The variations in Tennyson's The Revenge should be carefully studied.

The ballad stanza is closely similar to the _abab^{4}_ and _abcb^{4}_

quatrains, and (as in the Sir Galahad mentioned just above) the two are

sometimes united. All three were much used by Wordsworth and many minor

poets for lyrics as well as narratives; the result is often an

undignified tinkle that takes the popular ear and "makes the judicious

grieve." The stanzaic unit is so easily carried in one's mind and so

rapidly repeats itself, that there is little opportunity for the

necessary pleasing surprises. But that the measure is capable of a

simple expressive music is evident from such examples as Wordsworth's

'Lucy' poems. These stanzas, both alone and doubled (as in To Mary in

Heaven), were favorites with Burns.

A striking musical effect was obtained by Swinburne in Dolores by

shortening the last line of a double quatrain:

Cold eyelids that hide like a jewel

Hard eyes that grow soft for an hour;

The heavy white limbs, and the cruel

Red mouth like a venomous flower;

When these are gone by with their glories,

What shall rest of thee then, what remain,

O mystic and sombre Dolores,

Our Lady of Pain.

Similar interesting variations are Coleridge's Love, _aba^{4}b^{3}_ and

Wordsworth's The Solitary Reaper.

The In Memoriam stanza (_abba^{4})_ is named after Tennyson's poem

(though that was by no means its first use), because Tennyson gave it a

peculiar melody, and, partly for this reason and partly from the length

and subject of the poem, almost preëmpted it for elegiac purposes.[53]

Characteristic stanzas metrically are these:

Calm and deep peace in this wide air,

These leaves that redden to the fall;

And in my heart, if calm at all,

If any calm, a calm despair.

And all we met was fair and good,

And all was good that Time could bring,

And all the secret of the Spring

Moved in the chambers of the blood.

Now fades the last long streak of snow,

Now burgeons every maze of quick

About the flowering squares, and thick

By ashen roots the violets blow.

+--------------------------------------------------------------+

| [53] On its origin and the twenty-five poems in it by |

| seventeen different poets, from Ben Jonson to Clough and |

| Rossetti, before the publication of In Memoriam, see E. P. |

| Morton in Modern Language Notes, 24 (1909), pp. 67 ff. |

+--------------------------------------------------------------+

One of the peculiarities of the stanza is the increased emphasis which

the rime of the third verse receives from its proximity to that of the

second; and this is noticeable both when there is a logical pause after

the third verse and when there is none:

'Thou makest thine appeal to me:

I bring to life, I bring to death:

The spirit does but mean the breath:

I know no more.' And he, shall he....

I sometimes hold it half a sin

To put in words the grief I feel;

For words, like Nature, half reveal

And half conceal the Soul within.

Run-on stanzas are very frequent; especially remarkable is the periodic

movement of the four stanzas of LXXXVI, leading up to the last line--

A hundred spirits whisper 'Peace.'

"By the rhyme-scheme of the quatrain," says Corson, "the terminal

rhyme-emphasis of the stanza is reduced, the second and third verses

being the most closely braced by the rhyme. The stanza is thus admirably

adapted to the 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.

There are as many as ninety-one such stanzas.... The poem could not have

laid hold of so many hearts as it has, had the rhymes been alternate,

even if the thought-element had been the same."[54] Examples for this

experiment are:

To-night the winds begin to rise

And roar from yonder dropping day:

The last read leaf is rolled away,

The rooks are blown about the skies. XV, 1.

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. XXVII, 4.

Compare the slightly different effect of the same stanza printed as two

lines, in Wilde's The Sphinx:

The river-horses in the slime trumpeted when they saw him come

Odorous with Syrian galbanum and smeared with spikenard and with thyme.

He came along the river bank like some tall galley argent-sailed,

He strode across the waters, mailed in beauty, and the waters sank.

+--------------------------------------------------------------+

| [54] H. Corson, Primer of English Verse, pp. 70 f. |

+--------------------------------------------------------------+

The name 'elegiac stanza' for the _abab^{5}_ quatrain comes apparently

from its appropriate use by Gray in the Elegy Written in a Country

Churchyard, but it is not altogether fitting; for it is simply the

quatrain movement of the English sonnet, where no lament is intended,

and it was employed effectively by Dryden in his Annus Mirabilis, and

has been often employed since, without elegiac feeling. For examples

see the stanza from Gray, page 55, and the sonnets on pages 129 f. An

especially interesting modification is that of Tennyson's Palace of Art,

_a^{5}b^{4}a^{5}b^{3}_.

_Five-Line Stanza_

Five-line stanzas are formed in various ways, e. g., _aaaba_, _aabba_,

_aabab_, _abbba_, _ababa_, _ababb_, etc., in lines of three, four, five,

etc., stresses.

_Six-Line Stanza_

Six-line stanzas are formed by similar combinations; the most frequent

is the quatrain + couplet, called, from Shakespeare's poem, the Venus

and Adonis stanza, _ababcc^{5}_ (compare the end of the English sonnet

and the ottava rima).[55] Familiar examples are Wordsworth's To a

Skylark and his fine Laodamia.

Since them art dead, lo! here I prophesy:

Sorrow on love hereafter shall attend:

It shall be waited on with jealousy,

Find sweet beginning, but unsavoury end;

Ne'er settled equally, but high or low;

That all love's pleasure shall not match his woe.

Venus and Adonis.

The same rimes with 4-stress verses are also common,[56] for example,

Wordsworth's

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.

+--------------------------------------------------------------+

| [55] Early examples may be conveniently found in the Oxford |

| Book of English Verse, Nos. 75, 96, 102, 108, 172. |

| |

| [56] For early examples see again the Oxford Book of English |

| Verse, Nos. 74, 140, 182, 184, 187. |

+--------------------------------------------------------------+

Another important 6-line stanza is the tail-rime or _rime couée_, a

stanza much used in the Middle English romances and chosen by Chaucer

for his parody, Sir Thopas. Harry Bailey, mine host of the Canterbury

pilgrims, called it 'doggerel rime.' The simple and probably normal form

is _aa^{4}b^{3}cc^{4}b^{3}_ or _aa^{4}b^{3}aa^{4}b^{3}_, which to save

space in the manuscripts was written thus:

Listeth, lordes, in good entent,

Of mirthe and of solas;

And I wol telle verrayment

Al of a knyght was fair and gent

His name was sir Thopas.

In bataille and in tourneyment,

Variations are extremely common: the _aaa^{4}b^{2}ccc^{4}b^{2}_

of Wordsworth's To the Daisy, _aaaa^{4}b^{2}ccc^{4}b^{3}_ of

Tennyson's Lady of Shalott, _aa^{3}b^{2}ccc^{3}b^{2}_ of S. F. Smith's

America, _aaa^{3}b^{2}ccc^{3}b^{2}_ of Drayton's Agincourt, and the

so-called Burns stanza, in which Burns wrote some fifty poems,

_aaa^{4}b^{2}a^{4}b^{2}_, e. g., To a Mouse and Address to the Deil.

_Seven-Line Stanza_

The most important 7-line stanza is the _rime royale_ or Chaucer (or

Troilus) stanza, _ababbcc^{5}_. In the Parlement of Foules, the Man of

Law's Tale, and Troilus and Criseyde, Chaucer made it a splendid vehicle

both for narrative and for reflective analysis, for humor, satire,

description, and all the gamut of emotions; in the fifteenth and

sixteenth centuries James I, Lydgate and Hoccleve, Henryson and Dunbar,

and Skelton, Hawes and Barclay employed it, largely in imitation of

Chaucer; Wyatt used it in his Vixi Puellis Nuper Idoneus; and

Shakespeare in The Rape of Lucrece. Since then it has not proved

attractive to the poets--though no reason for its disuse is

obvious--except Wordsworth (in his translations of Chaucer) and Morris,

Chaucer's latest disciple.

And by the hond ful oft he wolde take

This Pandarus, and into gardyn lede,

And swich a feste, and swiche a proces make

Hym of Criseyde, and of hire wommanhede,

And of hire beaute, that, withouten drede,

It was an heven his wordes for to here,

And thanne he wolde synge in this manere.

Troilus and Criseyde, Bk. III.

So she, deep-drenched in a sea of care,

Holds disputation with each thing she views,

And to herself all sorrow doth compare;

No object but her passion's strength renews;

And as one shifts, another straight ensues:

Sometime her grief is dumb and hath no words;

Sometime 'tis mad and too much talk affords.

Rape of Lucrece.

Dreamer of dreams, born out of my due time,

Why should I strive to set the crooked straight?

Let it suffice me that my murmuring rhyme

Beats with light wing against the ivory gate,

Telling a tale not too importunate

To those who in the sleepy region stay,

Lulled by the singer of an empty day.

MORRIS, Earthly Paradise.

In comparison with the formality of Shakespeare's and the evenness of

Morris's, the ease and smoothness of Chaucer's stanza are striking.

Wyatt's stanzas are musical in their way.

_Eight-Line Stanza_

Eight-line stanzas are variously formed--chiefly by the doubling of

quatrains, sometimes with different rimes, as _ababcdcd_, sometimes

preserving one or another or both rimes, as _ababbcbc_, _abcbdbeb_,

_ababacac_, _abababab_, etc. Other varieties are _abcdabcd_ (Rossetti)

and _aaabcccb_ (tail-rime), and _aabbccdd_.

One of the commonest 8-line stanzas is that imported from Italy and

called _ottava rima_, _abababcc_. It has been charged with tediousness,

and tedious it may become if not sedulously varied. It was introduced,

along with so much else from Italy, by Wyatt, and was then employed for

different purposes by Sidney, Spenser, Daniel, and others.[57] At the

close of the eighteenth century it enjoyed a rebirth. "It had already

been used by Harrington, Drayton, Fairfax (in his translation of Tasso's

Jerusalem Delivered), and ... in later times by Gay; and it had even

been used by Frere's contemporary, William Tennant; but to Frere belongs

the honour of giving it the special characteristics which Byron

afterwards popularized in Beppo and Don Juan.... Byron, taking up the

stanza with equal skill and greater genius, filled it with the vigour of

his personality, and made it a measure of his own, which it has ever

since been hazardous for inferior poets to attempt."[58] Byron had first

adopted the stanza in his translation of Pulci's Morgante Maggiore,

which is itself in _ottava rime_. Beppo was written in 1817, and Don

Juan begun in the next year. In 1819 the first four cantos of Don Juan

were published; in 1820 Keats published his Isabella, and Shelley wrote

his Witch of Atlas, both in the same metre.

