Historical Manual of English Prosody

It is indeed sometimes said that such methods of scansion as these may apply very well to nineteenth-century poets, but that they are out of place in regard to older ones. This is demonstrably false. The method applies alike, and in like measure obviates all difficulties, in examples of the thirteenth, fourteenth, fifteenth, sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries. It is as applicable to the early and mostly anonymous romancers and song-writers as to Tennyson, it accommodates Shakespeare as well as Browning. To Milton as to Shelley, to Dryden and Pope as to the most celebrated of our modern experimenters, say to Miss Christina Rossetti or Mr. Swinburne, it "fits like a glove." The rules in the next chapter, and the subjoined examples fully scanned in Chapter VI., will show its application as a beginning; the whole contents of this volume must give the fuller illustration and confirmation.[24]

CHAPTER V
RULES OF THE FOOT SYSTEM

§ A. Feet

1. English poetry, from the first constitution of literary Middle English to the present day, can best be scanned by a system of feet, or groups of syllables in two different values, which may be called for convenience long ( ̄ ) and short ( ̆ ).

2. The nature of these groups of syllables is determined by the usual mathematical laws of permutation; but some of them appear more frequently than others in English poetry, and some hardly occur at all.

3. Although, in the symbols of their constitution, these feet resemble those of the classical prosodies, it does not follow that they are identical with them, except mathematically,[25] the nature of the languages being different; and, in particular, their powers of combining in metre are far from being identical, so that combinations of feet which are successful in Greek and Latin need by no means be successful in English. Success is indeed almost limited to instances where the metrical constituents are restricted to iambs ( ̆ ̄ ), anapæsts ( ̆ ̆ ̄ ), and trochees ( ̄ ̆ ), with the spondee ( ̄ ̄ ) as an occasional ingredient.

4. The iamb ( ̆ ̄ ), the trochee ( ̄ ̆ ), and the anapæst ( ̆ ̆ ̄ ) are by far the commonest English feet; in fact, the great bulk of English poetry is composed of them.

5. The spondee ( ̄ ̄ ) is not so unusual as has sometimes been thought; but owing to the commonness of most syllables, especially in thesis, it may often be passed as an iamb, and sometimes as a trochee.

6. The dactyl ( ̄ ̆ ̆ ), on the other hand, though observable enough in separate English words, does not seem to compound happily in English, its use being almost limited to that of a substitute for the trochee. Used in continuity, either singly or with other feet, it has a tendency, especially in lines of some length, to rearrange itself into anapæsts with anacrusis. In very short lines, however, this "tilt" has not always time to develop itself.

7. The pyrrhic ( ̆ ̆ ) may occur in English, but is rarely wanted (see note above on spondee).

8. The tribrach ( ̆ ̆ ̆ ), however, has become not unusual.

9. Other combinations (for names see Glossary) than these are certainly rare, and are perhaps never wanted in English verse, though they are plentiful in prose. (See Rule 41 and Glossary.)

§ B. Constitution of Feet

10. The quality, or contrast of quality, called "quantity," which fits English syllables for their places as long or short in a foot, is not uniform or constant.

11. It does not necessarily depend on the amount of time taken to pronounce the syllable; though there is probably a tendency to lengthen or shorten this time according to the prosodic length or shortness required.

12. It does not wholly depend on the usual quantity[26] of the vowel sound in the syllable; for long-sounding vowels are not very seldom shortened, and short-sounding ones are constantly made long.

13. An accumulation of consonants after the vowel will lengthen it prosodically, but need not necessarily do so.

14. Strong rhetorical stress will almost always lengthen if required.

15. The place in verse, if cunningly managed by the poet, will lengthen or shorten.

16. All monosyllables are common, the articles being, however, least susceptible of lengthening, and the indefinite perhaps hardly at all.

§ C. Equivalence and Substitution

17. The most important law of English prosody is that which permits and directs the interchange of certain of these feet with others, or, in technical language, the substitution of equivalent feet.

18. This process of substitution is governed by two laws: one in a manner a priori, the other the result of experience only.

19. Substitution must not take place in a batch of lines, or even (with rare exceptions) in a single line, to such an extent that the base of the metre can be mistaken.

20. Even short of this result of confusion the ear must decide whether the substitution is allowable.

21. As a result of experience we find that the feet most suitable—if not alone suitable—as substitutes for the iamb—the commonest foot-staple—are the trochee, the anapæst, and the tribrach; that the dactyl substitutes well, if not too freely used, for the trochee.[27] These equivalences are reciprocal.

