(Ib., canto i. st. xxii.)
(Browning: Pacchiarotto, v.)
(Browning: The Flight of the Duchess, xvii.)
These passages illustrate sufficiently the grotesque effects of double and triple rime in English verse,—effects of which Byron and Browning are the unquestioned masters. Professor Corson observes that the double rime is to be regarded as the means of "some special emphasis," whether serious or humorous. More commonly the effect is humorous, of course, as in Don Juan, where the rimes indicate "the lowering of the poetic key—the reduction of true poetic seriousness." The rimes in the Flight of the Duchess Mr. Edmund Gurney has said sometimes "produce the effect of jokes made during the performance of a symphony." The specimen which follows illustrates the use of these double and triple rimes for a wholly serious purpose. Professor Corson remarks that in this case the rime serves "as a most effective foil to the melancholy theme. It is not unlike the laughter of frenzied grief." It is interesting to note that in the Italian language, where double rimes are almost constant, masculine rimes are sometimes used for grotesque effect in the same way that English poets use the feminine.
(Thomas Hood: The Bridge of Sighs.)
(Swinburne: Winter in Northumberland, xiv.)
(Sidney Lanier: A Ballad of Trees and the Master.)
(George Canning: Song in The Rovers; Anti-Jacobin, June 4, 1798.[13])
(Thackeray: Ballads, What Makes my Heart to Thrill and Glow?)
Internal rime may be regarded on the one side as only a matter of the division of the verse, since if it occurs regularly at the medial cesura, it practically breaks the verse into two parts. On the other side, if used only sporadically, it is a matter of tone-color. It sometimes appears, however, in forms which entitle it to recognition by itself. The earliest of these forms is the "Leonine rime," which is said to have taken its name from Leoninus of St. Victor, who in the twelfth century wrote elegiacs (hexameters and pentameters) in which the syllable preceding the cesura regularly rimed with the final syllable. Obviously lines of this kind would easily break up into riming half-lines. Similarly, in septenary verse internal rime was often used together with end-rime, with a resulting resolution into short-line stanzas riming either aabb or abab.[14] The following specimen from a celebrated ballad shows the popular use of a somewhat complex system of internal rime.
(Ye Nutbrowne Maide. From Arnold's Chronicle, printed ab. 1502. In Flügel's Neuenglisches Lesebuch, vol. i. p. 167.)
(Gawain Douglas: A ballade in the commendation of honour and verteu; at the end of the Palace of Honor.)
Douglas, like his countryman Dunbar, was something of a metrical virtuoso, and his use of internal rime in this ballade is one of his most remarkable achievements. In the first stanza there are two internal rimes in each line, in the second three, and in the third (here quoted) four.
(Drinking Song in Gammer Gurton's Needle.)
(Coleridge: Rime of the Ancient Mariner.)
(Tennyson: Song in The Princess, iv.)
(Swinburne: The Armada, vii.)
Here the third and eighth syllables of each verse rime, giving the effect of a separate melody only half heard under that of the main rime-scheme. This is especially subtle where there is no possible pause after the riming word, as in the "sing" of the last line quoted.
(Rossetti: Penumbra.)
(See also Love's Nocturn, p. 146, below.)
This division includes the use made of the qualities of sound for the purpose of adding to the melodiousness of verse, or of expressing in some measure the ideas to be conveyed by means of the very sounds employed. Sometimes this takes the form of alliteration, differing from that of early English verse only in that it follows no regular structural laws. On the other hand, it may take the form of onomatopœia, the figure of speech in which sound and sense are closely related,—as in descriptive words like buzz, hiss, murmur, splash, and the like. The term Tone-color is formed by analogy with the German Klangfarbe, an expression apparently due to the feeling that the sound-qualities of speech have somewhat the same function as the various colors in a picture. It is unquestionably true that the selection of sounds, whether vowel or consonantal, has much to do with the melodious effect of very much poetry. The poet may choose the different sound-qualities (so far as the sense permits) just as the musician may choose the varying qualities of the different instruments in the orchestra or the different stops in the organ.
