Claud.Who wrongs him?
Leon.Marry, thou dost wrong me; thou dissembler, thou.—
Nay, never lay thy hand upon thy sword;
I fear thee not.
Claud.Marry, beshrew my hand,
If it should give your age such cause of fear.
In faith, my hand meant nothing to my sword.
Leon.Tush, tush, man! never fleer and jest at me;
I speak not like a dotard nor a fool;
As under privilege of age, to brag
What I have done being young, or what would do,
Were I not old. Know, Claudio, to thy heed,
Thou hast so wrong'd mine innocent child and me,
That I am forc'd to lay my reverence by,
And with gray hairs and bruise of many days,
Do challenge thee to trial of a man....
In the first part of this passage the language is the simple natural expression of prose, yet so devised that it also fits the metrical pattern. It is either prose or verse according to the way one reads it. But in Leonardo's long speech (after the first line, which is 'irregular') the verse pattern becomes more and more prominent, until in the last three lines it predominates over the natural utterance of the words and produces a certain stiffness. Here the two different manners stand side by side: a natural simplicity so great that the metrical quality is almost obscured, beside a formality so obvious that the feeling of natural expression is partly lost. Now Milton, and after him Dryden and the eighteenth century, regarding poetry generally as a thing apart, followed the latter sort; but when the Romantic Revival brought poetry back to ordinary human life there reappeared, tentatively, of course, a simpler blank verse in Thomson, Crabbe, Cowper, and Wordsworth. A clear example is the opening of Landor's Iphigeneia and Agamemnon—
Iphigeneia, when she heard her doom
At Aulis, and when all beside the King
Had gone away, took his right hand, and said,
"O father! I am young and very happy.
I do not think the pious Calchas heard
Distinctly what the Goddess spake. Old-age
Obscures the senses. If my nurse, who knew
My voice so well, sometimes misunderstood
While I was resting on her knee both arms
And hitting it to make her mind my words,
And looking in her face, and she in mine,
Might he not also hear one word amiss,
Spoken from so far off, even from Olympus?"
Again, compare Mrs. Browning's Aurora Leigh—
As it was, indeed,
I felt a mother-want about the world,
And still went seeking, like a bleating lamb
Left out at night, in shutting up the fold,—
As restless as a nest-deserted bird
Grown chill through something being away, though what
It knows not. I, Aurora Leigh, was born
To make my father sadder, and myself
Not overjoyous, truly. Women know
The way to rear up children (to be just),
They know a simple, merry, tender knack
Of tying sashes, fitting baby-shoes,
And stringing pretty words that make no sense,
And kissing full sense into empty words.
These are from the metrical point of view nearly identical with Mr. Robert Frost's talking verse, so often called a 'contribution' to verse technique—
Something there is that doesn't love a wall,
That sends the frozen ground-swell under it,
And spills the upper boulders in the sun;
And makes gaps even two can pass abreast.
The work of hunters is another thing:
I have come after them and made repair
Where they have left not one stone on stone,
But they would have the rabbit out of hiding,
To please the yelping dogs.
R. Frost, Mending Wall.[72]