The Circus, and Other Essays and Fugitive Pieces Part 12

That greatest of anthologists, Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch, quotes these remarks of Professor Ker in the preface to his volume "The Oxford Book of Ballads," a book which every lover of poetry and especially every member of the craft of verse-making should possess. He goes on to supplement Professor Ker's definition, or rather description, by quoting lines from a number of famous ballads of ancient days, and saying that the ballad is these things also and in proof of the statement that ballads are diverse in manner and theme he mentions as latter-day ballad-makers poets having so little in common as Sir Walter Scott, Coleridge and Rudyard Kipling. Thus do Professor Ker and Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch evade the task of definition-making. But they are critics of poetry and therefore ent.i.tled to the use of escapes and evasions denied to the author of a text-book. Let me therefore say with no thought of originality in the saying, that a ballad is a story told in verse. Usually it is told in a sequence of quatrains, with one rhyme to a stanza, and usually the line is the iambic heptameter--or rather the stanza consists of two iambic tetrameters and two iambic trimeters. But this form is not inevitable; the only thing inevitable about a ballad is that it shall be a story.

Of the ancient ballads there are many collections, of which the most famous are those of Bishop Percy and of Professor Child. But Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch's book, already mentioned, is sufficiently comprehensive for the needs of the ordinary student of the subject.

In the preface to this book, Sir Arthur says a rather surprising thing.

He says: "While the lyric in general, still making for variety, is to-day more prolific than ever and (all cant apart) promises fruit to equal the best, that particular offshoot which we call the ballad has been dead, or as good as dead, for two hundred years."

It is hard to understand why Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch made this statement. In his "The Oxford Book of English Verse" and "The Oxford Book of Victorian Verse" he had included so many true ballads--Rossetti's "The Blessed Damozel," and Dobell's "Keith of Ravelston"--which is as authentic a ballad as "Thomas the Rhymer" or "Sir Patrick Spens." Also Kipling was making genuine ballads of land and water, and Henry Newbolt was writing his glorious ballads of the British Navy. The ballad was far from dead; it was no longer the only popular form of poetry, but it had not ceased to thrive. And the Great War seems to have given English and American poets new enthusiasm for this form so suited to the chronicling of deeds of valor.

I have said that the true ballad was a story told in verse. Let me add that, according to the strictest interpretation of the term, the story must be told throughout in the third person--the narrator must be merely a narrator, he cannot figure in the tale. This is true of most of the old ballads. There are exceptions to the rule, however, notably "Archie of Cawfield" and the immortal "Helen of Kirconnel." Nor is it necessary that the modern ballad-maker should take pains to eliminate his own personality from his work, the modern tendency seems to be toward subjectivity in poetry and the verse-maker who seeks popular approval will be guided by popular tastes.

It is true that the very greatest of the ballads are those which were written in the days when the ballad had not to compete with other forms.

But in accordance with the principle underlying this work--that of exhibiting the work of successful modern poetic craftsmen, I will not quote "Sir Patrick Spens" or "Hugh of Lincoln" or "Cospatrick" or "Little Musgrave and Lady Barnard" or any other cla.s.sic. Instead, I will call the reader's attention to the work of some of the poets who, in our own time, have been proving the falsity of Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch's statement.

THE SONNET

I said that the ballad was the most primitive form of English verse composition of which examples have come down to us, and that it was the easiest form to write. I now come to what might almost be called the ant.i.thesis of the ballad--the sonnet. The ballad is simple, the sonnet is complex; the ballad appeals to the uneducated, being, as I said, merely a short story in verse, while the sonnet appeals chiefly to those who have a cultivated taste for poetry. It is easy, I said, to write a pa.s.sable ballad; to write a sonnet that is merely correct in technique is a difficult matter, and to write a good sonnet calls for the exercise of all a verse-maker's patience, ingenuity and talent.

Theodore Watts-Dunton, himself an accomplished sonneteer, finds the sonnet as "in the literature of modern Europe, a brief poetic form of fourteen rhymed verses, ranged according to prescription." This definition is open to criticism in two respects. In the first place it is redundant, since a poem of fourteen lines necessarily is brief. In the second place Watts-Dunton neglected to state that the length of the line is arbitrarily fixed--if the lines are not iambic pentameters, the poem is not a sonnet.

The first requirements of the sonnet, then, are that it shall have fourteen lines, and that these lines shall be iambic pentameters.

Furthermore, the rhyme scheme is arbitrarily fixed, and the number of rhymes arbitrarily limited in such a way as to add greatly to the verse-maker's labor.

The simplest form of the sonnet is what is called the Shakespearean sonnet, from its use in the famous sequence in which the greatest of English poets is said to have "unlocked his heart"--although this does not seem a fair description of it, when we consider the great library of books in which attempts are made to explain what Shakespeare meant in these sonnets. This form consists merely of the quatrains, rhyming _a, b, a, b, c, d, c, d, e, f, e, f_, followed by a rhymed couplet. The lines are, as in all forms of the sonnet, iambic pentameters.

