EXERCISE

Scan the following selections. Note substitutions and elusions.

The night has a thousand eyes,
And the day but one;
Yet the light of the bright world dies
With the dying sun.
The mind has a thousand eyes,
And the heart but one;
Yet the light of a whole life dies
When love is gone.

—Francis W. Bourdillon.

Laugh, and the world laughs with you,
Weep, and you weep alone;
For the sad old earth must borrow its mirth,
But has trouble enough of its own.

—Ella Wheeler Wilcox.

Hear the robin in the rain,
Not a note does he complain.
But he fills the storm refrain
With music of his own.

—Charles Coke Woode.

The mistletoe hung in the castle hall,
The holly branch shone on the old back wall
And the baron's retainers are blithe and gay,
And keeping their Christmas holiday.

—Thomas Haynes Bagley.

+114. Rhyme.+—Rhyme is a regular recurrence of similar sounds. In a broad sense, it may include sounds either terminal or not, but as here used it refers to terminal sounds.

Just as we expect a recurrence of accent in a line, so may we expect a recurrence of similar sounds at the end of certain lines of poetry. The interval between the rhymes may be of different lengths in different poems, but when the interval is once established, it should be followed throughout the poem. A rhyme out of place jars upon the rhythmic perfection of a stanza just as an accent out of place interferes with the rhythm of the verse.

Not only should the rhymes occur at expected places, but they should be the expected rhymes; that is, real rhymes. If we are expecting a word which will rhyme with blossom and find bosom, or if we are expecting a rhyme for breath and find beneath, the effect is unpleasant. The rhymes named above are based on spelling, while a real rhyme is based on sound. A correct rhyme should have precisely the same vowel sounds and the final consonants should be the same, but the initial consonant should be different. For example: death, breath; home, roam; tongue, young; debating, relating.

Notice the arrangement of the rhymes in the following selections:—

My soul to-day is far away,
Sailing the Vesuvian Bay;
My winged boat, a bird afloat,
Swims round the purple peaks remote.

—T. Buchanan Read.

I come from haunts of coot and hern,
I make a sudden sally,
And sparkle out among the fern,
To bicker down the valley.

By thirty hills I hurry down,
Or slip between the ridges,
By twenty thorps, a little town,
And half a hundred bridges.

—Tennyson.

I know it is a sin
For me to sit and grin
At him here;
But the old three-cornered hat
And the breeches, and all that,
Are so queer!

—Holmes.

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.
Blow, bugle, blow, set the wild echoes flying;
Blow, bugle; answer, echoes, dying, dying, dying.

—Tennyson.

Breathes there a man with soul so dead
Who never to himself hath said,
This is my own, my native land!
Whose heart hath ne'er within him burned
As home his footsteps he hath turned
From wandering in a foreign strand!
If such there be, go mark him well:
For him no minstrel raptures swell;
High though his titles, proud his name,
Boundless his wealth as wish can claim:
Despite those titles, power, and pelf,
The wretch concentered all in self,
Living, shall forfeit fair renown
And, doubly dying, shall go down
To the vile dust from whence he sprung,
Unwept, unhonored, and unsung.

—Scott.

+115. Blank Verse.+—When rhyme is omitted, we have blank verse. This is the most dignified of all kinds of verse, and is, therefore, appropriate for epic and dramatic poetry, where it is chiefly found. Most blank verse makes use of the iambic pentameter measure, but we find many exceptions. Read the following examples of blank verse so as to show the rhythm:—

So live, that when thy summons comes to join
The innumerable caravan that moves
To the pale realms of shade, where each shall take
His chamber in the silent halls of death,
Thou go not like the quarry slave at night
Scourged to his dungeon, but, sustained and soothed
By an unfaltering trust, approach the grave
Like one who wraps the drapery of his couch
About him, and lies down to pleasant dreams.

—Bryant.

I stood upon the steps—
The last who left the door—and there I found
The lady and her friend. The elder turned
And with a cordial greeting took my hand,
And rallied me on my forgetfulness.
Her eyes, her smile, her manner, and her voice.
Touched the quick springs of memory, and I spoke
Her name. She was my mother's early friend
Whose face I had not seen in all the years
That had flown over us, since, from her door,
I chased her lamb to where I found—myself.

—Holland.

+116. The Stanza.+—Some of our verse is continuous like Milton's Paradise Lost or Shakespeare's plays, but much of it is divided into groups called stanzas. The lines or verses composing a stanza are bound together by definite principles of rhythm and rhyme. Usually stanzas of the same poem have the same structure, but stanzas of different poems show a variety of structure.

Two of the most simple forms are the couplet and the triplet. They often form a part of a continuous poem, but they are occasionally found in divided poems.

The western waves of ebbing day
Roll'd o'er the glen their level way.

—Scott.

A chieftain's daughter seemed the maid;
Her satin snood, her silken plaid,
Her golden brooch such birth betray'd.

—Scott.

A stanza of four lines is called a quatrain. The lines of quatrains show a variety in the arrangement of their rhymes. The first two lines may rhyme with each other and the last two with each other; the first and fourth may rhyme and the second and third; or the rhymes may alternate. Notice the example on page 208, and also the following:—

I ask not wealth, but power to take
And use the things I have aright.
Not years, but wisdom that shall make
My life a profit and delight.

—Phoebe Cary.

I count this thing to be grandly true:
That a noble deed is a step toward God,—
Lifting the soul from the common sod
To a purer air and a broader view.

—Holland.

A quatrain consisting of iambic pentameter verse with alternate rhymes is called an elegiac stanza.

Now fades the glimmering landscape on the sight,
And all the air a solemn stillness holds,
Save where the beetle wheels his droning flight,
And drowsy tinklings lull the distant folds.

—Gray.

The Tennysonian stanza consists of four iambic tetrameter lines in which the first line rhymes with the fourth, and the second with the third.

Let knowledge grow from more to more,
But more of reverence in us dwell;
That mind and soul, according well,
May make one music as before.

—Tennyson.

Five and six line stanzas are found in a great variety. The following are examples:—

We look before and after,
And pine for what is not;
Our sincerest laughter
With some pain is fraught;
Our sweetest songs are those that tell of saddest thought.

—Shelley.

And if I should live to be
The last leaf upon the tree
In the spring.
Let them smile as I do now,
At the old forsaken bough
Where I cling.

—Holmes.

The upper air burst into life;
And a hundred fire flags sheen,
To and fro they were hurried about;
And to and fro, and in and out,
The wan stars danced between.

—Coleridge.

The Spenserian stanza consists of nine lines: the first eight are iambic pentameters, and the last line is an iambic hexameter or Alexandrine. Burns makes use of this stanza in The Cotter's Saturday Night. The following stanza from that poem shows the plan of the rhymes:—

O Scotia! my dear, my native soil!
For whom my warmest wish to Heaven is sent!
Long may thy hardy sons of rustic toil
Be blest with health, and peace, and sweet content!
And oh! may Heaven their simple lives prevent
From luxury's contagion, weak and vile!
Then, howe'er crowns and coronets be rent,
A virtuous populace may rise the while,
And stand a wall of fire around their much beloved isle.