Line Ninth, with the following three lines, warns against an error which naturally becomes the more frequent the longer English verse is written, since rhymes become more and more hackneyed every day.
Line Sixteenth. The Alexandrine will come under discussion in its place among metres.
Line Twenty-first might well serve for a motto for this little treatise. If a poet said this of poetry, how much more does it apply to versification!
Line Twenty-fifth. Here, and in the following line, by delicate manipulation of the accent, Pope gets the desired effect. Instead of "So so´ft the stra´in," he attracts the ear with "So´ft is," and the unexpected word gives the key-note of the line.
Line Twenty-seventh. It is almost needless to point out how in this, and the next line, the poet, by artful management of accent and careful selection of onomatopoetic words, gives the required assonance to the lines.
Line Twenty-ninth. The broad vowels here give the requisite pause and "deliberation" to the verse. In the following line, the introduction of "too"—(under some circumstances it might well come under the condemnation of Line Fifth)—makes the line labour, and the open "o" at the end of the line "tires the ear."
Line Thirty-first. Here the poet gets the slide of the "s" to give the idea of motion. In the following line by the elision and the apt introduction of short syllables he repeats the notion. In my opinion the artistic skill of Pope is peculiarly observable in the last few couplets. In the first line in each instance the effect is produced by the use of a different artifice from that employed in the second.
These rules were of course intended by Pope to apply only to the measure called "heroic," i.e., decasyllabic verse. But, mutatis mutandis, they will be equally applicable to general verse.
Coleridge in his "Christabel" struck out what he considered a new metre, which he describes as "not, properly speaking, irregular, though it may seem so from its being founded on a new principle: namely, that of counting in each line the accents, not the syllables. Though the latter may vary from seven to twelve, yet in each line the accents will be found to be only four." This was a decided step in the right direction, being in truth a recognition of the principle that measure in English was not exhausted—was, indeed, hardly satisfied—by the old rule of thumb; that, in short, it needed a compromise between accent and quantity.
Southey in his "Thalaba" essayed a new style of versification, of which he writes as follows:—