§ D. Pause

22. Next to equivalence, the most important and valuable engine in the constitution of English verses is the variation of the middle or internal pause.

23. Except in very long lines—which always tend to pause themselves either at the middle or at two places more or less equidistant—there is no reason why the pause of an English line should not be at any syllable from the first to the penultimate, and none why it should or should not occur at the end of a line, couplet, or even stanza—though in the last-named case rather special reasons are required for its omission. Not every line need necessarily have any pause at all.

24. The effect of blank verse depends more upon pause-variation than upon anything else; and by this variation, accompanied by stop or overrun ("enjambment") at the end of the line, verse-paragraphs are constituted, which can contain verse-clauses or sentences, in like manner brought into existence by pauses.

§ E. Line-Combination

25. Lines, composed as above of feet, can be used in English either continuously on the same or equivalent patterns, or in batches of two or more.

26. The batches of two almost necessarily require rhyme to indicate and isolate them, especially if the individual lines are of the same length. Other batches [stanzas] might, as far as any a priori objection goes, consist of unrhymed lines, symmetrically correspondent, or irregular [Pindaric].

27. It is, however, found in practice, despite the examples of Campion, Collins, and one or two others, that rhymeless batching or stanza-making is very seldom successful.[28]

28. There is neither a priori objection nor a posteriori inconvenience to be urged against the construction of stanzas or batches in lines of very uneven length.

29. Every stanza-scheme must undergo, and is finally to be judged by, the test of the ear, and that only.

30. The commonest and oldest line-combinations—octosyllabic couplet, "common" or "ballad" measure, "long" and "short" measure, etc.—in some cases demonstrably, in all probably, result from the breaking up of the old long line ("fifteener" or "fourteener"), which itself came from the metricalising of the O.E. double stave.

§ F. Rhyme

31. It is natural to English poetry—i.e. Middle and Modern English, or English poetry proper—to rhyme; and, except in the case of blank verse, no unrhymed measure for the last seven centuries has ever produced large quantities of uniformly satisfactory quality.

32. Rhyme in English must be "full," i.e. consonantal (on the vowel and following consonant or consonants), not merely assonantal (on the vowel only). Assonance by itself is insufficient.

33. It should not, according to modern usage, be identical—that is to say, the rhyming syllables should not consist of exactly the same vowels and consonants. But exceptions to this may be found in good poets, especially when the words are not the same.

34. Good rhyme has necessarily varied, at different times, with pronunciation; but a certain rough rule may be seen prevailing not uncommonly, that vowels in rhyme may take the value which they have in words other than those actually employed.[29]

35. What is sometimes called "head-rhyme" (i.e. "alliteration") has now no place in English as rhyme at all, nor does it constitute either metre or stanza; but it is a permissible, and often a very considerable, ornament to verse.

36. Rhyme is either single (on the last syllable only), double (on the two last), or triple (on the three last). Beyond three the effect would be burlesque, and this is hard to keep out of triple rhyme, and even sometimes seems to menace the double.

37. In serious poetry the fuller in sound the single rhyme is the better.

38. Rhyme is usually at the end of the line; but it may be "internal"; that is to say, syllables at one or even more than one place within the line may rhyme to the syllable at the end or to each other, and syllables within one line may rhyme to those at corresponding places within another.

39. But this has a dangerous tendency to break the lines up.

§ G. Miscellaneous

40. The effect of English poetry at all times, but especially for the last hundred years, has been largely dependent on Vowel-music. This is by no means limited to the practice of what used to be called "making the sound suit the sense," though the two sometimes coincide. Vowel-music, not without occasional assistance from consonants, establishes a sort of accompaniment to the intelligible poetry—a prosodic setting.

41. In the management of this, as of rhyme, pause, enjambment, and even the selection and juxtaposition of feet themselves, the poet often, if not as a rule in the best examples, uses particular sleights of fingering and execution parallel to those of the musical composer and performer. The results of this may appear to constitute verse-sections different from the feet. But these, however, never supersede feet, and are always resolvable into them; nor do they ever supply criteria for anything except the individual line or passage. They stand to prosody proper very much as delivery or elocution does to rhetoric. The conveniences of this "fingering," or poetic elocution, as well as sense and other things, may sometimes bring about alternative scansions, but all these connect themselves with and are obedient to the general foot system.[30]

42. Despite this possibility of alternative scansion, and the other and commoner possibility of substitution of individual feet, iambic and trochaic, dactylic and anapæstic, metre or rhythm remain entirely distinct. Any system which regards these as merely different names for the same thing is self-condemned as disregarding the evidence, or rather verdict, of the ear.

