Historical Manual of English Prosody

Book 1 — XIII. Later Middle English Period Potentially Metrical Lines in Langland (see Book II). (continued 2)

Reading edition

Sun-treader!—life and light be thine for ever! Thou art gone from us; years go by, and spring Gladdens, and the young earth is beautiful, Yet thy songs come not, other bards arise, But none like thee: they stand, thy majesties, Like mighty works which tell some spirit there Hath sat regardless of neglect and scorn, Till, its long task completed, it hath risen And left us, never to return, and all Rush in to peer and praise when all in vain. The air seems bright with thy past presence yet, But thou art still for me as thou hast been When I have stood with thee as on a throne With all thy dim creations gathered round Like mountains, and I felt of mould like them, And with them creatures of my own were mixed, Like things half-lived, catching and giving life.

(Wordsworthian-Shelleyan, but with a greater touch of dramatic soliloquy in it. Redundance, but no trisyllabics.)

(d) Browning—later (Mr. Sludge, "The Medium"):

(This unhesitating trisyllabic substitution sometimes reaches the very dangerous adjustment of trochee-anapæst, as in—

Gūilty̆ | fŏr thĕ whīm's | sā̆ke! Gūil|ty̆ hĕ sōme|how thinks.

The Ring and the Book.)

(e) Tennyson—early (Lover's Tale):

Glēams ŏf the water-circles as they broke, Flīckĕred | like doubtful smiles about her lips, Qūivĕred | a flying glory in her hair, Lēapt lĭke a passing thought across her eyes. And mine, with one that will not pass till earth And heaven pass too, dwell on my heaven—a face Most starry fair, but kindled from within As 'twere with dawn.

(Substitution trochaic only, except for "heaven"—always ambiguous in value.)

(f) Tennyson—standard middle (Ulysses):

There lies the port; the vessel puffs her sail: There gloom the dark broad seas. My mariners, Souls that have toil'd, and wrought, and thought with me— That ever with a frolic welcome took The thunder and the sunshine, and opposed Free hearts, free foreheads—you and I are old; Old age hath yet his honour and his toil; Death closes all: but something ere the end, Some work of noble note, may yet be done, Not unbecoming men that strove with Gods. The lights begin to twinkle from the rocks: The long day wanes: the slow moon climbs: the deep Moans round with many voices. Come, my friends, 'Tis not too late to seek a newer world. Push off, and sitting well in order smite The sounding furrows; for my purpose holds To sail beyond the sunset, and the baths Of all the western stars, until I die. It may be that the gulfs will wash us down: It may be we shall touch the Happy Isles, And see the great Achilles, whom we knew. Tho' much is taken, much abides; and tho' We are not now that strength which in old days Moved earth and heaven; that which we are, we are; One equal temper of heroic hearts, Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.

(Verse-paragraph completely achieved by variation of pause and different weighting of line, with, again, little or no trisyllabic substitution.)

Tennyson—later (The Holy Grail):

"There rose a hill that none but man could climb, Scarr'd with a hundred wintry wa|tercourses— Storm at the top, and when we gain'd it, storm Round us and death; for ev|ery mo|ment glanced His silver arms and gloom'd: so quick and thick The lightnings here and there to left and right Struck, till the dry old trunks about us, dead, Yea, rotten with a hundred years of death, Sprang into fi|re: and at | the base we found On either hand, as far as eye could see, A great black swamp and of an evil smell, Part black, part whiten'd with the bones of men, Not to be crost, save that some ancient king Had built a way, where, link'd with many a bridge, A thousand piers ran into the great Sea. And Ga|lahad fled | along them bridge by bridge, And ev|ery bridge | as quickly as he crost Sprang into fire and vanish'd, tho' I yearn'd To fol|low; and thrice | above him all the heavens Open'd and blazed with thunder such as seem'd Shoutings of all the sons of God: and first At once I saw him far on the great Sea, In silver-shining armour starry-clear; And o'er his head the Holy Vessel hung Clothed in white samite or a lu|minous cloud. And with exceeding swiftness ran the boat, If boat it were—I saw not whence it came. And when the heavens o|pen'd and blazed | again Roaring, I saw him like a silver star— And had he set the sail, or had the boat Become a living creature clad with wings? And o'er his head the Holy Vessel hung Redder than any rose, a joy to me, For now I knew the veil had been withdrawn. Then in a moment when they blazed again Opening, I saw the least of little stars Down on the waste, and straight beyond the star I saw | the spiri|tual cit|y and all | her spires And gateways in a glory like one pearl— No larger, tho' the goal of all the saints— Strike from the sea; and from the star there shot A rose-red sparkle to the cit|y, and there Dwelt, and I knew it was the Holy Grail, Which never eyes on earth again shall see."

