Different from either of the two classes of odes already represented are
the irregular choral measures used by a few English poets in translation
or imitation of the odes of the Greek drama.
_Chorus._
O dearly bought revenge, yet glorious!
Living or dying thou hast fulfilled
The work for which thou wast foretold
To Israel, and now liest victorious
Among thy slain self-killed;
Not willingly, but tangled in the fold
Of dire Necessity, whose law in death conjoined
Thee with thy slaughtered foes, in number more
Than all thy life had slain before.
_Semi-chorus._
While their hearts were jocund and sublime,
Drunk with idolatry, drunk with wine
And fat regorged of bulls and goats,
Chaunting their idol, and preferring
Before our living Dread, who dwells
In Silo, his bright sanctuary,
Among them he a spirit of phrenzy sent,
Who hurt their minds,
And urged them on with mad desire
To call in haste for their destroyer.
They, only set on sport and play,
Unweetingly importuned
Their own destruction to come speedy upon them.
So fond are mortal men,
Fallen into wrath divine,
As their own ruin on themselves to invite,
Insensate left, or to sense reprobate,
And with blindness internal struck.
_Semi-chorus._
But he, though blind of sight,
Despised, and thought extinguished quite,
With inward eyes illuminated,
His fiery virtue roused
From under ashes into sudden flame,
And as an evening dragon came,
Assailant on the perched roosts
And nests in order ranged
Of tame villatic fowl, but as an eagle
His cloudless thunder bolted on their heads.
So Virtue, given for lost,
Depressed and overthrown, as seemed,
Like that self-begotten bird
In the Arabian woods embost,
That no second knows nor third,
And lay erewhile a holocaust,
From out her ashy womb now teemed,
Revives, reflourishes, then vigorous most
When most unactive deemed;
And, though her body die, her fame survives,
A secular bird, ages of lives.
(MILTON: _Samson Agonistes_, ll. 1660-1707. 1671.)
Of this passage Mr. Swinburne says: "It is hard to realize and hopeless
to reproduce the musical force of classic metres so recondite and
exquisite as the choral parts of a Greek play. Even Milton could not;
though with his godlike instinct and his godlike might of hand he made a
kind of strange and enormous harmony by intermixture of assonance and
rhyme with irregular blank verse, as in that last Titanic chorus of
Samson which utters over the fallen Philistines the trumpet-blast and
thunder of its triumphs." (_Essays and Studies_, pp. 162, 163.)
The lyre's voice is lovely everywhere;
In the court of gods, in the city of men,
And in the lonely rock-strewn mountain-glen,
In the still mountain air.
Only to Typho it sounds hatefully,--
To Typho only, the rebel o'erthrown,
Through whose heart Etna drives her roots of stone,
To embed them in the sea.
Wherefore dost thou groan so loud?
Wherefore do thy nostrils flash,
Through the dark night, suddenly,
Typho, such red jets of flame?
Is thy tortured heart still proud?
Is thy fire-scathed arm still rash?
Still alert thy stone-crushed frame?
Doth thy fierce soul still deplore
Thine ancient rout by the Cilician hills,
And that curst treachery on the Mount of Gore?
Do thy bloodshot eyes still weep
The fight which crowned thine ills,
Thy last mischance on this Sicilian deep?
Hast thou sworn, in thy sad lair,
Where erst the strong sea-currents sucked thee down,
Never to cease to writhe, and try to rest,
Letting the sea-stream wander through thy hair?
That thy groans, like thunder prest,
Begin to roll, and almost drown
The sweet notes whose lulling spell
Gods and the race of mortals love so well,
When through thy caves thou hearest music swell?
But an awful pleasure bland
Spreading o'er the Thunderer's face,
When the sound climbs near his seat,
The Olympian council sees;
As he lets his lax right hand,
Which the lightnings doth embrace,
Sink upon his mighty knees.
And the eagle, at the beck
Of the appeasing, gracious harmony,
Droops all his sheeny, brown, deep-feathered neck,
Nestling nearer to Jove's feet;
While o'er his sovran eye
The curtains of the blue films slowly meet.
And the white Olympus-peaks
Rosily brighten, and the soothed gods smile
At one another from their golden chairs,
And no one round the charmed circle speaks.
Only the loved Hebe bears
The cup about, whose draughts beguile
Pain and care, with a dark store
Of fresh-pulled violets wreathed and nodding o'er;
And her flushed feet glow on the marble floor.
(MATTHEW ARNOLD: _Empedocles on Etna_, Act II. Song of Callicles. 1853.)
Wherefore to me, this fear--
Groundedly stationed here
Fronting my heart, the portent-watcher--flits she?
Wherefore should prophet-play
The uncalled and unpaid lay,
Nor--having spat forth fear, like bad dreams--sits she
On the mind's throne beloved--well-suasive Boldness?
For time, since, by a throw of all the hands,
The boat's stern-cables touched the sands,
Has passed from youth to oldness,--
When under Ilion rushed the ship-borne bands.
And from my eyes I learn--
Being myself my witness--their return.
Yet, all the same, without a lyre, my soul,
Itself its teacher too, chants from within
Erinus' dirge, not having now the whole
Of Hope's dear boldness: nor my inwards sin--
The heart that's rolled in whirls against the mind
Justly presageful of a fate behind.
But I pray--things false, from my hope, may fall
Into the fate that's not-fulfilled-at-all!
Especially at least, of health that's great
The term's insatiable: for, its weight
--A neighbor, with a common wall between--
Ever will sickness lean;
And destiny, her course pursuing straight,
Has struck man's ship against a reef unseen.
Now, when a portion, rather than the treasure
Fear casts from sling, with peril in right measure,
It has not sunk--the universal freight,
(With misery freighted over-full,)
Nor has fear whelmed the hull.
Then too the gift of Zeus,
Two-handedly profuse,
Even from the furrows' yield for yearly use
Has done away with famine, the disease;
But blood of man to earth once falling,--deadly, black,--
In times ere these,--
Who may, by singing spells, call back?
Zeus had not else stopped one who rightly knew
The way to bring the dead again.
But, did not an appointed Fate constrain
The Fate from gods, to bear no more than due,
My heart, outstripping what tongue utters,
Would have all out: which now, in darkness, mutters
Moodily grieved, nor ever hopes to find
How she a word in season may unwind
From out the enkindling mind.
(BROWNING: _Agamemnon_; chorus. 1877.)
Of the same general metrical character as the irregular odes are certain
poems (like some of Patmore's) with no regularly organized structure and
varying lengths of line. See, for example, Milton's verses _At a Solemn
Music_ and _On Time_; Swinburne's _Thalassius_ and _On the Cliffs_; and
William Morris's _On a fair Spring Morning_. Compare, also, the effect
of the irregular strophic forms in Southey's _Curse of Kehama_,
Shelley's _Queen Mab_, and the like.[41]