(This, in couplet, is a little dangerous.)
Note on the Application of the "Christabel" System to Nineteenth-Century Lyric generally.
It is most remarkable, but suggestive to a further extent of the fact that Coleridge did not entirely comprehend what he was doing, that Christabel, especially its opening stanza, supplies a complete key to the later nineteenth-century lyrical scansion which (v. sup. p. [27]) he and others failed to understand in Tennyson. That opening stanza, placed side by side with the "Hollyhock Song" (see above again), will completely interpret it to any one who has eye and ear enough to mutate the mutanda. And when the connection and the interpretation have once been seized, there is nothing, from Shelley's apparently impulsive and instinctive harmonies to the most complicated experiments of Browning and Swinburne, which will not yield to the master keys of equivalent substitution and varying of line-length, subject to the general law of rhythmical uniformity, or at least symphonised change. It has been said, for instance, by the latest and most painful French student of English prosody, M. Verrier, that in Shelley's Cloud "traditional metric renounces the attempt" to divide it into feet. Here is the division, made without its being necessary to think twice—hardly to think once—about a single article of it:
I bring | fresh showers | for the thirst|ing flowers,
From the seas | and the streams;
I bear | light shade | for the leaves | when laid
In their noon|day dreams.
From my wings | are shaken | the dews | that waken
The sweet | buds ev|ery one,
When rocked | to rest | on their mo|ther's breast,
As she dan|ces about | the sun.
I wield | the flail | of the lash|ing hail,
And whi|ten the green | plains un|der,
And then | again | I dissolve | it in rain,
And laugh | as I pass | in thun|der.
(Base anapæstic, and normal length dimeter; but shortened to three and two feet, thus—424243434343. The two last three-foot lines catalectic dimeter, or, to put the same thing in another way, the first threes plain, the last redundanced. Substitution of iamb or spondee for anapæst perfectly regular, and (to keep the anapæstic base specially marked against the iambic) not very much indulged in. "Showers" and "flowers" as well as probably "shaken" and "waken" used in their shortened or practically monosyllabic value. Nothing in the least incalculable, eccentric, or even difficult, on the foot system.)
XXXIX. Nineteenth-Century Couplet (Leigh Hunt to Mr. Swinburne)
(The examples given will be found to be all more or less of the enjambed variety. Not only has the other been much less practised, owing to reaction from the over-fondness of the eighteenth century for it, but that century, including the period of throwing back to Dryden,[46] practically found out all its considerable but limited possibilities.)
(a) Leigh Hunt (Story of Rimini):
Āll thĕ | sweet range-wood, flowerbed, grassy plot
Francesca loved, but most of all this spot.
Whenever she walk'd forth, wherever went
About the grounds, to this at last she bent:
Here she had brought a lute | ānd ă | few books.
Here would she lie for hours, | ōftĕn | with looks
More sorrowful by far, yet sweeter too;
Sometimes with firmer comfort, where she drew
From sense of in|jŭry̆'s sēlf | and truth sustained,
Sometimes with rarest indignation gained,
From meek, self-pitying mixtures of extremes,
Of hope, and soft despair, and child|lī̆ke drēams,
And all that promising calm smile we see
In Nature's face when we look patiently.
(Various substitutions marked, as also in the following.)