Strictly speaking, this matter of Tone-color is not a part of verse-form in the same sense as matters of rhythm, rime, and the like; for it may appear in prose as well as in verse, and is not in any case reducible to formal principles or laws. Yet its use in actual verse is so important, and it is so closely related to the use of sound-quality in the form of rime and alliteration, that it seems well to include it here.[15]
Dr. Guest treats sounds as having in themselves the suggestion of more or less definite ideas, this suggestiveness being explainable by physical causes. Thus the trembling character of l suggests trepidation, as in "Double, double, toil and trouble." R suggests harsh, grating, or rattling noises; the sibilants are appropriate to the expression of shrieks, screams, and the like; b and p, because of the compression of the lips, suggest muscular effort; st, from a sudden stopping of the s, suggests fear or surprise; f and h also fear, because of their whispering quality. Hollow sounds (au, ow, o, and the like) suggest depth and fulness. Guest quotes in this connection an interesting passage from Bacon's Natural History (ii. 200): "There is found a similitude between the sound that is made by inanimate bodies, or by animate bodies that have no voice articulate, and divers letters of articulate voices; and commonly men have given such names to those sounds as do allude unto the articulate letters; as trembling of hot water hath resemblance unto the letter l; quenching of hot metals with the letter z; snarling of dogs with the letter r; the noise of screech-owls with the letter sh; voice of cats with the diphthong eu; voice of cuckoos with the diphthong ou; sounds of strings with the diphthong ng.
A. W. Schlegel went even farther in suggesting a subtle symbolism in sounds apart from descriptive qualities. Thus he regarded a as suggestive of bright red, and as symbolizing youth, joy, or brightness (as in the words Strahl, Klang, Glans); i as suggestive of sky-blue, symbolic of intimacy or love; and so with other vowel sounds. (See Ehrenfeld's monograph, p. 57.) In general it may be said that it is dangerous to attempt to explain the special effects of tone-color in verse, except where it is obviously descriptive, the appreciation of such effects being a subtle and a more or less individual matter. On this subject Mr. Gurney makes some interesting observations, in the essays cited above. He believes that the pleasurable effect of the sound-qualities in verse can never be dissociated from the sense of the words; that the most melodious verse cannot be appreciated if in a foreign language, unless read with particular expressiveness; and that the pleasure derived from what we roughly call melodious or harmonious verses is always due to the mystical combination of the appropriate sound with the poetic content.
Dr. Johnson ridiculed the idea of tone-color, as appearing in Pope's teaching that the sound should be "an echo to the sense." See his Life of Pope, and especially the Idler for June 9, 1759, in which he describes Minim the critic as reading "all our poets with particular attention to this delicacy of versification." Such a critic discovers wonders in these lines from Hudibras:
"In these verses, says Minim, we have two striking accommodations of the sound to the sense. It is impossible to utter the first two lines emphatically without an act like that which they describe; bubble and trouble causing a momentary inflation of the cheeks by the retention of the breath, which is afterwards forcibly emitted, as in the practice of blowing bubbles. But the greatest excellence is in the third line, which is crack'd in the middle to express a crack, and then shivers into monosyllables."
In an article on "Some Technical Elements of Style in Literature" (originally published in the Contemporary Review, April, 1885; reprinted in the Scribner edition of Stevenson's Works, vol. xxii. p. 243) Robert Louis Stevenson discussed some of the more subtle effects of vowel and consonant color, as appearing in both prose and verse. The combination and repetition of the consonants PVF he found to be particularly frequent. The pervading sound-elements in the two following passages he analyzed by means of the key-letters in the margin:
(Coleridge.)
(Shakspere: Troilus and Cressida.)
No attempt has been made to classify the specimens that follow. Nor does comment seem necessary, in order to make clear the particular qualities of the sounds of the verse.
(Chaucer: Knight's Tale, ll. 1741-1755.)
(Marlowe: The Jew of Malta, I. i.)
(Shakspere: Midsummer Night's Dream, III. i. 167-177.)
(Shakspere: Henry V., Chorus to Act IV.)
(Milton: Paradise Lost, VII. 399-416.)
(Ib., II. 876-883.)
(Milton: Sonnet on the Late Massacre in Piedmont.)
(Milton: Lycidas, ll. 123-129.)
(Dryden: Song for St. Cecilia's Day, 1687.)
