Gleanings from the Harvest-Fields of Literature

Conformity of Sense to Sound.

Reading edition

In the hexameter rises the fountain’s silvery column;

In the pentameter aye falling in melody back.—Coleridge: trans. Schiller.

ARTICULATE IMITATION OF INARTICULATE SOUNDS.

Soft is the strain when zephyr gently blows,

And the smooth stream in smoother numbers flows;

But when loud surges lash the sounding shore,

The hoarse, rough verse should like the torrent roar.

—Pope: Essay on Criticism.

On a sudden open fly,

With impetuous recoil and jarring sound,

Th’ infernal doors, and on their hinges grate

Harsh thunder.—Milton: Paradise Lost, ii.

Grate on their scrannel pipes of wretched straw.—Milton: Lycidas.

His bloody hand

Snatched two unhappy of my martial band,

And dashed like dogs against the stony floor.—Pope: Hom. Odys.

The Pilgrim oft

At dead of night, ’mid his orison, hears

Aghast the voice of time, disparting towers,

Tumbling all precipitous down-dashed,

Rattling around, loud thundering to the moon.

—Dyer: Ruins of Rome.

What! like Sir Richard, rumbling, rough, and fierce,

With arms, and George, and Brunswick, crowd the verse,

Rend with tremendous sounds your cars asunder,

With drum, gun, trumpet, blunderbuss, and thunder?

Then all your muse’s softer art display:

Let Carolina smooth the tuneful lay,

Lull with Amelia’s liquid name the nine,

And sweetly flow through all the royal line.—Pope: Sat. I.

Remarkable examples are afforded by Dryden’s Alexander’s Feast, and The Bells of Edgar A. Poe.

IMITATION OF TIME AND MOTION.

When the merry bells ring round,

And the jocund rebecs sound

555To many a youth and many a maid

Dancing in the checkered shade.—Milton: L’Allegro.

Up the high hill he heaves a huge round stone;

The huge round stone, resulting with a bound,

Thunders impetuous down, and smokes along the ground.

Pope: Hom. Odys.

Which urged, and labored, and forced up with pain,

Recoils and rolls impetuous down, and smokes along the plain.

Dryden: Lucretius.

A needless Alexandrine ends the song,

That, like a wounded snake, drags its slow length along.

Pope: Essay on Criticism.

Not so when swift Camilla scours the plain,

Flies o’er th’ unbending corn, and skims along the main.

Pope: Essay on Criticism.

Oft on a plat of rising ground

I hear the far-off curfew sound,

Over some wide-watered shore,

Swinging slow with sullen roar.—Milton: Il Penseroso.

The well-known hexameters of Virgil, descriptive respectively of the galloping of horses over a resounding plain, and of the heavy blows in alternately hammering the metal on the anvil, afford good examples,—the dactylic, of rapidity, the spondaic, of slowness.

Æneid, viii. 596.

IMITATION OF DIFFICULTY AND EASE.

When Ajax strives some rock’s vast weight to throw,

The line, too, labors, and the words move slow, &c.—Pope: Ess. on Criticism.

He through the thickest of the throng gan threke.—Chaucer: Knight’s Tale.

And strains from hard-bound brains six lines a year.—Pope: Sat. Frag.

Part huge of bulk,

Wallowing, unwieldy, enormous in their gait,

Tempest the ocean.—Milton: Paradise Lost, vii.

He came, and with him Eve, more loath, though first

To offend, discountenanced both, and discomposed.

Milton: Paradise Lost, x.

So he with difficulty and labor hard

Moved on, with difficulty and labor he.—Milton: Paradise Lost, ii.

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