Chapter VII: Part ONE: English Verse (4)

The functions of rime in English verse may perhaps be grouped under three heads: the function of emphasis, the function of forming beautiful or pleasurable sounds, and the function of combining or organizing the verses. It is with reference to the first of these that Professor Corson speaks of rime as "an enforcing agency of the individual verse." Under the second head rime is considered simply as a form of tone-color, and as furnishing a part of the melody of verse. The third function, by which individual verses are bound into stanzas, is, in a sense, the most important.

On the subject of the æsthetic values of rime, see the chapter on "poetic unities" in Corson's _Primer of English Verse_, and Ehrenfeld's _Studien zur Theorie des Reims_ (Zürich, 1897). The problem of the relative values of rimed and unrimed verse will come up in connection with the history of the heroic couplet and of blank verse. The objection always urged against rime is that its demands are likely to turn the poet aside from the normal order of his ideas. Herder, as Ehrenfeld points out, thought that this was particularly true of English verse, the uninflected language not providing so naturally for cases where thought and sound are parallel. A recent protest against the tyranny of rime is found in the article by Mr. Larminie, cited on page 115, where it is claimed that undue attention to form is thinning out the substance of modern poetry, and that the demands of rime should be relaxed. See also Ben Jonson's "Fit of Rhyme against Rhyme," for a humorous complaint against the requirements of rime upon the poet.

The origin of rime has been a subject of prolonged controversy. See
the monograph by Ehrenfeld already cited; Meyer's _Anfang und
Ursprung der rythmischen Dichtung_ (Munich, 1884); W. Grimm's
_Geschichte des Reims_ (1851); Norden's _Antike Kunstprosa_
(Leipzig, 1898; _Anhang ueber die Geschichte des Reims_); Kluge's
article, _Zur Geschichte des Reimes im Altgermanischen_, in Paul u.
Braune's _Beiträge_, vol. ix. p. 422; and Schipper, vol. i. pp. 34
ff. Meyer's work is an exposition of the theory that rime was an
importation from the Orient. In like manner, it has been held by
many that the poetry of Otfried (the first regularly rimed German
verse) was produced under Latin influence wholly, and that rime was
introduced by him to the Germans (see the work by Kawczynski, cited
p. 117). Herder (see Ehrenfeld's monograph) regarded rime as a
natural growth of the instinct for symmetry in all human taste,
closely connected with dance-rhythms, all forms of parallelism, and
the like. Similarity of inflectional endings in similar clauses, he
pointed out, would naturally develop rime in any inflected
language. This view is in line with the tendency of recent opinion.
Schipper says, in effect: "Is rime to be regarded as the invention
of a special people, like the Arabian, or is it a form of art which
developed in the poetic language of the Aryan peoples, separately
in the several nations? In the opinion of the principal scholars
the latter opinion is the correct one. The chief support of this
opinion is the fact that traces of rime, in greater or less number,
appear in the oldest poetry of almost all the partially civilized
peoples. 'It is,' says C. F. Meyer, 'something inborn, original,
universally human, like poetry and music, and no more than these
the special invention of a single people or a particular time.' In
fact, traces of rime may be noticed in the poetry of the Greeks, in
Homer, Æschylus, Sophocles, Aristophanes, as also in the poetry of
the Romans; in a more developed form it appears in the late middle
Latin clerical poetry. In the Celtic languages, moreover, rime is
the indispensable mark of the poetic form, even in the oldest
extant specimens. The Latin poetry just referred to gives
interesting evidence that rime is a characteristic sign of popular
poetry. While the quantitative system became dominant, with the
artistic verse-forms of the Greeks, in the Golden Age of Roman
literature, the early Saturnian verses, written in free rhythms,
already showed the popular taste for similarity of sound in the
form of alliteration; and in the post-classical time, with the fall
of the quantitative metres, rime again came to the front in songs
intended for the people. The same element was made so essential a
characteristic in the organization of verse in the mediæval Latin,
that 'carmen rhythmicum' came to signify a rimed poem, and the
later Latinists used the word 'rhythmus' precisely in the sense of
'rime.'"

Schipper goes on to inquire whether this mediæval Latin poetry was
the means of introducing rime to the Germanic peoples. Wackernagel
held it as certain that Otfried learned his rimes from Latin poems;
but as Otfried declares that his poetry is intended to take the
place of useless popular songs, it seems probable that he was not
using an innovation, and that rime was already popular in Old High
German. Indeed, it appears sporadically in the _Hildebrandslied_
and the _Heliand_. Grimm observes that it is theoretically unlikely
that alliteration should have vanished suddenly and rime as
suddenly have taken its place. The gradual development of rime from
assonance among the Romance peoples suggests the same thing. The
early appearance of rime by the side of alliteration is illustrated
by C. F. Meyer (_Historische Studien_, Leipzig, 1851) from the
Norse _Edda_, from _Beowulf_, Cædmon, etc. In the later Anglo-Saxon
period rime was evidently securing a considerable though uncertain
hold. The Riming Poem suggests what development rime might have had
in English without the incoming of Romance influences. Grimm
observes that, while to his mind alliteration was a finer and
nobler quality than rime, there was need of a stronger
sound-likeness which should hold the attention more firmly by its
unchanging place at the end of the line. Schipper remarks, finally,
that the fact that the use of rime in connection with alliteration
was especially popular in the southern half of England, where the
Romance influence was strongest, may suggest why in the more purely
Germanic northern half alliteration remained the single support of
the poetic form well into the fifteenth century.

