Then to me so lying awake a vision
Came without sleep over the seas and touched me,
Softly touched mine eyelids and lips; and I too,
Full of the vision,
Saw the white implacable Aphrodite,
Saw the hair unbound and the feet unsandalled
Shine as fire of sunset on western waters;
Saw the reluctant....
Both Tennyson and Swinburne tried the Catullan hendecasyllabics. Tennyson's Milton, in alcaics, is famous, and has a well-marked Miltonic sound, but little of the sound of Horace's alcaics. Admirable also are the elegiac distichs of Watson's Hymn to the Sea—
Man whose deeds, to the doer, come back as thine own exhalations
Into thy bosom return, weepings of mountain and vale;
Man with the cosmic fortunes and starry vicissitudes tangled,
Chained to the wheel of the world, blind with the dust of its speed,
Even as thou, O giant, whom trailed in the wake of her conquests
Night's sweet despot draws, bound to her ivory car.
Of the French lyrical metres that have been imitated in English, mainly for lighter themes, the ballade and the rondeau are the most important. These and the villanelle, triolet, and pantoum are not, like imitations of classical forms, semi-learned attempts to do in English what is foreign to the nature of the language, but games of skill in phrasing and riming, wholly legitimate once their artificiality is granted. For the impassioned overflowing of a sincere spirit they are unfitted, but for grace, point, and delicate charm nothing could be better devised; and when occasionally they are used for the expression of genuine feeling, the unexpected union of lightness and seriousness has a peculiarly poignant effect.
The ballade in its commonest form consists of three 8-line stanzas riming ababbcbc and a 4-line stanza called 'envoy,' bcbc; the last line of each stanza being repeated as a refrain, and the a, b, and c rimes throughout the poem being the same. The lines contain usually either four or five stresses. The envoy is a sort of dedication, addressed traditionally to a "Prince." Variations of all kinds occur, encouraged by the difficulty of satisfying all the demands of the form. Examples may be found (with an excellent introduction) in Gleeson White's collection of Ballades and Rondeaus (Canterbury Poets), and Andrew Lang's Ballades of Blue China.
Rondeaus and rondels (two forms of the same word) are written with greater freedom of variation. Their organic principle is the use of the first phrase or first line, twice repeated, as a refrain (R). The commoner model in English is: aabba, aabR, aabbaR, in which the first half of the first line constitutes the refrain. Another type rimes ABba, abAB, abbaAB (the capital letters indicating the lines repeated). For examples see the reference above. Austin Dobson, Henley, and Swinburne have written successfully in this form.
The triolet is a sort of abbreviation of the second variety of rondeau. Its lines are usually short and rime ABaAabAB.
The villanelle, in its normal form, consists of five 3-line stanzas (aba) and a concluding 4-line stanza, all with but two rimes, the first line, moreover, being repeated as the sixth, twelfth, and eighteenth, the third line as the ninth, fifteenth, and nineteenth.