The present specimen shows the preference for alliteration; that on p.
127, below, represents the introduction of rime.
In a somer seson . whan soft was the sonne,
I shope me in shroudes . as I a shepe were,
In habite as an heremite . unholy of workes,
Went wyde in this world . wondres to here.
Ac on a May mornynge . on Malverne hulles
Me byfel a ferly . of fairy me thou[gh]te;
I was wery forwandred . and went me to reste
Under a brode banke . bi a bornes side,
And as I lay and lened . and loked in the wateres,
I slombred in a slepyng . it sweyved so merye.
(WILLIAM LANGLAND (?): _Piers the Plowman_, Prologue, ll. 1-10. B-text.
Fourteenth century.)
_Piers the Plowman_ represents the revival of the alliterative long
line, with fairly strict adherence to the old rules, by contemporaries
of Chaucer, in the fourteenth century. For this verse, see further in
Part Two, pp. 155, 156.
Apon the Midsumer evin, mirrest of nichtis,
I muvit furth allane, neir as midnicht wes past,
Besyd ane gudlie grene garth, full of gay flouris,
Hegeit, of ane huge hicht, with hawthorne treis;
Quhairon ane bird, on ane bransche, so birst out hir notis
That never ane blythfullar bird was on the beuche harde:
Quhat throw the sugarat sound of hir sang glaid,
And throw the savar sanative of the sueit flouris;
I drew in derne to the dyk to dirkin eftir myrthis;
The dew donkit the daill, and dynarit the foulis.
(WILLIAM DUNBAR: _The Tua Mariit Wemen and the Wedo_, ll. 1-10. Ed.
Scottish Text Society, vol ii. p. 30.)
See notes on Dunbar as a metrist, in this edition, vol. i. pp.
cxlix and clxxii, and T. F. Henderson's _Scottish Vernacular
Literature_, pp. 153-164.
Alliteration as an organic element of verse was especially favored in
the North country, and its popularity in Scotland--illustrated in the
present specimen from Dunbar--considerably outlasted its use in England.
The famous words of Chaucer's Parson will be recalled:
"But trusteth wel, I am a Southren man,
I can nat geste--rum, ram, ruf--by lettre."
We find King James, as late as 1585 (_Reulis and Cautelis_), giving the
following instructions: "Let all your verse be Literall, sa far as may
be, ... bot speciallie Tumbling verse for flyting. By Literall I meane,
that the maist part of your lyne sall rynne upon a letter, as this
tumbling lyne rynnis upon F:
_Fetching fude for to feid it fast furth of the Farie._"
The following specimen is one of the latest examples of fairly regular
alliterative verse, written in England, that has come down to us. It is
from a ballad of the battle of Flodden Field (1513).
Archers uttered out their arrowes, and egerlie they shotten.
They proched us with speares, and put many over,
That the blood outbrast at there broken harnish.
There was swinging out of swords, and swapping of headds;
We blanked them with bills through all their bright armor,
That all the dale dunned of their derfe strokes.
(_Scotishe Ffielde_, from Percy's Folio MS. In FLÜGEL'S _Neuenglisches
Lesebuch_, vol. i. p. 156.)
iii. _Rime_ (_i.e. end-rime_)
Full rime, or end-rime, involves the principally stressed vowel in the
riming word, and all that follows that vowel. When there is an entire
unstressed syllable following, the rime is called double, or feminine.
Triple rime is also recognized, though rare.[11] End-rime being a
stranger to the early Germanic languages, its appearance in any of them
may commonly be taken as a sign of foreign influence. In general, of
course, rime and the stanza were introduced together into English verse,
under the influence of Latin hymns and French lyrics.
The functions of rime in English verse may perhaps be grouped under
three heads: the function of emphasis, the function of forming beautiful
or pleasurable sounds, and the function of combining or organizing the
verses. It is with reference to the first of these that Professor Corson
speaks of rime as "an enforcing agency of the individual verse." Under
the second head rime is considered simply as a form of tone-color, and
as furnishing a part of the melody of verse. The third function, by
which individual verses are bound into stanzas, is, in a sense, the most
important.
