A History of English Versification

by J. Schipper

And end that I have now begun;

And when this song is sung and past,

My lute! be still, for I have done.

Another form of this stanza, consisting of five-foot lines with refrain, occurs in Swinburne, In an Orchard (Poems, i. 116), and a variety consisting of three-foot verses is found in Drayton’s Ode to Himself (Poets, iii, p. 587). More frequently this stanza is found with the two parts in inverted order (a b a a b₄), as in Moore:

Take back the sigh, thy lips of art

In passion’s moment breath’d to me:

Yet, no—it must not, will not part,

’Tis now the life-breath of my heart,

And has become too pure for thee.

There are also five-foot iambic and three-foot iambic-anapaestic and other lines connected in this way, as in G. Herbert (p. 82); in Longfellow, Enceladus (p. 595); on the scheme a b c c b₃ in Wordsworth, i. 248; and in R. Browning according to the formula a b c c b₄ (vi. 77). The allied form of stanza, a a b b a, probably originating by inversion of the two last verses of the former stanza (a a b a b), occurs in Middle English in the poem Of the Cuckoo and the Nightingale.[191]