Of man's | first diso|bedience | and the | fruit of that for- |
bidden | tree | whose | mortal | taste brought | death | into the |
world | and | all our | woe, | Sing, | Heavenly | Muse.
It must be perfectly evident to any one who will read these examples, even to himself, but still more aloud, not merely that they entirely destroy the actual cadence and rhythm of the actual verses, but that they provide a new doggerel which is absolutely inharmonious, unrhythmical, and contrary to every principle and quality of English poetry. It would doubtless be possible to accommodate them with a tune; in fact, any one who has ever looked at a "set" song will see how they correspond to it. But then any one who has ever looked at a set song must, in a majority of cases, have been convinced at once that musical arrangement has nothing to do with prosodic.
Historical and Romantic prosody.
It was inevitable that the "Romantic" movement—one of the principal causes and features of which was a demand for variety, while another was its disposition to return to older modes—should be largely concerned with prosody; but, with some notable exceptions, this concernment did not take the form of actual prosodic deliverances or discussions.
Gray
Gray, one of the chief precursors of the movement, had projected a regular history of English poetry, and has left invaluable notes under the general head of Metrum—notes in which he goes back, deliberately and directly, to Middle English, discovers therein the origin and nature of the metre of Spenser's February, etc., and has very good remarks about others. But it was not till the stir of the revolutionary period that much more was done, and even then more was done than said.
Taylor and Sayers.
The German explorations of William Taylor of Norwich induced English writers to follow the German attempt at accentual hexameters; and another of the Norwich group, Frank Sayers, not merely wrote, but expounded and defended in prose, rhymeless metres of a choric character; both being—in part, if not mainly—revolts from the mechanical heroic couplet.
Southey. His importance.
Before the end of the century, long before Coleridge published the explanatory note on Christabel metre, and not improbably before he had even thought of that note, Southey had not only used trisyllabic equivalence in his Ballads, but had formally and independently defended it as such in a letter to his friend Wynn.[143]