The Principles of English Versification Part 16

Many of these complex stanzaic forms, moreover, belong in the tradition of the so-called Pindaric ode, imitated freely from the Greek choric odes of Pindar. The closer imitations are in fixed though complex stanzas regularly repeated, and are called Regular Pindarics. These have first a strophe of undetermined length, then an antistrophe identical in structure with the strophe, and then an epode, different in structure from the strophe and antistrophe. The second strophe and second antistrophe are identical metrically with the first, the second epode with the first epode; and so on. The best examples in English are Ben Jonson's On the Death of Sir H. Morrison, and Gray's Progress of Poesy and The Bard.[66]

+----------------------------------------------------------------------+ [66] The rime scheme of the Progress of Poesy is: strophe and antistrophe _a^{4}b^{5}b^{4}a^{5}cc^{4}d^{5}d^{4}e^{5}e^{4}f^{4}f^{6}_, epode _aabb^{4}a^{3}ccdede^{4}fgfgh^{5}h^{6}_. The formula is three times repeated. Note the unusual arrangement of parts in Collins' Ode to Liberty and Sh.e.l.ley's Ode to Naples. +----------------------------------------------------------------------+

About the middle of the seventeenth century, Cowley, misunderstanding the structure of Pindar's verse, invented another sort of Pindaric ode, which is called Irregular because, as he himself explained, "the numbers are various and irregular," and there was no formal stanzaic repet.i.tion.

The lines were long or short according as the thought-rhythm demanded (or seemed to demand), and in respect to arrangement were not bound to any formal pattern. This freedom, under skilful control, may well produce felicitous results, but when not managed by poets of a strong and sure rhythmic sense--as it was not by the many Cowleyan imitators--it results merely in metrical license and amorphousness.

"That for which I think this inequality of number is chiefly to be preferred," said Dr. Sprat, the first historian of the Royal Society, intending no sarcasm, "is its affinity with prose." But this argument, which is in part also that of the modern free-versifiers, is simply a confusion of two functions, the verse function and the prose function.

But before very long Cowley's invention found a true master in Dryden, whose To the Pious Memory of ... Mrs. Anne Killigrew (1686), Song for St. Cecelia's Day (1687), and Alexander's Feast (1697) are justly praised for their 'concerted music.' The example had in fact already been set by a still greater master; for Milton with his early experiments in unequal rimed lines (On Time and At a Solemn Music), his incomparable success with the irregular placing of rimes in Lycidas, and his choral effects both with and without rime in Samson Agonistes, had shown what English could do under proper guidance. Then, after Dryden, the regular Pindarics of Gray and certain of Collins' Odes helped to carry on the tradition down to Coleridge's Dejection, Monody on the Death of Chatterton, and Ode on the Departing Year, and its culmination in Wordsworth's Intimations of Immortality ode (1807). After that, both in time and in interest, come Sh.e.l.ley's Mont Blanc (1816) (which he himself described as "an undisciplined overflowing of the soul") and Tennyson's On the Death of the Duke of Wellington (1852) (which has at least Tennyson's almost unfailing technical dexterity). The work of Coventry Patmore in this kind of verse has not been generally approved.

This is partly because of the subjects on which he wrote and partly because of his inability to compose lines of haunting melody--perhaps his deliberate avoidance of them. But in certain poems like The Azalea and The Toys the very intensity of the feeling both creates and sustains and in the end justifies the 'irregular' metre.

3. BLANK VERSE

Perhaps three-fourths of the greatest English poetry is in the unrimed 5-stress line called blank verse--nearly all the Elizabethan drama, Paradise Lost, some of the best of Keats and Sh.e.l.ley, Wordsworth's Michael, The Prelude, The Excursion (the good with the bad!), Tennyson's Princess and Idylls (notable poems of their age, though not to be ranked with 'the greatest'), and Browning's The Ring and the Book, together with most of the dramatic monologues. No other metrical form has such an interesting history; no other form has manifested so great a variety and adaptability for every kind of poetic thought and feeling.

These two facts alone--its bulk and its variety--would justify a much fuller treatment than is possible here. But it will perhaps be sufficient to follow rapidly in outline the development of blank verse, with ill.u.s.trations of the most significant stages, and then, in the following chapter, to devote more attention to blank verse than to rimed stanzas in the exposition of metrical harmonies and modulations.

