He saith, which heareth the words of God,
Which seeth the vision of the Almighty,
Falling down, and having his eyes open.
He shall eat up the nations his adversaries,
And shall break their bones in pieces,
And smite them through with his arrows.
Such a unit may be called a 'strain.' It will be seen in the examples that the first strain is a simple couplet, the second has its first line strengthened, the last has its second line strengthened. This power of occasionally strengthening either line of a couplet by an additional line gives the Antique Rhythm a flexibility suited to spontaneous composition. A similar device is found in connection with the traditional ballad poetry of England, of which such collections as The Percy Reliques are accidentally preserved specimens. While the regular metre of such ballads is a four-line stanza, yet a few poems, such as the Ballad of Sir Cauline, show some stanzas with individual lines strengthened:
Fair Christabel, that lady mild,
Was had forth of her tower;
But ever she droopeth in her mind,
As nipt by an ungentle wind
Doth some pale lily flower.
The poetry of the historic books mostly takes the form of aggregations of such 'strains' of Antique Rhythm, with no further structure. Occasionally such a poem will fall into verse paragraphs or 'strophes' [to be distinguished from the antistrophic system presently to be described]: an example is David's Song of Victory (see note on page [266]). [For a combination of Antique Rhythm and the Antistrophic system, see note to vii on page [267].]
2. The metre of Wisdom verse is highly elaborate: we find here, not only the parallelism of successive clauses, but the 'high parallelism' which correlates all parts of a whole poem with one another. Two types may be distinguished: the Stanza structure and the Antistrophic structure.
Stanzas are familiar to the English reader: in Biblical poetry groups of three lines, or four lines, etc., recur in succession: a simple example is the Chorus of Watchmen (on page [236]).
The Antistrophic system is familiar to students of Greek, as the metrical form of tragic choral odes. In this case the stanzas run in pairs, strophe and antistrophe, the theory being that the antistrophe exactly repeats the metrical form of its strophe; if another strophe follows the form may altogether change, but the changed form will be repeated in the corresponding antistrophe. [This may be expressed by the formula a a', b b', c c', etc.] Besides the pair of strophes there may be an introduction, or conclusion, or both. No. i of the Sonnets (on page [125]) is an example of a poem consisting simply of strophe and antistrophe; No. iii (page 126) has also a conclusion.[7]
[7]The term strophe is the Greek for 'turning': the system is derived from the dance performance of Greek odes, according to which the chorus danced from the altar to the end of the orchestra in one stanza, then 'turned,' and retraced their steps for the antistrophe or 'answering' stanza. The term strophe has come to be used also for verse paragraphs where there is no antistrophic arrangement. (See page 266, note on vi.)
Both in the case of the Stanza structure and the Antistrophic structure there are various modifications and elaborations—duplication, inversion, interruption, etc.: these it will be sufficient to explain in connection with the examples in which they are found.