Which chángeless rólls etérnallý;
So that wíldest of wáves, in their ángriest móod,
Scarce bréak on the bóunds of the lánd for a róod;
And the pówerless móon behólds them flów
Héedless if she cóme or gó:
Cálm or hígh, in máin or báy,
Ón their cóurse she háth no swáy.
Lines 5–7 can be at once recognized as four-stress verses by the iambic-anapaestic rhythm, as well as by the strongly-marked caesura, which, in the four-foot verses 4, and especially 8 and 10, is entirely or almost entirely absent (cf. pp. [98–9]); and both metrical forms, the calmer four-foot verse and the more animated four-stress metre, are in harmonious agreement with the tone of this passage.
Four-foot lines, forming component parts of metrically heterogeneous types of stanzas, such, for instance, as the tail-rhyme stave, are generally more regularly constructed than in the Middle English period.
§ 133. Among the metrical forms which took their rise from the four-foot line, the most noteworthy are the two-foot and the one-foot verse, the former the result of halving the four-foot verse, the latter of dividing the two-foot verse, as a rule, by means of the rhyme. These verse-forms only seldom occur in the Middle English period, as a rule in anisometrical stanzas in connexion with verses of greater length. Thus, in the poem in Wright’s Specimens of Lyric Poetry, p. 38, composed in the entwined tail-rhyme stanza, the short lines have two accents: wiþóute stríf: y wýte, a wýf 10–12; in tóune tréwe: while ý may gléwe 4–6. The eighteen-lined enlarged tail-rhyme stave of the ballad, The Nut-brown Maid (Percy’s Reliques, iii. 6), also consists of two- and three-foot lines; in this case the two-foot lines may be conceived as the result of halving the first hemistich of the septenary line.