(Paragraph still more ambitious and elaborate, with much trisyllabic substitution and some redundance.)

XLI. The Non-Equivalenced Octosyllable of Keats and Morris

(a) Keats (Eve of St. Mark):

Upon a Sabbath day it fell; Twice holy was the Sabbath-bell, That called the folk to evening-prayer; The city streets were clean and fair From wholesome drench of April rains; And on the western window-panes The chilly sunset faintly told Of unmatured green valleys cold, Of the green thorny bloomless hedge, Of rivers new with spring-tide sedge, Of primroses by sheltered rills, And daisies on the aguish hills. Twice holy was the Sabbath-bell: The silent streets were crowded well With staid and pious companies, Warm from their fire-side orat'ries, And moving, with demurest air, To even-song and vesper prayer. Each archèd porch, and entry low, Was filled with patient folk and slow, With whispers hush, and shuffling feet, While played the organ loud and sweet.

(b) Morris (The Ring given to Venus):

By then his eyes were opened wide. Already up the grey hillside The backs of two were turned to him: One, like a young man tall and slim, Whose heels with rosy wings were dight; One like a woman clad in white, With glittering wings of many a hue, Still changing, and whose shape none knew. In aftertime would Laurence say That though the moonshine, cold and grey, Flooded the lonely earth that night, These creatures in the moon's despite Were coloured clear, as though the sun Shone through the earth to light each one— And terrible was that to see.

(Here the effect is entirely achieved by dividing the couplets, with full stops or strong pauses at the end of the first line, and running the sense of the second into the first of the next; by considerable variations of internal pause, and by placing emphatic or brightly coloured words at different spots. Equivalence is practically limited to such things as "glittering," "aguish," "many a," etc., where it is at minimum strength.)

XLII. The Continuous Alexandrine (Drayton and Browning)

(a) Drayton (Polyolbion):

Whenas the pliant Muse, with fair and even flight, Betwixt her silver wings is wafted to the Wight,— That Isle, which jutting out into the sea so far, Her offspring traineth up in exercise of war; Those pirates to put back, that oft purloin her trade, Or Spaniards or the French attempting to invade. Of all the southern isles she holds the highest place, And evermore hath been the great'st in Britain's grace. Not one of all her nymphs her sovereign fav'reth thus, Embracèd in the arms of old Oceanus. For none of her account so near her bosom stand, 'Twixt Penwith's furthest point and Goodwin's queachy sand.

(b) Browning (Fifine at the Fair):

O trip and skip, Elvire! Link arm in arm with me! Like husband and like wife, together let us see The tumbling troop arrayed, the strollers on their stage, Drawn up and under arms, and ready to engage.

(Printing of lines disjoined to show the extra stress which Browning lays on the middle pause, and which, though not universal, is general throughout the poem. The case is rather the other way with Drayton. He observes the pause, which is indeed the law of the line; but he does not seem to avail himself of it much as a prosodic or rhetorical instrument.)