The idea of writing unrimed verse was no doubt the most valuable result to English poetry of the academic attempts, towards the end of the sixteenth century, to write cla.s.sical verse in English. It could be pointed out triumphantly that all the splendid poetry of cla.s.sical antiquity--Homer and Lucretius and Virgil, Sappho and Catullus and Horace and Ovid--had been independent of rime; and whatever might be the disagreement on quant.i.tative feet in English, it was impossible to deny that English could successfully copy this element of the great cla.s.sical verse and recover, as Milton said, the ancient liberty "from the troublesome and modern bondage of riming."

The movement had already begun in Italy with Trissino's Sophonisbe, written in 1515, the first modern tragedy. It reached England in the middle of the century with the influence of the Italian Renaissance brought chiefly by Wyatt and Surrey. Surrey translated two books of the aeneid (II and IV) into blank verse (published in 1557); Sackville and Norton adopted it for the first English tragedy, Gorboduc (1565); and then Gascoigne used it in his Steele Glas (1576) for general didactic and satiric purposes. Thus the beginning was made, and it remained only for the new form to justify itself by its children. Experiments continued, with the first great achievement in Marlowe's Tamburlaine the Great.

The early examples show plainly both the influence of the parent couplet--for, as was said above, blank verse was written first as the old couplet without rime--and the syllable-counting principle: the line unit is prominent, there are comparatively few run-on lines or couplets, and some of Surrey's verse, for example, though it has the ten syllables then regarded as necessary, refuses to 'scan' according to more recent practice because the stresses are wholly irregular. On the other hand, there is often so great a regularity in coincidence of natural rhythm and metrical pattern, reinforced by some awkward wrenches of the conventional order of word and phrase, that the result is unpleasantly stiff and formal.

The Greeks' chieftains all irked with the war Wherein they wasted had so many years, And oft repuls'd by fatal destiny, A huge horse made, high raised like a hill, By the divine science of Minerva: Of cloven fir compacted were his ribs; For their return a feigned sacrifice: The fame whereof so wander'd it at point.

In the dark bulk they clos'd bodies of men Chosen by lot, and did enstuff by stealth The hollow womb with armed soldiers.

There stands in sight an isle, high Tenedon, Rich, and of fame, while Priam's kingdom stood; Now but a bay, and road, unsure for ship.

SURREY, Second Book of Virgil's aeneid.

This is not so much monotonously regular as intolerably rough and unsteady.

For cares of kings, that rule as you have rul'd, For public wealth, and not for private joy, Do waste man's life and hasten crooked age, With furrowed face, and with enfeebled limbs, To draw on creeping death a swifter pace.

They two, yet young, shall bear the parted reign With greater ease than one, now old, alone Can wield the whole, for whom much harder is With lessened strength the double weight to bear.

Gorboduc, Act I, sc. ii.

The Nightingale, whose happy n.o.ble hart, No dole can daunt, nor fearful force affright, Whose chereful voice, doth comfort saddest wights, When she hir self, hath little cause to sing, Whom lovers love, bicause she plaines their greves, She wraies their woes, and yet relieves their payne, Whom worthy mindes, alwayes esteemed much, And gravest yeares, have not disdainde hir notes: (Only that king proud Tereus by his name With murdring knife, did carve hir pleasant tong, To cover so, his own foule filthy fault) This worthy bird, hath taught my weary Muze, To sing a song, in spight of their despight, Which work my woe, withouten cause or crime ...

The Steele Glas.

Note here the monotonous pauses, indicated by the original punctuation.

Marlowe, inheriting the defects of his predecessors, succeeded, by virtue of his "plastic energy and power of harmonious modulation" in recreating the measure. He found it "monotonous, monosyllabic, and divided into five feet of tolerably regular alternate short and long [i.

e., unstressed and stressed]. He left it various in form and structure, sometimes redundant by a syllable, sometimes deficient, enriched with unexpected emphases and changes in the beat. He found no sequence or attempt at periods; one line succeeded another with insipid regularity, and all were made after the same model. He grouped his verse according to the sense, obeying an internal law of melody, and allowing the thought contained in his words to dominate their form. He did not force his metre to preserve a fixed and unalterable type, but suffered it to a.s.sume most variable modulations, the whole beauty of which depended upon their perfect adaptation to the current of his ideal."[67] No metre responds so readily and so completely to a poet's endowment of genius as blank verse, and hence the secret of Marlowe's improvements over his predecessors is his superior poetic gift. He seems to have felt and thought and written with an enormous imaginative power; by making his verse an organic expression of this power he achieved an almost new medium, ranging in variety from the simplicity and pathos of--

Mortimer! who talks of Mortimer, Who wounds me with the name of Mortimer, That b.l.o.o.d.y man?

to the "swelling bombast of bragging blank verse" (Thomas Nash's hostile phrase) in Tamburlaine--

No! for I shall not die.

