What would the eighteenth century have thought of some of Browning's effects, if Shakespeare and Milton were considered irregular! There is no reason a priori that any arrangement of syllables that is possible to read in approximately equal time parts should not please our ear as it did the ears of the Saxons, but poets have accustomed us to certain rhythms and neglected others so that we call unusual ones bad verse. Chaucer could write, or, Twenty | bokës | clad in | black or | red (Canterbury Tales, Prologue, 294.) I mene of Mark, | Mathew, | Luk and | John in contexts of lines of ten syllables. Shakespeare and other Elizabethans also used the nine syllable line occasionally, e. g. | Dear my lord, if | you in your own proof (Much Ado About Nothing, IV, i, 46.) A third | thinks with- | out ex- | pense at all. (Henry VI, Part I, i, 76.) Modern poets, however, have accustomed our ears to consider this a blemish, so that when a blank verse line begins with direct attack there must be three syllables in the first foot, e. g. Guarded the sacred | shield of | Lance- | lot (Tennyson: Lancelot and Elaine.) How far allowable variation has gone in modern poetry may be seen by reading (in their contexts) the lines quoted in the last chapter as examples of lines with different kinds of feet. The rhythmical pattern of a line must be clearly marked by the poet if he expects his verses to be read as he intended. Poe has put it very strongly: "That rhythm is erroneous (at some point or other more or less obvious) which any ordinary reader can, without design, read improperly. It is the business of the poet so to construct his line that the intention must be caught at once."6 The lack of clearness of rhythmical pattern in a line may cause it to be read as prose, or may very often lead the reader to change the metrical pattern, i. e. to divide the line into a meter that is not consistent with the rest of the lines in the passage. For example, the verse, How happy could I be with either, may be read as duple tetrameter or triple trimeter;" but the context, Were t'other dear charmer away, shows that the second reading was intended by the poet. Professor Lewis has amusingly suggested that the Miltonic lines with two light stresses distributed as in, His ministèrs of véngeance and pursuit, would fit perfectly into a context of trimeter like, When the enterprising burglar isn't búrgling," (W. S. Gilbert: Pirates of Penzance.) though they may also be read perfectly in the duple pentameter of Paradise Lost. As the subjectivity of rhythm is very largely relied upon by the poet to insure a correct reading of his verses, it is very unfair to judge isolated lines. or, Poe: Rationale of Verse. 7e. g. How happy | could I | be with | either, How happy could I be with | either. & Principles of English Verse, p. 46. Metrical pattern (a regular number of feet to each line) may be varied slightly, just as rhythmical pattern may. Shakespeare occasionally introduces lines of two, three, four, or six feet into his pentameter. Here is one of three feet, which occurs in the middle of a soliloquy: I see thee yet in form as palpable As This which now I draw. Thou marshallst me the way That I was going. (Macbeth, II.) This breaking the metrical pattern with a short line is rarely found except in dramatic verse. The introduction of a hexameter (alexandrine) in rimed pentameter, however, was a very frequent trick of the eighteenth century poets. Radical changes in meter should be intentional on the part of the poet; he should not write lines of rhythm so ambiguous that his readers unconsciously fall into another meter. When one reads the following lines apart from their context one tends to make them tetrameter: Fears of the brave and Follies of the wise. (Johnson: Vanity of Human Wishes.) Because Thou hast hearkened to the voice of Thy wife, (Paradise Lost, X, 198.) but they easily fall into a pentameter division when read in their pentameter contexts: In life's last | Fears of the scene what | prodi- | gies sur- | prise, On | Adam | last thus | judgment | he pro- | nounced:- These seem to me allowable lines in spite of the fact that one might misread them at first. The lines that follow • The commonest change in meter is the introduction of the tensyllable tetrameter in the pentameter line. See Chapter XI. below, however, though their authorship is most distinguished I cannot admire as well written pentameters. To divide them into five time parts the prose accents of the words must be so wrenched that the effect is very artificial. Light from above from the fountain of light. (Paradise Lost, IV, 289.) And made him bow to the gods of his wives (Paradise Regained, II, 171.) Thank me no thankings nor proud me no prouds. Illimitable, insuperable, infinite. (Romeo and Juliet.) (Swinburne: Elegy on Burton.) These lines show how too great a change in an established rhythmic pattern may lead to an ambiguity in meter. Sometimes, in dramatic verse, lines are introduced that 10 Lowell (Essay on Milton) suggests that the printer may have dropped a word, and emends the line to read, Burnt after them down to the bottomless pit. probably are not meant to scan. The following from Romeo and Juliet could be read as pentameter, thus: | Day, | night, | hour, tîde, | time, wôrk, | play, or, we may consider that the rhythm is broken by the anger of the speaker, and read it as prose. Verse pattern in modern poetry has been carried even farther than merely establishing a norm of a certain meter and a duple, triple, or duple-triple rhythm. A fixed sequence of variation may be taken as a pattern, for instance, the scheme, represents the rhythmic pattern of Swinburne's Lines on the Death of Trelawney, i. e., each line begins with direct attack and the second foot of each is always trisyllabic: | Winds that warred with the | winds of | morning, Close at last, and a film is drawn Over the eyes of the storm-bird, scorning Waves that threaten or waves that fawn. This elaborate symmetry of arrangement makes a sort of verse-tune. It is, of course, a necessity in verse written in imitation of classical rhythms. A fixed and definite pattern is characteristic of nearly all Greek and Latin measures. The Lesser Sapphic stanza, for example, is composed of three pentameter lines concluded by one dimeter. The pentameters begin with direct attack and have a trisyllabic ripple in the middle, e. g. | Saw the white im- | placable | Aphro- | dite, Saw the hair un- | bound and the | feet un- | sandalled Saw the reluctant |