Those giant mountains inwardly were moved,

But never made an outward change of place;

Not so the mountain-giants--(as behoved

A more alert and locomotive race),

Hearing a clatter which they disapproved,

They ran straight forward to besiege the place

With a discordant universal yell,

Like house-dogs howling at a dinner-bell.

J. H. FRERE, The Monks and the Giants.

To the kind of reader of our sober clime

This way of writing will appear exotic;

Pulci was sire of the half-serious rhyme,

Who sang when chivalry was more Quixotic,

And revell'd in the fancies of the time,

True knights, chaste dames, huge giants, kings despotic,

But all these, save the last, being obsolete,

I chose a modern subject as more meet.

BYRON, Don Juan, IV, vi.

A lovely Lady garmented in light

From her own beauty: deep her eyes as are

Two openings of unfathomable night

Seen through a temple's cloven roof; her hair

Dark; the dim brain whirls dizzy with delight,

Picturing her form. Her soft smiles shone afar;

And her low voice was heard like love, and drew

All living things towards this wonder new.

SHELLEY, The Witch of Atlas.

+--------------------------------------------------------------+

| [57] There are two _ottava rime_ in Lycidas, one at the |

| close of the Blind Mouths passage and one at the end of the |

| poem. |

| |

| [58] A. Dobson, in Ward's English Poets, vol. iv, p. 240. |

+--------------------------------------------------------------+

_Nine-Line Stanza_

By far the most important of 9-line stanzas, and one of the finest of

all stanzas in English poetry, is the _ababbcbc^{5}c^{6}_ invented by

Spenser--a double quatrain of 5-stress lines plus an alexandrine. This

particular octave had been used by Chaucer in the Canterbury Tales, and

is sometimes referred to as the Monk's Tale stanza: the stroke of

metrical genius lay in adding the 'supplementary harmony' of the

alexandrine, by which the whole stanza climbs to a majestic close or

ebbs in a delightful decrescendo as the poet wills.[59] The long swing

of nine verses on three rimes, with the combined effect of the

interwoven rimes (_abab_ and _bcbc_) united by the couplet in the

middle, culminating in the unequal couplet at the close, the

extraordinary opportunity of balancing and contrasting the rime sounds,

and of almost infinitely varying the pauses--all these render the

Spenserian stanza incomparable for nearly every sort of poetic

expression.

+--------------------------------------------------------------+

| [59] On the Spenserian stanza see especially Corson, pp. 87 |

| ff. Lowell's characterization of Spenser's use of it is |

| interesting: "In the alexandrine, the melody of one stanza |

| seems forever longing and feeling forward after that which |

| is to follow.... 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" (Essay |

| on Spenser). See also Mackail's chapter on Spenser in |

| Springs of Helicon; and Shelley's praise in his 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. |

| This perhaps an aspiring spirit should desire. 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." |

+--------------------------------------------------------------+

After the Faerie Queene, the chief poems in this metre are: Shenstone's

The Schoolmistress (1742), Thomson's The Castle of Indolence (1748),

Burns's The Cotter's Saturday Night (1786), Scott's Don Roderick

(1811), Byron's Childe Harold's Pilgrimage (1818 et seq.), Shelley's

Laon and Cythna (The Revolt of Islam) (1817, 1818), and Adonais (1821),

Keats's Eve of St. Agnes (1820), and the opening of Tennyson's Lotos

Eaters (1833).

From the following examples only a limited conception can be gained of

the stanza's varied capabilities. Long passages should be read

together--and read, for this purpose, with more attention to the sound

than to the meaning--in order that the peculiarities of handling of the

different poets may be felt.

A gentle Knight was pricking on the plaine,

Ycladd in mightie armes and silver shielde,

Wherein old dints of deepe woundes did remaine,

The cruell marks of many a bloody fielde;

Yet armes till that time did he never wield.

His angry steede did chide his foming bitt,

As much disdayning to the curbe to yield:

Full jolly knight he seemd, and faire did sitt,

As one for knightly giusts and fierce encounters fitt.

Faerie Queen, I, i, 1.

With loftie eyes, halfe loth to looke so lowe,

She thancked them in her disdainefull wise;

Ne other grace vouchsafed them to showe

Of Princesse worthy; scarse them bad arise.

Her Lordes and Ladies all this while devise

Themselves to setten forth to straungers sight:

Some frounce their curled heare in courtly guise;

Some prancke their ruffes; and others trimly dight

Their gay attyre; each others greater pride does spight.

Ibid., I, iv, 14.

The whiles some one did chaunt this lovely lay:

Ah! see, whoso fayre thing doest faine to see,

In springing flowre the image of thy day.

Ah! see the Virgin Rose, how sweetly shee

Doth first peepe foorth with bashfull modestee,

That fairer seemes the lesse ye see her may.

Lo! see soone after how more bold and free

Her bared bosome she doth broad display;

Lo! see soone after how she fades and falls away.

Faerie Queen, II, xii, 74.

Or like the hell-borne Hydra, which they faine

That great Alcides whilome overthrew,

After that he had labourd long in vaine

To crop his thousand heads, the which still new

Forth budded, and in greater number grew.

Such was the fury of this hellish Beast,

Whitest Calidore him under him downe threw;

Who nathemore his heavy load releast,

But aye, the more he rag'd, the more his powre increast.

Ibid., VI, xii, 32.

O ruthful scene! when from a nook obscure

His little sister did his peril see:

All playful as she sate, she grows demure;

She finds full soon her wonted spirits free,

She meditates a prayer to set him free:

Nor gentle pardon could this dame deny

(If gentle pardons could with dames agree)

To her sad grief that swells in either eye

And wrings her so that all for pity she could die.

SHENSTONE, The Schoolmistress.

And hither Morpheus sent his kindest dreams,

Raising a world of gayer tinct and grace;

O'er which were shadowy cast Elysian gleams,

That played, in waving lights, from place to place,

And shed a roseate smile on nature's face.

Not Titian's pencil e'er could so array,

So fleece with clouds the pure ethereal space;

Ne could it e'er such melting forms display,

As loose on flowery beds all languishingly lay.

JAMES THOMSON, The Castle of Indolence, I, xliv.

The chearfu' supper done, wi' serious face,

They, round the ingle, form a circle wide;

The sire turns o'er, wi' patriarchal grace,

The big ha'-Bible, ance his father's pride:

His bonnet rev'rently is laid aside,

His lyart haffets wearing thin an' bare;

Those strains that once did sweet in Zion glide,

He wales a portion with judicious care;

And 'Let us worship God!' he says, with solemn air.

BURNS, Cotter's Saturday Night.

Now, where the swift Rhone cleaves his way between

Heights which appear as lovers who have parted

In hate, whose mining depths so intervene,

That they can meet no more, though broken-hearted;

Though in their souls, which thus each other thwarted,

Love was the very root of the fond rage

Which blighted their life's bloom, and then departed:

Itself expired, but leaving them an age

Of years all winters,--war within themselves to wage.

BYRON, Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, III, xciv.

(Childe Harold begins with many deliberate imitations of Spenser's

language and style, but soon neglects them. Here perhaps more than in

any other metre the tone and subject of the poem determine the movement

of the stanza. The above is but one example of Byron's great variety.)

The One remains, the many change and pass;

Heaven's light forever shines, earth's shadows fly;

Life, like a dome of many-colored glass,

Stains the white radiance of eternity,

Until Death tramples it to fragments.--Die,

If thou wouldst be with them that thou dost seek!

Follow where all is fled!--Rome's azure sky,

Flowers, ruins, statues, music, words, are weak

The glory they transfuse with fitting truth to speak.

SHELLEY, Adonais, lii.

The ancient Beadsman heard the prelude soft;

And so it chanced, for many a door was wide,

From hurry to and fro. Soon, up aloft,

The silver, snarling trumpets 'gan to chide:

The level chambers, ready with their pride,

Were flowing to receive a thousand guests:

The carvéd angels, ever eager-eyed,

Stared, where upon their head the cornice rests,

With hair blown back, and wings put cross-wise on their breasts.

KEATS, Eve of St. Agnes, iv.

During the earlier half of the seventeenth century a small group of

poets, imitating Spenser both in substance and in external manner,

introduced a number of stanzas, some of them not to be admired, whose

chief characteristic is the alexandrine for a last line--e. g.,

_abababcc^{5}c^{6}_, _ababcc^{5}c^{6}_, _ababbcc^{5}c^{6}_, and

_ababbc^{5}c^{6}_ (which last is that of Milton's On the Death of a

Fair Infant, The Passion, and the introduction to On the Morning of

Christ's Nativity). Another modification is that of Milton's Ode

itself, _aa^{3}b^{5}cc^{3}b^{5}d^{4}d^{6}_. Matthew Prior attempted to

improve the Spenserian stanza in his Ode on the Battle of Ramillies

by a rime scheme (suggested perhaps by the English sonnet)

_ababcdcde^{5}e^{6}_--of which Dr. Johnson says: "He has altered the

stanza of Spenser, as a house is altered by building another house in

its place of a different form." Still farther from the Spenserian

original, but probably a development from it, is Shelley's To a Skylark

_abab^{3}b^{6}_ (mainly in falling rhythm); and an extension of this

last is Swinburne's Hertha (see above, page 81) _abab^{2}b^{6}_ in

triple rising rhythm.

_Fourteen-Line Stanza: Sonnet_

A sonnet is a moment's monument,--

Memorial from the Soul's eternity

To one dead deathless hour. Look that it be,

Whether for lustral rite or dire portent,

Of its own arduous fulness reverent:

Carve it in ivory or in ebony,

As Day or Night may rule, and let Time see

Its flowering crest impearled and orient.

A sonnet is a coin: its face reveals

The soul,--its converse, to what Power 'tis due:--

Whether for tribute to the august appeals

Of Life, or dower in Love's high retinue,

It serve; or, 'mid the dark wharf's cavernous breath,

In Charon's palm it pay the toll to Death.

DANTE GABRIEL ROSETTI.

The sonnet is a world, where feelings caught

In webs of phantasy, combine and fuse

Their kindred elements 'neath mystic dews

Shed from the ether round man's dwelling wrought;

Distilling heart's content, star-fragrance fraught

With influences from breathing fires

Of heaven in everlasting endless gyres

Enfolding and encircling orbs of thought.

JOHN ADDINGTON SYMONDS.