The appendix to the work of Norden, cited above, is a fuller
development of ideas frequently suggested by the sporadic
appearance of rime in early Greek and Latin literature. Norden
gives many examples of this "rhetorical rime," as well as of rime
arising naturally from parallelism of sentence structure found in
primitive charms, incantations, and the like. In particular he
emphasizes the influence of the figure of _hom[oe]oteleuton_ as
used in the literary prose of the classical languages. His
conclusion is as follows: "Rime, then, was potentially as truly
present in the Greek and Latin languages, from the earliest times,
as in every other language; but in the metrical (quantitative)
poetry it had no regular place, and appeared there in general only
sporadically and by chance, being used by only a few poets as a
rhetorical ornament. It became actual by the transition from the
metrical poetry to the rhythmical (that is, the syllable-counting,
in which--in the Latin--the chief consideration is still for the
word-accent); and this transition was consummated by the aid of the
highly poetic prose, already used for centuries, which was
constructed according to the laws of rhythm, and in which the
rhetorical hom[oe]oteleuton had gained an ever-increasing
significance. In particular, rime found an entrance through sermons
composed in such prose, and delivered in a voice closely
approaching that of singing, into the hymn-poetry which was
intimately related to such sermons. From the Latin hymn-poetry it
was carried into other languages, from the ninth century onward. It
is self-evident that in these languages also rime was potentially
present before it became actual through the influence of foreign
poetry; for in this region also there operates the highest immanent
law of every being and every form of development,--that in the
whole field of life nothing absolutely new is invented, but merely
slumbering germs are awakened to active life." (_Antike
Kunstprosa_, vol. ii. pp. 867 ff.)

Me lifes onlah. se þis leoht onwrah.
and þæt torhte geteoh. tillice onwrah.
glæd wæs ic gliwum. glenged hiwum.
blissa bleoum. blostma hiwum.
Secgas mec segon. symbel ne alegon.
feorh-gife gefegon. frætwed wægon.
wic ofer wongum. wennan gongum.
lisse mid longum. leoma getongum.

(From the "Riming Poem" of the _Codex Exoniensis_.)

This puzzlingly early appearance of rime in Anglo-Saxon verse, in conjunction with fairly regular alliteration, is of especial interest.[12] "It is supposed," says Schipper, "that this new form has for its foundation the Scandinavian _Runhenda_, and that this was known to the Anglo-Saxons through the Old Norse poet, Egil Skalagrimsson, who was living in England in the tenth century, and who stayed twice in England at Athelstan's court, writing a poem in Northumbria in the same form." He also observes that the attempt to attain something like equality of feet and half-lines suggests the Norse models.

Sainte Marie, Cristes bur,
Maidenes clenhad, moderes flur,
Dilie mine sinne, rixe in min mod,
Bring me to winne with self god.

(Verses attributed to St. Godric. ab. 1100.)

Godric, the hermit of Norfolk, lived about 1065-1170. These verses seem to give the earliest extant appearance of end-rime in Middle English. The Romance words in the hymn indicate the presence of French influence. (On this hymn see article in _Englische Studien_, vol. xi. p. 401.)

Woden hehde þa hæhste la[gh]e: an ure ælderne dæ[gh]en.
he heom wes leof: æfne al swa heore lif.
he wes heore walden: and heom wurðscipe duden.
þene feorðe dæi i þere wike: heo [gh]iven him to wurðscipe.
þa Þunre heo [gh]iven þures dæi: for þi þat heo heom helpen mæi.
Freon heore læfdi: heo [gh]iven hire fridæi.
Saturnus heo [gh]iven sætterdæi: þene Sunne heo [gh]iven sonedæi.
Monenen heo [gh]ivenen monedæi: Tidea heo [gh]even tisdæi.
þus seide Hængest: cnihten alre hendest.

(LAYAMON: _Brut_, ll. 13921-13938. Madden ed., vol. ii. p. 158. ab. 1200.)

On the verse of the _Brut_ see above, p. 119.

Ich æm elder þen ich wes · a wintre and alore.
Ic wælde more þaune ic dude · mi wit ah to ben more.
Wel lange ic habbe child ibeon · a weorde end ech adede.
Þeh ic beo awintre eald · tu [gh]yng i eom a rede....
Mest al þat ic habbe ydon · ys idelnesse and chilce.
Wel late ic habbe me bi þoht · bute me god do milce.

