These last examples suffice to show the rich variety of the caesura, which may be referred perhaps to the influence of blank verse, in the management of which Chapman displays great skill, and to the frequent use which he makes of the enjambement. Rhyme-breaking also sometimes occurs in his verse. Occasionally three consecutive lines rhyme together, as in W. Warner, whose versification is otherwise extremely regular, similar to that of lyrical poetry. In this branch of poetry the Septenary, with the simple rhyme-order a b c b and especially with the more artistic form a b a b, has continued to be very popular from the time of Wyatt down to the present day. The three-foot line has naturally in most instances a masculine ending, but lines also occasionally occur with feminine rhyme. In many poems the feminine rhyme is, moreover, regularly employed in this metre; as, for instance, in Burns’s To John Taylor (p. 158):
With Pégasús upón a dáy,
Apóllo wéary flýing,
Through frósty hílls the jóurney láy,
On fóot the wáy was plýing.
In ballad poetry, on the other hand, the Septenary metre tends to assume a somewhat freer construction, similar to, though not so capricious as that in the old ballads edited by Percy. A well-known example is offered by Coleridge’s Rime of the Ancient Mariner:
It ís an áncient Márinér, | And he stoppeth óne of thrée:
‘By thy lóng grey béard and glíttering éye, | Now whérefore stópp’st thou mé?’
Two unaccented opening syllables and two unaccented syllables in the middle of the line are, in particular, often met with.
§ 141. The Septenary in combination with other metres. After its occurrence in the Moral Ode and the Ormulum the Septenary, as we have seen, appears at first very seldom by itself, but generally in connexion with other metres, especially the old long line in its freer development, the four-foot metre (though more rarely), and, particularly, the Alexandrine.