English Verse. Raymond Macdonald Alden
Two-stress irregular.
On the ground
Sleep sound:
I'll apply
To your eye,
Gentle lover, remedy.
When thou wak'st,
Thou tak'st
True delight
In the sight
Of thy former lady's eye.
(Shakspere: Puck's Song in Midsummer Night's Dream, III. ii. ab. 1595.)
What I hate,
Be consecrate
To celebrate
Thee and Thy state,
No mate
For Thee;
What see For envy In poor me?
(Browning: Song in Caliban upon Setebos. 1864.)
In the usual printing of Caliban upon Setebos this song is brought into the form of the five-accent lines. It is evidently intended, however, to be read in two-accent groups. Professor Moulton has remarked interestingly that Browning gives the unique figure of Caliban not only a grammar but a prosody of his own.
Though my rime be ragged,
Tattered and jagged,
Rudely raine-beaten,
Rusty and moth-eaten;
If ye take wel therewith,
It hath in it some pith.
(John Skelton: Colyn Cloute. ab. 1510.)
This is a specimen of what Mr. Churton Collins calls "that headlong voluble breathless doggrel which, rattling and clashing on through quick-recurring rhymes, … has taken from the name of its author the title of Skeltonical verse." (Ward's English Poets, vol. i. p. 185.) The number of accents, as well as the number of syllables, is irregular, being quite as often (perhaps more often) three as two.
Three-stress iambic.
O let the solid ground
Not fail beneath my feet
Before my life has found
What some have found so sweet;
Then let come what come may,
What matter if I go mad,
I shall have had my day.
(Tennyson: Song in Maud, xi. 1855.)
(In combination with verse of four, five, and six stresses:)
The Oracles are dumb;
No voice or hideous hum
Runs through the arched roof in words deceiving.
Apollo from his shrine
Can no more divine,
With hollow shriek the steep of Delphos leaving:
No nightly trance or breathed spell
Inspires the pale-eyed priest from the prophetic cell.
(Milton: Ode on the Morning of Christ's Nativity. 1629.)
Here, in line 5, we have an instance of a verse truncated at the beginning—rare in modern English poetry.
(With feminine ending:)
The mountain sheep are sweeter,
But the valley sheep are fatter;
We therefore deemed it meeter
To carry off the latter.
We made an expedition;
We met an host and quelled it;
We forced a strong position,
And killed the men who held it.
(Thomas Love Peacock: War Song of Dinas Vawr, from The Misfortunes of Elphin. 1829.)
In line 2 is an instance of anacrusis.
Three-stress trochaic.
(In combination with iambic:)
Go where glory waits thee,
But, while fame elates thee,
Oh! still remember me.
When the praise thou meetest To thine ear is sweetest, Oh! then remember me.
(Thomas Moore: Go Where Glory Waits Thee. ab. 1820.)
(In combination with six-stress verses:)
Hail to thee, blithe Spirit!
Bird thou never wert,
That from heaven, or near it,
Pourest thy full heart
In profuse strains of unpremeditated art.
Higher still and higher
From the earth thou springest,
Like a cloud of fire
The blue deep thou wingest,
And singing still dost soar, and soaring ever singest.
(Shelley: To a Skylark. 1820.)
Here lines 2 and 4 are catalectic.
Three-stress anapestic.
I am monarch of all I survey;
My right there is none to dispute;
From the centre all round to the sea
I am lord of the fowl and the brute.
(Cowper: Verses supposed to be written by Alexander Selkirk. 1782.)
In this specimen lines 2, 5, 6, and 8 show initial truncation, the first light syllable being missing.
(With two-stress verse:)
His desire is a dureless content,
And a trustless joy;
He is won with a world of despair
And is lost with a toy. …
But true love is a durable fire,
In the mind ever burning,
Never sick, never old, never dead,
From itself never turning.
(Sir Walter Raleigh (?): Pilgrim to Pilgrim. In MS. Rawl. 85; in Schelling's Elizabethan Lyrics, p. 3.)
"The metres of the earlier years of Elizabeth's reign are so overwhelmingly iambic," Professor Schelling observes, "that this perfectly metrical, if somewhat irregular, anapæstic movement comes like a surprise. Professor Gummere, of Haverford College, calls my attention to three epigrams—printed among the poems of Raleigh, ed. Hannah, p. 55—all of them in more or less limping anapæsts, but not of this measure. It is quite possible that the time to which these verses were sung may have affected the measure." (Notes to Elizabethan Lyrics, pp. 211, 212.)
(With initial truncation:)
She gazed, as I slowly withdrew,
My path I could hardly discern;
So sweetly she bade me adieu,
I thought that she bade me return.
(Shenstone: Pastoral Ballad. 1743.)
Mr. Saintsbury praises highly the anapests of Shenstone (Ward's English Poets, vol. iii. p. 272), saying that he "taught the metre to a greater poet than himself, Cowper, and these two between them have written almost everything that is worth reading in it, if we put avowed parody and burlesque out of the question." But this is probably to be regarded as overstating the case.