(_Poema Morale_, ll. 1-4, 7, 8. In Zupitza's _Alt-und Mittelenglisches Übungsbuch_, p. 58. ab. 1200.)

The _Poema Morale_, evidently one of the most popular poems of the early Middle English period, seems to be the earliest one of any considerable length in which end-rime was used regularly.

For other early examples of rime introduced into English under foreign influence, see above, in the section on the Stanza.

_Double and triple rime._

To our theme.--The man who has stood on the Acropolis,
And looked down over Attica; or he
Who has sailed where picturesque Constantinople is,
Or seen Timbuctoo, or hath taken tea
In small-eyed China's crockery-ware metropolis,
Or sat amidst the bricks of Nineveh,
May not think much of London's first appearance--
But ask him what he thinks of it a year hence?

(BYRON: _Don Juan_, canto xi. st. vii.)

'Tis pity learned virgins ever wed,
With persons of no sort of education,
Or gentlemen, who, though well born and bred,
Grow tired of scientific conversation;
I don't choose to say much upon this head,
I'm a plain man, and in a single station,
But--oh! ye lords of ladies intellectual,
Inform us truly, have they not hen-pecked you all?

(_Ib._, canto i. st. xxii.)

So the painter Pacchiarotto
Constructed himself a grotto
In the quarter of Stalloreggi--
As authors of note allege ye.
And on each of the whitewashed sides of it
He painted--(none far and wide so fit
As he to perform in fresco)--
He painted nor cried _quiesco_
Till he peopled its every square foot
With Man--from the Beggar barefoot
To the Noble in cap and feather;
All sorts and conditions together.
The Soldier in breastplate and helmet
Stood frowningly--hail fellow well met--
By the Priest armed with bell, book, and candle.
Nor did he omit to handle
The Fair Sex, our brave distemperer:
Not merely King, Clown, Pope, Emperor--
He diversified too his Hades
Of all forms, pinched Labor and paid Ease,
With as mixed an assemblage of Ladies.

(BROWNING: _Pacchiarotto_, v.)

What's a man's age? He must hurry more, that's all;
Cram in a day, what his youth took a year to hold:
When we mind labor, then only, we're too old--
What age had Methusalem when he begat Saul?
And at last, as its haven some buffeted ship sees
(Come all the way from the north-parts with sperm oil),
I hope to get safely out of the turmoil
And arrive one day at the land of the Gypsies,
And find my lady, or hear the last news of her
From some old thief and son of Lucifer,
His forehead chapleted green with wreathy hop,
Sunburned all over like an Æthiop.

(BROWNING: _The Flight of the Duchess_, xvii.)

These passages illustrate sufficiently the grotesque effects of double and triple rime in English verse,--effects of which Byron and Browning are the unquestioned masters. Professor Corson observes that the double rime is to be regarded as the means of "some special emphasis," whether serious or humorous. More commonly the effect is humorous, of course, as in _Don Juan_, where the rimes indicate "the lowering of the poetic key--the reduction of true poetic seriousness." The rimes in the _Flight of the Duchess_ Mr. Edmund Gurney has said sometimes "produce the effect of jokes made during the performance of a symphony." The specimen which follows illustrates the use of these double and triple rimes for a wholly serious purpose. Professor Corson remarks that in this case the rime serves "as a most effective foil to the melancholy theme. It is not unlike the laughter of frenzied grief." It is interesting to note that in the Italian language, where double rimes are almost constant, masculine rimes are sometimes used for grotesque effect in the same way that English poets use the feminine.

Perishing gloomily,
Spurred by contumely,
Cold inhumanity,
Burning insanity,
Into her rest.--
Cross her hands humbly,
As if praying dumbly,
Over her breast.
Owning her weakness,
Her evil behaviour,
And leaving, with meekness,
Her sins to her Saviour!

(THOMAS HOOD: _The Bridge of Sighs._)

Roll the strong stream of it
Up, till the scream of it
Wake from a dream of it
Children that sleep,
Seamen that fare for them
Forth, with a prayer for them;
Shall not God care for them,
Angels not keep?
Spare not the surges
Thy stormy scourges;
Spare us the dirges
Of wives that weep.
Turn back the waves for us:
Dig no fresh graves for us,
Wind, in the manifold gulfs of the deep.

(SWINBURNE: _Winter in Northumberland_, xiv.)

Into the woods my Master went,
Clean forspent, forspent.
Into the woods my Master came,
Forspent with love and shame.
But the olives they were not blind to Him,
The little gray leaves were kind to Him:
The thorn-tree had a mind to Him
When into the woods he came.

(SIDNEY LANIER: _A Ballad of Trees and the Master._)

_Broken rime._

There first for thee my passion grew,
Sweet, sweet Matilda Pottingen!
Thou wast the daughter of my tu-
tor, law-professor at the U-
niversity of Gottingen.

