English Verse Part 13

If to ascend to these be thy desire, Thereto shall be a soul of worthier strain; Thee shall I leave with her when I retire: Because the Emperor who there doth reign, For I rebellious was to his decree, Wills that his city none by me attain.

In all parts ruleth, and there reigneth he,-- There is his city and his lofty throne: O happy they who thereto chosen be!"

(MELVILLE B. ANDERSON: _Dante's Inferno_, Canto i. ll. 112-129.)

QUATRAINS

_aaaa_

Suete iesu, king of blysse, Myn huerte love, min huerte lisse, ou art suete myd ywisse, Wo is him at e shal misse!

(Song from Harleian Ms. 2253--12th century, Boddeker's _Altenglische Dichtungen_, p. 191.)

_aabb_

O Lord, that rul'st our mortal line, How through the world Thy name doth shine; Thou hast of Thy unmatched glory Upon the heavens engrav'd Thy story.

(SIR PHILIP SIDNEY: _Psalm viii._ ab. 1580.)

A Sensitive Plant in a garden grew, And the young winds fed it with silver dew, And it opened its fan-like leaves to the light, And closed them beneath the kisses of night.

(Sh.e.l.lEY: _The Sensitive Plant._ 1820.)

_abcb_

In somer, when the shawes be sheyne, And leves be large and long, Hit is full mery in feyre foreste To here the foulys song.

(Ballad of _Robin Hood and the Monk_. In Gummere's _English Ballads_, p.

77.)

This is the familiar stanza of the early ballads. The omission of rime in the third line signalizes the fact that the stanza could be (and was) regarded indifferently as made up either of two long lines or four short ones. Thus the famous Chevy Chase ballad is found (Ashmole Ms., of about 1560) written in long lines:

"The yngglyshe men hade ther bowys ybent yer hartes wer good ynoughe The first off arros that the shote off seven skore spear-men the sloughe."

(See in Flugel's _Neuenglisches Lesebuch_, vol. i. p. 199.)

The same thing occurs also where there are two rimes to the stanza.

Originally, the extra internal rime was no doubt the cause of the breaking up of the long couplet into two short lines. (See examples in Part Two, in the case of the septenary.)

Ye flowery banks o' bonnie Doon, How can ye bloom sae fair!

How can ye chant, ye little birds, And I sae fu' o' care!

(BURNS: _Bonnie Doon._ ab. 1790.)

_abab_

e grace of G.o.d ful of mi?t at is king and ever was, Mote among us ali?t And ?ive us alle is swet grace.

(From the Harleian Ms. 913. In Matzner's _Altenglische Sprachproben_, vol. i. p. 125.)

Furnivall prints this in long lines with internal rime, which of itself seems to form the short-line stanza from the long lines.

Of al this world the wyde compas. .h.i.t wol not in myn armes tweyne.-- Who-so mochel wol embrace Litel thereof he shal distreyne.

(CHAUCER: _Proverb._ ab. 1380.)

When youth had led me half the race, That Cupid's scourge me caus'd to run, I looked back to meet the place From whence my weary course begun.

(EARL OF SURREY: _Description of the restless state of a lover._ ab.

1545.)

Weep with me, all you that read This little story; And know, for whom a tear you shed Death's self is sorry.

(BEN JONSON: _Epitaph on Salathiel Pavy._ 1616.)

And now the weary world's great medicine, Sleep, This learned host dispensed to every guest, Which shuts those wounds where injured lovers weep, And flies oppressors to relieve the opprest.

(SIR WILLIAM DAVENANT: _Gondibert_, Bk. i. Canto 6. 1651)

Now like a maiden queen she will behold From her high turrets hourly suitors come; The East with incense and the West with gold Will stand like suppliants to receive her doom.

(DRYDEN: _Annus Mirabilis_, stanza 297. 1667.)

The boast of heraldry, the pomp of power, And all that beauty, all that wealth e'er gave, Await alike the inevitable hour.

The paths of glory lead but to the grave.

(GRAY: _Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard._ 1751.)

To Davenant's _Gondibert_ is usually traced the use of this "heroic"

stanza (_abab_ in iambic five-stress lines) in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In his preface the author said: "I believed it would be more pleasant to the reader, in a work of length, to give this respite or pause, between every stanza, ... than to run him out of breath with continued couplets. Nor doth alternate rime by any lowliness of cadence make the sound less heroic, but rather adapt it to a plain and stately composing of music." Dryden followed Davenant in using the stanza for his _Annus Mirabilis_, saying in his preface: "I have chosen to write my poem in quatrains, or stanzas of four in alternate rhyme, because I have ever judged them more n.o.ble, and of greater dignity, both for the sound and number, than any other verse in use amongst us.... I have always found the couplet verse most easy (though not so proper for this occasion), for there the work is sooner at an end, every two lines concluding the labor of the poet; but in quatrains he is to carry it further on, and not only so, but to bear along in his head the troublesome sense of four lines together." Dryden did not use the stanza again, however, and it is obviously unsuited to a long narrative poem.

Saintsbury says: "With regard to the n.o.bility and dignity of this stanza, it may safely be said that _Annus Mirabilis_ itself, the best poem ever written therein, killed it by exposing its faults.... It is chargeable with more than the disjointedness of the couplet, without the possibility of relief; while, on the other hand, the quatrains have not, like the Spenserian stave or the _ottava rima_, sufficient bulk to form units in themselves." (_Life of Dryden_, Men of Letters Series, p. 34.)

It is hard to say what Mr. Saintsbury means in speaking of the _Annus Mirabilis_ as the best poem ever written in the heroic quatrain, when we remember that it is the quatrain of Gray's _Elegy_. On the possible sources of his use of it, see Gosse's _Life of Gray_, in the Men of Letters Series, p. 98 (also his _From Shakespeare to Pope_, p. 140). Mr.

Gosse refers to the use of the quatrain by Sir John Davies in the _Nosce Teipsum_ (1599), with which Gray was familiar, and (in addition to Davenant, Dryden, and Hobbes's _Homer_) to the _Love Elegies_ of James Hammond, published 1743. "It is believed that the printing of Hammond's verses incited Gray to begin his _Churchyard Elegy_, and to make the four-line stanza the basis of most of his harmonies.... The measure itself, from first to last, is an attempt to render in English the solemn alternation of pa.s.sion and reserve, the interchange of imploring and desponding tones, that is found in the Latin elegiac; and Gray gave his poem, when he first published it, an outward resemblance to the text of Tibullus by printing it without any stanzaic pauses." Mr. Gosse neglects the elegies of William Shenstone, which were also in the quatrain, and some of which had apparently been published before the _Churchyard Elegy_. On this matter see Beers's _Romanticism in the Eighteenth Century_, p. 137, where Shenstone is said to have borrowed the stanza from Hammond, and Gray from Shenstone. Shenstone, in his _Prefatory Essay on Elegy_, defended the metrical form and referred to the elegies of Hammond. "Heroic metre, with alternate rhyme, seems well enough adapted to this species of poetry; and, however exceptionable upon other occasions, its inconveniencies appear to lose their weight in shorter elegies, and its advantages seem to acquire an additional importance. The world has an admirable example of its beauty in a collection of elegies not long since published." (Chalmers's _English Poets_, vol. xiii. p. 264.)

For there was Milton like a seraph strong, Beside him Shakespeare bland and mild; And there the world-worn Dante grasped his song, And somewhat grimly smiled.

(TENNYSON: _The Palace of Art._ 1833.)

_abba_

Yet those lips, so sweetly swelling, Do invite a stealing Kiss.

Now will I but venture this; Who will read, must first learn spelling.