Here the septenary is introduced in the May-day song of Ralph, the London apprentice, doubtless because of its popularity for such unliterary verse.
In somer, when the shawes be sheyne,
And leves be large and long,
Hit is full mery in feyre foreste
To here the foulys song.
(Ballad of Robin Hood and the Monk, in Gummere's English Ballads, p. 77.)
It is an ancient Mariner,
And he stoppeth one of three.
"By thy long grey beard and glittering eye,
Now wherefore stopp'st thou me?" ...
... He prayeth best, who loveth best
All things both great and small;
For the dear God who loveth us,
He made and loveth all.
(Coleridge: The Ancient Mariner, ll. 1-4, 614-617. 1798.)
These specimens show the ballad stanza, which is made of a sort of septenary resolved into short lines of four and three accents. It is often assumed that the measure was derived from the Latin septenary; but owing to the difficulty of supposing that a foreign metre should have been adopted for the most popular of all forms of poetry, some scholars prefer to think that the ballad stanza of this form is the same as that in which all lines have four accents (see specimen on p. [157], above), the last accent of the second and fourth lines having dropped off by natural processes. On the ballad stanzas in general, see Gummere's English Ballads, Appendix II. p. 303. Compare with the present specimens the metre of Cowper's John Gilpin.
That cross he now was fastening there, as the surest power and best
For supplying all deficiencies, all wants of the rude nest
In which, from burning heat, or tempest driving far and wide,
The innocent boy, else shelterless, his lonely head must hide.
(Wordsworth: The Norman Boy. 1842.)
This is a rare instance of the use of the long septenary in nineteenth-century poetry. Certainly in Wordsworth's verses the metrical effect cannot be called happy; the measure is made especially clumsy by the introduction of hypermetrical light syllables. In the succeeding specimen the same measure is used with feminine ending.