Sun, moon, and thou, vain world, adieu!
That kings and priests are plotting in;
Here doomed to starve on water gru-
el, never shall I see the U-
niversity of Gottingen.

(GEORGE CANNING: Song in _The Rovers; Anti-Jacobin_, June 4, 1798.[13])

Winter and summer, night and morn,
I languish at this table dark;
My office-window has a corn-
er looks into St. James's Park.

(THACKERAY: Ballads, _What Makes my Heart to Thrill and Glow?_)

_Internal rime._

Internal rime may be regarded on the one side as only a matter of the division of the verse, since if it occurs regularly at the medial cesura, it practically breaks the verse into two parts. On the other side, if used only sporadically, it is a matter of tone-color. It sometimes appears, however, in forms which entitle it to recognition by itself. The earliest of these forms is the "Leonine rime," which is said to have taken its name from Leoninus of St. Victor, who in the twelfth century wrote elegiacs (hexameters and pentameters) in which the syllable preceding the cesura regularly rimed with the final syllable. Obviously lines of this kind would easily break up into riming half-lines. Similarly, in septenary verse internal rime was often used together with end-rime, with a resulting resolution into short-line stanzas riming either _aabb_ or _abab_.[14] The following specimen from a celebrated ballad shows the popular use of a somewhat complex system of internal rime.

Be it right or wrong, these men among on women do complaine,
Affirming this, how that it is a labour spent in vaine,
To love them wele, for never a dele they love a man agayne.
For lete a man do what he can, ther favour to attayne,
Yet yf a newe to them pursue, ther furst trew lover than
Laboureth for nought, and from her thought he is a bannisshed man.

(_Ye Nutbrowne Maide._ From Arnold's Chronicle, printed ab. 1502. In Flügel's _Neuenglisches Lesebuch_, vol. i. p. 167.)

Haill rois maist chois till clois thy fois greit micht,
Haill stone quhilk schone upon the throne of licht,
Vertew, quhais trew sweit dew ouirthrew al vice,
Was ay ilk day gar say the way of licht;
Amend, offend, and send our end ay richt.
Thow stant, ordant as sanct, of grant maist wise,
Till be supplie, and the hie gre of price.
Delite the tite me quite of site to dicht,
For I apply schortlie to thy devise.

(GAWAIN DOUGLAS: _A ballade in the commendation of honour and verteu_; at the end of the _Palace of Honor_.)

Douglas, like his countryman Dunbar, was something of a metrical virtuoso, and his use of internal rime in this ballade is one of his most remarkable achievements. In the first stanza there are two internal rimes in each line, in the second three, and in the third (here quoted) four.

I cannot eat but little meat,
My stomach is not good,
But sure I think that I can drink
With him that wears a hood.
Though I go bare, take ye no care,
I nothing am a-cold,
I stuff my skin so full within
Of jolly good ale and old.

(Drinking Song in _Gammer Gurton's Needle_.)

The fair breeze blew, the white foam flew,
The furrow stream'd off free;
We were the first that ever burst
Into that silent sea.

(COLERIDGE: _Rime of the Ancient Mariner._)

The splendor falls on castle walls,
And snowy summits old in story;
The long light shakes across the lakes,
And the wild cataract leaps in glory.

(TENNYSON: Song in _The Princess_, iv.)

England, queen of the waves whose green inviolate girdle enrings thee
round,
Mother fair as the morning, where is now the place of thy foemen found?
Still the sea that salutes us free proclaims them stricken, acclaims
thee crowned ....
England, none that is born thy son, and lives, by grace of thy glory,
free,
Lives and yearns not at heart and burns with hope to serve as he worships
thee;
None may sing thee: the sea-wind's wing beats down our songs as it hails
the sea.

(SWINBURNE: _The Armada_, vii.)

Here the third and eighth syllables of each verse rime, giving the effect of a separate melody only half heard under that of the main rime-scheme. This is especially subtle where there is no possible pause after the riming word, as in the "sing" of the last line quoted.

Ah, broken is the golden bowl! the spirit flown forever!
Let the bell toll!--a saintly soul floats on the Stygian river;
And, Guy de Vere, hast thou no tear?--weep now or nevermore!
See on yon drear and rigid bier low lies thy love, Lenore!
Come, let the burial rite be read--the funeral song be sung:
An anthem for the queenliest dead that ever died so young,
A dirge for her the doubly dead in that she died so young.

(POE: _Lenore._)

I did not take her by the hand,
(Though little was to understand
From touch of hand all friends might take,)
Because it should not prove a flake
Burnt in my palm to boil and ache.

I did not listen to her voice,
(Though none had noted, where at choice
All might rejoice in listening,)
Because no such a thing should cling
In the wood's moan at evening.

(ROSSETTI: _Penumbra._)

(See also _Love's Nocturn_, p. 146, below.)