On the subject of the æsthetic values of rime, see the chapter on
"poetic unities" in Corson's _Primer of English Verse_, and Ehrenfeld's
_Studien zur Theorie des Reims_ (Zürich, 1897). The problem of the
relative values of rimed and unrimed verse will come up in connection
with the history of the heroic couplet and of blank verse. The objection
always urged against rime is that its demands are likely to turn the
poet aside from the normal order of his ideas. Herder, as Ehrenfeld
points out, thought that this was particularly true of English verse,
the uninflected language not providing so naturally for cases where
thought and sound are parallel. A recent protest against the tyranny of
rime is found in the article by Mr. Larminie, cited on page 115, where
it is claimed that undue attention to form is thinning out the substance
of modern poetry, and that the demands of rime should be relaxed. See
also Ben Jonson's "Fit of Rhyme against Rhyme," for a humorous complaint
against the requirements of rime upon the poet.
The origin of rime has been a subject of prolonged controversy. See
the monograph by Ehrenfeld already cited; Meyer's _Anfang und
Ursprung der rythmischen Dichtung_ (Munich, 1884); W. Grimm's
_Geschichte des Reims_ (1851); Norden's _Antike Kunstprosa_
(Leipzig, 1898; _Anhang ueber die Geschichte des Reims_); Kluge's
article, _Zur Geschichte des Reimes im Altgermanischen_, in Paul u.
Braune's _Beiträge_, vol. ix. p. 422; and Schipper, vol. i. pp. 34
ff. Meyer's work is an exposition of the theory that rime was an
importation from the Orient. In like manner, it has been held by
many that the poetry of Otfried (the first regularly rimed German
verse) was produced under Latin influence wholly, and that rime was
introduced by him to the Germans (see the work by Kawczynski, cited
p. 117). Herder (see Ehrenfeld's monograph) regarded rime as a
natural growth of the instinct for symmetry in all human taste,
closely connected with dance-rhythms, all forms of parallelism, and
the like. Similarity of inflectional endings in similar clauses, he
pointed out, would naturally develop rime in any inflected
language. This view is in line with the tendency of recent opinion.
Schipper says, in effect: "Is rime to be regarded as the invention
of a special people, like the Arabian, or is it a form of art which
developed in the poetic language of the Aryan peoples, separately
in the several nations? In the opinion of the principal scholars
the latter opinion is the correct one. The chief support of this
opinion is the fact that traces of rime, in greater or less number,
appear in the oldest poetry of almost all the partially civilized
peoples. 'It is,' says C. F. Meyer, 'something inborn, original,
universally human, like poetry and music, and no more than these
the special invention of a single people or a particular time.' In
fact, traces of rime may be noticed in the poetry of the Greeks, in
Homer, Æschylus, Sophocles, Aristophanes, as also in the poetry of
the Romans; in a more developed form it appears in the late middle
Latin clerical poetry. In the Celtic languages, moreover, rime is
the indispensable mark of the poetic form, even in the oldest
extant specimens. The Latin poetry just referred to gives
interesting evidence that rime is a characteristic sign of popular
poetry. While the quantitative system became dominant, with the
artistic verse-forms of the Greeks, in the Golden Age of Roman
literature, the early Saturnian verses, written in free rhythms,
already showed the popular taste for similarity of sound in the
form of alliteration; and in the post-classical time, with the fall
of the quantitative metres, rime again came to the front in songs
intended for the people. The same element was made so essential a
characteristic in the organization of verse in the mediæval Latin,
that 'carmen rhythmicum' came to signify a rimed poem, and the
later Latinists used the word 'rhythmus' precisely in the sense of
'rime.'"
