III.

This piece, with the "Hollyhock" (v. sup. p. 27), Blake's "Mad Song" (§ XXXV.), Shelley's "Cloud" (note, p. 100), and the Christabel selections (§ XXXVIII.), will almost completely exemplify substitution in lyric. But the germ is far older—in Shakespeare, in "E.I.O.," and even in pieces earlier still.

XLIV. The Stages of the Metre of "Dolores" and the Dedication of "Poems and Ballads"

and as even King Horn. But this gives far too little room in English; and the rhymes, when rhyme is introduced, come too quick. Substitution of trisyllabic feet remedies both faults; while the actual six, with interchanged rhyme, gives beautiful work, though the lines are still rather short:

This shortness kept it back, more especially when the fear of mainly trisyllabic measures came in after the fifteenth-century anarchy. But as soon as that fear disappeared, and the anapæst forced itself into general use, logic, assisted by tune, suggested a cutting down of the popular dimeter or four-foot anapæstic line to three. This, for a long time, maintained itself in strict literature without much variety of structure, as, at different times, is shown by Shenstone in the well-known—

and by Cowper in the still better known "Alexander Selkirk" lines—

and in "Catherina"—

Now, though these lines are pretty, they are exposed to the charge of being pretty sing-song, and monotonous jingle. But this had, long before Cowper, been to a great extent remedied, though for comic purposes only or mainly, in such things as Gay's "Molly Mog," quoted above, and Chesterfield-Pulteney's

(Pronounce "Verden" with the proper English value of er, and give "farthing" its then correct form of "farden," and the rhyme will be spotless.)

What it was that made Byron take this up for a serious purpose in the lines to Haidee (before Don Juan) is not, I believe, known:

The gain here, from the redundant syllable and double rhyme in the odd lines, and from a rather more frequent use of dissyllabic feet to prevent monotony, is immense. Praed adopted the measure, and improved it still further, in his admirable "Letter of Advice":

And then Mr. Swinburne had the probably final inspiration of shortening the last line to two feet (or an anapæstic monometer), with an astonishing result of added and finished music:

XLV. Long Metres of Tennyson, Browning, Morris, and Swinburne

(a) Tennyson (The Lotos-Eaters):

(Trochaic six- and seven-foot lines, always hypercatalectic, or, in stricter language, trochaic trimeters hypercatalectic and tetrameters catalectic.)

At the close the poet avails himself of the iambic alternative which is so effective, and has a pure fourteener:

(There is no trisyllabic substitution.)

(b) Tennyson (Maud):

(A rather deceptive metre; for which reason foot-division has been postponed above.) It may look at first sight like a trochaic run, but this will be found not to fit. Then hexameters of the Evangeline type, with a syllable cut off at the end, suggest themselves; but it will be seen that some openings make this very bad. It is really a six-foot anapæst with the usual allowance of iambic substitution and of monosyllabic ("anacrustic") beginning, as thus:

(c) Tennyson (Voyage of Maeldune):

(Same metre, but almost purely anapæstic; the central pause frequently strong.)

(d) Tennyson (Kapiolani)

(Apparently intended for a dactylic octometer. Like all these things in English, it probably goes better as anapæstic with anacrusis and hypercatalexis. See dotted scansion.)

(e) Browning (Abt Vogler):

(Note the alliteration.)

At first, as you read this, you can, if your ears are accustomed to classical metres, have no doubt about the scheme. It is simply the regular elegiac couplet "accentually" rendered in English, with the abscission of the last syllable of the hexameter—a catalectic hexameter and a pentameter acatalectic. For the first four lines of the first octave there is no doubt at all. But when you get on to the second half you are pulled up. In the fifth and sixth lines the pentameter seems to have got to the first place, and the seventh is no more a hexameter than the eighth is its proper companion. For a moment you may fancy that this was intended—that the poet meant octaves of two different parts. But when you look at the other stanzas you will find that this is by no means the case. Truncated elegiac cadence appears, reappears, disappears in the most bewildering fashion, till you recognise—sooner or later according to your prosodic experience—that it was only simulated cadence after all, a sort of leaf-insect rhythm, and that the whole thing (as marked by the dotted scansion lines) is in six-foot anapæsts equivalenced daringly, but quite legitimately, with monosyllabic and dissyllabic feet.