A sonnet is a wave of melody:

From heaving waters of the impassioned soul

A billow of tidal music one and whole

Flows, in the "octave"; then, returning free,

Its ebbing surges in the "sestet" roll

Back to the deeps of Life's tumultuous sea.

THEODORE WATTS-DUNTON.

It is the pure white diamond Dante brought

To Beatrice; the sapphire Laura wore

When Petrarch cut it sparkling out of thought;

The ruby Shakespeare hewed from his heart's core;

The dark, deep emerald that Rossetti wrought

For his own soul, to wear for evermore.

EUGENE LEE-HAMILTON.[60]

+--------------------------------------------------------------+

| [60] See also the collection of Sonnets on the Sonnet, |

| edited by M. Russell, London and New York, 1898. |

+--------------------------------------------------------------+

The only English stanza that can be said to rival the Spenserian in

artistic merit is the sonnet: but the two are for very different

purposes, the one being nearly always used in long, clearly connected

series, generally narrative, the other nearly always as an independent

poem. Even when sonnets are written in 'sequences,' the relation of the

individual sonnets to each other is rarely very close; the unity of the

whole sequence (as in Rossetti's House of Life, for example, or Mrs.

Browning's Sonnets from the Portuguese) is one merely of general tone

and subject. Some of Shakespeare's sonnets are bound together by an

intimate unity like stanzas of one poem; others are completely detached.

Occasionally a poem is composed of three or four sonnet-stanzas, as

Leigh Hunt's The Fish, the Man, and the Spirit, but even then each

sonnet remains an independent whole.

The word 'sonnet,' borrowed with the metrical form from Italy in the

late sixteenth century,[61] was at first used loosely for almost any

short poem on love not obviously a 'song'; but soon the term became

restricted to a poem of fourteen 5-stress iambic lines arranged

according to one of two definite rime schemes or their modifications.

These two rime schemes are the original Italian _abba abba cde cde_ and

the English _abab cdcd efef gg_.

+--------------------------------------------------------------+

| [61] On the origin of the sonnet in Italy (Sicily) see the |

| references in Alden's English Verse, p. 267. Still a |

| standard work is C. Tomlinson's The Sonnet, London, 1874. |

+--------------------------------------------------------------+

* * * * *

_Italian Sonnet._ The organization of the subject matter of an Italian

sonnet is (at least theoretically) as fixed as that of the rimes. The

whole should aim to convey without irrelevant detail a single thought or

feeling. The first quatrain, _abba_, should introduce the subject; the

second, _abba_, should develop it to a certain point, at which a pause

occurs; such is the octave. The sestet continues in the first tercet,

_cde_, the thought or feeling in a new direction or from a new point of

view, and in the second, _cde_, brings it to a full conclusion.[62] The

rime sounds of the octave and those of the sestet should be harmonious

but not closely similar.

+--------------------------------------------------------------+

| [62] Elaborate rules for the sonnet are given by William |

| Sharp in the introduction to his Sonnets of the Century, and |

| by Mark Pattison in the introduction to his edition of |

| Milton's sonnets. There is valuable matter in the |

| Introduction of J. S. Smart's The Sonnets of Milton, |

| Glasgow, 1921. Compare also the 'divisioni' of Dante's |

| sonnets in the Vita Nuova. |

+--------------------------------------------------------------+

It stands to reason that very few poets have enslaved themselves to such

an imperious master without assuming certain liberties. Very few sonnets

of any poetic value can be found conforming strictly to all these

requirements. But the general purport of the formal division may be seen

in Christina Rossetti's poignant "Remember"--

Remember me when I am gone away,

Gone far away into the silent land;

When you no more can hold me by the hand,

Nor I half turn to go, yet turning stay.

Remember me when no more day by day

You tell me of our future that you plann'd:

Only remember me; you understand

It will be late to counsel then or pray.

Yet if you should forget me for a while

And afterwards remember, do not grieve:

For if the darkness and corruption leave

A vestige of the thoughts that once I had,

Better by far you should forget and smile

Than that you should remember and be sad.

The first quatrain says: Remember me when I am gone and we can no longer

meet and part as in life. The second quatrain adds: when we can no

longer enjoy the companionship of mind, planning what might have been.

The sestet continues: Nevertheless, do not let the memory of me become a

burden, especially if you ever learn what was in my living thoughts.

Most sonnet writers, while regarding the form as in the abstract

something almost sacred, have felt free to mould it in some measure to

the immediate demands of their subject--not all, however, with the same

success.[63] For the sonnet demands perfection, a single flaw almost

cripples it; and few have the absolute command of language necessary to

forge a single idea without irrelevance and without omission according

to so strict a pattern. Those who are too subservient to the form weaken

their poetic thought; those who, like Wordsworth often, are inobedient

to the form, produce a poem which is imperfect because it is neither a

sonnet nor not a sonnet. Few have come as near the true balance as

Milton at his best. "A hundred Poets," says Sir William Watson,

A hundred Poets bend proud necks to bear

This yoke, this bondage. He alone could don

His badges of subjection with the air

Of one who puts a king's regalia on.

And yet Milton, while preserving the rime scheme, generally disregards

the thought divisions, and in half of his sonnets has the pause, not

after the eighth line but within the ninth. Commenting on this division

Wordsworth says: "Now it has struck me, that this is not done merely to

gratify the ear by variety and freedom of sound, but also to aid in

giving that pervading sense of intense unity in which the excellence of

the sonnet has always seemed to me mainly to consist. Instead of looking

at this composition as a piece of architecture, making a whole out of

three parts, I have been much in the habit of preferring the image of an

orbicular body--a sphere or dew-drop."

+--------------------------------------------------------------+

| [63] "In the production of a sonnet of triumphant success, |

| heart, head, and hand must be right." Corson, p. 145. |

+--------------------------------------------------------------+

Such a close unity can easily be obtained from the Italian sonnet, as

hundreds of examples prove,--Milton's On his Blindness is a striking

case, with no full stop until the end of the fourteenth line,--but even

better for this object is the rime scheme invented by Spenser and used

in a hundred and twenty-one sonnets: _ababbcbccdcdee_. The Spenserian

sonnet, however, has found no favor with later poets.

Certain variations in the Italian form are regularly admitted as

legitimate. The quatrains must always rime _abba_, but the sestet may

rime _cdecde_ or _cdcdcd_ or _cdedce_ or _cdedec_, or almost any

arrangement of two or three rimes which does not end in a couplet. And

even this last caveat is sometimes disregarded by careful sonneteers. A

greater liberty is to vary the rimes of the octave to _abbaacca_. The

division of the sestet into two distinct tercets is very rarely

maintained; and that of the octave into quatrains is frequently

neglected with impunity. Thus the poet adjusts his theme to the strict

rules of the sonnet much as he adjusts the natural rhythm of language to

the strict forms of metre; the one inescapable requisite being that in

neither may he lose hold of the fundamental pattern. But there is this

difference, that the sonnet form is extraordinarily firm, and breaks if

forced very far from normal. _How_ far one may go can be determined only

in special cases, for "the mighty masters are a law unto themselves, and

the validity of their legislation will be attested and held against all

comers by the splendour of an unchallengeable success" (Pattison).

The early Italian sonnets in English, those of Wyatt, Surrey, and

Sidney, are very irregular: Sidney's nearly always end in a couplet and

rime the octave _abbaabba_ or _abababab_ or _ababbaba_. Sometimes he

uses such a scheme as _ababbababccbcc_. Wyatt has one rimed

_abbaaccacddcee_, and Surrey one _ababababababaa_.

Donne's Holy Sonnets (written about 1617, though not printed till 1633,

1635) were regular in form, and were practically the first English

sonnets not concerned with love. Milton followed this tradition, and

expanded it to further themes--his only successful poems in lighter mood

are sonnets--occasional and political subjects--

... in his hand

The thing became a trumpet, whence he blew

Soul-animating strains--alas, too few!

On the formal side Milton handled the sonnet, as has been said, with the

freedom of a master.

From the time of Milton's (1642-58) very few sonnets were written in

England till towards the end of the eighteenth century. Then the form

was revived, under the original impulse of the Wartons in the

mid-century, by Bowles, and given a new life by Wordsworth and Keats. In

1850 Mrs. Browning published her Sonnets from the Portuguese, and in

1870 and 1881 Rossetti his sonnet-sequence, The House of Life. The

latter contains on the whole the truest representatives of the Italian

model.

The soote season, that bud and bloom forth brings,

With green hath clad the hill and eke the vale:

The nightingale with feathers new she sings;

The turtle to her make hath told her tale.

Summer is come, for every spray now springs:

The hart hath hung his old head on the pale;

The buck in brake his winter coat he flings;

The fishes flete with new repaired scale.

The adder all her slough away she slings;

The swift swallow pursueth the flies smale;

The busy bee her honey now she mings;

Winter is worn that was the flowers' bale.

And thus I see among these pleasant things

Each care decays, and yet my sorrow springs.

HENRY HOWARD, EARL OF SURREY.

With how sad steps, O Moon, thou climb'st the skies!

How silently, and with how wan a face!

What, may it be that e'en in heavenly place

That busy archer his sharp arrows tries!

Sure, if that long-with-love-acquainted eyes

Can judge of love, thou feelst a lover's case,

I read it in thy looks; thy languish'd grace,

To me, that feel the like, thy state descries.

Then, e'en of fellowship, O Moon, tell me,

Is constant love deem'd there but want of wit?

Are beauties there as proud as here they be?

Do they above love to be loved, and yet

Those lovers scorn whom that love doth possess?

Do they call virtue there, ungratefulness?

SIR PHILLIP SIDNEY, Astrophel and Stella, xxxi.

Death, be not proud, though some have called thee

Mighty and dreadful, for thou art not so:

For those whom thou think'st thou dost overthrow

Die not, poor Death; nor yet canst thou kill me.

From Rest and Sleep, which but thy picture be,

Much pleasure, then from thee much more must flow;

And soonest our best men with thee do go--

Rest of their bones and souls' delivery!

Thou'rt slave to fate, chance, kings, and desperate men,

And dost with poison, war, and sickness dwell;

And poppy or charms can make us sleep as well

And better than thy stroke. Why swell'st thou then?

One short sleep past, we wake eternally,

And Death shall be no more: Death, thou shalt die!

JOHN DONNE.

Cyriack, this three-years-day these eyes, though clear

To outward view of blemish or of spot,

Bereft of light, their seeing have forgot;

Not to their idle orbs doth sight appear

Of sun, or moon, or star, throughout the year,

Or man, or woman. Yet I argue not

Against Heav'ns hand or will, nor bate one jot

Or heart or hope; but still bear up, and steer

Right onward. What supports me, dost thou ask?