Schipper goes on to inquire whether this mediæval Latin poetry was
the means of introducing rime to the Germanic peoples. Wackernagel
held it as certain that Otfried learned his rimes from Latin poems;
but as Otfried declares that his poetry is intended to take the
place of useless popular songs, it seems probable that he was not
using an innovation, and that rime was already popular in Old High
German. Indeed, it appears sporadically in the _Hildebrandslied_
and the _Heliand_. Grimm observes that it is theoretically unlikely
that alliteration should have vanished suddenly and rime as
suddenly have taken its place. The gradual development of rime from
assonance among the Romance peoples suggests the same thing. The
early appearance of rime by the side of alliteration is illustrated
by C. F. Meyer (_Historische Studien_, Leipzig, 1851) from the
Norse _Edda_, from _Beowulf_, Cædmon, etc. In the later Anglo-Saxon
period rime was evidently securing a considerable though uncertain
hold. The Riming Poem suggests what development rime might have had
in English without the incoming of Romance influences. Grimm
observes that, while to his mind alliteration was a finer and
nobler quality than rime, there was need of a stronger
sound-likeness which should hold the attention more firmly by its
unchanging place at the end of the line. Schipper remarks, finally,
that the fact that the use of rime in connection with alliteration
was especially popular in the southern half of England, where the
Romance influence was strongest, may suggest why in the more purely
Germanic northern half alliteration remained the single support of
the poetic form well into the fifteenth century.
The appendix to the work of Norden, cited above, is a fuller
development of ideas frequently suggested by the sporadic
appearance of rime in early Greek and Latin literature. Norden
gives many examples of this "rhetorical rime," as well as of rime
arising naturally from parallelism of sentence structure found in
primitive charms, incantations, and the like. In particular he
emphasizes the influence of the figure of _hom[oe]oteleuton_ as
used in the literary prose of the classical languages. His
conclusion is as follows: "Rime, then, was potentially as truly
present in the Greek and Latin languages, from the earliest times,
as in every other language; but in the metrical (quantitative)
poetry it had no regular place, and appeared there in general only
sporadically and by chance, being used by only a few poets as a
rhetorical ornament. It became actual by the transition from the
metrical poetry to the rhythmical (that is, the syllable-counting,
in which--in the Latin--the chief consideration is still for the
word-accent); and this transition was consummated by the aid of the
highly poetic prose, already used for centuries, which was
constructed according to the laws of rhythm, and in which the
rhetorical hom[oe]oteleuton had gained an ever-increasing
significance. In particular, rime found an entrance through sermons
composed in such prose, and delivered in a voice closely
approaching that of singing, into the hymn-poetry which was
intimately related to such sermons. From the Latin hymn-poetry it
was carried into other languages, from the ninth century onward. It
is self-evident that in these languages also rime was potentially
present before it became actual through the influence of foreign
poetry; for in this region also there operates the highest immanent
law of every being and every form of development,--that in the
whole field of life nothing absolutely new is invented, but merely
slumbering germs are awakened to active life." (_Antike
Kunstprosa_, vol. ii. pp. 867 ff.)
Me lifes onlah. se þis leoht onwrah.
and þæt torhte geteoh. tillice onwrah.
glæd wæs ic gliwum. glenged hiwum.
blissa bleoum. blostma hiwum.
Secgas mec segon. symbel ne alegon.
feorh-gife gefegon. frætwed wægon.
wic ofer wongum. wennan gongum.
lisse mid longum. leoma getongum.
(From the "Riming Poem" of the _Codex Exoniensis_.)
This puzzlingly early appearance of rime in Anglo-Saxon verse, in
conjunction with fairly regular alliteration, is of especial
interest.[12] "It is supposed," says Schipper, "that this new form has
for its foundation the Scandinavian _Runhenda_, and that this was known
to the Anglo-Saxons through the Old Norse poet, Egil Skalagrimsson, who
was living in England in the tenth century, and who stayed twice in
England at Athelstan's court, writing a poem in Northumbria in the same
form." He also observes that the attempt to attain something like
equality of feet and half-lines suggests the Norse models.