(f) W. Morris ("The Wind"):

(First three lines six-foot (trimeter) anapæsts with full substitution. Refrain a graded "wheel" of four, four or five, and six iambic feet.)

(g) Morris (Love is Enough):

(Intentionally irregular "accentual" lines, but with an anapæstic or amphibrachic "under-hum." There is a good deal of alliteration elsewhere, and some here.)

(h) Morris (Sigurd metre, but the actual example from The House of the Wolfings):

(A splendid construction from older and newer examples. Strongly stressed, strictly middle-paused, but perfectly regular anapæstic sixes, with substitution and a hypercatalectic syllable or half foot at the pause.)

(i) Mr. Swinburne (Hesperia and Evening on the Broads).

The first line of Hesperia is practically a Kingsleyan hexameter (v. inf.) of the very best kind—

while the second—

is a pentameter of similar mould, with the centre gap cunningly filled in by the two short stitches "if at," capable, as you see below in

of being duly equivalenced with one long stitch, like "borne." Yet the second line is capable also of being scanned exactly as the first—anacrusis and five anapæests—but without the final redundance or hypercatalexis; and in other long lines you will find that the principle of equivalence is preserved throughout—that two shorts, as in

defeat the hexametrical movement, and pull off the mask at the beginning, though it returns at the end. The metre is really anapæstic throughout. And in Evening on the Broads the poet has carried this further still, providing in some cases regular apparent elegiacs:

(j) Mr. Swinburne (Choriambics):

(k) Mr. Swinburne (other long anapæstic and trochaic measures):

(These are respectively seven-foot anapæsts with redundance (anapæstic tetrameter catalectic); ditto eight-foot (tetrameter acatalectic); trochaic tetrameter acatalectic; and anapæstic tetrameter hypercatalectic (eight feet and a half).)

XLVI. The Later Sonnet

(To illustrate the strict octave and sextet pattern with final rhymes adjusted on the Italian pattern.)

Dante Rossetti:

XLVII. The Various Attempts at "Hexameters" in English

(a) Earlier (Elizabethan):

(Watson, ap. Asch. Schoolmaster, p. 73, ed. Arber.)

(Stanyhurst, Æn. iv. 1-5, ed. Arber, p. 94.)

(Harvey in letter to Spenser, Eliz. Crit. Essays,
ed. Gregory Smith, i. 106.)

(Spenser in letter to Harvey, ibid. i. 99.)

(All these tried to accommodate—though sometimes rather roughly—English pronunciation to such of the rules of Latin quantity, by "nature" and "position," as could be applied. Some of them even tried to make general rules for English quantity. But the wiser, from Ascham to Campion, admitted that dactylic rhythm was difficult, if not impossible, to keep up in our language.)

(b) Later Georgian and Victorian.

(1) Coleridge (Specimen c. 1799?):

(A very fair attempt, but already showing the natural tendency of the lines, when poetically rhythmed, to anapæstic—the dotted—scansion.)

(2) Southey (Vision of Judgment):

(Anapæstic run avoided with some skill, save now and then; but at the cost of weak beginnings, frequent, and admitted, substitution of trochaic for spondaic effect, and, above all, as in line 1, an ugly rocking-horse division into three batches of two feet each instead of the proper 2-1/2 + 3-1/2 or 3-1/2 + 2-1/2.)

(3) Longfellow (Evangeline):

(A popular, tunable sort of rhythm, obtained by a very large proportion of dactyls—often really giving (and always when really good) the anapæstic effect,—unhesitating adoption of trochees and even pyrrhics for spondees, and not seldom the Southeyan split at feet 2 and 4. An essentially rickety measure.)

