The Principles of English Versification Part 13

"By the rhyme-scheme of the quatrain," says Corson, "the terminal rhyme-emphasis of the stanza is reduced, the second and third verses being the most closely braced by the rhyme. The stanza is thus admirably adapted to the sweet continuity of flow, free from abrupt checks, demanded by the spiritualized sorrow which it bears along. Alternate rhyme would have wrought an entire change in the tone of the poem. To be a.s.sured of this, one should read, aloud, of course, all the stanzas whose first and second, or third and fourth, verses admit of being transposed without affecting the sense. By such transposition, the rhymes are made alternate, and the concluding rhymes more emphatic.

There are as many as ninety-one such stanzas.... The poem could not have laid hold of so many hearts as it has, had the rhymes been alternate, even if the thought-element had been the same."[54] Examples for this experiment are:

To-night the winds begin to rise And roar from yonder dropping day: The last read leaf is rolled away, The rooks are blown about the skies. XV, 1.

I hold it true, whate'er befall; I feel it when I sorrow most; 'Tis better to have loved and lost Than never to have loved at all. XXVII, 4.

Compare the slightly different effect of the same stanza printed as two lines, in Wilde's The Sphinx:

The river-horses in the slime trumpeted when they saw him come Odorous with Syrian galbanum and smeared with spikenard and with thyme.

He came along the river bank like some tall galley argent-sailed, He strode across the waters, mailed in beauty, and the waters sank.

+--------------------------------------------------------------+ [54] H. Corson, Primer of English Verse, pp. 70 f. +--------------------------------------------------------------+

The name 'elegiac stanza' for the _abab^{5}_ quatrain comes apparently from its appropriate use by Gray in the Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard, but it is not altogether fitting; for it is simply the quatrain movement of the English sonnet, where no lament is intended, and it was employed effectively by Dryden in his Annus Mirabilis, and has been often employed since, without elegiac feeling. For examples see the stanza from Gray, page 55, and the sonnets on pages 129 f. An especially interesting modification is that of Tennyson's Palace of Art, _a^{5}b^{4}a^{5}b^{3}_.

_Five-Line Stanza_

Five-line stanzas are formed in various ways, e. g., _aaaba_, _aabba_, _aabab_, _abbba_, _ababa_, _ababb_, etc., in lines of three, four, five, etc., stresses.

_Six-Line Stanza_

Six-line stanzas are formed by similar combinations; the most frequent is the quatrain + couplet, called, from Shakespeare's poem, the Venus and Adonis stanza, _ababcc^{5}_ (compare the end of the English sonnet and the ottava rima).[55] Familiar examples are Wordsworth's To a Skylark and his fine Laodamia.

Since them art dead, lo! here I prophesy: Sorrow on love hereafter shall attend: It shall be waited on with jealousy, Find sweet beginning, but unsavoury end; Ne'er settled equally, but high or low; That all love's pleasure shall not match his woe.

Venus and Adonis.

The same rimes with 4-stress verses are also common,[56] for example, Wordsworth's

I wandered lonely as a cloud That floats on high o'er vales and hills, When all at once I saw a crowd, A host, of golden daffodils; Beside the lake, beneath the trees, Fluttering and dancing in the breeze.

+--------------------------------------------------------------+ [55] Early examples may be conveniently found in the Oxford Book of English Verse, Nos. 75, 96, 102, 108, 172. [56] For early examples see again the Oxford Book of English Verse, Nos. 74, 140, 182, 184, 187. +--------------------------------------------------------------+

Another important 6-line stanza is the tail-rime or _rime couee_, a stanza much used in the Middle English romances and chosen by Chaucer for his parody, Sir Thopas. Harry Bailey, mine host of the Canterbury pilgrims, called it 'doggerel rime.' The simple and probably normal form is _aa^{4}b^{3}cc^{4}b^{3}_ or _aa^{4}b^{3}aa^{4}b^{3}_, which to save s.p.a.ce in the ma.n.u.scripts was written thus:

Listeth, lordes, in good entent, Of mirthe and of solas; And I wol telle verrayment Al of a knyght was fair and gent His name was sir Thopas.

In bataille and in tourneyment,

Variations are extremely common: the _aaa^{4}b^{2}ccc^{4}b^{2}_ of Wordsworth's To the Daisy, _aaaa^{4}b^{2}ccc^{4}b^{3}_ of Tennyson's Lady of Shalott, _aa^{3}b^{2}ccc^{3}b^{2}_ of S. F. Smith's America, _aaa^{3}b^{2}ccc^{3}b^{2}_ of Drayton's Agincourt, and the so-called Burns stanza, in which Burns wrote some fifty poems, _aaa^{4}b^{2}a^{4}b^{2}_, e. g., To a Mouse and Address to the Deil.