XLIII

The Dying Swan of Tennyson, scanned entirely through to show the application of the system. (It brings out a scheme of dimeters wholly iambic at the lowest rate of substitution, wholly anapæstic at the highest, mixed between. A few instances occur of the other usual and regular licences—trochaic and spondaic substitution, monosyllabic feet (or catalexis) and one or two of brachycatalexis, three feet instead of four. And it is to be specially noted that the poet uses these, not at random, but so as to swell and raise his rhythm, proportionately and progressively, from the slow motion and scanty syllabising of the opening scene-stanza to the "flood of eddying song" at the close. This process is entirely unaccounted for on the bare "four-stress" system.)

II.

III.

This piece, with the "Hollyhock" (v. sup. p. 27), Blake's "Mad Song" (§ XXXV.), Shelley's "Cloud" (note, p. 100), and the Christabel selections (§ XXXVIII.), will almost completely exemplify substitution in lyric. But the germ is far older—in Shakespeare, in "E.I.O.," and even in pieces earlier still.

XLIV. The Stages of the Metre of "Dolores" and the Dedication of "Poems and Ballads"

This remarkable measure illustrates, with especial appositeness, the natural history of metrical evolution, and so may be dealt with more fully as a specimen. There can be little doubt that its original, or the earliest form to which it can be traced, is the split Alexandrine or three-foot iambic, which appears in the French of Philippe de Thaun, and in several English poems, such as the Bestiary, translated from Philippe's—

After | him he | filleth, Drageth | dust with | his stert,

and as even King Horn. But this gives far too little room in English; and the rhymes, when rhyme is introduced, come too quick. Substitution of trisyllabic feet remedies both faults; while the actual six, with interchanged rhyme, gives beautiful work, though the lines are still rather short:

This shortness kept it back, more especially when the fear of mainly trisyllabic measures came in after the fifteenth-century anarchy. But as soon as that fear disappeared, and the anapæst forced itself into general use, logic, assisted by tune, suggested a cutting down of the popular dimeter or four-foot anapæstic line to three. This, for a long time, maintained itself in strict literature without much variety of structure, as, at different times, is shown by Shenstone in the well-known—

and by Cowper in the still better known "Alexander Selkirk" lines—

and in "Catherina"—

Now, though these lines are pretty, they are exposed to the charge of being pretty sing-song, and monotonous jingle. But this had, long before Cowper, been to a great extent remedied, though for comic purposes only or mainly, in such things as Gay's "Molly Mog," quoted above, and Chesterfield-Pulteney's

Had I Hanover, Bremen, and Ver|den, And likewise the Duchy of Zell, I would part with them all for a far|thing, To have my dear Molly Lepell!

(Pronounce "Verden" with the proper English value of er, and give "farthing" its then correct form of "farden," and the rhyme will be spotless.)

What it was that made Byron take this up for a serious purpose in the lines to Haidee (before Don Juan) is not, I believe, known:

The gain here, from the redundant syllable and double rhyme in the odd lines, and from a rather more frequent use of dissyllabic feet to prevent monotony, is immense. Praed adopted the measure, and improved it still further, in his admirable "Letter of Advice":

And then Mr. Swinburne had the probably final inspiration of shortening the last line to two feet (or an anapæstic monometer), with an astonishing result of added and finished music:

XLV. Long Metres of Tennyson, Browning, Morris, and Swinburne

(a) Tennyson (The Lotos-Eaters):

(Trochaic six- and seven-foot lines, always hypercatalectic, or, in stricter language, trochaic trimeters hypercatalectic and tetrameters catalectic.)

At the close the poet avails himself of the iambic alternative which is so effective, and has a pure fourteener:

(There is no trisyllabic substitution.)