See, where my slave, the ugly monster, Death, Shaking and quivering, pale and wan for fear, Stands aiming at me with his murdering dart, Who flies away at every glance I give, And, when I look away, comes stealing on.

Villain, away, and hie thee to the field!

I and mine army come to load thy back With souls of thousand mangled carca.s.ses.

Look, where he goes; but see, he comes again, Because I stay: Tech.e.l.les, let us march And weary Death with bearing souls to h.e.l.l.

Part II, Act V, sc. iii.

+--------------------------------------------------------------+ [67] J. A. Symonds, Blank Verse, London, 1895, p. 23. (This little volume contains a valuable, though incomplete and somewhat extravagant, summary of the history of English blank verse.) +--------------------------------------------------------------+

But even in Marlowe the 'mighty line' is still felt as the unit. All his volubility, his extravagance, his pa.s.sion, his occasional tenderness did but develop the line to its fullest possibilities; the larger unit of the long harmonious period or 'blank verse paragraph' is rare and exceptional with him, though credit is due him for foreshadowing this also:

Now, lords, our loving friends and countrymen, Welcome to England all, with prosperous winds; Our kindest friends in Belgia have we left, To cope with friends at home; a heavy case When force to force is knit, and sword and glaive In civil broils make kin and countrymen Slaughter themselves in others, and their sides With their own weapons gored.

Edward II, Act IV, sc. iv.

Shakespeare's blank verse is the supreme manifestation of the measure for dramatic purposes. In his plays it modulates and adapts itself to the changing emotions of every speaker, "from merely colloquial dialogue to strains of impa.s.sioned soliloquy, from comic repartee to tragic eloquence, from terse epigrams to elaborate descriptions." It is customary to distinguish three 'periods' in Shakespeare's blank verse, corresponding closely to his whole artistic development: first, the more formal, 'single-moulded' line of the early plays; second, the perfect freedom and mastery of the great tragedies; and, third, the daring liberties, verging on license, of the later plays. These distinctions have, of course, no more absolute value than all similar cla.s.sifications of impalpable modifications, but they at least suggest the underlying truth that Shakespeare began as a beginner, and then, having mastered the difficulties and subtleties of the form, treated it with the easy familiarity of a master. To ill.u.s.trate these developments adequately would require pages of quotation; but one may compare the restricted movement of such a pa.s.sage as this from Two Gentlemen of Verona (III, i)--

Proteus, I thank thee for thine honest care; Which to requite, command me while I live.

This love of theirs myself have often seen, Haply when they have judg'd me fast asleep, And oftentimes have purpos'd to forbid Sir Valentine her company and my court; But, fearing lest my jealous aim might err, And so unworthily disgrace the man,-- A rashness that I ever yet have shunn'd,-- I gave him gentle looks, thereby to find That which thyself hast now disclos'd to me.

with the fine modulations, fitting exactly the nuances of meaning in this from Hamlet (III, iii)--

May one be pardon'd and retain the offence?

In the corrupted currents of this world Offence's gilded hand may shove by justice, And oft 'tis seen the wicked prize itself Buys out the law. But 'tis not so above.

There is no shuffling, there the action lies In his true nature; and we ourselves compell'd, Even to the teeth and forehead of our faults, To give in evidence. What then? What rests?

Try what repentance can. What can it not?

or this from King Lear (II, iv)--

You see me here, you G.o.ds, a poor old man, As full of grief as age; wretched in both!

If it be you that stirs these daughters' hearts Against their father, fool me not so much To bear it tamely; touch me with n.o.ble anger, And let not women's weapons, water-drops, Stain my man's cheeks.

and also with the flowing, slightly 'irregular' lines of this from The Tempest (II, i)--

But I feel not This deity in my bosom. Twenty consciences, That stand 'twixt me and Milan, candied be they And melt ere they molest! Here lies your brother, No better than the earth he lies upon If he were that which now he's like, that's dead; Whom I, with this obedient steel, three inches of it, Can lay to be for ever; whiles you, doing thus, To the perpetual wink for aye might put This ancient morsel, this Sir Prudence, who Should not upbraid our course.