--The conscience, friend, to have lost them overpli'd

In liberty's defence, my noble task,

Of which all Europe rings from side to side.

This thought might lead me through this world's vain mask,

Content, though blind, had I no better guide.

MILTON.

Earth has not anything to show more fair:

Dull would he be of soul who could pass by

A sight so touching in its majesty:

This City now doth like a garment wear

The beauty of the morning; silent, bare,

Ships, towers, domes, theatres, and temples lie

Open unto the fields, and to the sky;

All bright and glittering in the smokeless air.

Never did sun more beautifully steep

In his first splendour valley, rock, or hill;

Ne'er saw I, never felt, a calm so deep!

The river glideth at his own sweet will:

Dear God! the very houses seem asleep;

And all that mighty heart is lying still!

WORDSWORTH, Upon Westminster Bridge.

Go from me. Yet I feel that I shall stand

Henceforward in thy shadow. Nevermore

Alone upon the threshold of my door

Of individual life shall I command

The uses of my soul, nor lift my hand

Serenely in the sunshine as before,

Without the sense of that which I forbore--

Thy touch upon the palm. The widest land

Doom takes to part us, leaves thy heart in mine

With pulses that beat double. What I do

And what I dream include thee, as the wine

Must taste of its own grapes. And when I sue

God for myself, He hears that name of thine,

And sees within my eyes the tears of two.

E. B. BROWNING, Sonnets from the Portuguese.

Of Adam's first wife, Lilith, it is told

(The witch he loved before the gift of Eve),

That, ere the snake's, her sweet tongue could deceive,

And her enchanted hair was the first gold.

And still she sits, young while the earth is old,

And, subtly of herself contemplative,

Draws men to watch the bright web she can weave,

Till heart and body and life are in its hold.

The rose and poppy are her flowers: for where

Is he not found, O Lilith! whom shed scent

And soft-shed kisses and soft sleep shall snare?

Lo! as that youth's eyes burned at thine, so went

Thy spell through him, and left his straight neck bent,

And round his heart one strangling golden hair.

D. G. ROSSETTI, Body's Beauty.

I met a traveler from an antique land,

Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone

Stand in the desert. Near them on the sand,

Half sunk, a shatter'd visage lies, whose frown

And wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command

Tell that its sculptor well those passions read

Which yet survive, stamp'd on these lifeless things,

The hand that mock'd them and the heart that fed;

And on the pedestal these words appear:

"My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:

Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!"

Nothing beside remains. Round the decay

Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,

The lone and level sands stretch far away.

SHELLEY, Ozymandias.

Here the rime scheme is peculiarly irregular, and the result is hardly a

sonnet at all. Shelley's manuscript shows that the poem cost him a great

deal of trouble.

* * * * *

_English Sonnet_. Out of the 'irregularities' and experiments of the

early English sonneteers there rapidly developed a new form based on an

entirely different principle of division, a series of three quatrains

_abab_, _cdcd_, _efef_, followed by a couplet _gg_. This looser

structure, simpler in music and in arrangement of subject matter, soon

became a favorite, was used by Surrey and by Sidney, and was adopted by

Shakespeare for his hundred and fifty-four sonnets[64]--hence it is

sometimes called the Shakespearian sonnet. "With this key," said

Wordsworth,

Shakespeare unlocked his heart.

But a sonnet in the stricter sense this 14-line stanza of course is not;

for it does not aim to possess the balance, contrast, and functional

organization of the Italian stanza. It has qualities of its own,

however, which give it its own distinction; and, moreover, it is frankly

what many sonnets of the stricter form, without the justification of a

difficult and definitely organic structure, are: simply a poem of

fourteen lines. For many of Wordsworth's and most of Mrs. Browning's

sonnets, though they have the rime-scheme of the Italian, have the

simple thought arrangement of the English sonnet.

+--------------------------------------------------------------+

| [64] Two of these are irregular, the 99th, with fifteen |

| lines (_ababacdcdefefgg_) and the 126th with twelve |

| (_aabbccddeeff_). Milton's On the Admirable Dramatick Poet, |

| W. Shakespear, still traditionally miscalled a sonnet, |

| resembles the latter, with its _aabbccddeeffgghh_ or eight |

| couplets. The 16-line stanza of Meredith's Modern Love |

| (_abbacddceffeghhg_) is sometimes loosely called a sonnet. |

+--------------------------------------------------------------+

Not many examples are necessary. Some, like the first two below,

preserve the metrical division of the quatrains, with the couplet for an

epigrammatic summary; others more or less obscure the division.

Combinations of the two sonnet forms not infrequently occur (as in the

last example below), but they are not approved by the critics or the

theorists, and generally they miss the excellences of both forms,

however successful they may be in other respects.

Leave me, O Love, which reachest but to dust,

And thou, my mind, aspire to higher things!

Grow rich in that which never taketh rust:

Whatever fades, but fading pleasure brings.

Draw in thy beams, and humble all thy might

To that sweet yoke where lasting freedoms be;

Which breaks the clouds and opens forth the light

That doth both shine and give us sight to see.

O take fast hold! let that light be thy guide

In this small course which birth draws out to death,

And think how evil becometh him to slide

Who seeketh Heaven, and comes of heavenly breath.

Then farewell, world! thy uttermost I see:

Eternal Love, maintain thy life in me!

SIR PHILIP SIDNEY.

That time of year thou may'st in me behold

When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang

Upon those boughs that shake against the cold--

Bare ruined choirs, where late the sweet birds sang.

In me thou see'st the twilight of such day

As after sunset fadeth in the west,

Which by and by black night doth take away,

Death's second self, that seals up all in rest.

In me thou see'st the glowing of such fire

That on the ashes of his youth doth lie,

As the death-bed whereon it must expire,

Consumed with that which it was nourished by.

This thou perceiv'st, which makes thy love more strong

To love that well which thou must leave ere long.

SHAKESPEARE, Sonnet 73.

Poor soul, the centre of my sinful earth,

Pressed by these rebel powers that thee array,

Why dost thou pine within and suffer dearth,

Painting thy outward walls so costly gay?

Why so large cost, having so short a lease,

Dost thou upon thy fading mansion spend?

Shall worms, inheritors of this excess,

Eat up thy charge? Is this thy body's end?

Then, soul, live thou upon thy servant's loss,

And let that pine to aggravate thy store;

Buy terms divine in selling hours of dross;

Within be fed, without be rich no more;

So shalt thou feed on Death, that feeds on men;

And Death once dead, there's no more dying then.

SHAKESPEARE, Sonnet 146.

When, in disgrace with fortune and men's eyes,

I all alone beweep my outcast state,

And trouble deaf heaven with my bootless cries,

And look upon myself, and curse my fate,

Wishing me like to one more rich in hope,

Featured like him, like him with friends possessed,

Desiring this man's art and that man's scope,

With what I most enjoy contented least;

Yet in these thoughts myself almost despising,

Haply I think on thee: and then my state,

Like to the lark at break of day arising

From sullen earth, sings hymns at heaven's gate:

For thy sweet love remembered such wealth brings

That then I scorn to change my state with kings.

SHAKESPEARE, Sonnet 29.

O deep unlovely brooklet, moaning slow

Through moorish fen in utter loneliness!

The partridge cowers beside thy loamy flow

In pulseful tremor, when with sudden press

The huntsman fluskers through the rustled heather.

In March thy sallow buds from vermeil shells

Break satin-tinted, downy as the feather

Of moss-chat, that among the purplish bells

Breasts into fresh new life her three unborn.

The plover hovers o'er thee, uttering clear

And mournful-strange his human cry forlorn.

While wearily, alone, and void of cheer,

Thou guid'st thy nameless waters from the fen,

To sleep unsunned in an untrampled glen.

DAVID GRAY, To a Brooklet.

If I should die, think only this of me:

That there's some corner of a foreign field

That is forever England. There shall be

In that rich earth a richer dust concealed;

A dust whom England bore, shaped, made aware,

Gave, once, her flowers to love, her ways to roam,

A body of England's, breathing English air,

Washed by the rivers, blest by suns of home.

And think, this heart, all evil shed away,

A pulse in the eternal mind, no less

Gives somewhere back the thoughts by England given;

Her sights and sounds; dreams happy as her day;

And laughter learnt of friends; and gentleness,

In hearts at peace, under an English heaven.

RUPERT BROOKE, The Soldier.[65]

+--------------------------------------------------------------+

| [65] Quoted by permission of Dodd, Mead & Co., owners of the |

| copy-right. |

+--------------------------------------------------------------+

_Complex Stanzas: the Ode_

Besides the stanzas described above, which are but the most familiar

or most important of the great variety of regular English stanzas,

there are others which, because they are peculiarly constructed or

not regularly repeated, may be called Complex. Such are, for

example, the 'trailing vine' stanzas of Spenser's Prothalamion

(_abba^{5}a^{3}bcbc^{5}dded^{5}ee^{3}ff^{5}_) and Epithalamion

(_ababc^{5}c^{3}dcde^{5}e^{3}fggf^{5}f^{4}hh^{5}_), and also the simpler

_ababcde^{5}c^{3}de^{5}_ of Keats' Ode to a Nightingale.

Many of these complex stanzaic forms, moreover, belong in the tradition

of the so-called Pindaric ode, imitated freely from the Greek choric

odes of Pindar. The closer imitations are in fixed though complex

stanzas regularly repeated, and are called Regular Pindarics. These have

first a strophe of undetermined length, then an antistrophe identical in

structure with the strophe, and then an epode, different in structure

from the strophe and antistrophe. The second strophe and second

antistrophe are identical metrically with the first, the second epode

with the first epode; and so on. The best examples in English are Ben

Jonson's On the Death of Sir H. Morrison, and Gray's Progress of Poesy

and The Bard.[66]

+----------------------------------------------------------------------+

| [66] |

| The rime scheme of the Progress of Poesy is: strophe and antistrophe |

| _a^{4}b^{5}b^{4}a^{5}cc^{4}d^{5}d^{4}e^{5}e^{4}f^{4}f^{6}_, epode |

| _aabb^{4}a^{3}ccdede^{4}fgfgh^{5}h^{6}_. The formula is three times |

| repeated. Note the unusual arrangement of parts in Collins' Ode to |

| Liberty and Shelley's Ode to Naples. |

+----------------------------------------------------------------------+

About the middle of the seventeenth century, Cowley, misunderstanding

the structure of Pindar's verse, invented another sort of Pindaric ode,

which is called Irregular because, as he himself explained, "the numbers

are various and irregular," and there was no formal stanzaic repetition.

