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production of one man. It is not a growth, it is something made. Virgil's "Eneid" and Milton's "Paradise Lost" are lofty examples of the written epic.

Dante's "Divine Comedy" may be called an epic. He called it a comedy because, in his day, a comedy meant a narrative that did not end tragically, while a tragedy meant "the story of those who had fallen from high to low estate. Tasso's "Jerusalem Delivered" and Ariosto's "Orlando Furioso" are also art epics, and likewise bear the names of their true authors.

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An epic should tell a story, yet not comment or moralize upon it. It may, and is pretty certain to, contain separate episodes and dialogue. The meter must be uniform, and we may add, the story must be interesting. The "Odyssey," apart from its other merits, has been called the finest story in the world; it is more interesting than a novel, more exciting than a best-seller.

All of the great epics which are the product of other languages may now be read in English translation, any one of which is good enough to convey a satisfactory idea of the original, both as regards content and form.

EXERCISES FOR CLASS USE AND SELF-INSTRUCTION I. Make a list of all the epics you can.

2. Which are higher epics and which art epics?

3. Tell briefly the story of any one.

4. Examine several and copy specimens of their meters. 5. Write a few lines in imitation of each.

CHAPTER XIV

BLANK VERSE

That which is the glory of blank verse, as a vehicle of poetry, is also its danger and its difficulty. Its freedom from the fetters of rime, the infinite variability of the metrical structure of its lines, the absence of couplets and stanzas,—all assimilate it to prose. It is the easiest of all conceivable meters to write; it is the hardest to write well. Its metrical requirements are next to nothing; its poetical requirements are infinite. It was Byron, I believe, who remarked, that it differed from other meters in this, that whereas they required a certain proportion of lines, some more, some less, to be good, in a blank verse every line must be good.

-SHADWORTH H. HODGSON, English Verse; quoted in MATTHEWS' A Study of Versification.

Blank verse is not merely unrhymed poetry, but the term has come to mean a particular metrical form. As commonly understood, blank verse consists of a line of ten syllables with five beats at regular intervals—an unaccented followed by an accented syllable, forming five iambic feet, or iambic pentameter. This metrical scheme, which is sometimes called English Heroic Measure, because of its peculiar adaptability to noble or heroic themes, is the meter of Milton's "Paradise Lost:"

I may assert | eter | nal Prov | idence |
And justify the ways of God | to men. |
-Paradise Lost, Book I, Line 26.

It will be interesting to read a master poet's own description of the meter of his great poem.

1. Milton on Blank Verse

"The measure is English Heroic Verse, without rime, as that of Homer in Greek, and of Virgil in Latin; Rime being no necessary Adjunct or true Ornament of Poem or good Verse, in longer Works especially, but the Invention of a barbarous Age, to set off wretched matter and lame Meeter. ***** True musical delight— consists only in apt Numbers, fit quantity of Syllables, and the same variously drawn out from one verse into another, not in the jingling sound of like endings. * * * This neglect then of Rime, so little is to be taken for a defect, though it may seem so perhaps to vulgar readers, that it rather is to be esteem'd an example set, the first in English, of ancient liberty recovered to Heroic Poem from the troublesome and modern bondage of Riming."

Although Milton terms his poem "An example set, the first in English," it was not the first English heroic poem in blank verse. Henry Howard, that Earl of Surrey to whom we owe the introduction of the sonnet, was the first to attempt blank verse in English, in his translation of the second and fourth books of Virgil's "Æneid." The following is a specimen of Surrey's blank verse:

I lived and ran the course fortune did grant;
And under earth my great ghost now shall wend;
A goodly town I built and saw my walls;
Happy, alas, too happy, if these coasts
The Troyan ships had never touched aye.

Surrey's verse has occasional roughnesses and crudenesses, but on the whole its effect is one of too much uniformity and monotony, due to his tendency to regard the line as the unit, and so to terminate his thought at the end of each. The mind can take no wide sweep or lofty flight when it is continually halted at each ten syllables.

Monotony, indeed, is the great fault to be guarded against by the amateur writer of blank verse. If he be not careful, he will find that his series of five iambic feet will go jogging endlessly along without relief, without variety, without power or beauty.

To counteract this tendency, let him study the blank verse of Milton. There is no monotony in "Paradise Lost." The music is endlessly varied, and this variety is gained in two ways: first, by the wide sweep of thought over-leaping the bondage of the line and forming groups or stanzas of varying length, or as Milton describes it, "the sense variously drawn out from one verse into another." Second, by the constant shifting of the place of the cæsura, or pause, thus delighting the ear with a continual change of cadence.

2. Examples of Milton's Groups of Lines

If thou beest he-But O, how fallen! how changed From him, who in the happy realms of light, Clothed with transcendent brightness, didst outshine Myriads though bright!

-Paradise Lost, Book I, Line 87.

He spake; and to confirm his words, outflew Millions of flaming swords, drawn from the thighs Of mighty cherubim; the sudden blaze

Far round illumined hell: highly they raged Against the Highest, and fierce with graspèd arms Clash'd on their sounding shields the din of war, Hurling defiance toward the vault of heaven.

-Book I, Line 669.

Milton's periods, with no hint of weakness or fatigue, sometimes sustain a flight of as many as twenty-two lines, before the thought and the verse alight together.

3. The Casura or Pause

Cowper says of blank verse, "The writer in this kind of meter, in order that he may be musical, must exhibit all the variations, as he proceeds, of which ten syllables are susceptible. Between the first and the last, there is no place at which he must not occasionally pause, and the place of the pause must be continually shifted." 1

In a line so long as a pentameter, or a hexameter, a pause is sometimes needed in order to take breath in reciting or reading aloud. This pause, or division, is called the cæsura, and its place in the line is determined by the meaning of the words. In classic verse, it fell at the end of a word, but usually in the middle of a foot, and it was governed by various complicated rules which are not observed in modern practice. In English verse it should fall

1 Note also the quotation from Hodgson which introduces this chapter.

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