(Pope: Essay on Criticism, ll. 366-373.)
(Thomson: Castle of Indolence, canto i. st. 3.)
(Keats: Ode to Psyche.)
(Tennyson: The Coming of Arthur.)
(Tennyson: Enoch Arden, ll. 577-595.)
(Tennyson: The Princess, VII.)
(Browning: Paracelsus, IV.)
(Browning: The Heretic's Tragedy.)
(Browning: Caliban upon Setebos.)
(Rossetti: Love's Nocturn.)
(Swinburne: Chorus in Atalanta in Calydon.)
(Swinburne: Winter in Northumberland.)
[11] "Perfect rime" is a term applied to rimes between two words identical in form, but different in meaning. It is inadmissible in modern English verse, although it was considered entirely proper in Middle English times (compare Chaucer's—
and is still common in French verse.
Schipper gives a separate paragraph also to "unaccented rime," where the similarity of sound belongs wholly to final, unstressed syllables. Generally speaking, this is inadmissible in English verse. Schipper quotes from Thomas Moore:
It might be said, however, that the final syllables of "summervale" and "nightingale" are not wholly unstressed; moreover, they are in the first and third verses of the stanza, where rime is not indispensable. Unaccented rime is most noticeable in some of the verse of the transition period in the sixteenth century, when the syllable-counting principle was so emphasized as to admit any license of accent so long as the proper number of syllables was observed. Thus, in the verse of Wyatt we find such rimes as "dreadeth" and "seeketh," "beginning" and "eclipsing," etc. See p. 10, above.
Imperfect rime, occurring where the vowel sounds are only similar, not identical, or where the consonants following them are not identical, is commonly regarded as an imperfection in verse form. The most common of these imperfect rimes are in cases where the spelling would indicate perfect rime (hence where, in many cases, the words rimed originally, but have separated in the changes of pronunciation), such as love and move, broad and load, and the like. For a defence of these "rimes to the eye," and other imperfect rimes, with a study of their use by English poets, see articles by Prof. A. G. Newcomer in the Nation for January 26 and February 2, 1899.
[12] Rime also appears in a short passage in Cynewulf's Elene. Some have thought it a later interpolation, but Schipper thinks it indicates that Cynewulf was a Northumbrian. Grein believes him to have been the author also of the Riming Poem, but, as Rieger points out, the rimes of Cynewulf are of a much less systematic character. (On this see Wülcker's Grundriss zur Geschichte der Angelsächsischen Literatur, pp. 216, 217.)
[13] The second of these stanzas is said to have been added to Canning's song by Willian Pitt.
[15] On the subject of Tone-color in English verse, see Guest's English Rhythms, chap. ii.; Lanier's Science of English Verse, part iii. ("Colors of English Verse"); Corson's Primer of English Verse (chapter on "Poetic Unities"); Edmund Gurney's Tertium Quid (essays on "Poets, Critics, and Class-Lists" and "The Appreciation of Poetry"); Professor J. J. Sylvester's Laws of Verse (London, 1870); G. L. Raymond's Poetry as a Representative Art and Rhythm and Harmony in Poetry and Music; and Ehrenfeld's Studien zur Theorie des Reims.
English verse of four stresses is chiefly to be divided into two groups: that representing the primitive Germanic tendency to emphasize the element of accent rather than the counting of syllables, and that produced under foreign influence, showing comparative regularity in the number of syllables to the verse. The first group is made up of the various descendants of the original "long line," sometimes rimed and sometimes unrimed; the second group of forms of the familiar octosyllabic couplet. (Of modern verse only iambic measures are included here.)
The earliest English verse, like early Germanic verse generally, is based on the recurrence of strong accents, and is composed of a long line made up of two short lines, or half-lines, which are bound together by alliteration. As to the number of accents to be counted in the line, there are two theories, the "two-accent" and the "four-accent." According to the first, we should count two accents to the half-line, and four to the long line; according to the second, we should count four to the half-line and eight to the long line. The distinction is not so marked, however, as would appear at first thought; for the two-accent theorists recognize a considerable number of secondary accents in addition to the principal ones, while the four-accent theorists recognize half the accents as being commonly weaker than the other half.