The lines were long or short according as the thought-rhythm demanded

(or seemed to demand), and in respect to arrangement were not bound to

any formal pattern. This freedom, under skilful control, may well

produce felicitous results, but when not managed by poets of a strong

and sure rhythmic sense--as it was not by the many Cowleyan

imitators--it results merely in metrical license and amorphousness.

"That for which I think this inequality of number is chiefly to be

preferred," said Dr. Sprat, the first historian of the Royal Society,

intending no sarcasm, "is its affinity with prose." But this argument,

which is in part also that of the modern free-versifiers, is simply a

confusion of two functions, the verse function and the prose function.

But before very long Cowley's invention found a true master in Dryden,

whose To the Pious Memory of ... Mrs. Anne Killigrew (1686), Song for

St. Cecelia's Day (1687), and Alexander's Feast (1697) are justly

praised for their 'concerted music.' The example had in fact already

been set by a still greater master; for Milton with his early

experiments in unequal rimed lines (On Time and At a Solemn Music), his

incomparable success with the irregular placing of rimes in Lycidas, and

his choral effects both with and without rime in Samson Agonistes, had

shown what English could do under proper guidance. Then, after Dryden,

the regular Pindarics of Gray and certain of Collins' Odes helped to

carry on the tradition down to Coleridge's Dejection, Monody on the

Death of Chatterton, and Ode on the Departing Year, and its culmination

in Wordsworth's Intimations of Immortality ode (1807). After that, both

in time and in interest, come Shelley's Mont Blanc (1816) (which he

himself described as "an undisciplined overflowing of the soul") and

Tennyson's On the Death of the Duke of Wellington (1852) (which has at

least Tennyson's almost unfailing technical dexterity). The work of

Coventry Patmore in this kind of verse has not been generally approved.

This is partly because of the subjects on which he wrote and partly

because of his inability to compose lines of haunting melody--perhaps

his deliberate avoidance of them. But in certain poems like The Azalea

and The Toys the very intensity of the feeling both creates and sustains

and in the end justifies the 'irregular' metre.

3. BLANK VERSE

Perhaps three-fourths of the greatest English poetry is in the unrimed

5-stress line called blank verse--nearly all the Elizabethan drama,

Paradise Lost, some of the best of Keats and Shelley, Wordsworth's

Michael, The Prelude, The Excursion (the good with the bad!),

Tennyson's Princess and Idylls (notable poems of their age, though not

to be ranked with 'the greatest'), and Browning's The Ring and the Book,

together with most of the dramatic monologues. No other metrical form

has such an interesting history; no other form has manifested so great a

variety and adaptability for every kind of poetic thought and feeling.

These two facts alone--its bulk and its variety--would justify a much

fuller treatment than is possible here. But it will perhaps be

sufficient to follow rapidly in outline the development of blank verse,

with illustrations of the most significant stages, and then, in the

following chapter, to devote more attention to blank verse than to rimed

stanzas in the exposition of metrical harmonies and modulations.

The idea of writing unrimed verse was no doubt the most valuable result

to English poetry of the academic attempts, towards the end of the

sixteenth century, to write classical verse in English. It could be

pointed out triumphantly that all the splendid poetry of classical

antiquity--Homer and Lucretius and Virgil, Sappho and Catullus and

Horace and Ovid--had been independent of rime; and whatever might be the

disagreement on quantitative feet in English, it was impossible to deny

that English could successfully copy this element of the great classical

verse and recover, as Milton said, the ancient liberty "from the

troublesome and modern bondage of riming."

The movement had already begun in Italy with Trissino's Sophonisbe,

written in 1515, the first modern tragedy. It reached England in the

middle of the century with the influence of the Italian Renaissance

brought chiefly by Wyatt and Surrey. Surrey translated two books of the

Æneid (II and IV) into blank verse (published in 1557); Sackville and

Norton adopted it for the first English tragedy, Gorboduc (1565); and

then Gascoigne used it in his Steele Glas (1576) for general didactic

and satiric purposes. Thus the beginning was made, and it remained only

for the new form to justify itself by its children. Experiments

continued, with the first great achievement in Marlowe's Tamburlaine the

Great.

The early examples show plainly both the influence of the parent

couplet--for, as was said above, blank verse was written first as the

old couplet without rime--and the syllable-counting principle: the line

unit is prominent, there are comparatively few run-on lines or couplets,

and some of Surrey's verse, for example, though it has the ten syllables

then regarded as necessary, refuses to 'scan' according to more recent

practice because the stresses are wholly irregular. On the other hand,

there is often so great a regularity in coincidence of natural rhythm

and metrical pattern, reinforced by some awkward wrenches of the

conventional order of word and phrase, that the result is unpleasantly

stiff and formal.

The Greeks' chieftains all irked with the war

Wherein they wasted had so many years,

And oft repuls'd by fatal destiny,

A huge horse made, high raised like a hill,

By the divine science of Minerva:

Of cloven fir compacted were his ribs;

For their return a feigned sacrifice:

The fame whereof so wander'd it at point.

In the dark bulk they clos'd bodies of men

Chosen by lot, and did enstuff by stealth

The hollow womb with armed soldiers.

There stands in sight an isle, high Tenedon,

Rich, and of fame, while Priam's kingdom stood;

Now but a bay, and road, unsure for ship.

SURREY, Second Book of Virgil's Æneid.

This is not so much monotonously regular as intolerably rough and

unsteady.

For cares of kings, that rule as you have rul'd,

For public wealth, and not for private joy,

Do waste man's life and hasten crooked age,

With furrowed face, and with enfeebled limbs,

To draw on creeping death a swifter pace.

They two, yet young, shall bear the parted reign

With greater ease than one, now old, alone

Can wield the whole, for whom much harder is

With lessened strength the double weight to bear.

Gorboduc, Act I, sc. ii.

The Nightingale, whose happy noble hart,

No dole can daunt, nor fearful force affright,

Whose chereful voice, doth comfort saddest wights,

When she hir self, hath little cause to sing,

Whom lovers love, bicause she plaines their greves,

She wraies their woes, and yet relieves their payne,

Whom worthy mindes, alwayes esteemed much,

And gravest yeares, have not disdainde hir notes:

(Only that king proud Tereus by his name

With murdring knife, did carve hir pleasant tong,

To cover so, his own foule filthy fault)

This worthy bird, hath taught my weary Muze,

To sing a song, in spight of their despight,

Which work my woe, withouten cause or crime ...

The Steele Glas.

Note here the monotonous pauses, indicated by the original punctuation.

Marlowe, inheriting the defects of his predecessors, succeeded, by

virtue of his "plastic energy and power of harmonious modulation" in

recreating the measure. He found it "monotonous, monosyllabic, and

divided into five feet of tolerably regular alternate short and long [i.

e., unstressed and stressed]. He left it various in form and structure,

sometimes redundant by a syllable, sometimes deficient, enriched with

unexpected emphases and changes in the beat. He found no sequence or

attempt at periods; one line succeeded another with insipid regularity,

and all were made after the same model. He grouped his verse according

to the sense, obeying an internal law of melody, and allowing the

thought contained in his words to dominate their form. He did not force

his metre to preserve a fixed and unalterable type, but suffered it to

assume most variable modulations, the whole beauty of which depended

upon their perfect adaptation to the current of his ideal."[67] No metre

responds so readily and so completely to a poet's endowment of genius as

blank verse, and hence the secret of Marlowe's improvements over his

predecessors is his superior poetic gift. He seems to have felt and

thought and written with an enormous imaginative power; by making his

verse an organic expression of this power he achieved an almost new

medium, ranging in variety from the simplicity and pathos of--

Mortimer! who talks of Mortimer,

Who wounds me with the name of Mortimer,

That bloody man?

to the "swelling bombast of bragging blank verse" (Thomas Nash's hostile

phrase) in Tamburlaine--

No! for I shall not die.

See, where my slave, the ugly monster, Death,

Shaking and quivering, pale and wan for fear,

Stands aiming at me with his murdering dart,

Who flies away at every glance I give,

And, when I look away, comes stealing on.

Villain, away, and hie thee to the field!

I and mine army come to load thy back

With souls of thousand mangled carcasses.

Look, where he goes; but see, he comes again,

Because I stay: Techelles, let us march

And weary Death with bearing souls to hell.

Part II, Act V, sc. iii.

+--------------------------------------------------------------+

| [67] J. A. Symonds, Blank Verse, London, 1895, p. 23. (This |

| little volume contains a valuable, though incomplete and |

| somewhat extravagant, summary of the history of English |

| blank verse.) |

+--------------------------------------------------------------+

But even in Marlowe the 'mighty line' is still felt as the unit. All his

volubility, his extravagance, his passion, his occasional tenderness did

but develop the line to its fullest possibilities; the larger unit of

the long harmonious period or 'blank verse paragraph' is rare and

exceptional with him, though credit is due him for foreshadowing this

also:

Now, lords, our loving friends and countrymen,

Welcome to England all, with prosperous winds;

Our kindest friends in Belgia have we left,

To cope with friends at home; a heavy case

When force to force is knit, and sword and glaive

In civil broils make kin and countrymen

Slaughter themselves in others, and their sides

With their own weapons gored.

Edward II, Act IV, sc. iv.

Shakespeare's blank verse is the supreme manifestation of the measure

for dramatic purposes. In his plays it modulates and adapts itself to

the changing emotions of every speaker, "from merely colloquial

dialogue to strains of impassioned soliloquy, from comic repartee to

tragic eloquence, from terse epigrams to elaborate descriptions." It is

customary to distinguish three 'periods' in Shakespeare's blank verse,

corresponding closely to his whole artistic development: first, the more

formal, 'single-moulded' line of the early plays; second, the perfect

freedom and mastery of the great tragedies; and, third, the daring

liberties, verging on license, of the later plays. These distinctions

have, of course, no more absolute value than all similar classifications

of impalpable modifications, but they at least suggest the underlying

truth that Shakespeare began as a beginner, and then, having mastered

the difficulties and subtleties of the form, treated it with the easy

familiarity of a master. To illustrate these developments adequately

would require pages of quotation; but one may compare the restricted

movement of such a passage as this from Two Gentlemen of Verona (III,

i)--

Proteus, I thank thee for thine honest care;

Which to requite, command me while I live.

