The western wave was all aflame,
The day was wellnigh done!
Almost upon the western wave
Rested the broad, bright sun.
Coleridge, Ancient Mariner, Part III.
The more notable long poems in septenaries are Warner's Albion's England (1586), Golding's translation of Ovid's Metamorphoses (1565, 1567), and Chapman's translation of the Iliad (1598-1611).
2. The Stanza
Couplet. The line unit is used sometimes singly and continuously, as in blank verse, and sometimes in groups usually held together by rime. These groups are called stanzas or strophes. The simplest stanza is, therefore, the couplet rimed aa.[45] Couplets are either unequal or equal in length.
The only much-used unequal couplet is the combination, now old-fashioned, of an alexandrine and a septenary, and called, from the number of syllables, Poulter's Measure, because, says Gascoigne (1575), "it gives xii. for one dozen and xiii. for another." Wyatt and Surrey and Sidney wrote in it; the older drama employed it occasionally; Arthur Brooke's Romeus and Juliet (1562) on which Shakespeare's play was based, is in this measure. The following example is by Nicholas Grimald (1519-62).
What sweet relief the showers to thirsty plants we see,
What dear delight the blooms to bees, my true love is to me!
As fresh and lusty Ver foul Winter doth exceed—
As morning bright, with scarlet sky, doth pass the evening's weed—
As mellow pears above the crabs esteemed be—
So doth my love surmount them all, whom yet I hap to see!
It survives chiefly in the S.M. (short measure) of the hymn books and such stanzas as that used by Macaulay in his Horatius:
From Egypt's bondage come,
Where death and darkness reign,
We seek our new and better home,
Where we our rest shall gain.
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When the goodman mends his armor,
And trims his helmet's plume;
When the goodwife's shuttle merrily
Goes flashing through the loom;
With weeping and with laughter
Still is the story told,
How well Horatius kept the bridge
In the brave old days of old.