Sainte Marie, Cristes bur,
Maidenes clenhad, moderes flur,
Dilie mine sinne, rixe in min mod,
Bring me to winne with self god.
(Verses attributed to St. Godric. ab. 1100.)
Godric, the hermit of Norfolk, lived about 1065-1170. These verses seem
to give the earliest extant appearance of end-rime in Middle English.
The Romance words in the hymn indicate the presence of French influence.
(On this hymn see article in _Englische Studien_, vol. xi. p. 401.)
Woden hehde þa hæhste la[gh]e: an ure ælderne dæ[gh]en.
he heom wes leof: æfne al swa heore lif.
he wes heore walden: and heom wurðscipe duden.
þene feorðe dæi i þere wike: heo [gh]iven him to wurðscipe.
þa Þunre heo [gh]iven þures dæi: for þi þat heo heom helpen mæi.
Freon heore læfdi: heo [gh]iven hire fridæi.
Saturnus heo [gh]iven sætterdæi: þene Sunne heo [gh]iven sonedæi.
Monenen heo [gh]ivenen monedæi: Tidea heo [gh]even tisdæi.
þus seide Hængest: cnihten alre hendest.
(LAYAMON: _Brut_, ll. 13921-13938. Madden ed., vol. ii. p. 158. ab.
1200.)
On the verse of the _Brut_ see above, p. 119.
Ich æm elder þen ich wes · a wintre and alore.
Ic wælde more þaune ic dude · mi wit ah to ben more.
Wel lange ic habbe child ibeon · a weorde end ech adede.
Þeh ic beo awintre eald · tu [gh]yng i eom a rede....
Mest al þat ic habbe ydon · ys idelnesse and chilce.
Wel late ic habbe me bi þoht · bute me god do milce.
(_Poema Morale_, ll. 1-4, 7, 8. In Zupitza's _Alt-und Mittelenglisches
Übungsbuch_, p. 58. ab. 1200.)
The _Poema Morale_, evidently one of the most popular poems of the early
Middle English period, seems to be the earliest one of any considerable
length in which end-rime was used regularly.
For other early examples of rime introduced into English under foreign
influence, see above, in the section on the Stanza.
_Double and triple rime._
To our theme.--The man who has stood on the Acropolis,
And looked down over Attica; or he
Who has sailed where picturesque Constantinople is,
Or seen Timbuctoo, or hath taken tea
In small-eyed China's crockery-ware metropolis,
Or sat amidst the bricks of Nineveh,
May not think much of London's first appearance--
But ask him what he thinks of it a year hence?
(BYRON: _Don Juan_, canto xi. st. vii.)
'Tis pity learned virgins ever wed,
With persons of no sort of education,
Or gentlemen, who, though well born and bred,
Grow tired of scientific conversation;
I don't choose to say much upon this head,
I'm a plain man, and in a single station,
But--oh! ye lords of ladies intellectual,
Inform us truly, have they not hen-pecked you all?
(_Ib._, canto i. st. xxii.)
So the painter Pacchiarotto
Constructed himself a grotto
In the quarter of Stalloreggi--
As authors of note allege ye.
And on each of the whitewashed sides of it
He painted--(none far and wide so fit
As he to perform in fresco)--
He painted nor cried _quiesco_
Till he peopled its every square foot
With Man--from the Beggar barefoot
To the Noble in cap and feather;
All sorts and conditions together.
The Soldier in breastplate and helmet
Stood frowningly--hail fellow well met--
By the Priest armed with bell, book, and candle.
Nor did he omit to handle
The Fair Sex, our brave distemperer:
Not merely King, Clown, Pope, Emperor--
He diversified too his Hades
Of all forms, pinched Labor and paid Ease,
With as mixed an assemblage of Ladies.
