Historical Manual of English Prosody - George Saintsbury

Application further to his "Hollyhock" song.

Let us now take a more complicated instance, also from Tennyson. In that poet's first volume there was a "Song" which, unlike most of its fellows, remained practically unaltered amid the great changes which he introduced later. It has, I believe, always been a special favourite with those who have been most in sympathy with his poetry. But, nearly twenty years after its first appearance, it was described by no ill-qualified judge (an admirer of Tennyson on the whole) in the words given in the note:[22] and I believe it had been similarly objected to earlier. Now what were the lines that excited this cry of agonised indignation? They are as follows:—

A spirit haunts the year's last hours
Dwelling amid these yellowing bowers:
To himself he talks;
For at eventide, listening earnestly,
At his work you may hear him sob and sigh
In the walks;
Earthward he boweth the heavy stalks
Of the mouldering flowers:
Heavily hangs the broad sunflower
Over its grave in the earth so chilly;
Heavily hangs the hollyhock,
Heavily hangs the tiger-lily.

Now it is not very difficult to perceive the defects of this extremely beautiful thing in the eyes of a syllabic-accentualist, as this critic (whether knowing it or not) probably was.

The syllabists have always, by a perhaps natural though perhaps also irrational extension of their arithmetical prepossession, disliked lines of irregular length on the page. Bysshe would have barred stanzas; a very few years before Tennyson's book, Crowe, then Public Orator at Oxford, had protested against the exquisite line-adjustments of the seventeenth century. To the pure accentualists the thing might seem an unholy jumble, accented irregularly, irregularly arranged in number, seemingly observing different rhythms in different parts.

Now see how it looks under the foot system:

the feet being sometimes, at the beginning of the lines, monosyllabic, and of course of one long syllable only (Ēarth-|, Hēa-|, Ō-|); sometimes dissyllabic, iambic mainly, but occasionally at least semi-spondaic—

Ă spīr|ĭt hāunts | thĕ yēar's | lā̆st hōurs;

often trisyllabic, and then always anapæstic—