Obviously, this form presents no real difficulty to the verse-maker with a fair degree of talent. Its use by Shakespeare gives it a certain authority, and some critics, notably Professor Israel Gollanez, of London University, say that it is better suited the English language than the more usual or Petrarchan form. Nevertheless, the weight of opinion is against this form. Many critics deny that three quatrains followed by a couplet const.i.tute a true sonnet, and Professor Brander Matthews always calls this form not a sonnet but a "fourteener." Modern English poets who have written Shakespearean sonnets are few in number.

George Eliot wrote a sequence in this form, but did not thereby add to her fame. In fact, the only notable use of the Shakespearean sonnet form during the last half century is to be found in John Masefield's "Good Friday and Other Poems," which contain a sequence of introspective and philosophical Shakespearean sonnets, so lofty in thought and appropriate in expression as actually to suggest the work of the poet who first greatly made use of their instrument.

The form generally used by poets writing in English is what is called the Petrarchan sonnet. In its simplest but not its easiest form, this consists of a division of eight lines called the octave and a division of six lines called the sestet, the rhyme scheme of the octave being _a, b, b, a, a, b, b, a_, and that of the sestet being _c, d, c, d, c, d_.

Here we have, you see, only four rhymes in all the fourteen lines. An excellent example of the Petrarchan sonnet of this exact type is Austin Dobson's "Don Quixote."

DON QUIXOTE

BY AUSTIN DOBSON

Behind thy pasteboard, on thy battered back, Thy lean cheek striped with plaster to and fro, Thy long spear levelled at the unseen foe, And doubtful Sancho trudging at thy back, Thou wert a figure strange enough, good lack!

To make wiseacredom, both high and low, Rub purblind eyes, and (having watched thee go) Dispatch its Dogberrys upon thy track:

Alas! poor Knight! Alas! poor soul possest!

Yet would to-day, when Courtesy grows chill, And life's fine loyalties are turned to jest, Some fire of thine might burn within us still!

Ah, would but one might lay his lance in rest And charge in earnest--were it but a mill!

This is a good sonnet to study for several reasons. In the first place the accuracy of the form makes it an excellent model. And in the second place it ill.u.s.trates what I have to say as to the correspondence in the thought of the sonnet and its form.

Now, there have been attempts to make a sonnet the vehicle of a narrative; these attempts have seldom been successful. A sonnet is descriptive and interpretative in theme, and it must give at the very least two aspects of interpretations of the emotion, idea, or object with which it deals. One of these must be in the octave and the other in the sestet. Sometimes the idea is merely expressed or described in the octave, and explained in the sestet, sometimes the idea in the octave suggests a different idea in the sestet--the point to remember is that there must be a change in the thought marked by the beginning of the sonnet's ninth line.

This we see admirably ill.u.s.trated in Austin Dobson's "Don Quixote." In the first four lines we have a graphic picture of the mad knight of La Mancha, and a statement of the effect this vision has upon those who are wise in this world. But the very first words of the sestet show the development in the thought. The poet ceases to describe, instead he expresses emotion, he expresses his pity, his sympathy, his admiration for Don Quixote, and his wish that the knight might find a successor in our own day. The octave has its climax and the sestet has its climax, and the two sections of the poem are related by the continuity of thought, and divided by the contrast of ideas.

This type of sonnet was called by Watts-Dunton the sonnet of flow and ebb--the significance of this term being that the thought flowed to the end of the octave and ebbed from that point to the close of the sestet.

Commenting on this John Addington Symonds wrote: "The striking metaphorical symbol drawn from the observation of the swelling and declining wave can even in some examples be applied to sonnets on the Shakespearean model; for, as a wave may fall gradually or abruptly, so the sonnet may sink with stately volume or with precipitate subsidence to its close."

For a verse-maker to give his sonnet this requisite flow and ebb of idea, and keep at the same time his rhyme scheme accurate is no easy matter. And the very difficulty of the form is a strong argument in favor of its frequent use by novices in versification. If you can write a sonnet that is technically correct, you need fear none of the difficulties that any other kind of verse-making will present. The accuracy and condensation, the concentration of thought, the straight-forwardness of statement, which are the distinguishing marks of the well-turned sonnet are the most valuable tools which a verse writer can have. In writing, as well as he can, one sonnet, the verse-maker will learn more than he could learn in writing half a dozen ballads or twenty volumes full of unrhymed free verse.

This book is intended for the guidance not of poets but of verse-makers.