This love of theirs myself have often seen,

Haply when they have judg'd me fast asleep,

And oftentimes have purpos'd to forbid

Sir Valentine her company and my court;

But, fearing lest my jealous aim might err,

And so unworthily disgrace the man,--

A rashness that I ever yet have shunn'd,--

I gave him gentle looks, thereby to find

That which thyself hast now disclos'd to me.

with the fine modulations, fitting exactly the nuances of meaning in

this from Hamlet (III, iii)--

May one be pardon'd and retain the offence?

In the corrupted currents of this world

Offence's gilded hand may shove by justice,

And oft 'tis seen the wicked prize itself

Buys out the law. But 'tis not so above.

There is no shuffling, there the action lies

In his true nature; and we ourselves compell'd,

Even to the teeth and forehead of our faults,

To give in evidence. What then? What rests?

Try what repentance can. What can it not?

or this from King Lear (II, iv)--

You see me here, you gods, a poor old man,

As full of grief as age; wretched in both!

If it be you that stirs these daughters' hearts

Against their father, fool me not so much

To bear it tamely; touch me with noble anger,

And let not women's weapons, water-drops,

Stain my man's cheeks.

and also with the flowing, slightly 'irregular' lines of this from The

Tempest (II, i)--

But I feel not

This deity in my bosom. Twenty consciences,

That stand 'twixt me and Milan, candied be they

And melt ere they molest! Here lies your brother,

No better than the earth he lies upon

If he were that which now he's like, that's dead;

Whom I, with this obedient steel, three inches of it,

Can lay to be for ever; whiles you, doing thus,

To the perpetual wink for aye might put

This ancient morsel, this Sir Prudence, who

Should not upbraid our course.

The greater freedom of syncopation and substitution, of extra syllables

and unusual pauses, which characterizes Shakespeare's later blank verse,

became almost a norm with Beaumont and Fletcher, Shirley, Ford, and the

Jacobean dramatists. They often carried freedom to the extreme limit,

where an inch further would change verse into prose. They were capable,

to be sure, of more careful regular verse, and wrote it when the

occasion seemed to call for it; but partly from choice, and partly no

doubt from haste or indifference or both, they made a very free blank

verse their staple. Shakespeare had alternated prose and verse as the

subject or tone required; the later dramatists seemed to seek a verse

that might be, in a sense, midway between prose and verse. Thus they

avoided a necessity of frequent change, except a loosening or tightening

of the reins. To call this verse decadent is somewhat unjust. It is in

truth a special form which is certainly well justified for certain

subjects and occasions.

Why how darst thou meet me again thou rebel,

And knowst how thou hast used me thrice, thou rascal?

Were there not waies enough to fly my vengeance,

No hole nor vaults to hide thee from my fury,

But thou must meet me face to face to kill thee?

I would not seek thee to destroy thee willingly,

But now thou comest to invite me,

And comest upon me,

How like a sheep-biting rogue taken i'th' manner,

And ready for the halter dost thou look now!

Thou hast a hanging look thou scurvy thing, hast ne'er a knife

Nor ever a string to lead thee to Elysium?

BEAUMONT and FLETCHER, Rule a Wife and Have a Wife, V, i.

By this you find I am to Millaine neer

Ally'd; but more to tempt your fury on

My life, know 'twas my valiant father took

Your brother prisoner, and presented him

Where he receiv'd his death, my father that

So oft hath humbled you in war, and made

His victories triumph almost upon

The ruines of your state.

DAVENANT, Love and Honour, V, iii.

When Milton composed Comus in 1634 it was natural for him to model his

blank verse on the best of Shakespeare's and Ben Jonson's, rather than

on that of the contemporary playwrights; for his finer taste, his more

delicate ear, and his classical training and tendencies would at once

lead him to reject the metrical laxities of Ford, Shirley, Davenant, and

the other writers of 'broken down' blank verse. And though his language

shows great familiarity with the later plays of Shakespeare, especially

The Tempest, he admitted comparatively few of their metrical licenses

and followed in the main the versification of the Midsummer Night's

Dream and the earlier tragedies. There is generally a tendency to make

the line the unit--but the verse paragraph or stanza effect is also

present in nearly fully developed form, as witness the opening lines of

the poem--weak or feminine endings are not frequent, alexandrines very

few. The 'short fit of rhyming' (ll. 495 ff.), disapproved by Dr.

Johnson, would be explained partly by the tradition of the masque and

partly by the model of Shakespeare's comedies.

But the great Miltonic blank verse of Paradise Lost is not a copy of any

master; it is a development and a consummation of two influences, the

slow maturity of Milton's mind, deepened and broadened by the

Commonwealth controversies "not without dust and heat," and the exalted

sublimity of the yet unattempted theme of justifying God's management of

human and divine affairs. His maturity brought him his great familiarity

both in matter and in style with nearly all that was best in European

literature, and his peculiar subject, with only gods and angels (Adam

and Eve are scarcely human, even after the fall) for characters and

selected portions of eternity and infinity for time and place, gave him

the tendency to artificiality and strain to the outmost verges of

sublimity, and to extraordinary involution of phrase and idea--for all

of which he must have a suitable prosody. He chose blank verse when the

poetical fashion was for rime and described it, in words not altogether

clear, as consisting "only in apt numbers, fit quantity of syllables,

and the sense variously drawn out from one verse to another."[68] Apt

numbers, that is, appropriate rhythms, Milton's verse certainly has; but

it is the last item, the great variety of movements subordinating the

line-unit, and running-on of verses into longer periods, for which his

blank verse is famous. Every page of Paradise Lost contains examples;

some of the finest occur in the rhetorical display of the Pandemonic

Council in Book II. Note the position of the pauses in the following

passage, and then compare the specimens of early blank verse given

above.

+--------------------------------------------------------------+

| [68] The main crux of this passage is "fit quantity of |

| syllables." _Quantity_ in such a context suggests syllabic |

| length; and one recalls the sonnet to Lawes-- |

| |

| not to scan |

| With Midas' ears, committing short and long. |

| |

| But, on the other hand, Mr. Robert Bridges has made it |

| almost if not quite certain that Milton counted syllables, |

| and therefore the phrase would mean "ten syllables to a |

| line," proper allowance being made for elision. Since both |

| interpretations agree pretty well with Milton's practice, |

| one cannot be sure which he had in mind. |

+--------------------------------------------------------------+

Or could we break our way

By force, and at our heels all hell should rise

With blackest insurrection, to confound

Heaven's purest light, yet our great enemy

All incorruptible would on his throne

Sit unpolluted, and the ethereal mould

Incapable of stain would soon expel

Her mischief, and purge off the baser fire,

Victorious.

II, 134-142.

On its formal side, what makes Milton's versification as unique as

it is admirable, is the instinctive and yet prescient skill with

which the pause is continuously varied so as to keep the whole

metrical structure in movement. There are no dead lines. There are

no jerks or stoppages. His movement may best be described by

quoting a passage which, like many others, is at once a description

and an instance. It is a

Mystical dance, which yonder starry sphere

Of planets and of fixt in all her wheels

Resembles nearest, mazes intricate,

Eccentric, intervolv'd, yet regular

Then most, when most irregular they seem,

And in their motions harmony divine.

I ask the reader most particularly to notice that these six lines,

like almost any short quotation that can be made from the poem, are

broken from their context. They begin in the middle of a sentence,

and end in the middle of a clause. The continuous periodic movement

cannot be really shown by examples, just because it is continuous

and periodic. If we except the speeches, each of which by the

necessity of the case is more or less a definite and detachable

unit, the periods flow into one another. Like the orbit of a

planet, the movement of the verse never closes its ellipse and

begins again. Each of the twelve books is a single organic

rhythmical structure. But one cannot very well quote a whole book.

Within that structure, the variation of pause and stress is

similarly in continuous movement. As a general fact, this is

instinctively felt in reading the poem; how rigorously the law of

freedom is observed comes out even more surprisingly when brought

to the test of figures. For movement of stress one instance may

serve as a typical example. In Michael's description of the plagues

of Egypt in the twelfth book, beginning--

But first the lawless tyrant, who denies

To know their God, or message to regard,

Must be compelled by signs and judgments dire--

the detailed roll of the plagues is all threaded on the word

_must_. It recurs nine times, with studied and intricate variation

of its place in the line: this is, taken by order, in the first,

eighth, fifth, fourth, fifth, fifth, first, third, and fourth

syllable. Again, as regards variation, in the whole ten thousand

lines of the Paradise Lost there are less than five-and-twenty

instances of the pause coming at the same point in the line for

more than two lines consecutively. Facts like these are the formal

index of what is the great organic principle of Milton's verse.

That is, that like all organic structures, it is incalculable; it

cannot be reduced to a formula.... His rhythm is perpetually

integrating as it advances; and not only so, but at no point can

its next movement be predicted, although tracing it backwards we

can see how each phrase rises out of and carries on the rhythm of

what was before it, how each comes in not only rightly, but as it

seems inevitably. This secret he inherited from no English

predecessor and transmitted to no follower.[69]

+--------------------------------------------------------------+

| [69] J. W. Mackail, The Springs of Helicon, pp. 181 ff. |

+--------------------------------------------------------------+

One may surely say that Milton extracted from blank verse all its

possibilities of variety and movement so far as his subject matter

permitted. He is lyrical, dramatic, didactic, and of course epic, in

turn. He even showed that it is possible to imitate hollowly his own

"planetary wheelings"--as though the instruments kept on playing and the

music ceased.[70]

+--------------------------------------------------------------+

| [70] Cf., for example. Paradise Regained, III, 68 ff. |

+--------------------------------------------------------------+

Since Paradise Regained and Samson Agonistes, though various poets have

adapted it to their own uses, blank verse has shown only one significant

development, the conversational, or so-called 'talking,' style. In the

eighteenth century Milton's mannerisms dominated nearly all blank

verse, both for good and for evil. What freedom Thomson allowed himself

he got from Milton; most of Cowper's thin grandiosity he took from

Milton; and much also of Wordsworth's false and empty elaboration which

make the Prelude and Excursion so dull in places--the whole tribe of

verses of which

And at the Hoop alighted, famous inn

is the pilloried example--came from the Miltonic tradition. Keats fell

partially into the error, but was wise enough to recognize it. Shelley,

with much of Milton's intensity and somewhat too of his sublimity, could

successfully follow the great stride and at the same time preserve his

own idiom. Tennyson, keeping both the freedom and as much of the

"continuous planetary movement" as was consistent with his themes,

softened the metre--weakened it, some will say--by his decorative

tendency and indulgence in only half-concealed virtuosity.[71] And the

famous Oxus ending of Arnold's Sohrab and Rustum is a studied

reproduction of the Miltonic music in a lower key. But it was Landor

who, taking a hint perhaps from Milton's unadorned didacticism of

Paradise Regained and also from the straightforward verse used on

occasion by the Elizabethan dramatists, showed the way to what has often

been called a strictly contemporary development of blank verse, the

talking style. Since this is less familiar than most of the phenomena

of blank verse, it will require fuller illustration.

