Feet, the straining plumes of the doves that drew her,
Looking always, looking with necks reverted,

Back to Lesbos, back to the hills whereunder

Shone Mitylene.

(Swinburne: Sapphics.)

This adherence to a fixed rhythmic pattern is not only characteristic of classical imitations" in English, but of many other exquisitely musical poems of Swinburne and a number of other modern poets. 12 A simple pattern is that of William Watson's England My Mother, a poem of twentyfour stanzas, all exactly following the arrangement of the duple-triple rhythm of the first, without variation:

| x x x x x

| England my mother
| Wardress of waters
Builder of peoples
| Maker of men.

The opening of Swinburne's Channel Passage has a more elaborate "tune." The second and sixth foot of each octameter line is trisyllabic, the others dissyllabic, and each line begins with direct attack:

| Forth from | Calais, at | dawn of | night, when | sunset | summer on autumn shone,

Fared the steamer alert and loud through seas whence only the sun was gone:

Soft and sweet as the sky they smiled, and bade man welcome: a dim sweet hour

Gleamed and whispered in wind and sea, and heaven was fair as a field in flower.

Kipling is one of our greatest masters of rhythmic

"For other examples see Tennyson's To Milton (hendecasyllabics), Clough's Hope evermore and believe (elegiacs), Hovey's Taleisin [pp. 27-28] (choriambics), and Rupert Brooke's Choriambics.

12 More of these patterns are analyzed in the chapter on duple-triple rhythm. See Chapter XVIII.

technique. Many of his poems have as clear cut and definite a rhythm as if they were accompanied by a musical setting. He has said that he considers a large part of his work over when he once has the "tune" of his poem in his head. The pattern of the First Chantey is a good example of his finished technique. It gains its peculiar effect from the checking of the flow of the triple rhythm by a monosyllabic foot always occurring before the cesura in the middle of the line:

| Mine was the woman to me, | darkling I | found her;

| Haling her | dumb from the camp, | held her and | bound her.

| Hot rose her tribe on our | track | ere I had proved her:

| Hearing her | laugh in the | gloom, | greatly I loved her.

Compare the somewhat similar pattern of Longfellow's Skeleton in Armor:

Longfellow has borrowed his rhythmic and stanzaic pattern from Drayton's Ballad of Agincourt, which Tennyson also used for his Charge of the Light Brigade. Another interesting effect of Kipling's is the following combination of duple with quadruple rhythm:

| Coast-wise- cross-seâs- round the world and | back again | Where the flâw shall | head us or the | full Trâde | suits— | Plain-sail-storm-saîl-| lay your board and ❘ tack again And that's the way we'll pay Pâddy | Doyle for his | boots! 13

13 Note that the dissyllabic feet have extra accents. See above, p. 25, note 13.

Sometimes a poet may employ in the same poem a number of different line patterns to which he recurs from time to time to vary the music of his verse. Alfred Noyes' BarrelOrgan is a striking example:

There's a barrel-organ | carolling a- | cross a golden | street
In the City as the | sun sinks | low;

And the music's not immortal; but the world has made it sweet
And fulfilled it with the sunset glow;

And it pulses through the pleasures of the City and the pain
That surrounds the singing organ like a large eternal light;
And they've given it a glory and a part to play again

In the Symphony that | rules the dây and night.

There are three types of line here: five are tetrameters with four syllables in three feet and one in the last; two are trimeters with four syllables in the first foot, two in the second, and one in the last; and the final line is a trimeter with four syllables in two feet followed by a monosyllabic ending. All the lines begin with two unstressed syllables. The combination of eight of these lines makes a larger rhythmical pattern, the stanza. Eleven of the stanzas of the poem are made up of slightly different combinations of the three types of rhythm in this first stanza. Then there are two other types of stanza occasionally interspersed, of totally different rhythms that make pleasing changes in the music of the poem. One is composed of duple tetrameter alternating with trimeter:

And there La | Travi- | ata | sighs
Another sadder song;

And there Il Trovatore cries

A tale of deeper wrong;

And bolder knights to battle go

With sword and shield and lance,

Than ever here on earth below

Have whirled into a dance!

The other form of stanza is composed of duple octameter alternating with heptameter:14

Go down to Kew in | lilac- | time, in | lilac- | time, in | lilac- | time; Go down to Kew in lilac-time (it isn't far from London!)

And you shall wander hand in hand with love in Summer's wonderland;

Go down to Kew in lilac-time (it isn't far from London!)

The poem with the exception of four or five lines out of a total of 166 is composed on the seven pattern lines pointed out, arranged in larger patterns, or stanzas.

The reader who is interested should study a collection like the Oxford Book of Verse to understand the manifold possibilities of metrical and rhythmical patterns that have been used by English poets.

14 One might increase the tempo of this and read it as quadruple tetrameter:

Go down to Kew in | lilac-time, in | lilac-time, in | lilac-time.

CHAPTER V

PROSE AND VERSE1

Several times in the preceding pages, "a prose reading" of a passage has been mentioned as something different from "a verse reading." Before going further with the discussion of verse we shall have to determine if possible what the chief distinctions are from the point of view of rhythm— between prose and verse.

Will the reader be patient enough to read the following passage of prose, trying to decide upon which syllables he puts prominent accents?

Likewise had he served a year on board a
merchantman, and made himself full sailor;
and he thrice had plucked a life from the
dread sweep of the down-streaming/seas: and
all men looked upon him favourably. He
purchased his own boat, and made a home
for Annie, neat and nestlike, half way up
the narrow street.

Now what is the difference between the passage as you just read it and as you read it when divided into lines of verse as follows?

Likewise had he served a year

On board a merchantman, and made himself
Full sailor; and he thrice had plucked a life

From the dread sweep of the down-streaming seas:
And all men looked upon him favourably.

1 Portions of this chapter have already appeared in the Sewanee Review (Apr., 1918) in an article, "The Rhythms of Prose and of Free Verse."