B. AS A SPORADIC ELEMENT (TONE-COLOR)

This division includes the use made of the qualities of sound for the purpose of adding to the melodiousness of verse, or of expressing in some measure the ideas to be conveyed by means of the very sounds employed. Sometimes this takes the form of alliteration, differing from that of early English verse only in that it follows no regular structural laws. On the other hand, it may take the form of _onomatop[oe]ia_, the figure of speech in which sound and sense are closely related,--as in descriptive words like _buzz_, _hiss_, _murmur_, _splash_, and the like. The term Tone-color is formed by analogy with the German _Klangfarbe_, an expression apparently due to the feeling that the sound-qualities of speech have somewhat the same function as the various colors in a picture. It is unquestionably true that the selection of sounds, whether vowel or consonantal, has much to do with the melodious effect of very much poetry. The poet may choose the different sound-qualities (so far as the sense permits) just as the musician may choose the varying qualities of the different instruments in the orchestra or the different stops in the organ.

Strictly speaking, this matter of Tone-color is not a part of verse-form in the same sense as matters of rhythm, rime, and the like; for it may appear in prose as well as in verse, and is not in any case reducible to formal principles or laws. Yet its use in actual verse is so important, and it is so closely related to the use of sound-quality in the form of rime and alliteration, that it seems well to include it here.[15]

Dr. Guest treats sounds as having in themselves the suggestion of
more or less definite ideas, this suggestiveness being explainable
by physical causes. Thus the trembling character of _l_ suggests
trepidation, as in "Double, double, toil and trouble." _R_ suggests
harsh, grating, or rattling noises; the sibilants are appropriate
to the expression of shrieks, screams, and the like; _b_ and _p_,
because of the compression of the lips, suggest muscular effort;
_st_, from a sudden stopping of the _s_, suggests fear or surprise;
_f_ and _h_ also fear, because of their whispering quality. Hollow
sounds (_au_, _ow_, _o_, and the like) suggest depth and fulness.
Guest quotes in this connection an interesting passage from Bacon's
_Natural History_ (ii. 200): "There is found a similitude between
the sound that is made by inanimate bodies, or by animate bodies
that have no voice articulate, and divers letters of articulate
voices; and commonly men have given such names to those sounds as
do allude unto the articulate letters; as trembling of hot water
hath resemblance unto the letter _l_; quenching of hot metals with
the letter _z_; snarling of dogs with the letter _r_; the noise of
screech-owls with the letter _sh_; voice of cats with the diphthong
_eu_; voice of cuckoos with the diphthong _ou_; sounds of strings
with the diphthong _ng_.

A. W. Schlegel went even farther in suggesting a subtle symbolism in sounds apart from descriptive qualities. Thus he regarded _a_ as suggestive of bright red, and as symbolizing youth, joy, or brightness (as in the words _Strahl_, _Klang_, _Glans_); _i_ as suggestive of sky-blue, symbolic of intimacy or love; and so with other vowel sounds. (See Ehrenfeld's monograph, p. 57.) In general it may be said that it is dangerous to attempt to explain the special effects of tone-color in verse, except where it is obviously descriptive, the appreciation of such effects being a subtle and a more or less individual matter. On this subject Mr. Gurney makes some interesting observations, in the essays cited above. He believes that the pleasurable effect of the sound-qualities in verse can never be dissociated from the sense of the words; that the most melodious verse cannot be appreciated if in a foreign language, unless read with particular expressiveness; and that the pleasure derived from what we roughly call melodious or harmonious verses is always due to the mystical combination of the appropriate sound with the poetic content.

Dr. Johnson ridiculed the idea of tone-color, as appearing in Pope's teaching that the sound should be "an echo to the sense." See his _Life of Pope_, and especially the _Idler_ for June 9, 1759, in which he describes Minim the critic as reading "all our poets with particular attention to this delicacy of versification." Such a critic discovers wonders in these lines from _Hudibras_:

"Honor is like the glossy bubble,
Which cost philosophers such trouble;
Where, one part crack'd, the whole does fly,
And wits are crack'd to find out why."

"In these verses, says Minim, we have two striking accommodations of the sound to the sense. It is impossible to utter the first two lines emphatically without an act like that which they describe; _bubble_ and _trouble_ causing a momentary inflation of the cheeks by the retention of the breath, which is afterwards forcibly emitted, as in the practice of _blowing bubbles_. But the greatest excellence is in the third line, which is _crack'd_ in the middle to express a crack, and then shivers into monosyllables."

In an article on "Some Technical Elements of Style in Literature" (originally published in the _Contemporary Review_, April, 1885; reprinted in the Scribner edition of Stevenson's Works, vol. xxii. p. 243) Robert Louis Stevenson discussed some of the more subtle effects of vowel and consonant color, as appearing in both prose and verse. The combination and repetition of the consonants PVF he found to be particularly frequent. The pervading sound-elements in the two following passages he analyzed by means of the key-letters in the margin:

"In Xanadu did Kubla Khan (KANDL)
A stately pleasure-dome decree, (KDLSR)
Where Alph the sacred river ran (KANDLSR)
Through caverns measureless to man, (KANLSR)
Down to a sunless sea." (NDLS)

(COLERIDGE.)