The greater freedom of syncopation and subst.i.tution, of extra syllables and unusual pauses, which characterizes Shakespeare's later blank verse, became almost a norm with Beaumont and Fletcher, Shirley, Ford, and the Jacobean dramatists. They often carried freedom to the extreme limit, where an inch further would change verse into prose. They were capable, to be sure, of more careful regular verse, and wrote it when the occasion seemed to call for it; but partly from choice, and partly no doubt from haste or indifference or both, they made a very free blank verse their staple. Shakespeare had alternated prose and verse as the subject or tone required; the later dramatists seemed to seek a verse that might be, in a sense, midway between prose and verse. Thus they avoided a necessity of frequent change, except a loosening or tightening of the reins. To call this verse decadent is somewhat unjust. It is in truth a special form which is certainly well justified for certain subjects and occasions.

Why how darst thou meet me again thou rebel, And knowst how thou hast used me thrice, thou rascal?

Were there not waies enough to fly my vengeance, No hole nor vaults to hide thee from my fury, But thou must meet me face to face to kill thee?

I would not seek thee to destroy thee willingly, But now thou comest to invite me, And comest upon me, How like a sheep-biting rogue taken i'th' manner, And ready for the halter dost thou look now!

Thou hast a hanging look thou scurvy thing, hast ne'er a knife Nor ever a string to lead thee to Elysium?

BEAUMONT and FLETCHER, Rule a Wife and Have a Wife, V, i.

By this you find I am to Millaine neer Ally'd; but more to tempt your fury on My life, know 'twas my valiant father took Your brother prisoner, and presented him Where he receiv'd his death, my father that So oft hath humbled you in war, and made His victories triumph almost upon The ruines of your state.

DAVENANT, Love and Honour, V, iii.

When Milton composed Comus in 1634 it was natural for him to model his blank verse on the best of Shakespeare's and Ben Jonson's, rather than on that of the contemporary playwrights; for his finer taste, his more delicate ear, and his cla.s.sical training and tendencies would at once lead him to reject the metrical laxities of Ford, Shirley, Davenant, and the other writers of 'broken down' blank verse. And though his language shows great familiarity with the later plays of Shakespeare, especially The Tempest, he admitted comparatively few of their metrical licenses and followed in the main the versification of the Midsummer Night's Dream and the earlier tragedies. There is generally a tendency to make the line the unit--but the verse paragraph or stanza effect is also present in nearly fully developed form, as witness the opening lines of the poem--weak or feminine endings are not frequent, alexandrines very few. The 'short fit of rhyming' (ll. 495 ff.), disapproved by Dr.

Johnson, would be explained partly by the tradition of the masque and partly by the model of Shakespeare's comedies.

But the great Miltonic blank verse of Paradise Lost is not a copy of any master; it is a development and a consummation of two influences, the slow maturity of Milton's mind, deepened and broadened by the Commonwealth controversies "not without dust and heat," and the exalted sublimity of the yet unattempted theme of justifying G.o.d's management of human and divine affairs. His maturity brought him his great familiarity both in matter and in style with nearly all that was best in European literature, and his peculiar subject, with only G.o.ds and angels (Adam and Eve are scarcely human, even after the fall) for characters and selected portions of eternity and infinity for time and place, gave him the tendency to artificiality and strain to the outmost verges of sublimity, and to extraordinary involution of phrase and idea--for all of which he must have a suitable prosody. He chose blank verse when the poetical fashion was for rime and described it, in words not altogether clear, as consisting "only in apt numbers, fit quant.i.ty of syllables, and the sense variously drawn out from one verse to another."[68] Apt numbers, that is, appropriate rhythms, Milton's verse certainly has; but it is the last item, the great variety of movements subordinating the line-unit, and running-on of verses into longer periods, for which his blank verse is famous. Every page of Paradise Lost contains examples; some of the finest occur in the rhetorical display of the Pandemonic Council in Book II. Note the position of the pauses in the following pa.s.sage, and then compare the specimens of early blank verse given above.

+--------------------------------------------------------------+ [68] The main crux of this pa.s.sage is "fit quant.i.ty of syllables." _Quant.i.ty_ in such a context suggests syllabic length; and one recalls the sonnet to Lawes-- not to scan With Midas' ears, committing short and long. But, on the other hand, Mr. Robert Bridges has made it almost if not quite certain that Milton counted syllables, and therefore the phrase would mean "ten syllables to a line," proper allowance being made for elision. Since both interpretations agree pretty well with Milton's practice, one cannot be sure which he had in mind. +--------------------------------------------------------------+

Or could we break our way By force, and at our heels all h.e.l.l should rise With blackest insurrection, to confound Heaven's purest light, yet our great enemy All incorruptible would on his throne Sit unpolluted, and the ethereal mould Incapable of stain would soon expel Her mischief, and purge off the baser fire, Victorious.