(b) Tennyson (Maud):

Cōld ănd clēar-cŭt fāce, why̆ cōme yŏu sŏ crūelly̆ mēek, Brēakĭng ă slūmbĕr ĭn whīch āll splēenfŭl fōlly̆ wăs drōwn'd, Pāle wĭth thĕ gōldĕn bēam ŏf ăn ēyelăsh dēad ŏn thĕ chēek, Passionless, pale, cold face, star-sweet on a gloom profound; Womanlike, taking revenge too deep for a transient wrong Done but in thought to your beauty, and ever as pale as before Growing and fading and growing upon me without a sound, Luminous, gemlike, ghostlike, deathlike, half the night long Growing and fading and growing, till I could bear it no more, Bŭt ărōse, and all by myself in my own dark garden ground, Listening now to the tide in its broad-flung shipwrecking roar, Now to the scream of a madden'd beach dragg'd down by the wave, Walk'd in a wintry wind by a ghastly glimmer, and found Thĕ shīning daffodil dead, and Orion low in his grave.

(A rather deceptive metre; for which reason foot-division has been postponed above.) It may look at first sight like a trochaic run, but this will be found not to fit. Then hexameters of the Evangeline type, with a syllable cut off at the end, suggest themselves; but it will be seen that some openings make this very bad. It is really a six-foot anapæst with the usual allowance of iambic substitution and of monosyllabic ("anacrustic") beginning, as thus:

(Same metre, but almost purely anapæstic; the central pause frequently strong.)

(d) Tennyson (Kapiolani)

(Apparently intended for a dactylic octometer. Like all these things in English, it probably goes better as anapæstic with anacrusis and hypercatalexis. See dotted scansion.)

(e) Browning (Abt Vogler):

Would ¦ that the | struc¦ture | brave, ¦ the | man¦ifold | mu¦sic I | build,¦ Bid¦ding my | or¦gan o|bey, ¦| call¦ing its |keys ¦ to their | work, Claim¦ing each | slave ¦ of the | sound ¦ at a | touch, ¦ as when | So¦lomon | willed Ar¦mies of | an¦gels that | soar, ¦| le¦gions of | de¦mons that | lurk. Man, brute, ¦| reptile, ¦| fly, ¦|| alien ¦ of | end ¦ and of | aim, Ad¦verse | each ¦ from the | oth¦er, | hea¦ven-high ¦ hell-¦deep re|moved, Should rush ¦ into sight ¦ at once ¦ as he named ¦ the ineff¦able name, And pile ¦ him a pal¦ace straight, ¦ to plea¦sure the prin¦cess he loved.

(Note the alliteration.)

At first, as you read this, you can, if your ears are accustomed to classical metres, have no doubt about the scheme. It is simply the regular elegiac couplet "accentually" rendered in English, with the abscission of the last syllable of the hexameter—a catalectic hexameter and a pentameter acatalectic. For the first four lines of the first octave there is no doubt at all. But when you get on to the second half you are pulled up. In the fifth and sixth lines the pentameter seems to have got to the first place, and the seventh is no more a hexameter than the eighth is its proper companion. For a moment you may fancy that this was intended—that the poet meant octaves of two different parts. But when you look at the other stanzas you will find that this is by no means the case. Truncated elegiac cadence appears, reappears, disappears in the most bewildering fashion, till you recognise—sooner or later according to your prosodic experience—that it was only simulated cadence after all, a sort of leaf-insect rhythm, and that the whole thing (as marked by the dotted scansion lines) is in six-foot anapæsts equivalenced daringly, but quite legitimately, with monosyllabic and dissyllabic feet.

(f) W. Morris ("The Wind"):

(First three lines six-foot (trimeter) anapæsts with full substitution. Refrain a graded "wheel" of four, four or five, and six iambic feet.)

(g) Morris (Love is Enough):

Such words shall my ghost see the chronicler writing In the days that shall be—ah!—what would'st more, my fosterling? Knowest thou not how words fail us awaking, That we seemed to hear plain amid sleep and its sweetness.

(Intentionally irregular "accentual" lines, but with an anapæstic or amphibrachic "under-hum." There is a good deal of alliteration elsewhere, and some here.)

