After Lyly’s The Maid’s Metamorphosis, entirely written in heroic verse, this metre was chiefly employed by Shakespeare and his contemporaries for prologues and epilogues. Rhymed five-foot verses frequently occur in Shakespeare’s earlier dramas, e.g. in Romeo and Juliet, where their technical structure is found to be fairly strict. In his later dramas, on the other hand, e.g. in the Prologue and Epilogue to Henry VIII, the heroic verse is, on the analogy of the freer treatment of his later blank verse, also more loosely constructed. Enjambement, and the caesuras connected with it after the first and fourth accents, are often met with.
§ 159. Dryden’s dramatic heroic verse does not differ essentially from that of his satirical poems and translations. After Dryden returned to blank verse for dramatic writing, heroic verse ceased to be employed for this purpose. Rhymed verse, rhyming in couplets and stanzas, however, still continued to be in vogue in lyrical, satirical, didactic, and narrative poetry.
Pope’s heroic verse is still more uniformly constructed than that of Dryden. Both poets hardly ever employ any caesura but the masculine and the lyric after the second and third beat, and the end of the line is almost exclusively masculine. Initial truncation or the absence of an unaccented syllable internally is hardly to be met with in their poems. The earlier diversity in the structure of this line was (under the influence of the French models whom they closely imitated) considerably restricted. Even transposition of accent occurs comparatively seldom, so that the word-accent generally exactly coincides with the rhythmical accent. Enjambement is, however, employed more frequently by Dryden than by Pope; and the former, moreover, occasionally admits at the close of a triplet a verse of six feet, while Pope, in his original poems, completely avoids triplets as well as six-accent lines. The breaking of rhyme both poets purposely exclude.
A similar uniform character is exhibited by the heroic verse of most of the poets of the eighteenth century. It is not before the nineteenth century that this metre, in spite of the persistence of individual poets, e.g. Byron, in adhering to the fashion set by Pope, again acquires greater freedom. Shelley and Browning, for instance, are fond of combining lines of heroic verse by enjambement so as to form periods of some length. Wordsworth, Coleridge, Southey and others again admit couplets and triplets with occasional six-foot lines at the close. But the caesura remains nearly always restricted to the places which it occupies in Pope’s verse, and the close of the line is masculine. Keats only often indulges in feminine rhymes.
It is, however, remarkable that such rhymes more often occur in five-foot verses combined in stanzas when employed for satirical and comic compositions, as e.g. in Byron’s Beppo and Don Juan. In these poems the disyllabic thesis, the slurring of syllables, and other rhythmical licences, also more frequently occur.
DIVISION III
Verse-forms Occurring in Modern English
Poetry Only
CHAPTER XII
BLANK VERSE
§ 160. The Beginnings of Modern English Poetry. Puttenham, in his Arte of English Poesie, i. 31, speaks of Surrey and Wyatt as having originated the modern period of English poetry. This is true in so far as their poems are the first to show clearly—especially in metrical form—the influence of the spirit of the Renaissance, which had been making itself felt in English Literature for some time past. The new tendencies manifested themselves not only in the actual introduction of new rhythms and verse-forms borrowed from Classical and Italian poetry, but also in the endeavour to regulate and reform the native poetry according to the metrical laws and peculiarities of foreign models, especially of the ancient classics.