Such perfection of form is unusual, and, of course, with many themes this cumulative effect would be out of place, but wherever possible, the poet should strive for it. Stanzas are practically always built on a framework of rime pattern. There are very few successful poems in English in unrimed stanzaic form. Tennyson's Tears, Idle Tears has been quoted before1 as an example. Notice that in this poem the sense does not run over the line, as in the best blank verse, and that the end of the fifth line of each of the four stanzas is the refrain, "The days that are no more." This grammatical pause at the end of the line and the use of the refrain are also characteristic of Longfellow's Bells of Lynn and Lamb's Old Familiar Faces. Blake's To Spring has neither of these aids to keep the stanza form clear: O thou with dewy locks, who lookest down Which in full choir hails thy approach, O Spring! The hills tell one another, and the listening And let thy holy feet visit our clime! The poem from which this is quoted is really sixteen lines of blank verse phrased in four-line paragraphs. The stanzas are purely a matter of printing. The ear likewise would find the unrimed stanza form of Collins's greatly admired Ode to Evening, or, Keble's Burial of the Dead, difficult to grasp. 1 See above, p. 82. The Southey's three hundred page poem, Thalaba, the Destroyer, is a most ambitious attempt at unrimed stanzas. opening of it is typical: How beautiful is night! A dewy freshness fills the silent air; No mist obscures, nor cloud, no speech, nor stain In full-orbed glory yonder morn divine The desert circle spreads, Like the round ocean, girded with the sky. The poet here has tried to keep the lines distinct by the phrasing, but the stanza is purely arranged for the eye, not the ear, for the length of the stanzas and length and arrangement of the lines composing them are constantly changing throughout the poem. The result, in spite of the elaborate indentations of the printer, is free verse like Matthew Arnold's. It should be added that it is excellent verse, but without the stanzaic organization that the poet probably wished. The important thing in writing unrimed stanzas, beside keeping the line and stanza pattern regular and distinct, is not leading the reader to expect a rime which does not come. The jolt with which one arrives at the end of the fourth line of Southey's early experiment, the Spanish Armada, is most painful: Clear shone the moon, the gale was fair, When from Corunna's crowded port, With many a cheerful shout and loud acclaim, The huge Armada, passed. The annoyance is caused by the ballad swing that starts the recognized stanza form and makes us expect the rime that is always associated with it. All these stanzas without rime are comparatively rare in English verse, and, like the imitations of classical rhythms, must be regarded chiefly as experiments. Stanzas are practically always rimed. The form of a stanza is a fixed, but purely arbitrary matter, quite at the option of the poet. Almost every combination of length of line and variety of rime-scheme seems to have been tried in the course of English poetry. Certain forms, however, have been given preference over others by the poets; and some stanzas by association with great masterpieces, have come to have a fitness for certain kinds of subject matter. Fashion is as arbitrary in poetic forms as everywhere else, and breaches of it, however rational, are likely to be met with disapproval. The ballad stanza suggests simple narrative; the heroic quatrain a reflective mood; the sonnet, "a moment's monument." There is no reason for these correspondences of form and subject except that the usage of poets has made us expect them. Mr. John Masefield's brutally realistic narratives written in "rime royal" the stanza form associated with the Scottish James I. and Chaucerian romance-are like an over-dressed kitchen maid, For different styles with different subjects sort, As several garbs with country, town, and court. There are not many poetic forms so consistently devoted to one type of thought that one may venture to be dogmatic about them. In general, the simpler stanzas are best for simple narrations or simple ideas, and the more intricate forms had better be reserved for elaborate story-telling, or for subtler or more complex poetic thought. In the following pages, the forms in most frequent use are exemplified; the list, by no means pretends to be exhaustive. Two line stanzas are used in a very few poems: Up and away through the drifting rain! Up and away from the council board! The king is blind with gnashing his teeth! Rossetti's White Ship and Kipling's Bo Da Thone are other ballads in this form. There is no difference, except in the printing, between this and the continuous couplet.2 Tennyson's Higher Pantheism is written in two line stanzas of trochaic-dactylic hexameters, and his Locksley Hall in two line stanzas of trochaic octameter lines. In the usual iambic movement these long lines rimed in pairs would be exactly the same as quatrains of short lines. 3 Tercets, three line stanzas riming a a a, were in considerable favor in the seventeenth century. They were used with great charm by Fletcher, Herrick, and Rochester. The following, in trochaic movement, are supposed to be by Shakespeare: Truth may seem, but cannot be; To this urn let those repair That are either true or fair; For these dead birds sigh a prayer. (Threnos in Phoenix and the Turtle.) In the nineteenth century, Lamb wrote his In My Own Album in tercets, and Tennyson used them for his Two See Chapter X. For a discussion of Locksley Hall see Chapter XVI. Voices and the fragment, the Eagle: He clasps the crag with hooked hands; The wrinkled sea beneath him crawls;' Other examples in tetrameter are Landor's Children Playing in a Churchyard and Longfellow's Maidenhood. Kipling's Mulholland's Contract is an example in lines of seven feet, occasionally varied by lines of six: I had been singin' to them to keep 'em quiet For the lower deck is the dangerousest, requirin' constant care, An' give to me, as the strongest man, though The form has also been used with a dactylic movement: Maiden most beautiful, mother most wonderful, lady of lands, Queen and republican, crowned of the centuries whose years are thy sands, See for thy sake what we bring to thee, here in our hands. Terza rima is a continuous form composed of pentameter tercets, each linked to the preceding tercet by the rime scheme (aba, bcb, cdc, ded, ... . . etc.). The final stanza of the poem is a quatrain, linked to the preceding tercet by the rime scheme (... ded, efe, fgfg). Terza rima is the form of Dante's Divina Commedia; it has not been used to any great extent in English. It was introduced by Wyatt and used in one or two poems by Sidney, Daniel, Drummond, and Milton. In the nineteenth century it was used by Byron |