(h) Morris (Sigurd metre, but the actual example from The House of the Wolfings):

Thou sayest it, I am outcast: || for a God that lacketh mirth Hath no more place in God-home || and never a place on earth. A man grieves, and he gladdens, || or he dies and his grief is gone; But what of the grief of the Gods? and || the sorrow never undone? Yea, verily, I am the outcast. || When first in thine arms I lay, On the blossoms of the woodland || my godhead passed away; Thenceforth unto thee I was looking || for the light and the glory of life, And the Gods' doors shut behind me || till the day of the uttermost strife. And now thou hast taken my soul, thou || wilt cast it into the night, And cover thine head with the darkness || and cover thine eyes from the light. Thou would'st go to the empty country || where never a seed is sown, And never a deed is fashioned || and the place where each is alone; But I thy thrall shall follow, || I shall come where thou seem'st to lie, I shall sit on the howe that hides thee, || and thou so dear and nigh! A few bones white in their war-gear, || that have no help or thought, Shall be Thiodolf the Mighty, || so nigh, so dear—and nought!

(A splendid construction from older and newer examples. Strongly stressed, strictly middle-paused, but perfectly regular anapæstic sixes, with substitution and a hypercatalectic syllable or half foot at the pause.)

(i) Mr. Swinburne (Hesperia and Evening on the Broads).

The first line of Hesperia is practically a Kingsleyan hexameter (v. inf.) of the very best kind—

while the second—

Full of the sunset and sad ¦ if at ¦ all with the fulness of joy,

is a pentameter of similar mould, with the centre gap cunningly filled in by the two short stitches "if at," capable, as you see below in

Thee I beheld as bird ¦ borne ¦ in with the wind from the west,

of being duly equivalenced with one long stitch, like "borne." Yet the second line is capable also of being scanned exactly as the first—anacrusis and five anapæests—but without the final redundance or hypercatalexis; and in other long lines you will find that the principle of equivalence is preserved throughout—that two shorts, as in

defeat the hexametrical movement, and pull off the mask at the beginning, though it returns at the end. The metre is really anapæstic throughout. And in Evening on the Broads the poet has carried this further still, providing in some cases regular apparent elegiacs:

O|ver the ¦ sha|dowless ¦ wa|ters a¦drift | as a ¦ pin|nace ¦ in per|il, Hangs | as in ¦ hea|vy sus¦pense || charged | with ir¦re|solute ¦ light.

(j) Mr. Swinburne (Choriambics):

Lōve, whăt | āiled thĕe tŏ lēave | līfe thăt wăs māde | lōvely̆ wĕ thōught | wĭth lōve?—

(k) Mr. Swinburne (other long anapæstic and trochaic measures):

(These are respectively seven-foot anapæsts with redundance (anapæstic tetrameter catalectic); ditto eight-foot (tetrameter acatalectic); trochaic tetrameter acatalectic; and anapæstic tetrameter hypercatalectic (eight feet and a half).)

XLVI. The Later Sonnet

(To illustrate the strict octave and sextet pattern with final rhymes adjusted on the Italian pattern.)

Dante Rossetti:

Under the arch of Life, where love and death, Tērrŏr and mys|tĕry̆, gūard | her shrine, I saw Beauty enthroned; and though her gaze struck awe, I drew it in as simply as my breath. Hers are the eyes which, over and beneath The sky and sea, bend o'er thee—which can draw By sea, or sky, or woman, to one law Thĕ ăllōt|ted burden of her palm and wreath. This is that Lady Beauty, in whose praise Thy voice and hand shake still—long known to thee By flying hair and flut|tĕrĭng hēm |—the beat Fōllŏwĭng | her daily of thy heart and feet. How pas|sĭonătelȳ | and irretrievably In what fond flight, how many ways and days!

XLVII. The Various Attempts at "Hexameters" in English

(a) Earlier (Elizabethan):

(Watson, ap. Asch. Schoolmaster, p. 73, ed. Arber.)

