With the two foregoing extracts may be compared the following from Shelley's "Alastor," in which all the periods are "end-stopt," and divide the selection into clearly recognizable and almost regular stanzas. It will be noted that the movement and effect are very different from those of Thomson and Milton.
"There was a poet | whose untimely tomb
No human hand | with pious reverence reared,
But the charmed eddies | of autumnal winds
Built o'er his mouldering bones | a pyramid
Of mouldering leaves | in the waste wilderness.
"A lovely youth, | no mourning maiden decked
With weeping flowers | or votive cypress wreath
The lone couch | of his everlasting sleep;
Gentle and brave and generous, | no lorn bard
Breathed o'er his dark fate | one melodious sigh;
He lived, he died, he sang, | in solitude.
"Strangers have wept | to hear his passionate notes;
And virgins, | as unknown he passed, | have pined
And wasted | for fond love of his wild eyes.
"The fire of those soft orbs | has ceased to burn,
And Silence, | too enamored of that voice,
Locks its mute music | in her rugged cell."
It will be observed that not only all the periods, but also twelve out of the seventeen lines are "end-stopt."
54. Poetic Style. By poetic style is meant the choice and arrangement of words peculiar to poetry. While in the main poetic and prose diction is the same, still there are words and verbal combinations admissible only in poetry. Poetry strives after concreteness and vividness of expression. Such words as steed, swain, wight, muse, Pegasus, yclept, a-cold, sprent, bower, meed, isle, a-field, dight, sooth, hight, and many others, are hardly ever met with in ordinary prose. Their prose equivalents are generally preferred.
Poetry uses great freedom, called poetic license, in the order of words and construction of sentences. The principal deviations from the prose order are as follows:
(1) The verb may precede the subject for the sake of emphasis or meter; as,