"On the ground,
Sleep sound;
I'll apply
To your eye,
Gentle | lover, | remedy.
When thou wak'st,
Thou tak'st
True delight
In the sight
Of thy | former | lady's eye." [508]
IDEM: Midsummer-Night's Dream, Act iii, Sc. 2.
ORDER II.—TROCHAIC VERSE.
In Trochaic verse, the stress is laid on the odd syllables, and the even ones are short. Single-rhymed trochaic omits the final short syllable, that it may end with a long one; for the common doctrine of Murray, Chandler, Churchill, Bullions, Butler, Everett, Fowler, Weld, Wells, Mulligan, and others, that this chief rhyming syllable is "additional" to the real number of feet in the line, is manifestly incorrect. One long syllable is, in some instances, used as a foot; but it is one or more short syllables only, that we can properly admit as hypermeter. Iambics and trochaics often occur in the same poem; but, in either order, written with exactness, the number of feet is always the number of the long syllables.
Examples from Gray's Bard.
(1.)
"Ruin | seize thee,| ruthless | king! Confu | -sion on | thy ban |-ners wait, Though, fann'd | by Con | -quest's crim | -son wing. They mock | the air | with i | -dle state. Helm, nor | hauberk's | twisted | mail, Nor e'en | thy vir | -tues, ty | -rant, shall | avail."
(2.)
"Weave the | warp, and | weave the | woof,
The wind | -ing-sheet | of Ed | -ward's race.
Give am | -ple room, | and verge | enough,
The char | -acters | of hell | to trace.
Mark the |year, and | mark the | night,
When Sev | -ern shall | re-ech | -o with | affright."
"The Bard, a Pindaric Ode;"
British Poets, Vol. vii, p. 281 and 282.
OBSERVATIONS.
OBS. 1.—Trochaic verse without the final short syllable, is the same as iambic would be without the initial short syllable;—it being quite plain, that iambic, so changed, becomes trochaic, and is iambic no longer. But trochaic, retrenched of its last short syllable, is trochaic still; and can no otherwise be made iambic, than by the prefixing of a short syllable to the line. Feet, and the orders of verse, are distinguished one from an other by two things, and in general by two only; the number of syllables taken as a foot, and the order of their quantities. Trochaic verse is always as distinguishable from iambic, as iambic is from any other. Yet have we several grammarians and prosodies who contrive to confound them—or who, at least, mistake catalectic trochaic for catalectic iambic; and that too, where the syllable wanting affects only the last foot, and makes it perhaps but a common and needful cæsura.