XLV. Long Metres of Tennyson, Browning, Morris, and Swinburne

(a) Tennyson (The Lotos-Eaters):

(Trochaic six- and seven-foot lines, always hypercatalectic, or, in stricter language, trochaic trimeters hypercatalectic and tetrameters catalectic.)

At the close the poet avails himself of the iambic alternative which is so effective, and has a pure fourteener:

(There is no trisyllabic substitution.)

(b) Tennyson (Maud):

Cōld ănd clēar-cŭt fāce, why̆ cōme yŏu sŏ crūelly̆ mēek,
Brēakĭng ă slūmbĕr ĭn whīch āll splēenfŭl fōlly̆ wăs drōwn'd,
Pāle wĭth thĕ gōldĕn bēam ŏf ăn ēyelăsh dēad ŏn thĕ chēek,
Passionless, pale, cold face, star-sweet on a gloom profound;
Womanlike, taking revenge too deep for a transient wrong
Done but in thought to your beauty, and ever as pale as before
Growing and fading and growing upon me without a sound,
Luminous, gemlike, ghostlike, deathlike, half the night long
Growing and fading and growing, till I could bear it no more,
Bŭt ărōse, and all by myself in my own dark garden ground,
Listening now to the tide in its broad-flung shipwrecking roar,
Now to the scream of a madden'd beach dragg'd down by the wave,
Walk'd in a wintry wind by a ghastly glimmer, and found
Thĕ shīning daffodil dead, and Orion low in his grave.

(A rather deceptive metre; for which reason foot-division has been postponed above.) It may look at first sight like a trochaic run, but this will be found not to fit. Then hexameters of the Evangeline type, with a syllable cut off at the end, suggest themselves; but it will be seen that some openings make this very bad. It is really a six-foot anapæst with the usual allowance of iambic substitution and of monosyllabic ("anacrustic") beginning, as thus:

(Same metre, but almost purely anapæstic; the central pause frequently strong.)

(d) Tennyson (Kapiolani)

(Apparently intended for a dactylic octometer. Like all these things in English, it probably goes better as anapæstic with anacrusis and hypercatalexis. See dotted scansion.)

(e) Browning (Abt Vogler):

Would ¦ that the | struc¦ture | brave, ¦ the | man¦ifold | mu¦sic I | build,¦
Bid¦ding my | or¦gan o|bey, ¦| call¦ing its |keys ¦ to their | work,
Claim¦ing each | slave ¦ of the | sound ¦ at a | touch, ¦ as when | So¦lomon | willed
Ar¦mies of | an¦gels that | soar, ¦| le¦gions of | de¦mons that | lurk.
Man, brute, ¦| reptile, ¦| fly, ¦|| alien ¦ of | end ¦ and of | aim,
Ad¦verse | each ¦ from the | oth¦er, | hea¦ven-high ¦ hell-¦deep re|moved,
Should rush ¦ into sight ¦ at once ¦ as he named ¦ the ineff¦able name,
And pile ¦ him a pal¦ace straight, ¦ to plea¦sure the prin¦cess he loved.

(Note the alliteration.)

At first, as you read this, you can, if your ears are accustomed to classical metres, have no doubt about the scheme. It is simply the regular elegiac couplet "accentually" rendered in English, with the abscission of the last syllable of the hexameter—a catalectic hexameter and a pentameter acatalectic. For the first four lines of the first octave there is no doubt at all. But when you get on to the second half you are pulled up. In the fifth and sixth lines the pentameter seems to have got to the first place, and the seventh is no more a hexameter than the eighth is its proper companion. For a moment you may fancy that this was intended—that the poet meant octaves of two different parts. But when you look at the other stanzas you will find that this is by no means the case. Truncated elegiac cadence appears, reappears, disappears in the most bewildering fashion, till you recognise—sooner or later according to your prosodic experience—that it was only simulated cadence after all, a sort of leaf-insect rhythm, and that the whole thing (as marked by the dotted scansion lines) is in six-foot anapæsts equivalenced daringly, but quite legitimately, with monosyllabic and dissyllabic feet.

(f) W. Morris ("The Wind"):

(First three lines six-foot (trimeter) anapæsts with full substitution. Refrain a graded "wheel" of four, four or five, and six iambic feet.)

(g) Morris (Love is Enough):

Such words shall my ghost see the chronicler writing
In the days that shall be—ah!—what would'st more, my fosterling?
Knowest thou not how words fail us awaking,
That we seemed to hear plain amid sleep and its sweetness.

(Intentionally irregular "accentual" lines, but with an anapæstic or amphibrachic "under-hum." There is a good deal of alliteration elsewhere, and some here.)

(h) Morris (Sigurd metre, but the actual example from The House of the Wolfings):

Thou sayest it, I am outcast: || for a God that lacketh mirth
Hath no more place in God-home || and never a place on earth.
A man grieves, and he gladdens, || or he dies and his grief is gone;
But what of the grief of the Gods? and || the sorrow never undone?
Yea, verily, I am the outcast. || When first in thine arms I lay,
On the blossoms of the woodland || my godhead passed away;
Thenceforth unto thee I was looking || for the light and the glory of life,
And the Gods' doors shut behind me || till the day of the uttermost strife.
And now thou hast taken my soul, thou || wilt cast it into the night,
And cover thine head with the darkness || and cover thine eyes from the light.
Thou would'st go to the empty country || where never a seed is sown,
And never a deed is fashioned || and the place where each is alone;
But I thy thrall shall follow, || I shall come where thou seem'st to lie,
I shall sit on the howe that hides thee, || and thou so dear and nigh!
A few bones white in their war-gear, || that have no help or thought,
Shall be Thiodolf the Mighty, || so nigh, so dear—and nought!

(A splendid construction from older and newer examples. Strongly stressed, strictly middle-paused, but perfectly regular anapæstic sixes, with substitution and a hypercatalectic syllable or half foot at the pause.)

(i) Mr. Swinburne (Hesperia and Evening on the Broads).

The first line of Hesperia is practically a Kingsleyan hexameter (v. inf.) of the very best kind—

while the second—

Full of the sunset and sad ¦ if at ¦ all with the fulness of joy,

is a pentameter of similar mould, with the centre gap cunningly filled in by the two short stitches "if at," capable, as you see below in

Thee I beheld as bird ¦ borne ¦ in with the wind from the west,

of being duly equivalenced with one long stitch, like "borne." Yet the second line is capable also of being scanned exactly as the first—anacrusis and five anapæests—but without the final redundance or hypercatalexis; and in other long lines you will find that the principle of equivalence is preserved throughout—that two shorts, as in

defeat the hexametrical movement, and pull off the mask at the beginning, though it returns at the end. The metre is really anapæstic throughout. And in Evening on the Broads the poet has carried this further still, providing in some cases regular apparent elegiacs:

O|ver the ¦ sha|dowless ¦ wa|ters a¦drift | as a ¦ pin|nace ¦ in per|il,
Hangs | as in ¦ hea|vy sus¦pense || charged | with ir¦re|solute ¦ light.

(j) Mr. Swinburne (Choriambics):

Lōve, whăt | āiled thĕe tŏ lēave | līfe thăt wăs māde | lōvely̆ wĕ thōught | wĭth lōve?—

(k) Mr. Swinburne (other long anapæstic and trochaic measures):

(These are respectively seven-foot anapæsts with redundance (anapæstic tetrameter catalectic); ditto eight-foot (tetrameter acatalectic); trochaic tetrameter acatalectic; and anapæstic tetrameter hypercatalectic (eight feet and a half).)