(Stanyhurst, Æn. iv. 1-5, ed. Arber, p. 94.)

(Harvey in letter to Spenser, Eliz. Crit. Essays, ed. Gregory Smith, i. 106.)

See yee the | blindefold|ēd pretie | god, that | feathered | archer Of lo|vērs mise|ries || which maketh | his bloodie | game.

(Spenser in letter to Harvey, ibid. i. 99.)

(All these tried to accommodate—though sometimes rather roughly—English pronunciation to such of the rules of Latin quantity, by "nature" and "position," as could be applied. Some of them even tried to make general rules for English quantity. But the wiser, from Ascham to Campion, admitted that dactylic rhythm was difficult, if not impossible, to keep up in our language.)

(b) Later Georgian and Victorian.

(1) Coleridge (Specimen c. 1799?):

In ¦ the hex|am¦eter | ri¦ses the | foun¦tain's | sil¦very | col¦umn; In ¦ the pen|ta¦meter | aye || fall¦ing in | mel¦ody | back.

(A very fair attempt, but already showing the natural tendency of the lines, when poetically rhythmed, to anapæstic—the dotted—scansion.)

(2) Southey (Vision of Judgment):

(Anapæstic run avoided with some skill, save now and then; but at the cost of weak beginnings, frequent, and admitted, substitution of trochaic for spondaic effect, and, above all, as in line 1, an ugly rocking-horse division into three batches of two feet each instead of the proper 2-1/2 + 3-1/2 or 3-1/2 + 2-1/2.)

(3) Longfellow (Evangeline):

(A popular, tunable sort of rhythm, obtained by a very large proportion of dactyls—often really giving (and always when really good) the anapæstic effect,—unhesitating adoption of trochees and even pyrrhics for spondees, and not seldom the Southeyan split at feet 2 and 4. An essentially rickety measure.)

(4) Clough—earlier (in the Bothie of Tober-na-Vuolich—Evangeline type, but with more spondees and spondaic endings):

I was quite | right last | night, it | is too sōon, tōo | sudden.

(5) Later he attempted English "quantitative" things of this kind:

and

Unto the | sweet flut|ing, girls, of a swarthy shĕphērd.

This deliberate neglect of pronunciation ("pălāte" for "pālăte," "shĕphērd" for "shēphĕrd") has, in the last half-century or so, developed itself into a still more deliberate crusade against pronunciation; it being supposed that a conflict of accent and quantity has something attractive about it. Thus the late Mr. Stone wrote as a hexameter:

(6) On the other hand, Kingsley's Andromeda—the best poem of some length intended for English hexameters—is clearly, though not consciously, anapæstic, as thus:

And Mr. Swinburne did the same thing (see above) consciously.

XLVIII. Minor Imitations of Classical Metres

(a) Sapphics (Watts):

This illustrates—as do the pieces which it, beyond all doubt, patterned, though in succession rather than directly (Cowper's "Hatred and Vengeance," Southey's "Cold was the Night Wind," and Canning's triumphant parody of this latter, the "Needy Knifegrinder")—the unyokeableness of classical metres—when not merely iambic, trochaic, or anapæstic—to English rhythm. The proper run of the Sapphic line is—

tumti-tumtum-tumtity-tumti-tum{-ti;

-tum

but this constantly in English, though not so much in the first line as elsewhere, changes itself into

tumtity-tum { -tum|| tumtiti-titumty.

-ti

Mr. Swinburne has got it right, but only as a tour de force, and, as in line 2, not always quite certainly.

But Southey and Canning always suggest the wrong:

Shē hăd nŏ ¦ hōme, thē̆ ¦ wōrld wăs ăll ¦ bĕfōre hĕr,

and

Stōry̆, sĭr? ¦ Blēss yŏu! ¦ Ī hăve nŏne ¦ tŏ tēll yŏu;

(b) Alcaics (Tennyson):

(Correct, but not natural.)