(BROWNING: _Pacchiarotto_, v.)
What's a man's age? He must hurry more, that's all;
Cram in a day, what his youth took a year to hold:
When we mind labor, then only, we're too old--
What age had Methusalem when he begat Saul?
And at last, as its haven some buffeted ship sees
(Come all the way from the north-parts with sperm oil),
I hope to get safely out of the turmoil
And arrive one day at the land of the Gypsies,
And find my lady, or hear the last news of her
From some old thief and son of Lucifer,
His forehead chapleted green with wreathy hop,
Sunburned all over like an Æthiop.
(BROWNING: _The Flight of the Duchess_, xvii.)
These passages illustrate sufficiently the grotesque effects of double
and triple rime in English verse,--effects of which Byron and Browning
are the unquestioned masters. Professor Corson observes that the double
rime is to be regarded as the means of "some special emphasis," whether
serious or humorous. More commonly the effect is humorous, of course, as
in _Don Juan_, where the rimes indicate "the lowering of the poetic
key--the reduction of true poetic seriousness." The rimes in the _Flight
of the Duchess_ Mr. Edmund Gurney has said sometimes "produce the
effect of jokes made during the performance of a symphony." The specimen
which follows illustrates the use of these double and triple rimes for a
wholly serious purpose. Professor Corson remarks that in this case the
rime serves "as a most effective foil to the melancholy theme. It is not
unlike the laughter of frenzied grief." It is interesting to note that
in the Italian language, where double rimes are almost constant,
masculine rimes are sometimes used for grotesque effect in the same way
that English poets use the feminine.
Perishing gloomily,
Spurred by contumely,
Cold inhumanity,
Burning insanity,
Into her rest.--
Cross her hands humbly,
As if praying dumbly,
Over her breast.
Owning her weakness,
Her evil behaviour,
And leaving, with meekness,
Her sins to her Saviour!
(THOMAS HOOD: _The Bridge of Sighs._)
Roll the strong stream of it
Up, till the scream of it
Wake from a dream of it
Children that sleep,
Seamen that fare for them
Forth, with a prayer for them;
Shall not God care for them,
Angels not keep?
Spare not the surges
Thy stormy scourges;
Spare us the dirges
Of wives that weep.
Turn back the waves for us:
Dig no fresh graves for us,
Wind, in the manifold gulfs of the deep.
(SWINBURNE: _Winter in Northumberland_, xiv.)
Into the woods my Master went,
Clean forspent, forspent.
Into the woods my Master came,
Forspent with love and shame.
But the olives they were not blind to Him,
The little gray leaves were kind to Him:
The thorn-tree had a mind to Him
When into the woods he came.
(SIDNEY LANIER: _A Ballad of Trees and the Master._)
_Broken rime._
There first for thee my passion grew,
Sweet, sweet Matilda Pottingen!
Thou wast the daughter of my tu-
tor, law-professor at the U-
niversity of Gottingen.
Sun, moon, and thou, vain world, adieu!
That kings and priests are plotting in;
Here doomed to starve on water gru-
el, never shall I see the U-
niversity of Gottingen.
(GEORGE CANNING: Song in _The Rovers; Anti-Jacobin_, June 4, 1798.[13])
Winter and summer, night and morn,
I languish at this table dark;
My office-window has a corn-
er looks into St. James's Park.
(THACKERAY: Ballads, _What Makes my Heart to Thrill and Glow?_)
_Internal rime._
Internal rime may be regarded on the one side as only a matter of the
division of the verse, since if it occurs regularly at the medial
cesura, it practically breaks the verse into two parts. On the other
side, if used only sporadically, it is a matter of tone-color. It
sometimes appears, however, in forms which entitle it to recognition by
itself. The earliest of these forms is the "Leonine rime," which is said
to have taken its name from Leoninus of St. Victor, who in the twelfth
century wrote elegiacs (hexameters and pentameters) in which the
syllable preceding the cesura regularly rimed with the final syllable.
