S'entènd peralin
L'aigo que lalejo
E batarelejo
Darrié lou moulin.
La luno barbano
Debano
De lin."[15]
The little poem, Aubencho, is interesting as offering two rhymes in its nine lines.
Mistral's sonnets offer some peculiarities. He has one composed of lines of six syllables, others of eight, besides those considered regular in French, consisting, namely, of twelve syllables. The following sonnet addressed to Roumania appears to be unique in form:—
"Quand lou chaple a pres fin, que lou loup e la rùssi
An rousiga lis os, lou soulèu flamejant
Esvalis gaiamen lou brumage destrùssi
E lou prat bataié tourno lèu verdejant.
"Après lou long trepé di Turc emai di Rùssi
T'an visto ansin renaisse, o nacioun de Trajan,
Coume l'astre lusènt, que sort dóu negre eslùssi,
Emé lou nouvelun di chato de quinge an.
"E li raço latino
A ta lengo argentino
An couneigu l'ounour que dins toun sang i'avié;
"E t'apelant germano,
La Prouvenço roumano
Te mando, o Roumanio, un rampau d'óulivié."[16]
It would be a hopeless task for an English translator to attempt versions of these poems that should reproduce the original strophe forms. A few such translations have been made into German, which possesses a much greater wealth of rhyme than English. Let us repeat that it must not be imputed to Mistral as a fault that he is too clever a versifier. His strophes are not the artificial complications of the Troubadours, and if these greatly varied forms cost him effort to produce, his art is most marvellously concealed. More likely it is that the almost inexhaustible abundance of rhymes in the Provençal, and the ease of construction of merely syllabic verse, explain in great measure his fertility in the production of stanzas. Some others of the Félibres, even Aubanel, in our opinion, have produced verse that is very ordinary in quality. Verse may be made too easily in this dialect, and fluent rhymed language that merely expresses commonplace sentiment may readily be mistaken for poetry.
The wealth of rhyme in the Provençal language appears to be greater than in any other form of Romance speech. As compared with Italian and Spanish, it may be noted that the Provençal has no proparoxytone words, and hence a whole class of words is brought into the two categories possible in Provençal. Though the number of different vowels and diphthongs is greater than in these two languages, only three consonants are found as finals, n, r, s (l very rarely). The consequent great abundance of rhymes is limited by an insistence upon the rich rhyme to an extent scarcely attainable in French; in fact, the merely sufficient rhyme is very rare. It is unfortunate that so many of the feminine rhymes terminate in o. In the Poem of the Rhone, composed entirely in feminine verses, passages occur where nine successive lines end in this letter, and the verses in o vastly out-number all others. In this unrhymed poem, assonance is very carefully avoided.