughed to hear
The hare had planned a race
Against the tortoise, patient, dull,
And very slow of ——.

The hare assured them one and all,
"It's but that I may show
That I can sleep till near the dusk
And beat the —u —

— u — ran like the wind
And almost reached the goal,
u — u — amid the hay
And slept, the lazy ——!

u — u — the hare still slept
u — u passed him by,
u — u — u — again
It was too late to try

To reach the goal, or win u —
The tortoise by my troth
u — u — u steadiness
u — u — u sloth.

Exercise 144.—Try to put into verse, on this model, The Fox and the Grapes, The City Mouse and the Country Mouse, The Wolf and the Lamb, The Frog and the Stork, The Woodchopper and Death, The Goose that laid the Golden Eggs,—or any other fable you have known in prose.

Sometimes it may be interesting to you to try to write a letter or to send an invitation in verse. Some of the greatest writers have amused themselves by making such playful use of verse in letters. Here is part of a letter written from India by Bishop Phillips Brooks to his little niece.

Exercise 145.—1. Try writing a rhymed letter, describing an expedition in which you have taken part,—a railway journey, a picnic, a ride. Or write an invitation, from your class to the class below, to a spelling match, or entertainment you are giving.

2. Read The One-Hoss Shay, John Gilpin's Ride, Lochinvar, The Legend of Bishop Hatto, The Falcon—or any poem you know which tells a story, and try your own hand at turning into verse one of the stories you wrote in your study of narration.

The uses of verse which have been pointed out as possible to you are not out of the question for any one who can write at all. This is verse making and not poetry. But there may be times when you find that you can say what you mean better in a few words of verse than in many of ordinary prose, that you can express some aspect of out of doors, or some sensation, more vividly in verse than in any other way. You will notice that words seem often to have a greater force and life in poetry than in prose, and if you make use of this quality, you will be writing real poetry.

For instance, one day a third-grade class was asked to write a description of the conditions that morning in the woods near the school. It had rained and snowed the night before and everything was coated in ice. The wind was high and, shaking the branches violently, sent down a continuous shower of tiny pieces of ice, glistening in the sun and tinkling on the ice-covered snow. Many long compositions were written in the attempt to describe the effect such a day made on the observer; every one agreed that a little boy, eight years old, who wrote the following lines, had best expressed the singular spirit of the morning:—

Of course, that is not perfect verse, but it has a quality of real poetry in it.

You cannot expect great results from your verse making, but you will certainly profit by some practice in managing meters. You will have a greater interest in the construction of the poetry you read, you will have greater ease in writing prose, and you may perhaps succeed in expressing some feeling of your own in a simple stanza which will be worth writing for its own sake.