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and keep the refrain line in the same meter:

| Rode the six hundred;

but read the lines with important final syllables as trimeter:

All in the valley of Death,

and,

"Forward the Light Bri- | gade!

| Charge for the | guns!" he said.

But Tennyson probably intended that all the lines should be dimeter. The final syllables he made important in order to avoid the jingle of perfect triple rimes which spoils Hood's poem in this meter and rhythm. One might slight these syllables in reading, and by keeping the lines consistently dimeter give a more appropriate galloping rhythm, e. g.

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CHAPTER XVIII

DUPLE-TRIPLE RHYTHMS1

IAMBIC-ANAPESTIC AND TROCHAIC-DACTYLIC

If one prefers to consider the single foot the basis for discussions of rhythm, one will call the line,

The sound of the hollow sea's release,

iambic with the variation of a single trisyllabic foot; and the line,

In the night's retreat from the gathering frost,

anapestic with the variation of a single dissyllabic foot. If, however, one prefers to consider the whole line as the basisor still better, the movement characteristic of a group of lines, as the basis for discussions of rhythm-one feels the need of a third classification, iambic-anapestic, to describe the verses just quoted. Each would fit perfectly as a slight variant in a poem whose rhythmic norm is the movement which each approaches. But they also fit perfectly together in the same poem:

The crickets mourning their comrades lost,
In the night's retreat from the gathering frost;

(Or is it their slogan, plaintive and shrill,
As they beat in their corselets, valiant still?)

(O leaves, O leaves, I am one with you,

Of the mould and the sun and the wind and the dew!)

1 See also Chapter V.

The broad gold wake of the afternoon;
The silent fleck of the cold new moon;

The sound of the hollow sea's release
From stormy tumult to starry peace;

With only another league to wend;
And two brown arms at the journey's end!

These are the joys of the open road-
For him who travels without a load.

(Bliss Carman: Joys of the Road.)

Evidently the rhythmic "tune" of this poem is something different from the regular duple or regular triple considered in the previous chapters. The norm here is a free combination of time divisions composed of either two or three syllables.

This term duple-triple is not merely a convenient pigeonhole in which to place all the poems that cannot be described as either duple or triple in rhythm; it is a necessary division for such poems as Shelley's Cloud, and Swinburne's Seaboard, or his Swimmer's Dream, the music of which comes from a technique different from that of the other rhythms.2

2 The dividing line which separates duple-triple rhythm from the two rhythms which it approaches is quite hazy. Simple verses like

or,

The sound of the hollow sea's release,

In the night's retreat from the gathering frost,

may be introduced into the regular rhythms occasionally, but when a variation is constantly repeated it establishes a new rhythmic norm. In general, we may consider that a proportion of one or more trisyllabic feet to four dissyllabic in a passage of verse will give a duple-triple rhythm. (See Chap. IV, p. 37.) Duple-triple rhythm usually has a greater proportion of dissyllabic feet than trisyllabic. Triple rhythm can apparently be varied much more than duple without suggesting a new rhythmic pattern to the ear. The question of just at what point either duple or triple rhythm becomes duple-triple is perhaps not important, but the special recognition of this mixed rhythm and its characteristic possibilities is quite significant.

The duple-triple was the latest of all the important rhythms to be developed, although the early history of our versification would lead one to expect it to be among the first. When foreign influence brought the duple rhythm into English verse, it was accepted in a very rough form. The English ear accustomed to the irregular native rhythm did not demand smooth iambics. The verse of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries admitted considerable variation, and the freedom of the metrical romances of that period was continued later in the versification of the ballads. The fact that the ballads were sung doubtless allowed them to fall into the extremely rough state in which many of them have come down to us. Not infrequently the roughness amounts to a duple-triple rather than a duple rhythm for a whole stanza, e. g.

It was in and about the Martinmas time,
When the green leaves were a-falling,
That Sir John Graeme in the West Country,
Fell in love with Barbara Allan.

(Bonny Barbara Allan.)

The verse of a few of the miracle plays is a tumbling rhythm smoothed into a duple-triple, or, as in the Second Shepherds' Play, a fairly even triple. And duple-triple seems to be what Skelton is driving at sometimes. But like the straight triple rhythm it had no recognized place with the Elizabethans, except in a few songs. Chappell cites a number of these that were sung to the Jacobean tune of Hunting the Hare-songs in a rhythm of two syllable and three syllable feet arranged in a tuneful pattern; and Gay's Beggars' Opera has this one, which seems to sing itself even without the music:

If the heart of a man is depress'd with cares,
The mist is dispell'd, when woman appears;

'Op. cit., 1: 320 ff

Like the notes of a fiddle, she sweetly, sweetly,
Raises the spirits, and charms our ears.
Roses and lilies her cheeks disclose,

But her ripe lips are more sweet than those.
Press her,

Caress her,

With blisses,
Her kisses

Dissolve us in pleasure and soft repose.

Songs in this varied rhythm, however, are not common even in the eighteenth century when anapestics were extremely popular. And wherever they do occur they seem to have been written to a tune.

Blake, who wrote a number of poems apparently on the principle of musical equivalence, in a few places fell into a duple-triple rhythm. The second stanza of the Nurses' Song, which antedates Christabel by eight years, he wrote in a rhythm which Coleridge thought he himself had invented; and the Laughing Song is in the style of dupletriple rhythm which became extremely common in the nineteenth century, e. g.

When the green woods laugh with the voice of joy,
And the dimpling stream runs laughing by;
When the air does laugh with our merry wit,

And the green hill laughs with the noise of it.

To Coleridge, however, must be given the credit of definitely placing duple-triple among recognized modern English rhythms. Christabel is written chiefly in octosyllabics, but with a frequent variation of duple-triple and triple lines. Except in a few Cowleian odes and in Blake's Nurse's Song, this deliberate blending of different rhythms in the same poem had not been used since Spenser's experiments in the Shepherd's Calendar. The most discussed part of the poem is the opening, already quoted (p. 163). This is written on the principle of duple-triple rhythm, a

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