(These very pretty lines exhibit a most curious instance of the unconscious force of the prosodic genius of a language. Coleridge was a good classical scholar, and quite enough of a mathematician to know the difference between 11 and 12. Yet every one of these hendecasyllabics will be found to be a dodecasyllabic; the poet having substituted (as in English prosody is quite allowable) an initial dactyl for the dissyllabic foot of the original metre. Once more this shows the English impatience of classical form.)

(d) Hendecasyllabics (Tennyson):

O you chorus of indolent reviewers, Irresponsible, indolent reviewers, Look, I come to the test, a tiny poem All composed in a metre of Catullus. .. .. .. . Hard, hard, hard is it, only not to tumble, So fantastical is the dainty metre.

A triumph, but a criticism as well, as its own ending shows:

As some rare little rose, a piece of inmost Horticultural art—

or "versicultural" rather.

(e) Galliambics.

These have been tried splendidly by Tennyson in Boadicea, interestingly by Mr. George Meredith in Phaethon, unsuccessfully by the late Mr. Grant Allen in his version of the Atys of Catullus. But the metre is not quite plain sailing even in Greek and Latin, and it is therefore better to leave it alone here and return to it in Glossary.

XLIX. Imitations of Artificial French Forms

(a) Triolet:

(b) Rondeau:

With pipe and flute the rustic Pan Of old made music sweet for man; And wonder hushed the warbling bird, And closer drew the calm-eyed herd,— The rolling river slowlier ran. Ah! would,—ah! would, a little span, Some air of Arcady could fan This age of ours, too seldom stirred With pipe and flute! But now for gold we plot and plan; And from Beersheba unto Dan, Apollo's self might pass unheard, Or find the night-jar's note preferred;— Not so it fared, when time began, With pipe and flute!

(The number of lines in a rondeau is not immutable, nor is it in a rondel, where the principle is the return of whole lines as in the triolet, but, since the poem is longer, giving room for more not repeated matter.)

Ship, to the roadstead rolled, What dost thou?—O, once more Regain the port. Behold! Thy sides are bare of oar, Thy tall mast wounded sore Of Africus, and see, What shall thy spars restore?— Tempt not the tyrant sea! What cable now will hold When all drag out from shore? What god canst thou, too bold, In time of need implore? Look! for thy sails flap o'er, Thy stiff shrouds part and flee, Fast—fast thy seams outpour,— Tempt not the tyrant sea! What though thy ribs of old The pines of Pontus bore! Not now to stern of gold Men trust, or painted prore! Thou, or thou count'st it store A toy of winds to be, Shun thou the Cyclads' roar,— Tempt not the tyrant sea!

ENVOY. Ship of the State, before A care, and now to me A hope in my heart's core,— Tempt not the tyrant sea!

(All these examples are Mr. Austin Dobson's, and inserted here by his kind permission. It will be observed that the lines follow general English prosodic rules. It is only the stanza that is borrowed.)

L. Later Rhymelessness

(a) M. Arnold (The Strayed Reveller. Words printed exactly as original, except the added "and"; the also added brackets show the unconscious decasyllabism):

[Ever new magic! Hast thou then lured hither,] [Wonderful Goddess, by thy art, The young], [languid-eyed Ampelus, Iacchus' darling—] . . . . . . . [They see the Indian Drifting, knife in hand,] [His frail boat moor'd to A floating isle thick-matted] [With large-leaved [and] low-creeping melon-leaves,] [x]And the dark cucumber. [He reaps, and stows them, Drifting—drifting;—round him, [Round his green harvest-plot, Flow the cool lake-waves,] [y]The mountains ring them.

(Here the first piece is three pure decasyllables, with redundance, cut into five. The second requires only the addition of the italicised "and" to make it a complete blank-verse passage with two shortened lines or half-lines, x and y, of the kind common in Shakespeare. The poem is crammed with shorter stanza-pieces of the same kind.)

