Rólls o’er the rócky chánnel,| líe at lárge,
And síng the glóries | óf the círcling yéar.
The blank verse of Young (Night Thoughts), Cowper (The Task), and other less important poets of the eighteenth century is of a similar uniform structure; cf. Metrik, ii, §193
§ 180. In the blank verse of the nineteenth century we find both tendencies, the strict and the free treatment of this verse-form; according to their predominant employment in epic and dramatic poetry respectively, we may call them the epic and the dramatic form of the verse. They may be chiefly distinguished by the peculiarities to be observed in the blank verse of Milton and Thomson on the one hand, and of Dryden on the other; i.e. by the admission or exclusion of feminine endings.
The strict form of the epic blank verse, with masculine endings, is preferred in the narrative or reflective poems of Coleridge, Wordsworth, Southey, Shelley, Keats, W.S. Landor, Longfellow, D. G. Rossetti, Mrs. Browning, Robert Browning, Matthew Arnold, Tennyson, Swinburne, and Edwin Arnold.[170]
The free form is represented, mainly, in the dramatic verse of the same and other poets, being used by Coleridge (in his translation of The Piccolomini), Wordsworth, Southey, Lamb, Byron, Shelley, W.S. Landor, Tennyson, Matthew Arnold, and others.[171]
CHAPTER XIII
TROCHAIC METRES
§ 181. Trochaic metres, which, generally speaking, are less common in English poetry than iambics, were not used at all till the Modern English Period. The old metrical writers (Gascoigne, James VI, W. Webbe) only know rising metres.