Obviously lines of this kind would easily break up into riming
half-lines. Similarly, in septenary verse internal rime was often used
together with end-rime, with a resulting resolution into short-line
stanzas riming either _aabb_ or _abab_.[14] The following specimen from
a celebrated ballad shows the popular use of a somewhat complex system
of internal rime.
Be it right or wrong, these men among on women do complaine,
Affirming this, how that it is a labour spent in vaine,
To love them wele, for never a dele they love a man agayne.
For lete a man do what he can, ther favour to attayne,
Yet yf a newe to them pursue, ther furst trew lover than
Laboureth for nought, and from her thought he is a bannisshed man.
(_Ye Nutbrowne Maide._ From Arnold's Chronicle, printed ab. 1502. In
Flügel's _Neuenglisches Lesebuch_, vol. i. p. 167.)
Haill rois maist chois till clois thy fois greit micht,
Haill stone quhilk schone upon the throne of licht,
Vertew, quhais trew sweit dew ouirthrew al vice,
Was ay ilk day gar say the way of licht;
Amend, offend, and send our end ay richt.
Thow stant, ordant as sanct, of grant maist wise,
Till be supplie, and the hie gre of price.
Delite the tite me quite of site to dicht,
For I apply schortlie to thy devise.
(GAWAIN DOUGLAS: _A ballade in the commendation of honour and verteu_;
at the end of the _Palace of Honor_.)
Douglas, like his countryman Dunbar, was something of a metrical
virtuoso, and his use of internal rime in this ballade is one of his
most remarkable achievements. In the first stanza there are two internal
rimes in each line, in the second three, and in the third (here quoted)
four.
I cannot eat but little meat,
My stomach is not good,
But sure I think that I can drink
With him that wears a hood.
Though I go bare, take ye no care,
I nothing am a-cold,
I stuff my skin so full within
Of jolly good ale and old.
(Drinking Song in _Gammer Gurton's Needle_.)
The fair breeze blew, the white foam flew,
The furrow stream'd off free;
We were the first that ever burst
Into that silent sea.
(COLERIDGE: _Rime of the Ancient Mariner._)
The splendor falls on castle walls,
And snowy summits old in story;
The long light shakes across the lakes,
And the wild cataract leaps in glory.
(TENNYSON: Song in _The Princess_, iv.)
England, queen of the waves whose green inviolate girdle enrings thee
round,
Mother fair as the morning, where is now the place of thy foemen found?
Still the sea that salutes us free proclaims them stricken, acclaims
thee crowned ....
England, none that is born thy son, and lives, by grace of thy glory,
free,
Lives and yearns not at heart and burns with hope to serve as he worships
thee;
None may sing thee: the sea-wind's wing beats down our songs as it hails
the sea.
(SWINBURNE: _The Armada_, vii.)
Here the third and eighth syllables of each verse rime, giving the
effect of a separate melody only half heard under that of the main
rime-scheme. This is especially subtle where there is no possible pause
after the riming word, as in the "sing" of the last line quoted.
Ah, broken is the golden bowl! the spirit flown forever!
Let the bell toll!--a saintly soul floats on the Stygian river;
And, Guy de Vere, hast thou no tear?--weep now or nevermore!
See on yon drear and rigid bier low lies thy love, Lenore!
Come, let the burial rite be read--the funeral song be sung:
An anthem for the queenliest dead that ever died so young,
A dirge for her the doubly dead in that she died so young.
(POE: _Lenore._)
I did not take her by the hand,
(Though little was to understand
From touch of hand all friends might take,)
Because it should not prove a flake
Burnt in my palm to boil and ache.
I did not listen to her voice,
(Though none had noted, where at choice
All might rejoice in listening,)
Because no such a thing should cling
In the wood's moan at evening.
(ROSSETTI: _Penumbra._)
(See also _Love's Nocturn_, p. 146, below.)