Ȝete þe férþ is our fá,
Dèþ, þat dérieþ ous swá
And díolely ous díȝtes.
Here, again, the difference between the lines on the pattern of the first hemistich of the long line, which form the body of the stanza (a a a, b b b, c c c, d d d), and those on the pattern of the second hemistich used as tail-rhyme lines (b, b, b, b) is plainly recognizable.
The same is the case in other poems written in this form of stanza, as e.g. in the Metrical Romances, Sir Perceval, Sir Degrevant (Halliwell, Thornton Romances, Camden Society, 1844, pp. 1, 177) and others; cf. Luick, Anglia, xii, pp. 440ff., and Paul’s Grundriss, ii a, p. 1016. But in these later works, one of the latest of which probably is the poem The Droichis Part of the Play, possibly by Dunbar (Laing, ii. 37; Small, ii. 314; Schipper, 190), the two-beat lines are frequently intermingled and blended with even-beat lines, which from the beginning of the fifth stanza onward completely take the place of the two-beat lines in the last-mentioned poem. Likewise in the ‘Bob-wheel-staves’, i.e. stanzas of the structure of those sixteenth-century stanzas quoted above (§§ [60], [61]), the cauda, as is expressly stated by King James VI in his Revlis and Cavtelis, is written in even-beat lines of four and three measures, though the main part of the stanza (the frons) is composed in four-beat rhyming-alliterative lines (cf. Luick, Anglia, xii, P. 444)
§ 66. In the contemporary Dramatic Poetry this mixture of four-beat (or two-beat) alliterative lines with lines of even measures is still more frequent, and may be used either strophically or otherwise.
In the first place, we must note that in the earlier collections of Mystery Plays (Towneley Mysteries, York Plays, and Ludus Coventriae) the rhyming alliterative long line, popular, as we have seen, in lyric and in narrative poetry, is also used in the same or cognate forms of stanzas.
But the form of verse in these Mysteries, owing to the loss of regular alliteration, cannot with propriety be described as the four-beat alliterative long line, but only as the four-beat long line. In many instances, however, the remnants of alliteration decidedly point to the four-beat character of this rhythm, as e.g. in the following stanza of the Towneley Mysteries (p. 140):
Moste mýghty Máhòwne | méng you with mýrthe,
Both of búrgh and of tówne | by féllys and by fýrthe;