And aroused me from my sleep.
Chorus—Ha-ah, ha-ah, ha-ah, ha!”
This last shows a feature extremely common in barbaric songs, the refrain of generally meaningless syllables. We moderns are often struck with the absurdity of the nonsense-chorus in many of our own songs, but the habit is one which seems to have been kept up from the stages of culture in which the Australian savage sings “Abang! abang!” over and over at the end of his verse, or a Red Indian hunting-party enjoy singing in chorus “Nyah eh wa! nyah eh wa!” to an accompaniment of rattles like those which children use with us.
It is among nations at a higher stage of culture that there appears regular metre, where the verses are measured accurately in syllables. The ancient hymns of the Veda are in regular metre, and this is proof how far the old Aryans had advanced beyond the savage state. Indeed the resemblances between the metre of the most ancient Indian and Persian and Greek poetry show that in the remote ages of their national connection their measured verse had already begun. Metre is best known to us from Greek and Latin verses, but there are more metres in the world than Horace knew of. For instance, when Longfellow versified a collection of American native tales in his “Song of Hiawatha,” he found no metre among the Indians themselves, who were not cultured enough to have such a device; so he imitated the peculiar metre of the Kalewala, the epic poem chanted by the native bards of Finland. Our own poetry, where the verses are scanned by accent, differs in its nature from the classic metres whose syllables are measured by quantity or length. Later than the invention of metre, came other means by which the poet could please his hearers with new effects of matched and balanced sounds. Thus our early English forefathers rejoiced in alliteration, where the same consonant comes in again and again, with a frequency which would weary our modern taste, though our ear is pleased with occasional touches of it, as
“Sober he seemde, and very sagely sad.”—Spenser.
“He rushed into the field, and, foremost fighting, fell.”—Byron.
Rhyme, too, seems comparatively modern in the world’s history of poetry. Its clumsy beginnings may be judged from such lines as these of an old Latin poet (perhaps Ennius) quoted by Cicero:—
“Cœlum nitescere, arbores frondescere,
Vites lætificæ pampinis pubescere,
Rami bacarum ubertate incurvescere.”