(4) Clough—earlier (in the Bothie of Tober-na-Vuolich—Evangeline type, but with more spondees and spondaic endings):

(5) Later he attempted English "quantitative" things of this kind:

and

This deliberate neglect of pronunciation ("pălāte" for "pālăte," "shĕphērd" for "shēphĕrd") has, in the last half-century or so, developed itself into a still more deliberate crusade against pronunciation; it being supposed that a conflict of accent and quantity has something attractive about it. Thus the late Mr. Stone wrote as a hexameter:

(6) On the other hand, Kingsley's Andromeda—the best poem of some length intended for English hexameters—is clearly, though not consciously, anapæstic, as thus:

And Mr. Swinburne did the same thing (see above) consciously.

XLVIII. Minor Imitations of Classical Metres

(a) Sapphics (Watts):

This illustrates—as do the pieces which it, beyond all doubt, patterned, though in succession rather than directly (Cowper's "Hatred and Vengeance," Southey's "Cold was the Night Wind," and Canning's triumphant parody of this latter, the "Needy Knifegrinder")—the unyokeableness of classical metres—when not merely iambic, trochaic, or anapæstic—to English rhythm. The proper run of the Sapphic line is—

but this constantly in English, though not so much in the first line as elsewhere, changes itself into

Mr. Swinburne has got it right, but only as a tour de force, and, as in line 2, not always quite certainly.

Saw the | white im|placable | Aphro|dite,
Saw the | hair un|bound and the | feet un|sandalled
Shine as | fire of | sunset on | western |waters,
Saw the re|luctant.

But Southey and Canning always suggest the wrong:

and

(b) Alcaics (Tennyson):

(Correct, but not natural.)

(c) Hendecasyllabics (Coleridge):

(These very pretty lines exhibit a most curious instance of the unconscious force of the prosodic genius of a language. Coleridge was a good classical scholar, and quite enough of a mathematician to know the difference between 11 and 12. Yet every one of these hendecasyllabics will be found to be a dodecasyllabic; the poet having substituted (as in English prosody is quite allowable) an initial dactyl for the dissyllabic foot of the original metre. Once more this shows the English impatience of classical form.)

(d) Hendecasyllabics (Tennyson):

A triumph, but a criticism as well, as its own ending shows:

or "versicultural" rather.

(e) Galliambics.

These have been tried splendidly by Tennyson in Boadicea, interestingly by Mr. George Meredith in Phaethon, unsuccessfully by the late Mr. Grant Allen in his version of the Atys of Catullus. But the metre is not quite plain sailing even in Greek and Latin, and it is therefore better to leave it alone here and return to it in Glossary.

XLIX. Imitations of Artificial French Forms

(a) Triolet:

(b) Rondeau:

(The number of lines in a rondeau is not immutable, nor is it in a rondel, where the principle is the return of whole lines as in the triolet, but, since the poem is longer, giving room for more not repeated matter.)

(c) Ballade:

(All these examples are Mr. Austin Dobson's, and inserted here by his kind permission. It will be observed that the lines follow general English prosodic rules. It is only the stanza that is borrowed.)

L. Later Rhymelessness

(a) M. Arnold (The Strayed Reveller. Words printed exactly as original, except the added "and"; the also added brackets show the unconscious decasyllabism):

(Here the first piece is three pure decasyllables, with redundance, cut into five. The second requires only the addition of the italicised "and" to make it a complete blank-verse passage with two shortened lines or half-lines, x and y, of the kind common in Shakespeare. The poem is crammed with shorter stanza-pieces of the same kind.)

(b) Mr. Henley ("Speed." Printed as original and as prose):

(The decasyllable is not quite avoided even here, as in the bracketed phrase. But the main point is that the thing reads perfectly well as prose, with no obvious suggestion of metre at all.)

LI. Some "Unusual" Metres and Disputed Scansions

Some measures of recent poets have been objected, or at least proposed, as offering difficulties in respect of the system of this book. It has therefore seemed well to scan them here.

(a) Frederic Myers (St. Paul):