II
"Trailing their melancholy and their woe,
Trailing their solemn ennui as they go
The gold and emerald peacocks saunter slow
From out the gardens where blue poppies blow
Thence to the temple's pillared portico."
[Footnote: Frederic Adrian Lopere, "World Wisdom," The International,
September, 1915.]
Rhyme, then, is not merely a "jingle," it is rather, as Samuel Johnson said of all versification, a "joining music with reason." Its blending of decorative with structural purpose is in truth "a dictate of nature," or, to quote E. C. Stedman, "In real, that is, spontaneous minstrelsy, the fittest assonance, consonance, time, even rime,… come of themselves with imaginative thought."
3. Stanza
There are some lovers of poetry, however, who will grant this theoretical justification of rhyme as an element in the harmony of verse, without admitting that the actual rhyming stanzas of English verse show "spontaneous minstrelsy." The word "stanza" or "strophe" means literally "a resting-place," a halt or turn, that is to say, after a uniform group of rhymed lines. Alden defines it in his English Verse as "the largest unit of verse-measure ordinarily recognized. It is based not so much on rhythmical divisions as on periods either rhetorical or melodic; that is, a short stanza will roughly correspond to the period of a sentence, and a long one to that of a paragraph, while in lyrical verse the original idea was to conform the stanza to the melody for which it was written." "Normally, then," Alden adds in his Introduction to Poetry, "all the stanzas of a poem are identical in the number, the length, the metre, and the rime-scheme of the corresponding verses." The question arises, therefore, whether those units which we call "stanzas" are arbitrary or vital. Have the lines been fused into their rhymed grouping by passionate feeling, or is their unity a mere mechanical conformation to a pattern? In Theodore Watts-Dunton's well-known article on "Poetry" in the Encyclopaedia Brittanica [Footnote: Now reprinted, with many expansions, in his Poetry and the Renascence of Wonder. E. P. Dutton, New York.] the phrases "stanzaic law" and "emotional law" are used to represent the two principles at issue:
"In modern prosody the arrangement of the rhymes and the length of the lines in any rhymed metrical passage may be determined either by a fixed stanzaic law, or by a law infinitely deeper—by the law which impels the soul, in a state of poetic exultation, to seize hold of every kind of metrical aid, such as rhyme, caesura, etc., for the purpose of accentuating and marking off each shade of emotion as it arises, regardless of any demands of stanza…. If a metrical passage does not gain immensely by being written independently of stanzaic law, it loses immensely; and for this reason, perhaps, that the great charm of the music of all verse, as distinguished from the music of prose, is inevitableness of cadence. In regular metres we enjoy the pleasure of feeling that the rhymes will inevitably fall under a recognized law of couplet or stanza. But if the passage flows independently of these, it must still flow inevitably—it must, in short, show that it is governed by another and a yet deeper force, the inevitableness of emotional expression."
This distinction between "stanzaic law" and "emotional law" is highly suggestive and not merely in its application to the metres of the famous regular and irregular odes of English verse. It applies also to the infinite variety of stanza-patterns which English poetry has taken over from Latin and French sources and developed through centuries ofexperimentation, and it affords a key, as we shall see in a moment, to some of the vexed questions involved in free verse.
Take first the more familiar of the stanza forms of English verse. They are conveniently indicated by using letters of the alphabet to correspond with each rhyme-sound, whenever repeated.
Thus the rhymed couplet
"Around their prows the ocean roars,
And chafes beneath their thousand oars"
may be marked as "four-stress iambic," rhyming aa; the heroic couplet