+--------------------------------------------------------------+

| [71] Browning's blank verse, like all his metres, is |

| typically Browningesque; instead of moulding his verse to |

| fit the idea perfectly, he too often effected the compromise |

| between content and form by slighting the latter. |

+--------------------------------------------------------------+

The uneven line which separates blank verse and prose is easily apparent

in such a passage as the following from Much Ado about Nothing (V, i)--

_Leon._ Some haste, my lord!--well, fare you well, my lord:--

Are you so hasty now--Well, all is one.

_D. Pedro._ Nay, do not quarrel with us, good old man.

_Ant._ If he could right himself with quarrelling,

Some of us would lie low.

_Claud._ Who wrongs him?

_Leon._ Marry, thou dost wrong me; thou dissembler, thou.--

Nay, never lay thy hand upon thy sword;

I fear thee not.

_Claud._ Marry, beshrew my hand,

If it should give your age such cause of fear.

In faith, my hand meant nothing to my sword.

_Leon._ Tush, tush, man! never fleer and jest at me;

I speak not like a dotard nor a fool;

As under privilege of age, to brag

What I have done being young, or what would do,

Were I not old. Know, Claudio, to thy heed,

Thou hast so wrong'd mine innocent child and me,

That I am forc'd to lay my reverence by,

And with gray hairs and bruise of many days,

Do challenge thee to trial of a man....

In the first part of this passage the language is the simple natural

expression of prose, yet so devised that it also fits the metrical

pattern. It is either prose or verse according to the way one reads it.

But in Leonardo's long speech (after the first line, which is

'irregular') the verse pattern becomes more and more prominent, until in

the last three lines it predominates over the natural utterance of the

words and produces a certain stiffness. Here the two different manners

stand side by side: a natural simplicity so great that the metrical

quality is almost obscured, beside a formality so obvious that the

feeling of natural expression is partly lost. Now Milton, and after him

Dryden and the eighteenth century, regarding poetry generally as a thing

apart, followed the latter sort; but when the Romantic Revival brought

poetry back to ordinary human life there reappeared, tentatively, of

course, a simpler blank verse in Thomson, Crabbe, Cowper, and

Wordsworth. A clear example is the opening of Landor's Iphigeneia and

Agamemnon--

Iphigeneia, when she heard her doom

At Aulis, and when all beside the King

Had gone away, took his right hand, and said,

"O father! I am young and very happy.

I do not think the pious Calchas heard

Distinctly what the Goddess spake. Old-age

Obscures the senses. If my nurse, who knew

My voice so well, sometimes misunderstood

While I was resting on her knee both arms

And hitting it to make her mind my words,

And looking in her face, and she in mine,

Might he not also hear one word amiss,

Spoken from so far off, even from Olympus?"

Again, compare Mrs. Browning's Aurora Leigh--

As it was, indeed,

I felt a mother-want about the world,

And still went seeking, like a bleating lamb

Left out at night, in shutting up the fold,--

As restless as a nest-deserted bird

Grown chill through something being away, though what

It knows not. I, Aurora Leigh, was born

To make my father sadder, and myself

Not overjoyous, truly. Women know

The way to rear up children (to be just),

They know a simple, merry, tender knack

Of tying sashes, fitting baby-shoes,

And stringing pretty words that make no sense,

And kissing full sense into empty words.

These are from the metrical point of view nearly identical with Mr.

Robert Frost's talking verse, so often called a 'contribution' to verse

technique--

Something there is that doesn't love a wall,

That sends the frozen ground-swell under it,

And spills the upper boulders in the sun;

And makes gaps even two can pass abreast.

The work of hunters is another thing:

I have come after them and made repair

Where they have left not one stone on stone,

But they would have the rabbit out of hiding,

To please the yelping dogs.

R. FROST, Mending Wall.[72]

The obvious difficulty is to maintain dignity along with relaxation--a

feat which Mr. Frost and Mr. E. A. Robinson have occasionally

accomplished. And from this it is but a step to the extreme simplicity

of Miss Lowell's To Two Unknown Ladies--

If either of you much attracted me

We could fall back upon phenomena

And make a pretty story out of psychic

Balances, but not to be too broad

In my discourtesy, nor prudish neither

(Since, really, I can hardly quite suppose

With all your ghostliness you follow me),

I feel no such attraction. Or if one

Bows to my sympathy for the briefest space,

Snap--it is gone! And, worst of all to tell,

What broke it is not in the least dislike

But utter boredom.

Now....

+--------------------------------------------------------------+

| [72] Mr. Frost in some of his later work permits himself |

| such laxness as-- |

| |

| Had beauties he had to point out to me at length |

| To insure their not being wasted on me. |

| The Axe-Helve. |

+--------------------------------------------------------------+

Thus the wheel has come nearly full circle, but with a longer radius.

For just as blank verse developed from the early Elizabethan--and

pre-Elizabethan--strict formality to the laxity of the Jacobean

dramatists and found a true balance of freedom and restraint in Milton,

so from the monotonous eighteenth-century couplet (and it should be

recalled that in the beginning blank verse sprang from the couplet) it

has gradually enlarged its freedom into the extreme license from a

metrical point of view of its adopted cousin free-verse. Already,

moreover, there have been signs of a reaction against the extreme, and

the wheel is coming to an artistic balance again.

4. FREE-VERSE

Free-verse (or, as Miss Lowell prefers, 'unrhymed cadence') is a

hydra-headed phenomenon. It can never be adequately discussed; for when

one head is disposed of, two others appear in its place. Its origins are

involved in obscurity and--what is worse--ignorance; and its

practitioners and staunchest defenders are as variable in their points

of view as it itself is in its rhythmic impulses.[73]

+--------------------------------------------------------------+

| [73] Strongly to be deprecated is the frequent confusion |

| not only of the different varieties of English free-verse, |

| but of the fundamentally distinct phenomena of free-verse as |

| commonly understood and French _vers libre_. _Vers libre_ |

| itself has many aspects, from the literally freer use of |

| rime and the mute-_e_ than the traditional French prosody |

| allowed and an escape from the old principle of |

| syllabification to what superficially corresponds with |

| English free-verse, that is, a substitution of prose for |

| verse; but only superficially, since the French language is |

| phonetically different from English, and its ordinary prose |

| has a naturally greater song potentiality. Since the |

| phenomena differ they should not be called by the same name. |

| The English term 'free-verse' is wholly adequate. |

+--------------------------------------------------------------+

Behind all the utterances of friend and foe seems to lie the ultimate

belief that the 'voluntary thraldom' of formal metrical patterns is a

monstrous error which can only be removed by unrestricted appreciation

and application of the natural rhythms of idea and of language. There is

in every thought, however simple or subtle, in every feeling, however

evanescent or profound, an inherent rhythm which is as a material body

to the thought's or emotion's soul. This native, inevitable rhythm--one

might call it the _rhythme juste_, the exact rhythm--is the only fit

expression for an intellectual or emotional idea; all others are foreign

to it, tyrannous usurpations, in a word, impossible substitutions for

it. To attempt, therefore, to twist these natural and exact rhythms to

the formal predetermined patterns of traditional versification is a

suicidal impertinence, foredoomed to failure.

Such a position has in theory much justice. It means briefly that the

basis of poetical form should not be the metrical pattern freely varied

yet always perceptible, but the natural organic rhythm of the ideas

expressed; that is, there should be no harmonized difference between

what have been explained above as thought rhythms, sound rhythms, and

metrical rhythms, but all three should be one original and indivisible

unit. This would make a combined thought-and-sound unit (breath group

and logical-emotional group) the foundation of verse, whereas this is

really the characteristic of prose as distinguished from verse. These

exact organic rhythms "differ from ordinary prose rhythms," says Miss

Lowell, "in being more curved, and containing more stress"; which,

though not very perspicuous, seems to mean that free-verse is more

carefully cadenced, or, in other words, more nearly metrical, than

ordinary prose. Perhaps it would be no injustice to the upholders of

free-verse in its best manifestations to say that, while metre requires

that beneath all variations the regular beat should never be missed,

free-verse requires as much rhythm (i. e., regularity) as is possible

without its becoming perceptible.

If this is true, or as near the manifold truth as one can get, then the

free-verse movement in English is mainly a return to the cadenced prose

of the seventeenth century with the additional trait of the appearance

of verse. This is an important addition, however. It involves a careful

recognition of what psychology calls the 'prose attitude' and the 'verse

attitude,' and also (as has been suggested above) the peculiar union of

prose with the spatial rhythm of verse. We read with ear and eye

together, though with varying proportions of emphasis on the one or the

other; for some 'vocalize' whatever they read, others read almost

entirely with the eye. Since it is the eye that takes the earlier and

quicker perception of printed language, we tend to judge by the

appearance of a page whether it contains prose or verse. Columns of

irregular but approximately equal line lengths, regular blocks of

printing regularly spaced and separated as stanzas, indentation of

every second or every third line--these at once announce that the page

contains verse. And they at the same time constitute an obvious spatial

rhythm to the eye, and prepare the attention of eye and ear and mind for

the approximate regularity of verse. Then, when so prepared, we

unconsciously organize as fully as possible any irregularities that

appear in the language and transform into actual verse the verse

potentialities which pervade our speech.

Some kinds of free-verse, however, do not, so far as one can see, aim to

be more than ordinary prose printed in segments more or less closely

corresponding with the phrase rhythm or normal sound rhythms of

language. It is then prose in actuality and verse in appearance--no

more.

On the justification of this peculiar amalgam there is little agreement.

No doubt for certain swift effects free-verse is the natural and most

serviceable medium. Many short poems in this irregular form are like

snapshots or like rapid sketches as compared with finished paintings.

