• • • •
And like green clouds in opal calms.
• • • •
Behind her banners burns the crimson sun.
• • • •
While down the soft blue-shadowed aisles of snow
Night, like a sacristan with silent step,
Passes to light the tapers of the stars.
Carman is as adept as Kipling in employing, for the sake of verbal music and variety of rhythm, such devices as shifting of accent, slurring, and elision, and, further, he invents beautiful measures, as, for instance, the dimeter of Ilicet, or the six-line stanza of The White Gull (Shelley):—
O captain of the rebel host,