(Browning: Agamemnon; chorus. 1877.)
Of the same general metrical character as the irregular odes are certain poems (like some of Patmore's) with no regularly organized structure and varying lengths of line. See, for example, Milton's verses At a Solemn Music and On Time; Swinburne's Thalassius and On the Cliffs; and William Morris's On a fair Spring Morning. Compare, also, the effect of the irregular strophic forms in Southey's Curse of Kehama, Shelley's Queen Mab, and the like.[41]
FOOTNOTES:
[39] On English ode-forms, see the introductions to Mr. Gosse's English Odes and Mr. William Sharp's Great Odes; also Schipper, vol. ii. p. 792.
[40] Mr. Patmore has used the same sort of verse for narrative poetry, with unusual daring but also with unusual success. For an example see his Amelia, included in the Golden Treasury, Second Series. The following passage exhibits the metrical method of the poem at its best:
"And so we went alone
By walls o'er which the lilac's numerous plume
Shook down perfume;
Trim plots close blown
With daisies, in conspicuous myriads seen,
Engross'd each one
With single ardor for her spouse, the sun;
Garths in their glad array
Of white and ruddy branch, auroral, gay,
With azure chill the maiden flower between;
Meadows of fervid green,
With sometime sudden prospect of untold
Cowslips, like chance-found gold;
And broadcast buttercups at joyful gaze,
Rending the air with praise,
Like the six-hundred-thousand-voiced shout
Of Jacob camp'd in Midian put to rout;
Then through the Park,
Where Spring to livelier gloom
Quickened the cedars dark,
And, 'gainst the clear sky cold,
Which shone afar
Crowded with sunny alps oracular,
Great chestnuts raised themselves abroad like cliffs of bloom."
[41] The easy abuse of these irregular measures is amusingly parodied by Mr. Owen Seaman, in a burlesque of an ode of Mr. Le Gallienne's:
"Is this the Seine?
And am I altogether wrong
About the brain,
Dreaming I hear the British tongue?
Dear Heaven! what a rhyme!
And yet 'tis all as good
As some that I have fashioned in my time,
Like bud and wood;
And on the other hand you couldn't have a more precise or neater
Metre."
(The Battle of the Bays, p. 37.)