But the ultimate æsthetic judgment must be precisely that of the

snapshot as compared with finished painting. Nature is always wrong,

says the paradox; art depends upon a deliberate selection of details and

structure. It balances freedom and restraint, variety and uniformity,

one against the other; and even when it appears spontaneous it is but

the result of an unconscious choice which is itself born of long

training or of the mysterious faculty divine. In very little of what at

present is called free-verse does art have a real place. It is all

freedom and variety, with almost no restraint and uniformity: all

stimulation and no repose. There is sometimes a rapid alternation of

verse rhythm and prose rhythm, which, in Bacon's phrase, may cleave but

not incorporate; they succeed each other but do not melt into each

other. Now and again, to be sure, this uncertainty, this very

irregularity, powerfully represents the thought and emotion of the poem;

but nevertheless there can be little doubt that except in the limited

field of instantaneous flashes the most adequate and pleasing medium is

the skilfully varied regularity of formal verse.[74]

+--------------------------------------------------------------+

| [74] "In the effort to get rhyme, 'the rack of finest |

| wits,'" says a pseudonymous newspaper writer, "and in the |

| struggle, writhing, and agony of trying to get the wrong |

| words to say the right thing, one sometimes achieves the |

| impossible, or, rather, from the flame of frantic friction |

| (of 'Rhyming Dictionary' leaves) rises, phoenix-like, |

| another idea, somewhat like the first, its illegitimate |

| child, so to say, and thus more beautiful. |

| |

| "With vers libre one experiences the mortification one |

| sometimes feels in having roared out one's agony in |

| perfectly fit terms. With rhymed poetry one feels the |

| satisfaction of a wit who gives the nuance of his meaning by |

| the raise of an eyebrow, the turn of a word." |

+--------------------------------------------------------------+

The many kinds of free-verse are recognizable chiefly by the greater or

less feeling of metrical form lying behind them. For convenience they

may be distinguished, according as verse or prose predominates, as (1)

irregular unrimed metre, (2) very free blank verse, (3) unusual mingling

of metre and prose, a kind of recitative, and (4) mere prose printed as

verse, or what may be called free-verse _par excellence_. A few

illustrations will help to make clear the distinctions.

Of the first sort are the unrimed choruses in Milton's Samson Agonistes,

the metre of Southey's once-admired Thalaba and the Curse of Kehama,

and parts of Shelley's Queen Mab. Here the lines are irregular in length

(as in the 'irregular' Pindaric odes), but they are usually felt as

truly metrical, though they do not repeat a single pattern.

This, this is he; softly a while;

Let us not break in upon him.

O change beyond report, thought, or belief!

See how he lies at random, carelessly diffused,

With languished head unpropt,

As one past hope, abandoned,

And by himself given over,

In slavish habit, ill-fitted weeds

O'er-worn and soiled.

Or do mine eyes misrepresent? Can this be he,

That heroic, that renowned,

Irresistible Samson?...

Samson Agonistes, 115-126.

The Fairy waved her wand:

Ahasuerus fled

Fast as the shapes of mingled shade and mist

That lurk in the glens of a twilight grove

Flee from the morning beam:

The matter of which dreams are made

Not more endowed with actual life

Than this phantasmal portraiture

Of wandering human thought.

Queen Mab, iii.

Thou tyrannous over-mastering Spirit, Lucifer,

Hear now thy guilt.

The first in glory amongst us all wast thou;

Nor did we grudge thee loyalty,

When of old beneath thy leadership against Yahveh,

And thereafter against the mild Galilean Godhead,

We waged war for dominion over the minds of man.

But perished now long since is the might of Yahveh;

And his Son, a plaintive, impotent phantom, wails

Over that faith, withering, corrupted, petrified,

For which he died vainly.

R. C. TREVELYAN, Lucifer Enchained.

Green boughs stirring in slumber

Sigh at the lost remembrance

Of Aulon,

Golden-thighed, in the heart of the forest.

Here, where the dripping leaves

Whisper of passing feet

To the fragrant woodways,

The moonlight floods the forsaken tangled boughs

With loneliness

For Melinna, gone from the evening.

EDWARD J. O'BRIEN, Hellenica.

Very free blank verse, when taken in small excerpts, often seems devoid

of metrical regularity. The reason for this is that in long poems much

greater freedom is possible because the ear and the attention,

accustomed for longer periods to the formal pattern, hold it more easily

where it becomes faint. Examples of this approximation to prose have

been given above, pages 43, 44. The famous first lines of Paradise Lost,

if printed after the contemporary fashion of free-verse, would by very

few be recognized as blank verse; and the same is true of many passages

throughout the poem, and indeed throughout all long poems in blank

verse.

Of Man's first disobedience

And the fruit of that forbidden tree

Whose mortal taste brought death into the world,

And all our woe,

With loss of Eden,

Till one greater Man restore us

And regain the blissful seat,

Sing,

Heavenly Muse,

That on the secret top of Horeb

Or of Sinai

Didst inspire that shepherd ...

Among the finest free-verse in English are the Evening Voluntaries of

Henley.[75] In these poems clearly metrical lines (sometimes only parts

of lines) alternate with simple prose. The line length is now based on

phrasal rhythm, and at other times on no discoverable principle except

that of beginning a new line with some emphatic word.

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| [75] See a part of Margaritæ Sorori, page 43, above. |

+--------------------------------------------------------------+

White fleets of cloud,

Argosies heavy with fruitfulness,

Sail the blue peacefully. Green flame the hedgerows.

Blackbirds are bugling, and white in wet winds

Sway the tall poplars.

Pageants of colour and fragrance,

Pass the sweet meadows, and viewless

Walks the mild spirit of May,

Visibly blessing the world.

HENLEY, Pastoral.

Have the gods then left us in our need

Like base and common men?

Were even the sweet grey eyes

Of Artemis a lie,

The speech of Hermes but a trick,

The glory of Apollonian hair deceit?

Desolate we move across a desolate land,

The high gates closed,

No answer to our prayer;

Naught left save our integrity,

No murmur against Fate

Save that we are juster than the unjust gods,

More pitiful than they.

RICHARD ALDINGTON, Disdain.

Modern free-verse, or free-verse _par excellence_, which is mere prose

with the spatial rhythm of verse, has been skilfully written by various

contemporaries. Let a single example suffice. Such a bare but moving

situation as that of Miss Lowell's Fool's Money Bags could no doubt be

adequately presented in traditional metre, but perhaps not so directly

as in her 'curved' prose--

Outside the long window,

With his head on the stone sill,

The dog is lying,

Gazing at his Beloved.

His eyes are wet and urgent,

And his body is taut and shaking.

It is cold on the terrace;

A pale wind licks along the stone slabs,

But the dog gazes through the glass

And is content.

The Beloved is writing a letter.

Occasionally she speaks to the dog,

But she is thinking of her writing.

Does she, too, give her devotion to one

Not worthy?[76]

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| [76] From Sword Blades and Poppy Seeds, by permission of |

| Houghton Mifflin Co. |

+--------------------------------------------------------------+

A good example of combined metre and confessed prose (not to be confused

with the mingling of verse and prose illustrated on the previous page)

with easy transitions from one form to the other may be seen in a poem

called Spring by Mr. Clement Wood. The rapid change from verse to prose

is, of course, familiar in Shakespeare and his fellow dramatists,

sometimes even in a single speech.

5. EXOTIC FORMS

As wide as are the possibilities of variety in native English verse, the

poets have endeavored to extend its boundaries by the annexation of

foreign prosodies from ancient Greece and Rome and from mediaeval

France. In absolute contrast to free-verse, which is the denial of

metrical formalism, this is the apotheosis of it. They admittedly place

form above content and are satisfied (for the most part) with the mere

exhilaration of dancing gracefully in chains.

A group of Elizabethan experimenters, among whom were Sidney and

Spenser, sought diligently to compose in the quantitative metres of the

classics; Puttenham, the author of one of the first English treatises on

the Art of Poetry (1589), declared that by "leisurable travail" one

might "easily and commodiously lead all those feet of the ancients into

our vulgar language"; but while they may have satisfied themselves

(Spenser certainly did not) these experimenters produced nothing of

genuine significance. The result was candidly anticipated by Ascham, who

said in the Schoolmaster (1570) that "_carmen exametrum_ doth rather

trot and hobble than run smoothly in our English tongue." Thomas Nash

confirms this opinion in his criticism of Stanyhurst's attempt to

translate Virgil into hexameters: "The hexameter verse I grant to be a

gentleman of an ancient house (so is many an English beggar); yet this

clime of ours he cannot thrive in. Our speech is too craggy for him to

set his plow in. He goes twitching and hopping in our language like a

man running upon quagmires, up the hill in one syllable and down the

dale in another, retaining no part of that stately smooth gait which he

vaunts himself with amongst the Greeks and Latins" (Four Letters

Confuted). Coleridge's judgment was the same:

This is a galloping measure, a hop, and a trot, and a gallop.

Thereafter, apart from isolated attempts, efforts were abandoned until

the nineteenth century, when Southey, following William Taylor, who in

turn had been induced by Goethe's Hermann und Dorothea to try a new

principle of frankly substituting sentence stress or accent for length

of syllable, wrote his Vision of Judgment (1821). Out of this revised

experimenting came ultimately Longfellow's Evangeline (1847) and the

Courtship of Miles Standish (1858) and Clough's Bothie of

Tober-na-Vuolich (1848). These alone, not to mention the lesser

imitations, were enough to discredit the movement metrically. Meanwhile

Tennyson and Kingsley, followed later by William Watson, and still

enthusiastically by the present Poet Laureate, undertook to harmonize

syllabic length and stress by more or less occult processes. As a matter

of learned experiment and debate these problems have a certain academic

interest, but only the staunchest and (one may say) blindest adherents

find in them any practical importance.

The storm centre of all classical adaptations has been the dactylic

hexameter, the standard measure of Greek and Latin narrative poetry. The

most nearly successful English hexameters are probably those of

Kingsley's Andromeda (1858), which occupy a middle ground between the

purely accentual and the purely (so-called) quantitative experiments. An

example of this and one of Mr. Bridges' quantitative hexameters must

suffice. Though both have good qualities, neither approaches the melodic

variety and dignity of Homer and Virgil, or even Ovid.[77]

Over the sea, past Crete, on the Syrian shore to the southward,

Dwells in the well-tilled lowland a dark-haired Æthiop people,

Skilful with needle and loom, and the arts of the dyer and carver,

Skilful, but feeble of heart; for they know not the lords of Olympus,

Lovers of men; neither broad-browed Zeus, nor Pallas Athené,

Teacher of wisdom to heroes, bestower of might in the battle;

Share not the cunning of Hermes, nor list to the songs of Apollo.

Andromeda.