Yet I cannot forbear quoting Watts-Dunton's admirable statement of the whole content of the sonnet. He writes: "Without being wholly artificial, like the rondeau, the sestina, the ballade, the villanelle, and the rest, the sonnet is yet so artistic in structure, its form is so universally known, recognized, and adopted as being artistic, that the too fervid spontaneity and reality of the poet's emotion may be in a certain degree veiled, and the poet can whisper, as from behind a mask, those deepest secrets of the heart which could otherwise only find expression in purely dramatic forms."

As I said, the simplest, and in some respects, the most difficult form of sonnet, has for the rhyme scheme _a, b, b, a, a, b, b, a, c, d, c, d, c, d_. But there is a tendency to vary the rhyme scheme in the sestet--the octave usually is unchanged. One common variation is to have the rhymes of the sestet _c, d, e, c, d, e_, instead of _c, d, c, d, c, d_. This is the scheme we find followed in the sestet of two of "Three Sonnets on Oblivion," by a distinguished American poet, Mr. George Sterling.

THREE SONNETS OF OBLIVION

BY GEORGE STERLING

_Oblivion_

Her eyes have seen the monoliths of kings Upcast like foam of the effacing tide; She hath beheld the desert stars deride The monuments of power's imaginings: About their base the wind a.s.syrian flings The dust that throned the satrap in his pride; Cambyses and the Memphian pomps abide As in the flame the moth's presumptuous wings.

There gleams no glory that her hand shall spare, Nor any sun whose days shall cross her night, Whose realm enfolds man's empire and its end.

No armour of renown her sword shall dare, No council of the G.o.ds withstand her might-- Stricken at last Time's lonely t.i.tans bend.

_The Night of G.o.ds_

Their mouths have drunken the eternal wine-- The draught that Baal in oblivion sips.

Unseen about their courts the adder slips, Unheard the sucklings of the leopard whine; The toad has found a resting-place divine, And bloats in stupor between Ammon's lips.

O Carthage and the unreturning ships, The fallen pinnacle, the shifting Sign!

Lo! when I hear from voiceless court and fane Time's adoration of eternity,-- The cry of kingdoms past and G.o.ds undone,-- I stand as one whose feet at noontide gain A lonely sh.o.r.e; who feels his soul set free, And hears the blind sea chanting to the sun.

In these two sonnets, you see, Mr. Sterling has in his sestet the rhymes _c, d, e, c, d, e_, thus having more license than the poet of the sonnet in four rhymes. He uses the same number of rhymes in the final sonnet of this trilogy, but varies the order of the rhymes in the sestet, having for his scheme not _c, d, e, c, d, e_, but _c, d, d, e, c, e_. One objection to this method is that it produces, as you see, a rhymed couplet in the midst of the sestet.

_The Dust Dethroned_

Sargon is dust, Semiramis a clod.

In crypts profaned the moon at midnight peers; The owl upon the Sphinx hoots in her ears, And scant and dere the desert gra.s.ses nod Where once the armies of a.s.syria trod, With younger sunlight splendid on the spears; The lichens cling the closer with the years, And seal the eyelids of the weary G.o.d.

Where high the tombs of royal Egypt heave, The vulture shadows with arrested wings The indecipherable boasts of kings, Till Arab children hear their mother's cry And leave in mockery their toy--they leave The skull of Pharaoh staring at the sky.

It is seldom that we find such a couplet as: "The vulture shadows with arrested wings, The indecipherable boasts of kings," in the midst of the sestet. But there are many verse writers who use the couplet, unrelated in rhyme to the rest of the sestet, to conclude the sonnet. This of course was Shakespeare's method, but Shakespeare, as we have seen, was not making Petrarchan sonnets. The great danger is that the final couplet will give the conclusion of the sonnet too much of a snap, too much of an epigrammatic flavor. Therefore it is well to avoid this device, although it cannot be denied that some of the greatest sonnets in the language end in a couplet. Some years ago I asked a number of English and American poets and critics to name their favorite brief poems. Many of them chose sonnets, and one of them, Mr. Edward J.

Wheeler, a critic of experience and discrimination, for many years the President of the Poetry Society of America, selected a sonnet ending in a couplet--Blanco White's "Night." It may be remarked that this famous sonnet is almost the only one of Blanco White's many compositions to escape oblivion.

NIGHT

BY JOSEPH BLANCO WHITE

Mysterious Night! when our first parent knew Thee from report divine, and heard thy name, Did he not tremble for this lovely frame, This glorious canopy of light and blue?

Yet 'neath a curtain of translucent dew, Bathed in the rays of the great setting flame, Hesperus with the host of heaven came, And lo! creation widened in man's view.

Who could have thought such darkness lay concealed Within thy beams, O Sun! or who could find, Whilst fly and leaf and insect stood revealed, That to such countless...o...b.. thou mad'st us blind!

Why do we then shun Death with anxious strife?

If Light can thus deceive, wherefore not Life?