I have not attempted in this chapter to give elaborate illustrations of
the varieties of rhyme and stanza in English poetry. Full illustrations
will be found in Alden's _English Verse_. A clear statement of the
fundamental principles involved is given in W. H. Carruth's _Verse
Writing_.
Free verse is suggestively discussed by Lowes, _Convention and Revolt_,
chapters 6 and 7, and by Andrews, _Writing and Reading of Verse_, chapters
5 and 19. Miss Amy Lowell has written fully about it in the Prefaces to
_Sword Blades and Poppy Seed_ and _Can Grande's Castle_, in the final
chapter of _Tendencies in Modern American Poetry_, in the Prefaces to
_Some Imagist Poets_, and in the _North American Review_ for January,
1917. Mr. Braithwaite's annual _Anthologies of American Verse_ give a full
bibliography of special articles upon this topic.
An interesting classroom test of the difference between prose rhythm and
verse rhythm with strongly marked metre and rhyme may be found in
comparing Emerson's original prose draft of his "Two Rivers," as found in
volume 9 of his Journal, with three of the stanzas of the finished poem:
"Thy voice is sweet, Musketaquid, and repeats the music of the ram, but
sweeter is the silent stream which flows even through thee, as thou
through the land.
"Thou art shut in thy banks, but the stream I love flows in thy water, and
flows through rocks and through the air and through rays of light as well,
and through darkness, and through men and women.
"I hear and see the inundation and the eternal spending of the stream in
winter and in summer, in men and animals, in passion and thought. Happy
are they who can hear it."
"Thy summer voice, Musketaquit,
Repeats the music of the rain;
But sweeter rivers pulsing flit
Through thee, as thou through Concord plain.
"Thou in thy narrow banks are pent;
The stream I love unbounded goes
Through flood and sea and firmament;
Through light, through life, it forward flows.
"I see the inundation sweet,
I hear the spending of the stream
Through years, through men, through nature fleet,
Through love and thought, through power and dream."
I also suggest for classroom discussion the following brief passages from
recent verse, printed without the authors' names:
1. "The milkman never argues; he works alone and no one speaks to him;
the city is asleep when he is on his job; he puts a bottle on six hundred
porches and calls it a day's work; he climbs two hundred wooden stairways;
two horses are company for him; he never argues."
2. "Sometimes I have nervous moments--
there is a girl who looks at me strangely
as much as to say,
You are a young man,
and I am a young woman,
and what are you going to do about it?
And I look at her as much as to say,
I am going to keep the teacher's desk
between us, my dear,
as long as I can."
3. "I hold her hands and press her to my breast.
"I try to fill my arms with her loveliness, to plunder her sweet smile
with kisses, to drink her dark glances with my eyes.
"Ah, but where is it? Who can strain the blue from the sky?
"I try to grasp the beauty; it eludes me, leaving only the body in my
hands.
"Baffled and weary, I came back. How can the body touch the flower which
only the spirit may touch?"
4. "Child, I smelt the flowers,
The golden flowers ... hiding in crowds like fairies at my feet,
And as I smelt them the endless smile of the infinite broke over me,
and I knew that they and you and I were one.
They and you and I, the cowherds and the cows, the jewels and the
potter's wheel, the mothers and the light in baby's eyes.
For the sempstress when she takes one stitch may make nine unnecessary;
And the smooth and shining stone that rolls and rolls like the great
river may gain no moss,
And it is extraordinary what a lot you can do with a platitude when you
dress it up in Blank Prose.
Child, I smelt the flowers."