It is not told if her untoward heart
Was melted by her poet's lyric woe,
Or if in vain so amorously he sang.
Perchance through crowd of dark conceits he rose
To nobler heights of philosophic love,
And crowned his later years with sterner rhyme.
This thing alone we know: the triple rhyme
Of him who bared his vast and passionate heart
To all the crossing flames of hate and love,
Wears in the midst of all its storm and woe—
As some loud morn of March may bear a rose—
The impress of a song that Arnaut sang.
"Smith of his mother-tongue," the Frenchman sang
Of Lancelot and of Galahad, the rhyme
That beat so bloodlike at its core of rose,
It stirred the sweet Francesca's gentle heart
To take that kiss that brought her so much woe,
And sealed in fire her martyrdom of love.
And Dante, full of her immortal love,
Stayed his drear song, and softly, fondly sang
As though his voice broke with that weight of woe;
And to this day we think of Arnaut's rhyme,
Whenever pity at the laboring heart
On fair Francesca's memory drops the rose.
Ah! sovereign Love, forgive this weaker rhyme!
The men of old who sang were great at heart,
Yet have we too known woe, and worn thy rose.
(Edmund Gosse: Sestina.)
For a specimen of the rimed sestina, see Swinburne's Poems and Ballads, Second Series, p. 46.
The Virelai, which we have seen was one of the forms used by Chaucer, though not represented in his extant poetry, has been but slightly imitated in English. It was a poem of indeterminate length, composed of longer and shorter lines, the longer lines in each stanza riming, the shorter lines in the same stanza also riming, while in the succeeding stanza the short-line rime of the previous stanza became the long-line rime. The last stanza took the unrepeated rime of the first stanza as its new rime; so that in the whole poem each rime was used in two stanzas. Charles Cotton, one of whose rondeaus has been quoted, also wrote a virelai. A modern specimen, by Mr. John Payne, is quoted in Ballades and Rondeaus, p. 276.
The Pantoum is another very interesting form belonging in this group rather than elsewhere, although it originated not in France but Malaysia. It was imitated in French by Victor Hugo and other poets, and through French influence has found a place in English verse. It consists of an indeterminate number of stanzas of four lines each, the second and fourth line of each stanza being repeated as the first and third of the succeeding stanza, while the second and fourth lines of the last stanza repeat the first and third lines of the first stanza. Thus the whole forms a sort of interwoven circle, and is used most appropriately to represent any kind of monotony,—the dull round of repetition. From Love in Idleness (1883) Mr. White reprints the following admirable specimen:
Monologue d'outre Tombe.