4. Name the three poets generally considered to be the best sonneteers in English verse.

5. Write out the rhyme-schemes of at least three sonnetforms.

6. Map out in skeleton form several sonnets with euphonious, contrasting rhymes placed at the ends of fourteen lines otherwise blank.

7. Which line of a good sonnet would naturally be the first to arise in the mind of the poet?

8. Rewrite any good lyric in sonnet form.

9. Rewrite any of the sonnets given in this volume, and change the rhyme-schemes.

10. Write upon a modern theme a sonnet in the Italian pattern.

II. Write a sonnet in any pattern you prefer.

CHAPTER XX

IMITATIONS OF CLASSICAL METERS

The advantages of the more numerous versification of the ancients.

-LEIGH HUNT, What is Poetry?

I salute thee, Mantovano,

I that loved thee since my day began,
Wielder of the stateliest measure

ever moulded by the lips of man.

-TENNYSON, To Virgil. Professed imitations of Greek rhythm in English poetry seem to me to have gone practically always on quite wrong lines. They ought to have been more intensely rhythmical than the average; as a matter of fact, they think they are being Greek when they lose lyrical rhythm altogether.

-GILBERT MURRAY, What English Poetry may still Learn from Greek.

As we have already said in Chapter IV, the classical rules of quantity were different from the accentual laws of English verse. It is therefore not only difficult, but almost impossible to reproduce in English the effect of Greek or Latin meters. There are two classes of such attempts: first, those that endeavor more or less exactly to follow the classical rules of quantity depending on long and short syllables; second, those that frankly employ accented syllables in place of the long ones in the original. Those that follow the classical rules are more difficult to read according to English rhythm, and they are also less pleasing to the average English ear.

1. Hexameters

Dactylic Hexameter is the meter most often attempted in imitation. It was used for heroic or epic poetry. It consisted of six feet, the first four being either dactyls or spondees, the fifth ordinarily a dactyl (but occasionally a spondee, when the line was called a spondaic verse), and the sixth and last always a spondee or a trochee.

It is almost impossible to follow this rule in English, because there are practically no natural spondees in the English language. (A spondee was a foot consisting of two long, or equally accented, syllables). Therefore, there is usually a preponderance of dactyls in English hexameters, making the meter lighter and more tripping than the original, and trochees are often substituted for spondees.

Poe, after a scathing denunciation of the hexameters of some of his contemporaries, goes on to say, however, that he will not admit that a truly Greek hexameter cannot be composed in English and offers the following as an example:

Do tell! | when may we | hope to make | men of sense | out of the | Pundits |

Born and brought | up with their | snouts deep down in the mud of the | Frog-pond? |

Why ask? | Who ever | yet saw | money made out of a fat old |

Jew, or

downright | upright | nutmegs | out of a pine-knot? |

He maintains that the "proper spondee predominance is here preserved." But English writers are content with one or two, what we might call, imitation spondees in a line. They are always careful, however, to have their fifth foot a dactyl, and their last foot a foot of two syllables, although it is usually a trochee.

Coleridge gives us an example of this meter in the following translation from Schiller:

Strongly it | bears us a | long in | swelling and | limitless | billows,

Nothing before and | nothing behind but the | sky and the ocean.

And in an epistle to Wordsworth he says:

And as I live you will see my hexameters trotting before

you,

This is a galloping measure, a hop, and a trot, and a gallop.

Walter Savage Landor writes on the same subject:

Askest thou if in my youth I have mounted, as others have mounted,

Galloping Hexameter, Pentameter cantering after?

Much as old meters delight me, 'tis only where first they were nurtured,

In their own clime, their own speech; than pamper them here, I would rather

Tie up my Pegasus tight to the scanty-fed rack of a sonnet.

Longfellow used this measure in "The Children of the Lord's Supper" and in "Evangeline." We may divide the opening lines of the latter poem into feet as follows:

This is the forest primeval.

pines and the hemlocks |

The murmuring |

Bearded with moss and in | garments | green, indi- | stinct in the | twilight, |

Stand like | Druids of | eld, with voices | sad and prophetic, |

Stand like harpers | hoar, with | beards that | rest on their | bosoms. |

Elegiac Meter, which is very rarely used today, consists of a dactylic hexameter line followed by a dactylic pentameter.

This pentameter is unusual in being composed of two sections of two and a half feet each. There are two whole feet, then a single long syllable, followed by the cæsura, or pause; then two more feet, followed by a long syllable. Coleridge imitates it in this translation from Schiller:

In the hexameter | rises the fountain's | silvery | column |

In the pen | tameter | aye'' | falling in | melody | back''

The cæsural pause is marked ''.