English Verse. Raymond Macdonald Alden
several kinds of feet are of course borrowed from classical prosody, where they are used to mark feet made up not of accented and unaccented, but of long and short syllables. The different significance of the terms as applied to the verse of different languages has given rise to some confusion, and it is proposed by some to abandon the classical terms; their use, however, seems to be too well established in English to permit of change. Some would even abandon the attempt to measure English verse by feet, contending that its rhythm is too free to admit of any such measuring process; thus, see Mr. J. M. Robertson, in the Appendix to New Essays toward a Critical Method, and Mr. J. A. Symonds in his Blank Verse. See also in Mr. Robert Bridges's Milton's Prosody, Appendix G "On the Use of Greek Terminology in English Prosody." (1901 ed. p. 77.)
[7] On the historical problem of the distinction between elided and genuinely hypermetrical syllables in the French and English decasyllabic verse, see Motheré: Les théories du vers héroique anglais et ses relations avec la versification française (Havre, 1886).
III. THE STANZA
The stanza, or strophe, is the largest unit of verse-measure ordinarily recognized. It is based not so much on rhythmical divisions as on periods either rhetorical or melodic; that is, a short stanza will roughly correspond to the period of a sentence, and a long one to that of a paragraph, while in lyrical verse the original idea was to conform the stanza to the melody for which it was written. Thus Schipper observes: "The word strophe properly signifies a turning, and originally indicated the return of the song, as sung, to the melody with which it began." Schipper defines a stanza as a group of verses of a certain number, so combined that all the stanzas of the same poem will be identical in the number, the length, and the metre of the corresponding verses; in rimed verse, also, the arrangement of the rimes will be identical. (See Grundriss, p. 268.)
The form of a stanza, then, is determined and described (the fundamental metre being assumed) by the number of verses, the length of verses, and the arrangement of rimes. The usual and convenient method of indicating these conditions is to represent all the verses that rime together by the same letter, while the number of feet in the verse is written like an algebraic exponent. Thus a quatrain in "common metre" (four-stress and three-stress lines), riming alternately, is represented by the formula a4b3a4b3.
The appearance of the stanza in English verse is always the sign of foreign influence. The West Germanic verse, as far back as we have specimens of it, is uniformly stichic (that is, marked by no periods save those of the individual verse), not stanzaic.[8] On the other hand, we find the stanza in the Old Norse verse. Sievers's view is that originally the two sorts of verse existed side by side, the stanzaic being preferred for chorus delivery, the stichic for individual recitation; one form at length crowding out the other.
The great organizer of the stanza is, of course, the element of rime. While unrimed stanzas are familiar in classical verse, the two innovations, rime and stanza, were introduced together into English verse, under both Latin and French influences, and have almost invariably been associated. For notes on the history of the beginnings of stanza-forms in English, see therefore under Rime, in the following section.
Truth may seem, but cannot be;
Beauty brag, but 'tis not she;
Truth and beauty buried be.
(Shakspere: The Phœnix and the Turtle. 1601.)
O praise the Lord, his wonders tell,
Whose mercy shines in Israel,
At length redeem'd from sin and hell.
(George Sandys: Paraphrase upon Luke i. ab. 1630.)
Love, making all things else his foes,
Like a fierce torrent overflows
Whatever doth his course oppose.
(Sir Jno. Denham: Against Love. ab. 1640.)
Children, keep up that harmless play:
Your kindred angels plainly say
By God's authority ye may.
(Landor: Children Playing in a Churchyard. 1858.)
Whoe'er she be,
That not impossible She
That shall command my heart and me;
Where'er she lie,
Lock'd up from mortal eye
In shady leaves of destiny: …
—Meet you her, my Wishes,
Bespeak her to my blisses,
And be ye call'd, my absent kisses.
(Crashaw: Wishes for the Supposed Mistress. 1646.)
I said, "I toil beneath the curse,
But, knowing not the universe,
I fear to slide from bad to worse.
"And that, in seeking to undo
One riddle, and to find the true,
I knit a hundred others new."
(Tennyson: The Two Voices. 1833.)
Like the swell of some sweet tune,
Morning rises into noon,
May glides onward into June.
(Longfellow: Maidenhood. 1842.)
Whenas in silks my Julia goes,
Then, then (methinks) how sweetly flows
That liquefaction of her clothes.
(Herrick: To Julia. 1648)
The fear was on the cattle, for the gale was on the sea, An' the pens broke up on the lower deck an' let the creatures free— An' the lights went out on the lower deck, an' no one down but me.
(Kipling: Mulholland's Contract.)
Terza rima (aba, bcb, etc.).
A spending hand that alway poureth out
Had need to have a bringer in as fast;
And on the stone that still doth turn about
There groweth no moss. These proverbs yet do last:
Reason hath set them in so sure a place,
That length of years their force can never waste.
When I remember this, and eke the case
Wherein thou stand'st, I thought forthwith to write,
Bryan, to thee. Who knows how great a grace, …
(Sir Thomas Wyatt: How to use the court and himself therein, written to Sir Francis Bryan. ab. 1542.)
The terza rima is, strictly speaking, a scheme of continuous verse rather than a stanza, each tercet being united by the rime-scheme to the preceding. Its use in English has always been slight, and always due to conscious imitation of the Italian. No successful attempt has been made to use it for a long poem, as Dante did in the Divina Commedia. Wyatt's specimen is the earliest in English; he chose the form for his three satires imitating those of Alamanni.
Once, O sweet once, I saw with dread oppressed
Her whom I dread; so that with prostrate lying
Her length the earth Love's chiefe clothing dressed.
I saw that riches fall, and fell a crying:— Let not dead earth enjoy so deare