CHAPTER VI
CONTINUOUS ILLUSTRATIONS OF ENGLISH SCANSION ACCORDING TO THE FOOT SYSTEM

I. Old English Period
Scansion only dimly visible.

No better examples can be taken for this than two already used by Dr. Sievers—the close of the Phœnix with its illuminative Latin admixture, and a bit of Beowulf (205 ff.)(dotted foot division added in first case):

In these the general trochaic run and the corresponding tendency to dactylic substitution, which are so evident in the Latin, as it were muffle themselves in the English; and the contrast, so strikingly brought out in the mixed passage, is not really less evident in the pure Anglo-Saxon one. The muffling is the result, partly of the imperfect substitution, or rather the actual presence of syllables not digested into the metre; partly of the overbearing middle pause, which, suggesting another in each section, chops the whole up into disconnected grunts or spasmodic phrases.

II. Late Old English with Nisus towards Metre
("Grave" Poem. Guest's text, spelling, and accentuation; the usual marks for the latter being substituted for his dividing bars, and foot division added in dots.)

Here an immense advance is made. The rhythm is still trochaic, though it is by no means certain that it does not show symptoms of iambicisation. It is far more well marked; and one of the means of the marking is that the "ditch in the middle"—the formal pause,—though no doubt technically and even rhetorically existing, is overrun by the suggested feet as long as the trochee is kept. But if this pause holds its place it suggests iambic scansion—

and something like the whole future of English poetry lies in the suggestion. Do not omit to notice the metrical assistance given by the epanaphora, or repetition of the same word and phrases in the same place, and by the imperfect and irregular assonances emphasising the divisions.

III. Transition Period
Metre struggling to assert itself in a New Way.
Part of the verses of St. Godric.

A distinct effort at iambic stanza, such as that of the great Ambrosian hymn, Veni Redemptor gentium.

It is not surprising if the experimenter stumbles, if the old trochaic rhythm is sometimes in his head, and if, in the last verse, he either overruns or divides and makes a quintet. The struggle towards feet—and new feet—is there, and rhyme, if imperfect, is there also.

IV. Early Middle English Period
Attempt at merely Syllabic Uniformity with Unbroken Iambic Run and no Rhyme.
Orm.

The moral of this (whether it be written as above in eights and sevens or continuously as "fifteeners") is unmistakable, as stated before: the writer, for all his scrupulous indication of short vowels, seems to care no more than if he were a modern Frenchman for syllabic quantity, or even for accent. He will have his fifteen syllables, his pause at the eighth, and his sing-song run of seven dissyllabic batches and a feminine ending. But, will he nill he, he impresses—with whatever sing-song effect and whatever merciless iteration—the iambic beat throughout his whole enormous work.

V. Early Middle English Period
Conflict or Indecision between Accentual Rhythm and Metrical Scheme.
Layamon.

These four couplets (continuous in the original) exhibit perfectly the process which was going on. (2) is a rather shapeless example of the old scarcely metrical Anglo-Saxon line with a roughly trochaic rhythm; and (4) is not very different. But (3) is a not quite successful, though recognisable, attempt at a rhymed (it is actually assonanced) iambic dimeter or octosyllabic couplet. And (1) is this couplet complete at all points in rhythm, metre, and rhyme—capable, in fact, of being exactly quantified and rendered exactly into modern English, all but the dropped final e:

Thĕn ān|swĕrēd|[ĕ] Vōr|tĭger
ŏf īlk | ăn ē|vĭl hē | wăs wāre.

VI. Early Middle English Period
The Appearance and Development of the "Fourteener."

The exact origin[31] of the "fourteener," "septenar" (as the Germans call it), "long Alexandrine" (as it was very improperly termed in England for a time), "seven-foot" or "seven-accent" line—to give its various designations—is a matter of conjecture. The "fifteener" of Orm with the redundant syllable lopped off; a variation with iambic or "rising stress" rhythm substituted for trochaic or falling, and a syllable added in the popular Latin metre of

with other things; most probably of all, a shortened metrification of the old long line, to represent the frequent inequality of its halves better than the octosyllabic couplet—have been suggested. It holds, however, such an important place in English prosody from the early thirteenth to the late sixteenth century, and its resolution into the ballad couplet or "common measure" is of so much greater importance still, that it can hardly have too much attention.

