CHAPTER II
THE RHYME AS A STRUCTURAL ELEMENT OF THE STANZA
§ 220. On the model of the Provençal and Northern French lyrics, where the rhyme was indispensable in the construction of stanzas, rhyme found a similar employment in Middle English poetry. Certain simple kinds of stanzas, however, were in their formation just as much influenced by the Low Latin hymn forms, in which at that time rhyme had long been in vogue.
But the rules prescribed for the formation of stanzas by the Provençal poets in theory and practice were observed neither by the Northern French, nor by the Middle English poets with equal rigour, although later on, it is true, in the court-poetry greater strictness prevailed than in popular lyrical poetry.
One of the chief general laws relating to the use of rhyme in the formation of stanzas has already been mentioned in § [214] (at the end). A few other points of special importance require to be noticed here.
Both in Middle English and in Romanic poetry we find stanzas with a single rhyme only and stanzas with varied rhymes. But the use of the same rhymes throughout all the stanzas of one poem (in German called Durchreimung), so frequent in Romanic literature, occurs in Middle English poetry only in some later poems imitated directly from Romanic models. As a rule, both where the rhyme in the same stanza is single and where it is varied, all the stanzas have different rhymes, and only the rhyme-system, the arrangement of rhymes, is the same throughout the poem. It is, however, very rarely and only in Modern English literary poetry that the several stanzas are strictly uniform with regard to the use of masculine and feminine rhyme; as a rule the two kinds are employed. Sometimes, it is true, in the anisometrical ‘lays’, as they are called, as well as in the later popular ballads (e.g. in Chevy Chace and The Battle of Otterbourne), we find single stanzas deviating from the rest in rhyme-arrangement as well as in number of lines, the stanzas consisting of Septenary lines with cross-rhymes and intermittent rhymes (a b a b, and a b c b) being combined now and then with tail-rhyme. This is found to a still greater extent in lyrical poetry of the seventeenth century (e.g. Cowley, G. Herbert, &c.) as well as in odic stanzas of the same or a somewhat later period.
§ 221. It does not often happen in Middle English poetry that a line is not connected by rhyme with a corresponding line in the same stanza to which it belongs, but only with one in the next stanza. In Modern English poetry this peculiarity, corresponding to what are called Körner in German metres, may not unfrequently be observed in certain poetic forms of Italian origin, as the terza rima or the sestain. Of equally rare occurrence in English strophic poetry are lines without any rhyme (analogous to the Waisen—literally ‘orphans’—of Middle High German poetry), which were strictly prohibited in Provençal poetry. In Middle English literature they hardly ever occur, but are somewhat more frequent in Modern English poetry, where they generally come at the end of the stanza. On the other hand the mode of connecting successive stanzas, technically called Concatenatio (rhyme-linking), so frequently used by the Provençal and Northern French poets, is very common in Middle English verse. Three different varieties of this device are to be distinguished, viz.:
1. The repetition of the rhyme-word (or of a word standing close by it) of the last line of a stanza, at the beginning of the first line of the following stanza.
2. The repetition of the whole last line of a stanza, including the rhyme-word, as the initial line of the following stanza (not very common); and
3. The repetition of the last rhyme of a stanza as the first rhyme of the following one; so that the last rhyme-word of one stanza and the first rhyme-word of the next not only rhyme with the corresponding rhyme-words of their own stanzas, but also with one another. Such ‘concatenations’ frequently connect the first and the last part (i.e. the frons and the cauda) of a stanza with each other. They even connect the single lines of the same stanza and sometimes of a whole poem, with each other, as e.g. in the ‘Rhyme-beginning Fragment’ in Furnivall’s Early English Poems and Lives of Saints, p. 21 (cf. Metrik, i, p. 317)