(b) Ernest Dowson (Cynara) [Non sum qualis eram, etc.]:
Last night, | ah! yes|ter night | betwixt | her lips | and mine
There fell | thy sha|dow, Cy|nara! | thy breath | was shed
Upon | my soul | between | the kiss|es and | the wine,
And I | was de|solate, | and sick | of an | old passion;
Yea, I | was de|solate | and bowed | my head.
I have | been faith|ful to | thee, Cy|nara, in my fashion.
(Sextet of Alexandrines with decasyllable (or brachycatalexis) in the 5th line, and with hypercatalexis, redundance, or double rhyme in the 4th and 6th. An original collocation, so far as I know, but nothing new or strange in principle. The actual poem is a rather beautiful one; but how much is contributed to the beauty by the special metre is another question. At any rate, once more, it has no difficulties for foot-scansion.)
(c) The universally known passage in Macbeth—
To-morrow and to-morrow and to-morrow,
with the following lines, has also been proposed as a crux. But this must have been a not very brilliant joke; and it would be an insult to the student to scan the passage. It is one of the finest specimens of Shakespearian equivalence and "fingered" blank verse, but offers no more difficulties, on the system of this book, than any couplet of Pope or any verse of the "Old Hundredth." On the other hand, many passages of Shakespeare may not illegitimately puzzle the student if he does not realise that, although (it is believed) every line which is not corrupt can be scanned on our system, every line is by no means an exact five-foot. In accordance with the best English practice, older and newer, Shakespeare does not scruple to extend his lines to Alexandrines, and even to fourteeners, while the exigencies of drama entitle him to use lines of less than five full feet. But all these—the fragments as well as the extended lines—obey the general law of iambic arrangement with substitution in individual feet. Thus in Lady Macbeth's invocation of the Spirits of Evil (I. v. 49)—
And take | my milk | for gall, | you mur|dering min|isters,
is a regular Alexandrine. Her husband's hallucination—
I see thee yet, in form as palpable
As this | which now | I draw,
stops in the second line at the third foot. Different lines of the ghost's great speech in Hamlet (I. v. 42-91) show the Alexandrine—