(h) MISCELLANEOUS. Imitations of classic metres are not confined to hexameter verse. The "elegiac elegiac" verse, in which "pentameter" alternated with "hexameter," has been occasionally tried by English poets, but not so much as in Germany; Coleridge's translation from Schiller is well known: "In the hexameter rises the fountain's silvery column, Tennyson has some "Alcaics" to Milton: "O míghty-mouth'd inventor of hármonies, Milton himself has very gracefully Englished one of Horace's Odes (1. 5): "What slender youth bedew'd with liquid odours Pyrrha? For whom bind'st thou In wreaths thy golden hair?" Compare with this the exquisite Ode to Evening of Collins. The difficult "Hendecasyllabic" verse, as used by the Roman Catullus, has been imitated by Coleridge, Tennyson, and Swinburne. The latter poet has even essayed the "Choriambic" verse: 66 ‘Lòve, whàt | áiled thee to leáve | lífe that was máde | lóvely, we thought | with love? What sweet | vísions of sleép | lúred thee awáy | down from the light | above?". Bulwer wrote a collection of stories, The Lost Tales of Miletus, all in classical metres; nor must we forget the rimeless rhythm of Southey, as in Thalaba, or of Matthew Arnold, as in The Strayed Reveller, and the highly successful choruses (with sporadic rime) of the Samson Agonistes. But it may be said, notwithstanding these cases, that with the possible exception of the hexameter, the movement of classical metres does not harmonize with the fundamental conditions of Germanic rhythm. CHAPTER VIII. § 1. THE STANZA, OR STROPHE. This is a subject which presents few difficulties; for the construction of a stanza appeals to the eye, and cannot be mistaken. A verse is the unit of every Verses are combined in two ways, — either poem. continuously, as in blank verse, the classic hexameter, and our Anglo-Saxon metre; or they may be bound together in a stanza, which in its turn goes with other stanzas to make up a poem or a division of a poem. The simplest of these combinations is the couplet, which, however, in practice is not looked on as a stanza; for the heroic couplet often has a continuous, epic effect. Next comes the triplet, which is decidedly stanzaic in effect: cf. Tennyson's Two Voices. Strophe means literally "a turning": cf. verse. At the end of the strophe we turn, and repeat the same conditions: it is "the return of the song to the melody with which it begins." Stanza, under another symbol, means the same thing. We demand for the stanza identity of structure and a close connection of statement and subject-matter. The two factors of the stanza are the Refrain and Rime. Thus Lamb's Old Familiar Faces has no rime; but the recurrence of these three words marks the end of a strophe. The Refrain, according to Wolff (Lais, Sequenzen, etc.), "probably arose from the participation of the people or congregation in songs which were sung by one or more persons on festal occasions, at church, play, or dance. The whole people repeated in chorus single words, or verses, or whole stanzas . . . or in the pauses of the chief singer, they answered him with some repeated cry. . . . This became finally a regular form." Through the Provençal poetry these refrains came into England. They are common in the old folk-song, and the reader is familiar with them in many modern ballads; cf. also the Epithalamion. The refrain may be in another tongue: cf. Byron's Maid of Athens. But the prevailing method of combining verses is by end-rime; and here we distinguish between stanzas where the verses are homogeneous, and stanzas made up of verses with a varying number of accents, though rarely with varying movement. It would require a volume to catalogue all the combinations in our poetry; any one can easily determine the form of a stanza for himself by noting the order of rimes. A decidedly different effect is made by two stanzas which may be alike in movement and number of verses, but unlike in rime-order. Thus the common four-stress quatrain with alternate rime (the number four being very popular in lyric poetry): "How happy is he born and taught That serveth not another's will; And simple truth his highest skill," - has a quite different effect from the arrangement of the In Memoriam stanza, a combination found in Ben Jonson, Prior, Lord Herbert of Cherbury, and others:"Now rings the woodland loud and long, The distance takes a lovelier hue, The lark becomes a sightless song." The first we denote by the letters abab; the second by abba. Still another variation is aaba, the stanza made popular in Fitzgerald's translation of the quatrains of Omar Khayyam. But of these the simplest and by all odds the most popular is the first, -abab; or with only two rimes, abcb. Here, too, we may note another division of the simple stanza (cf. Schipper, p. 84). The rimes bb mark each the end of a "Period,"-i.e., they denote the necessary rime of the quatrain, and hence divide it into equal parts. Two verses make a period, two periods make a quatrain (if of this form), because one period exactly repeats the conditions of the other. To mark the end of this period, a different ending is often employed: thus, if a a (or a c) are masculine, b b will be feminine, and vice versa. Thus abcb (Burns): "Go fetch to me a pint o' wine, And fill it in a silver tassie; That I may drink before I go or a bab (Prior): — "The merchant, to secure his treasure, Still more marked is the period when bb are verses with fewer or more stresses than a a (a c), as was the case with the divided Septenary (common measure) already noted, in which bb have fewer accents than a a (c); a case where b b have more is "Art thou pale for weariness Of climbing heaven and gazing on the earth, Among the stars that have a different birth?"— Shelley. |