LI. Some 'Unusual' Metres and Disputed Scansions - Historical Manual of English Prosody - 41

LI. Some "Unusual" Metres and Disputed Scansions

Some measures of recent poets have been objected, or at least proposed, as offering difficulties in respect of the system of this book. It has therefore seemed well to scan them here.

(a) Frederic Myers (St. Paul):

(There is nothing very peculiar or at all original in this, though it was probably now first used continuously for a poem of some length. It is only decasyllabic quatrain with uniform redundance in the first and third lines, and a strong inclination to trochaic opening, which in its turn suggests a primary dactyl and trochees to follow, as an alternative (see dotted scansion). Examples of it anterior to Myers may be found—commented on in the larger History (vol. iii. 481)—in Zophiel, very likely known to Myers, as he was much connected by family friendship with the Lake School; in the famous poem

From the lone sheiling on the misty island,

the authorship of which has been so much contested; and in Emily Bronte's Remembrance (see again vol. iii. of Hist. Pros. p. 378), of which he cannot possibly have been ignorant.[48] His own share in the matter would seem to have been limited to the persevering adoption of it in an unvaried form. Whether this be an advantage or not is a question of taste: the prosodic description of the metre is clear and in no way recondite.)

(b) Ernest Dowson (Cynara) [Non sum qualis eram, etc.]:

(Sextet of Alexandrines with decasyllable (or brachycatalexis) in the 5th line, and with hypercatalexis, redundance, or double rhyme in the 4th and 6th. An original collocation, so far as I know, but nothing new or strange in principle. The actual poem is a rather beautiful one; but how much is contributed to the beauty by the special metre is another question. At any rate, once more, it has no difficulties for foot-scansion.)

To-morrow and to-morrow and to-morrow,

with the following lines, has also been proposed as a crux. But this must have been a not very brilliant joke; and it would be an insult to the student to scan the passage. It is one of the finest specimens of Shakespearian equivalence and "fingered" blank verse, but offers no more difficulties, on the system of this book, than any couplet of Pope or any verse of the "Old Hundredth." On the other hand, many passages of Shakespeare may not illegitimately puzzle the student if he does not realise that, although (it is believed) every line which is not corrupt can be scanned on our system, every line is by no means an exact five-foot. In accordance with the best English practice, older and newer, Shakespeare does not scruple to extend his lines to Alexandrines, and even to fourteeners, while the exigencies of drama entitle him to use lines of less than five full feet. But all these—the fragments as well as the extended lines—obey the general law of iambic arrangement with substitution in individual feet. Thus in Lady Macbeth's invocation of the Spirits of Evil (I. v. 49)—

is a regular Alexandrine. Her husband's hallucination—

I see thee yet, in form as palpable
As this | which now | I draw,

stops in the second line at the third foot. Different lines of the ghost's great speech in Hamlet (I. v. 42-91) show the Alexandrine—

and a fragment of two feet and a half—

All my | smooth bo|dy.

If studied in this way, even the scenes where short speeches of the conversational kind form the staple will be found to piece themselves together perfectly well in continuous scansion.