The Principles of English Versification Part 18

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 leaders.h.i.+p against Yahveh, And thereafter against the mild Galilean G.o.dhead, 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 pa.s.sing feet To the fragrant woodways, The moonlight floods the forsaken tangled boughs With loneliness For Melinna, gone from the evening.

EDWARD J. O'BRIEN, h.e.l.lenica.

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 fas.h.i.+on of free-verse, would by very few be recognized as blank verse; and the same is true of many pa.s.sages 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 h.o.r.eb 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.

+--------------------------------------------------------------+ [75] See a part of Margaritae 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, Pa.s.s the sweet meadows, and viewless Walks the mild spirit of May, Visibly blessing the world.

HENLEY, Pastoral.

Have the G.o.ds 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 G.o.ds, 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 gla.s.s 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]

+--------------------------------------------------------------+ [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 ill.u.s.trated 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 quant.i.tative metres of the cla.s.sics; 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 antic.i.p.ated 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 subst.i.tuting 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 Courts.h.i.+p 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 cla.s.sical 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) quant.i.tative experiments. An example of this and one of Mr. Bridges' quant.i.tative 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 sh.o.r.e to the southward, Dwells in the well-tilled lowland a dark-haired aethiop 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 Athene, 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.

Now in wintry delights, and long fireside meditation, 'Twixt studies and routine paying due court to the Muses, My solace in solitude, when broken roads barricade me Mudbound, unvisited for months with my merry children, Grateful t'ward Providence, and heeding a slander against me Less than a rheum, think of me to-day, dear Lionel, and take This letter as some account of Will Stone's versification.

R. BRIDGES, Wintry Delights.

+--------------------------------------------------------------+ [77] The advanced student should of course read carefully the paper on "Cla.s.sical Metres in English" by W. J. Stone in Bridges' Milton's Prosody (2d ed.), pp. 113 ff. Mr. Stone regards the hexameters of Clough's Actaeon and some specimen verses by Spedding (the biographer of Bacon) as the best he has seen. +--------------------------------------------------------------+

After the hexameter the most frequently imitated metre is the Sapphic strophe. Swinburne's Sapphics in Poems and Ballads are the best known; but though they are finely musical they do not pretend to give more than an echo of the Greek music.

All the night sleep came not upon my eyelids, Shed not dew, nor shook nor unclosed a feather, Yet with lips shut close and with eyes of iron Stood and beheld me.

Then to me so lying awake a vision Came without sleep over the seas and touched me, Softly touched mine eyelids and lips; and I too, Full of the vision,

Saw the white implacable Aphrodite, Saw the hair unbound and the feet unsandalled s.h.i.+ne as fire of sunset on western waters; Saw the reluctant....

Both Tennyson and Swinburne tried the Catullan hendecasyllabics.

Tennyson's Milton, in alcaics, is famous, and has a well-marked Miltonic sound, but little of the sound of Horace's alcaics. Admirable also are the elegiac distichs of Watson's Hymn to the Sea--

Man whose deeds, to the doer, come back as thine own exhalations Into thy bosom return, weepings of mountain and vale; Man with the cosmic fortunes and starry vicissitudes tangled, Chained to the wheel of the world, blind with the dust of its speed, Even as thou, O giant, whom trailed in the wake of her conquests Night's sweet despot draws, bound to her ivory car.

Of the French lyrical metres that have been imitated in English, mainly for lighter themes, the _ballade_ and the _rondeau_ are the most important. These and the _villanelle_, _triolet_, and _pantoum_ are not, like imitations of cla.s.sical forms, semi-learned attempts to do in English what is foreign to the nature of the language, but games of skill in phrasing and riming, wholly legitimate once their artificiality is granted. For the impa.s.sioned overflowing of a sincere spirit they are unfitted, but for grace, point, and delicate charm nothing could be better devised; and when occasionally they are used for the expression of genuine feeling, the unexpected union of lightness and seriousness has a peculiarly poignant effect.

The _ballade_ in its commonest form consists of three 8-line stanzas riming _ababbcbc_ and a 4-line stanza called 'envoy,' _bcbc_; the last line of each stanza being repeated as a refrain, and the _a_, _b_, and _c_ rimes throughout the poem being the same. The lines contain usually either four or five stresses. The envoy is a sort of dedication, addressed traditionally to a "Prince." Variations of all kinds occur, encouraged by the difficulty of satisfying all the demands of the form.

Examples may be found (with an excellent introduction) in Gleeson White's collection of Ballades and Rondeaus (Canterbury Poets), and Andrew Lang's Ballades of Blue China.

_Rondeaus_ and _rondels_ (two forms of the same word) are written with greater freedom of variation. Their organic principle is the use of the first phrase or first line, twice repeated, as a refrain (R). The commoner model in English is: _aabba_, _aabR_, _aabbaR_, in which the first half of the first line const.i.tutes the refrain. Another type rimes _ABba_, _abAB_, _abbaAB_ (the capital letters indicating the lines repeated). For examples see the reference above. Austin Dobson, Henley, and Swinburne have written successfully in this form.

The _triolet_ is a sort of abbreviation of the second variety of rondeau. Its lines are usually short and rime _ABaAabAB_.

The _villanelle_, in its normal form, consists of five 3-line stanzas (_aba_) and a concluding 4-line stanza, all with but two rimes, the first line, moreover, being repeated as the sixth, twelfth, and eighteenth, the third line as the ninth, fifteenth, and nineteenth.

The _pantoum_ is of Eastern origin, but it came into English through the French. It is extremely rare. It consists of a series of quatrains _abab_, with the second and fourth lines of each stanza repeated chainwise as the first and third of the next stanza. The closing stanza completes the chain by taking as its second and fourth lines the first and third of the first stanza.

From Italy have come, besides the _ottava rima_ and the sonnet, two other metrical forms, the _sestina_ and the _terza rima_. The sestina is composed of six 6-line stanzas and a final 3-line stanza. Instead of rimes the end words of the lines of the first stanza are repeated in this order 1.2.3.4.5.6. -- 6.1.5.2.4.3. -- 3.6.4.1.2.5. -- 5.3.2.6.1.4.

-- 4.5.1.3.6.2. -- 2.4.6.5.3.1. -- and the last stanza 5.3.1. with 2.4.6. in the middle of the lines. Gosse, Swinburne, and Kipling have written sestinas; Swinburne one with the additional embellishment of rime.