The Principles of English Versification Part 24

Pa.s.sion and apathy and glory and shame.

Ibid, II, 567.

Eyeless in Gaza at the mill with slaves.

Samson Agonistes, 41.

Envy and calumny and hate and pain.

Sh.e.l.lEY, Adonais, xl.

And sometimes no special emphasis is apparent, as--

Servile to all the skyey influences.

SHAKESPEARE, Measure for Measure, III, i.

Like a sad votarist in palmer's weed.

MILTON, Comus, 189.

Gorgons and hydras and chimaeras dire.

Paradise Lost, II, 628.

But fooled by hope, men favor the deceit.

DRYDEN.

The friar hooded and the monarch crowned.

By strangers honour'd and by strangers mourn'd.

POPE.

With forest branches and the trodden weed.

KEATS.

The rhythm of the last four examples is very common in all English verse. Occasionally the metre becomes almost ambiguous--according to its metrical context the line may be either 4-stress or 5-stress, as--

To the garden of bliss, thy seat prepar'd.

Paradise Lost, VIII, 299.

By the waters of life, where'er they sat.

Ibid., IX, 79.

In the visions of G.o.d. It was a hill.

Ibid., XI, 377.

Three-stress lines in blank verse are less frequent, but the more striking when they do occur. There is Shakespeare's famous--

To-morrow and to-morrow and to-morrow.

Milton's

Omnipotent, Immutable, immortal, infinite, Eternal King.

Paradise Lost, III, 372 ff.

(where the heaping up of the polysyllabic epithets adds greatly to the effect); and

Of difficulty or danger could deter.

Paradise Lost, II, 499.

Of happiness and final misery.

Ibid., II, 563.

Abominable, inutterable, and worse.

Ibid., II, 626.

His ministers of vengeance and pursuit.

Ibid., I, 170.

and Meredith's

The army of unalterable law.

Lucifer in Starlight.

and such lines as--

Unrespited, unpitied, unreprieved.

Paradise Lost, II, 185.

for which parallels may be found in several other poets before and after Milton.

There is no reason why a metrically 5-stress line should not contain only two prose stresses, but examples are of course rare. Such an unusual rhythm would be seldom demanded. The phrase "acidulation of perversity" might do, for it is easily modulated to the metrical form.

Occasionally, as in the last line of Christina Rossetti's sonnet quoted on pages 120 f., a series of monosyllables with almost level inflection will reduce the prose emphasis of a line and force attention on the important words--

Than that you should _remember_ and be _sad_.

A better example is Sh.e.l.ley's

A sepulchre for its eternity.

Epipsychidion, 173.

In direct contrast to these lines whose effectiveness springs from a lack of the normal quant.i.ty of stress are those which are metrically overweighted. A single stressed monosyllable, supported or unsupported by a pause, may occupy the place of a whole rhythmic beat, or it may be compressed to the value of a theoretically unstressed element. Thus Milton's well-known line--

Rocks, caves, lakes, fens, bogs, dens, and shades of death.

Paradise Lost, II, 621.

might if it stood by itself equally well be taken as an 8-stress or as a 5-stress line; and obviously in a blank verse context it produces a very marked r.e.t.a.r.dation of the tempo. No one would dream of reading it in the same s.p.a.ce of time as the rapid line which just precedes it and to which it stands in such striking contrast--

O'er many a frozen, many a fiery Alp.

Similar are--

Light-armed, or heavy, sharp, smooth, swift or slow.

Paradise Lost, II, 902.