The extraordinarily prosaic and "stumping" cadence of the Ormulum perhaps obscures the connection, especially as this rigid syllabisation makes trisyllabic feet impossible. But the true rhythm appears, though still with a redundant syllable, in the famous Moral Ode, the older versions of which are dated before Orm. The oldest, as it is supposed to be, of these shows the form in full existence—

But the youngest—

gives a priceless improvement; for even if "nu" has dropped out, the resulting monosyllabic foot is quite rhythmical, the trisyllabic "-ter and eke" is unmistakable, and the life and spirit that it gives to the verse equally so.

In the course of the thirteenth century the form develops immensely. As a continuous one, it furnishes the staple of the Chronicle and Saints' Lives, attributed—the former certainly and the latter probably in at least some cases—to Robert of Gloucester. As thus in Lear's complaint:

But before long it shows, though it may be still written on, an evident tendency to break up into ballad measure, as in the (also thirteenth-century) Judas poem:

VII. Early Middle English Period
The Plain and Equivalenced Octosyllable.

We have seen how, in Layamon, the regular rhymed octosyllabic couplet or iambic dimeter ("four-stress line," etc.) shows itself, either as a deliberate alternative to the old long line, or as a half-unconscious result of the endeavour to adjust it to the new metrical tendencies of the language. And we saw, also, that its examples in Layamon himself vary from absolute normality to different stages of licence or incompleteness. Before long, however, we find two varieties establishing themselves, with more or less distinct and definite contrast. The first, which seems to keep French or Latin examples more or less strictly before it, is exemplified in The Owl and the Nightingale, and scans as follows:

Here, it will be observed, there is practically no licence except a few doubtful e's, and that of omitting one syllable and making the line "acephalous" iambic or catalectic trochaic. This form was followed largely, and, from Chaucer and Gower onwards, by most poets, except Spenser, till the time of Chatterton, Blake, and Coleridge in Christabel.

Side by side with it, however, a form embodying the special characteristic of the new English prosody— equivalent substitution—exhibits itself in full force in the mid-thirteenth-century Genesis and Exodus, as well as in other miscellaneous poems and in the romances. Here are specimens from Genesis and Exodus, 2367-2376:

And from Richard Cœur de Lion, 3261-3268:

Here, it will be observed, the foot of three syllables—generally, if not always, an anapæst—and even, it would seem, that of one sometimes, are freely substituted for that of two, adding immensely to the variety, spirit, and freedom of the line. The first "ne hadde" is perhaps run together.

VIII. Early Middle English Period
The Romance-Six or "Rime Couée."

At an uncertain period in the thirteenth century this makes its appearance—no doubt directly imitated from the French, but probably also in part a derivative of the application of metrical tendency to the aboriginal line-couplet. Its French name[33] is not, to our eyes, appropriate —one would rather call it "waisted" or "waisted-and-tailed rhyme"; and as it is very largely (in fact, with the plain couplet predominantly) used in the English romances, "romance-six" as opposed to "ballad-four" seems a good name for it. It sometimes, however, extends to three, four, or even six sets of two eights and a six, and is found both plain and equivalenced, as thus:

(Chaucer, Sir Thopas.)

(Le Bone Florence of Rome, 778-783.)

The plain form, as Chaucer, of malice prepense, showed in the above, is particularly liable to sing-song effect.

IX. Early Middle English Period
Miscellaneous Stanzas.

(a) A very considerable number of these were introduced, sometimes no doubt by direct imitation of French or (as in the case of the "Burns-metre,"[34]) Provençal originals, sometimes by the ingenuity of the individual poet, working on the plastic material of the blended language, according to the new metrical foot-system. They all scan easily by this, as may be seen in a stanza of Tristrem, one of the Harleian Lyrics, and a "Burns stanza" from the York Plays; while anapæstic substitution, amounting to something like "triple time" as a whole, appears in the Hampolian extract.

(Sir Tristrem, 1255-63.)

(Three-foot iambic with single-foot "bob." All final e's sounded or elided. One monosyllabic, and two or three trisyllabic, substitutions.)

(Alison, Harleian MS. p. 27, ed. Wright.)

(From the other stanzas it appears that the middle quatrain should consist of three eights and a six, and that something has dropped—supplied now by carets. Otherwise the scheme is clear.)