_Seven-Line Stanza_

The most important 7-line stanza is the _rime royale_ or Chaucer (or Troilus) stanza, _ababbcc^{5}_. In the Parlement of Foules, the Man of Law's Tale, and Troilus and Criseyde, Chaucer made it a splendid vehicle both for narrative and for reflective a.n.a.lysis, for humor, satire, description, and all the gamut of emotions; in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries James I, Lydgate and Hoccleve, Henryson and Dunbar, and Skelton, Hawes and Barclay employed it, largely in imitation of Chaucer; Wyatt used it in his Vixi Puellis Nuper Idoneus; and Shakespeare in The Rape of Lucrece. Since then it has not proved attractive to the poets--though no reason for its disuse is obvious--except Wordsworth (in his translations of Chaucer) and Morris, Chaucer's latest disciple.

And by the hond ful oft he wolde take This Pandarus, and into gardyn lede, And swich a feste, and swiche a proces make Hym of Criseyde, and of hire wommanhede, And of hire beaute, that, withouten drede, It was an heven his wordes for to here, And thanne he wolde synge in this manere.

Troilus and Criseyde, Bk. III.

So she, deep-drenched in a sea of care, Holds disputation with each thing she views, And to herself all sorrow doth compare; No object but her pa.s.sion's strength renews; And as one s.h.i.+fts, another straight ensues: Sometime her grief is dumb and hath no words; Sometime 'tis mad and too much talk affords.

Rape of Lucrece.

Dreamer of dreams, born out of my due time, Why should I strive to set the crooked straight?

Let it suffice me that my murmuring rhyme Beats with light wing against the ivory gate, Telling a tale not too importunate To those who in the sleepy region stay, Lulled by the singer of an empty day.

MORRIS, Earthly Paradise.

In comparison with the formality of Shakespeare's and the evenness of Morris's, the ease and smoothness of Chaucer's stanza are striking.

Wyatt's stanzas are musical in their way.

_Eight-Line Stanza_

Eight-line stanzas are variously formed--chiefly by the doubling of quatrains, sometimes with different rimes, as _ababcdcd_, sometimes preserving one or another or both rimes, as _ababbcbc_, _abcbdbeb_, _ababacac_, _abababab_, etc. Other varieties are _abcdabcd_ (Rossetti) and _aaabcccb_ (tail-rime), and _aabbccdd_.

One of the commonest 8-line stanzas is that imported from Italy and called _ottava rima_, _abababcc_. It has been charged with tediousness, and tedious it may become if not sedulously varied. It was introduced, along with so much else from Italy, by Wyatt, and was then employed for different purposes by Sidney, Spenser, Daniel, and others.[57] At the close of the eighteenth century it enjoyed a rebirth. "It had already been used by Harrington, Drayton, Fairfax (in his translation of Ta.s.so's Jerusalem Delivered), and ... in later times by Gay; and it had even been used by Frere's contemporary, William Tennant; but to Frere belongs the honour of giving it the special characteristics which Byron afterwards popularized in Beppo and Don Juan.... Byron, taking up the stanza with equal skill and greater genius, filled it with the vigour of his personality, and made it a measure of his own, which it has ever since been hazardous for inferior poets to attempt."[58] Byron had first adopted the stanza in his translation of Pulci's Morgante Maggiore, which is itself in _ottava rime_. Beppo was written in 1817, and Don Juan begun in the next year. In 1819 the first four cantos of Don Juan were published; in 1820 Keats published his Isabella, and Sh.e.l.ley wrote his Witch of Atlas, both in the same metre.

Those giant mountains inwardly were moved, But never made an outward change of place; Not so the mountain-giants--(as behoved A more alert and locomotive race), Hearing a clatter which they disapproved, They ran straight forward to besiege the place With a discordant universal yell, Like house-dogs howling at a dinner-bell.

J. H. FRERE, The Monks and the Giants.

To the kind of reader of our sober clime This way of writing will appear exotic; Pulci was sire of the half-serious rhyme, Who sang when chivalry was more Quixotic, And revell'd in the fancies of the time, True knights, chaste dames, huge giants, kings despotic, But all these, save the last, being obsolete, I chose a modern subject as more meet.

BYRON, Don Juan, IV, vi.