"But in the wind and tempest of her frown, W.P.V.F. (st) (ow)
Distinction with a loud and powerful fan, W.P.F. (st) (ow) L.
Puffing at all, winnows the light away; W.P.F.L.
And what hath mass and matter by itself W.F.L.M.A.
Lies rich in virtue and unmingled." V.L.M.

(SHAKSPERE: _Troilus and Cressida._)

No attempt has been made to classify the specimens that follow. Nor does comment seem necessary, in order to make clear the particular qualities of the sounds of the verse.

The heraudes lefte hir priking up and doun;
Now ringen trompes loude and clarioun;
There is namore to seyn, but west and est
In goon the speres ful sadly in arest;
In goth the sharpe spore in-to the syde.
Ther seen men who can juste, and who can ryde;
Ther shiveren shaftes up-on sheeldes thikke;
He feeleth thurgh the herte-spoon the prikke.
Up springen speres twenty foot on highte;
Out goon the swerdes as the silver brighte.
The helmes they to-hewen and to-shrede;
Out brest the blood, with sterne stremes rede.
With mighty maces the bones they to-breste.
He thurgh the thikkeste of the throng gan threste.
Ther stomblen stedes stronge, and doun goth al.

(CHAUCER: _Knight's Tale_, ll. 1741-1755.)

And in his house heap pearls like pebble-stones,
Receive them free, and sell them by the weight;
Bags of fiery opals, sapphires, amethysts,
Jacinths, hard topaz, grass-green emeralds,
Beauteous rubies, sparkling diamonds,
And seld-seen costly stones of so great price,
As one of them indifferently rated,
And of a carat of this quantity,
May serve in peril of calamity.

(MARLOWE: _The Jew of Malta_, I. i.)

Be kind and courteous to this gentleman;
Hop in his walks and gambol in his eyes;
Feed him with apricocks and dewberries,
With purple grapes, green figs and mulberries;
The honey-bags steal from the humble-bees,
And for night-tapers crop their waxen thighs,
And light them at the fiery glow-worm's eyes,
To have my love to bed and to arise;
And pluck the wings from painted butterflies,
To fan the moonbeams from his sleeping eyes:
Nod to him, elves, and do him courtesies.

(SHAKSPERE: _Midsummer Night's Dream_, III. i. 167-177.)

Now entertain conjecture of a time
When creeping murmur and the poring dark
Fills the wide vessel of the universe.
From camp to camp, through the foul womb of night,
The hum of either army stilly sounds,
That the fix'd sentinels almost receive
The secret whispers of each other's watch:
Fire answers fire; and through their paly flames
Each battle sees the other's umber'd face:
Steed threatens steed, in high and boastful neighs
Piercing the night's dull ear; and from the tents
The armourers, accomplishing the knights,
With busy hammers closing rivets up,
Give dreadful note of preparation.
The country cocks do crow, the clocks do toll,
And the third hour of drowsy morning name.

(SHAKSPERE: _Henry V._, Chorus to Act IV.)

Forthwith the sounds and seas, each creek and bay,
With fry innumerable swarm, and shoals
Of fish that, with their fins and shining scales,
Glide under the green wave in sculls that oft
Bank the mid-sea. Part, single or with mate,
Graze the sea-weed, their pasture, and through groves
Of coral stray, or, sporting with quick glance,
Show to the sun their wav'd coats dropt with gold,
Or, in their pearly shells at ease, attend
Moist nutriment, or under rocks their food
In jointed armor watch; on smooth the seal
And bended dolphins play: part, huge of bulk,
Wallowing unwieldy, enormous in their gait,
Tempest the ocean. There leviathan,
Hugest of living creatures, on the deep
Stretch'd like a promontory, sleeps or swims,
And seems a moving land, and at his gills
Draws in, and at his trunk spouts out, a sea.

(MILTON: _Paradise Lost_, VII. 399-416.)

Then in the key-hole turns
The intricate wards, and every bolt and bar
Of massy iron or solid rock with ease
Unfastens. On a sudden open fly,
With impetuous recoil and jarring sound,
The infernal doors, and on their hinges grate
Harsh thunder, that the lowest bottom shook
Of Erebus.

(_Ib._, II. 876-883.)

Avenge, O Lord, thy slaughtered saints, whose bones
Lie scattered on the Alpine mountains cold;
Even them who kept thy truth so pure of old,
When all our fathers worshipped stocks and stones,
Forget not: in thy book record their groans
Who were thy sheep, and in their ancient fold
Slain by the bloody Piemontese, that rolled
Mother with infant down the rocks. Their moans
The vales redoubled to the hills, and they
To heaven. Their martyred blood and ashes sow
O'er all the Italian fields, where still doth sway
The triple Tyrant; that from these may grow
A hundredfold, who, having learnt thy way,
Early may fly the Babylonian woe.