(b) Mr. Henley ("Speed." Printed as original and as prose):

Roads where the stalwart Soldier of Cæsar Put by his bread And his garlic, and girding [His conquering sword To his unconquered thigh,] Lay down in his armour, And went to his Gods By the way that he'd made.

Roads where the stalwart soldier of Cæsar put by his bread and his garlic, and girding [his conquering sword to his unconquered thigh,] lay down in his armour, and went to his Gods by the way he had made.

(The decasyllable is not quite avoided even here, as in the bracketed phrase. But the main point is that the thing reads perfectly well as prose, with no obvious suggestion of metre at all.)

LI. Some "Unusual" Metres and Disputed Scansions

Some measures of recent poets have been objected, or at least proposed, as offering difficulties in respect of the system of this book. It has therefore seemed well to scan them here.

(a) Frederic Myers (St. Paul):

(There is nothing very peculiar or at all original in this, though it was probably now first used continuously for a poem of some length. It is only decasyllabic quatrain with uniform redundance in the first and third lines, and a strong inclination to trochaic opening, which in its turn suggests a primary dactyl and trochees to follow, as an alternative (see dotted scansion). Examples of it anterior to Myers may be found—commented on in the larger History (vol. iii. 481)—in Zophiel, very likely known to Myers, as he was much connected by family friendship with the Lake School; in the famous poem

From the lone sheiling on the misty island,

the authorship of which has been so much contested; and in Emily Bronte's Remembrance (see again vol. iii. of Hist. Pros. p. 378), of which he cannot possibly have been ignorant.[48] His own share in the matter would seem to have been limited to the persevering adoption of it in an unvaried form. Whether this be an advantage or not is a question of taste: the prosodic description of the metre is clear and in no way recondite.)

(b) Ernest Dowson (Cynara) [Non sum qualis eram, etc.]:

(Sextet of Alexandrines with decasyllable (or brachycatalexis) in the 5th line, and with hypercatalexis, redundance, or double rhyme in the 4th and 6th. An original collocation, so far as I know, but nothing new or strange in principle. The actual poem is a rather beautiful one; but how much is contributed to the beauty by the special metre is another question. At any rate, once more, it has no difficulties for foot-scansion.)

To-morrow and to-morrow and to-morrow,

with the following lines, has also been proposed as a crux. But this must have been a not very brilliant joke; and it would be an insult to the student to scan the passage. It is one of the finest specimens of Shakespearian equivalence and "fingered" blank verse, but offers no more difficulties, on the system of this book, than any couplet of Pope or any verse of the "Old Hundredth." On the other hand, many passages of Shakespeare may not illegitimately puzzle the student if he does not realise that, although (it is believed) every line which is not corrupt can be scanned on our system, every line is by no means an exact five-foot. In accordance with the best English practice, older and newer, Shakespeare does not scruple to extend his lines to Alexandrines, and even to fourteeners, while the exigencies of drama entitle him to use lines of less than five full feet. But all these—the fragments as well as the extended lines—obey the general law of iambic arrangement with substitution in individual feet. Thus in Lady Macbeth's invocation of the Spirits of Evil (I. v. 49)—

is a regular Alexandrine. Her husband's hallucination—

I see thee yet, in form as palpable As this | which now | I draw,

stops in the second line at the third foot. Different lines of the ghost's great speech in Hamlet (I. v. 42-91) show the Alexandrine—

and a fragment of two feet and a half—

All my | smooth bo|dy.

If studied in this way, even the scenes where short speeches of the conversational kind form the staple will be found to piece themselves together perfectly well in continuous scansion.

FOOTNOTES:

Notes in this chapter

Note 1 · I regret that in my larger History (iii. 430-431) I did not notice the misprint of "travel"; metrically, however, it makes no real differenc Note 2 · In fact, there are even much older examples, as in Cleveland's Mark Antony and some things of Dryden's, on one of their possible scansions,