A lovely Lady garmented in light From her own beauty: deep her eyes as are Two openings of unfathomable night Seen through a temple's cloven roof; her hair Dark; the dim brain whirls dizzy with delight, Picturing her form. Her soft smiles shone afar; And her low voice was heard like love, and drew All living things towards this wonder new.

Sh.e.l.lEY, The Witch of Atlas.

+--------------------------------------------------------------+ [57] There are two _ottava rime_ in Lycidas, one at the close of the Blind Mouths pa.s.sage and one at the end of the poem. [58] A. Dobson, in Ward's English Poets, vol. iv, p. 240. +--------------------------------------------------------------+

_Nine-Line Stanza_

By far the most important of 9-line stanzas, and one of the finest of all stanzas in English poetry, is the _ababbcbc^{5}c^{6}_ invented by Spenser--a double quatrain of 5-stress lines plus an alexandrine. This particular octave had been used by Chaucer in the Canterbury Tales, and is sometimes referred to as the Monk's Tale stanza: the stroke of metrical genius lay in adding the 'supplementary harmony' of the alexandrine, by which the whole stanza climbs to a majestic close or ebbs in a delightful decrescendo as the poet wills.[59] The long swing of nine verses on three rimes, with the combined effect of the interwoven rimes (_abab_ and _bcbc_) united by the couplet in the middle, culminating in the unequal couplet at the close, the extraordinary opportunity of balancing and contrasting the rime sounds, and of almost infinitely varying the pauses--all these render the Spenserian stanza incomparable for nearly every sort of poetic expression.

+--------------------------------------------------------------+ [59] On the Spenserian stanza see especially Corson, pp. 87 ff. Lowell's characterization of Spenser's use of it is interesting: "In the alexandrine, the melody of one stanza seems forever longing and feeling forward after that which is to follow.... In all this there is soothingness, indeed, but no slumberous monotony; for Spenser was no mere metrist, but a great composer. By the variety of his pauses--now at the close of the first or second foot, now of the third, and again of the fourth--he gives spirit and energy to a measure whose tendency it certainly is to become languorous" (Essay on Spenser). See also Mackail's chapter on Spenser in Springs of Helicon; and Sh.e.l.ley's praise in his Preface to the Revolt of Islam: "I have adopted the stanza of Spenser (a measure inexpressibly beautiful), not because I consider it a finer model of poetical harmony than the blank verse of Shakespeare and Milton, but because in the latter there is no shelter for mediocrity; you must either succeed or fail. This perhaps an aspiring spirit should desire. But I was enticed also by the brilliancy and magnificence of sound which a mind that has been nourished upon musical thoughts can produce by a just and harmonious arrangement of the pauses of this measure." +--------------------------------------------------------------+

After the Faerie Queene, the chief poems in this metre are: Shenstone's The Schoolmistress (1742), Thomson's The Castle of Indolence (1748), Burns's The Cotter's Sat.u.r.day Night (1786), Scott's Don Roderick (1811), Byron's Childe Harold's Pilgrimage (1818 et seq.), Sh.e.l.ley's Laon and Cythna (The Revolt of Islam) (1817, 1818), and Adonais (1821), Keats's Eve of St. Agnes (1820), and the opening of Tennyson's Lotos Eaters (1833).

From the following examples only a limited conception can be gained of the stanza's varied capabilities. Long pa.s.sages should be read together--and read, for this purpose, with more attention to the sound than to the meaning--in order that the peculiarities of handling of the different poets may be felt.

A gentle Knight was p.r.i.c.king on the plaine, Ycladd in mightie armes and silver s.h.i.+elde, Wherein old dints of deepe woundes did remaine, The cruell marks of many a b.l.o.o.d.y fielde; Yet armes till that time did he never wield.

His angry steede did chide his foming bitt, As much disdayning to the curbe to yield: Full jolly knight he seemd, and faire did sitt, As one for knightly giusts and fierce encounters fitt.

Faerie Queen, I, i, 1.

With loftie eyes, halfe loth to looke so lowe, She thancked them in her disdainefull wise; Ne other grace vouchsafed them to showe Of Princesse worthy; sca.r.s.e them bad arise.

Her Lordes and Ladies all this while devise Themselves to setten forth to straungers sight: Some frounce their curled heare in courtly guise; Some prancke their ruffes; and others trimly dight Their gay attyre; each others greater pride does spight.

Ibid., I, iv, 14.

The whiles some one did chaunt this lovely lay: Ah! see, whoso fayre thing doest faine to see, In springing flowre the image of thy day.

Ah! see the Virgin Rose, how sweetly shee Doth first peepe foorth with bashfull modestee, That fairer seemes the lesse ye see her may.