(MILTON: _Sonnet on the Late Massacre in Piedmont._)

And when they list, their lean and flashy songs
Grate on their scrannel pipes of wretched straw;
The hungry sheep look up, and are not fed,
But, swoln with wind and the rank mist they draw,
Rot inwardly, and foul contagion spread;
Besides what the grim wolf with privy paw
Daily devours apace, and nothing said.

(MILTON: _Lycidas_, ll. 123-129.)

The soft complaining flute
In dying notes discovers
The woes of helpless lovers,
Whose dirge is whispered by the warbling lute.
Sharp violins proclaim
Their jealous pangs and desperation,
Fury, frantic indignation,
Depth of pains and height of passion,
For the fair, disdainful dame.

(DRYDEN: _Song for St. Cecilia's Day_, 1687.)

Soft is the strain when Zephyr gently blows,
And the smooth stream in smoother numbers flows;
But when loud surges lash the sounding shore,
The hoarse, rough verse should like the torrent roar:
When Ajax strives some rock's vast weight to throw,
The line too labors, and the words move slow;
Not so, when swift Camilla scours the plain,
Flies o'er th' unbending corn, and skims along the main.

(POPE: _Essay on Criticism_, ll. 366-373.)

Was nought around but images of rest:
Sleep-soothing groves, and quiet lawns between;
And flowery beds that slumberous influence kest,
From poppies breath'd: and beds of pleasant green,
Where never yet was creeping creature seen.
Meantime unnumber'd glittering streamlets played,
And hurled everywhere their waters' sheen;
That, as they bickered through the sunny shade,
Though restless still themselves, a lulling murmur made.

(THOMSON: _Castle of Indolence_, canto i. st. 3.)

Yes, I will be thy priest, and build a fane
In some untrodden region of my mind,
Where branched thoughts, new grown with pleasant pain,
Instead of pines shall murmur in the wind:
Far, far around shall those dark-cluster'd trees
Fledge the wild-ridged mountains steep by steep;
And there by zephyrs, streams, and birds, and bees,
The moss-lain Dryads shall be lull'd to sleep;
And in the midst of this wide quietness
A rosy sanctuary will I dress
With the wreath'd trellis of a working brain,
With buds, and bells, and stars without a name,
With all the gardener Fancy e'er could feign,
Who breeding flowers will never breed the same.

(KEATS: _Ode to Psyche._)

Strike for the King and die! and if thou diest,
The King is King, and ever wills the highest.
Clang battleaxe, and clash brand! Let the King reign.

(TENNYSON: _The Coming of Arthur._)

He could not see the kindly human face,
Nor ever hear a kindly voice, but heard
The myriad shriek of wheeling ocean-fowl,
The league-long roller thundering on the reef,
The moving whisper of huge trees that branch'd
And blossom'd in the zenith, or the sweep
Of some precipitous rivulet to the wave,
As down the shore he ranged, or all day long
Sat often in the seaward-gazing gorge,
A shipwreck'd sailor, waiting for a sail:
No sail from day to day, but every day
The sunrise broken into scarlet shafts
Among the palms and ferns and precipices;
The blaze upon the waters to the east;
The blaze upon his island overhead;
The blaze upon the waters to the west;
Then the great stars that globed themselves in heaven,
The hollower-bellowing ocean, and again
The scarlet shafts of sunrise--but no sail.

(TENNYSON: _Enoch Arden_, ll. 577-595.)

But follow; let the torrent dance thee down
To find him in the valley; let the wild
Lean-headed eagles yelp alone, and leave
The monstrous ledges there to slope, and spill
Their thousand wreaths of dangling water-smoke,
That like a broken purpose waste in air:
So waste not thou; but come; for all the vales
Await thee; azure pillars of the hearth
Arise to thee; the children call, and I
Thy shepherd pipe, and sweet is every sound,
Sweeter thy voice, but every sound is sweet;
Myriads of rivulets hurrying through the lawn,
The moan of doves in immemorial elms,
And murmurings of innumerable bees.

(TENNYSON: _The Princess_, VII.)

Heap cassia, sandal-buds and stripes
Of labdanum, and aloe-balls,
Smeared with dull nard an Indian wipes
From out her hair: such balsam falls
Down sea-side mountain pedestals,
From tree-tops where tired winds are fain,
Spent with the vast and howling main,
To treasure half their island-gain.

(BROWNING: _Paracelsus_, IV.)

Good sappy bavins that kindle forthwith;
Billets that blaze substantial and slow;
Pine-stump split deftly, dry as pith;
Larch-heart that chars to a chalk-white glow;
Then up they hoist me John in a chafe,
Sling him fast like a hog to scorch,
Spit in his face, then leap back safe,
Sing 'Laudes' and bid clap-to the torch.

(BROWNING: _The Heretic's Tragedy._)

'Will sprawl, now that the heat of day is best,
Flat on his belly in the pit's much mire,
With elbows wide, fists clenched to prop his chin.
And, while he kicks both feet in the cool slush,
And feels about his spine small eft-things course,
Run in and out each arm, and make him laugh:...
He looks out o'er yon sea which sunbeams cross
And recross till they weave a spider-web.

(BROWNING: _Caliban upon Setebos._)

Master of the murmuring courts
Where the shapes of sleep convene!
Lo! my spirit here exhorts
All the powers of thy demesne
For their aid to move my queen.
What reports
Yield thy jealous courts unseen?

Vaporous, unaccountable,
Dreamland lies forlorn of light,
Hollow like a breathing shell.
Ah! that from all dreams I might
Choose one dream and guide its flight!
I know well
What her sleep should tell to-night.

(ROSSETTI: _Love's Nocturn._)

When the hounds of spring are on winter's traces,
The mother of months, in meadow or plain,
Fills the shadows and windy places
With lisp of leaves and ripple of rain.

(SWINBURNE: Chorus in _Atalanta in Calydon._)

Till, as with clamor
Of axe and hammer,
Chained streams that stammer and struggle in straits,
Burst bonds that shiver,
And thaws deliver
The roaring river in stormy spates.

(SWINBURNE: _Winter in Northumberland._)

But, oh! that deep romantic chasm which slanted
Down the green hill athwart a cedarn cover!
A savage place! as holy and enchanted
As e'er beneath a waning moon was haunted
By woman wailing for her demon-lover!
And from this chasm, with ceaseless turmoil seething,
As if this earth in fast thick pants were breathing,
A mighty fountain momently was forced:
Amid whose swift half-intermitted burst
Huge fragments vaulted like rebounding hail,
Or chaffy grain beneath the thresher's flail;
And 'mid these dancing rocks at once and ever
It flung up momently the sacred river.
Five miles meandering, with a mazy motion,
Through wood and dale the sacred river ran,
Then reach'd the caverns measureless to man,
And sank in tumult to a lifeless ocean.

(COLERIDGE: _Kubla Khan._)

FOOTNOTES:

[11] "Perfect rime" is a term applied to rimes between two words identical in form, but different in meaning. It is inadmissible in modern English verse, although it was considered entirely proper in Middle English times (compare Chaucer's--

"The holy blisful martir for to _seke_, That hem hath holpen, whan that they were _seke_."),

and is still common in French verse.

Schipper gives a separate paragraph also to "unaccented rime," where the similarity of sound belongs wholly to final, unstressed syllables. Generally speaking, this is inadmissible in English verse. Schipper quotes from Thomas Moore:

"Down in yon summervale Where the rill flows, Thus said the Nightingale To his loved Rose."

It might be said, however, that the final syllables of "summervale" and "nightingale" are not wholly unstressed; moreover, they are in the first and third verses of the stanza, where rime is not indispensable. Unaccented rime is most noticeable in some of the verse of the transition period in the sixteenth century, when the syllable-counting principle was so emphasized as to admit any license of accent so long as the proper number of syllables was observed. Thus, in the verse of Wyatt we find such rimes as "dreadeth" and "seeketh," "beginning" and "eclipsing," etc. See p. 10, above.

Imperfect rime, occurring where the vowel sounds are only similar, not identical, or where the consonants following them are not identical, is commonly regarded as an imperfection in verse form. The most common of these imperfect rimes are in cases where the spelling would indicate perfect rime (hence where, in many cases, the words rimed originally, but have separated in the changes of pronunciation), such as _love_ and _move_, _broad_ and _load_, and the like. For a defence of these "rimes to the eye," and other imperfect rimes, with a study of their use by English poets, see articles by Prof. A. G. Newcomer in the _Nation_ for January 26 and February 2, 1899.

[12] Rime also appears in a short passage in Cynewulf's _Elene_. Some have thought it a later interpolation, but Schipper thinks it indicates that Cynewulf was a Northumbrian. Grein believes him to have been the author also of the Riming Poem, but, as Rieger points out, the rimes of Cynewulf are of a much less systematic character. (On this see Wülcker's _Grundriss zur Geschichte der Angelsächsischen Literatur_, pp. 216, 217.)

[13] The second of these stanzas is said to have been added to Canning's song by Willian Pitt.

[14] See notes on the Septenary, in Part Two, p. 259.

[15] On the subject of Tone-color in English verse, see Guest's _English Rhythms_, chap. ii.; Lanier's _Science of English Verse_, part iii. ("Colors of English Verse"); Corson's _Primer of English Verse_ (chapter on "Poetic Unities"); Edmund Gurney's _Tertium Quid_ (essays on "Poets, Critics, and Class-Lists" and "The Appreciation of Poetry"); Professor J. J. Sylvester's _Laws of Verse_ (London, 1870); G. L. Raymond's _Poetry as a Representative Art_ and _Rhythm and Harmony in Poetry and Music_; and Ehrenfeld's _Studien zur Theorie des Reims_.