Such omissions, seldom if ever found in narrative blank verse, are quite explicable on the stage, where their place is supplied by some gesture or intonation of the voice. Less easy to account for is the omission of the unaccented syllable at the beginning of the line, e. g. : Out, you rogue! | you pluck | my foot | awry. The Taming of the Shrew, iv. 1, 150. Pray, good shepherd, what | fair swain | is this? The Winter's Tale, iv. 4, 166. The movement is changed from iambic to trochaic. 6. Extra unaccented syllable at the end of the line. This is not uncommon in dramatic blank verse, e. g. : But music for the time doth change his nature. And burn in many places; on the topmast, The yards and bowsprit, would I flame distinctly. 1, 82. but is rare in narrative. E. g.: The Tempest, i. 2, 199. Sends from its woods of muskrose twin'd with jasmine. SHELLEY: Alastor. 200. 7. Light and weak endings. The line-end is said to be light when the final metrical accent falls upon a word which can bear it only partially. Such words are am, are; do, does; I, they, thou, etc. The ending is weak when the final accent falls upon a word which cannot bear it at all. Such words are and, for, if, in, to, etc. The effect of a light or a weak ending is to run the elocution over to the next line; hence such verse is technically called run-on verse. Whereas verse in which the voice can pause at the line-end is called end-stopt. The distinction is important in the study of the Elizabethan drama. According as the percentage of run-on lines in a given drama is small or large, the drama is considered to belong to the early or the late period. In fact, the distinction has been used for determining the relative age of a Shakespearean play, when external evidence of age is wanting. The following passages illustrate the difference between end-stopt and run-on verse: A league from Epidamnum had we sail'd, A doubtful warrant of immediate death. Comedy of Errors, i. 1, 63–69. These three have robb'd me; and this demi-devil- To take my life. Two of these fellows you Must know and own; this thing of darkness I The Tempest, v. 1, 272-277. One grave shall be for both; upon them shall The Winter's Tale, iii. 2, 237–241. The contrast between Shakespeare's earlier and later manner is palpable. The lines from the Comedy of Errors are almost sing-song in their cadence. In The Tempest note the superfluous syllable in devil, with them, the light endings you, I; in The Winter's Tale, the superfluous syllable in visit, the light ending shall, and the weak ending unto. And in both the later plays note the shifting of the cæsura. The combined effect of superfluous end-syllable, shifting cæsura, and light-weak ending was to give to the later dramatic verse a remarkable fluidity. The sense flows on in long stretches, running through line after line, in apparent disregard of line-beginning or line-ending. Milton accomplishes a somewhat similar effect by means of his hovering accents, cæsural pauses, and choriambics, without weak endings. But Milton's verse, although highly diversified and harmonious, is far from having the fluidity, the nimbleness, of the verse of Shakespeare and some of Shakespeare's successors. And the same may be said of the blank verse of Wordsworth, Tennyson, and Browning. The only nineteenth century poet who has attempted the frequent use of light-weak endings is Byron, especially in his Cain. 8. In reading Elizabethan blank verse we are to remember that the accent and pronunciation of those days differed somewhat from our own. E. g., words like complexion might be, and were sometimes, pronounced complexion, etc.; on the other hand, innocence might be slurred into inn'cence, as in Middleton's line: As wild and merry as the heart of innocence. Speculative and medicine were slurred into speclative and medcine. Candlestick might be pronounced as canstick, ignominy as ignomy: spirit and sprite were equivalents, also whether and whe'r. It is not possible to mention here all the peculiarities of Elizabethan pronunciation. The careful reader will overcome most of them with a little ingenuity. The fullest treatment accessible to the general student is that in the section entitled Prosody, in E. A. Abbott's Shakespearean Grammar; Macmillan & Co. 201. Terza Rima.-This peculiar Italian metre, employed occasionally by a few of the Elizabethan poets, has been made somewhat prominent in the nineteenth century by students of Italian poetry, especially in their translations of Dante. Byron's Prophecy of Dante is written in terza rima, so are Shelley's Ode to the West Wind, The Triumph of Life, Prince Athanase, and The Woodman and the Nightingale.* Among the translations of Dante may be mentioned those by C. B. Cayley and Mrs. Ramsay. * The metre of Byron and Shelley is irregular, in comparison with that of Dante. The line is iambic pentameter, but (in Italian) always ending in an eleventh unaccented syllable. The lines are in stanzas of three. The rhymes are arranged in the formula a ba; bcb; c d c, etc. The meaning comes to a stop, usually a full stop, with every stanza, while the rhyme is carried over to the following stanza. Every reader, even though he be wholly unfamiliar with Italian, can perceive these features in the following extract, the opening of Canto iii. of the Inferno, the inscription on the gate of Hell: Per me si va nella città dolente, Per me si va nell' eterno dolore, La somma Sapienzia e il primo Amore. Lasciate ogni speranza voi ch' entrate. Note the rhymes dolente, gente; dolore, Fattore, Amore; Potestate, create, entrate, with the extra unaccented syllable at the end. Also note the full stop after gente, Amore, entrate. In Mrs. Ramsay's translation the above reads: Through me ye pass the mournful city's door, By justice moved, my Maker willed it so, When I was formed by the Supremest Mind, If not eternal; ever I endure: O ye who enter here leave hope behind. The best English terza rima, whether original verse or translation, is far below the Italian. This inferiority is mainly due to the inability of our language to yield a continuous supply of double rhymes. The fluidity of Dante's verse, its lilt, due to this extra-syllabic overflow, is equalled only by its sustained dignity. We must also remember that the terza rima, although a three-line stanza, does not produce the effect of stanza measure upon the ear; its effect is that of continuous verse. This is due to the carrying-over of the rhyme. 6. IRREGULAR RHYTHMS. 202. Occasionally the reader of modern literature meets with poems, usually short lyrics, which he is unable to fit into any regular metre, whether iambic or trochaic, anapæstic or dactylic. Such poems are best treated as rhythmical, rather than metrical. Looked at from the historical point of view, they are doubtless a product of the folkspirit, a survival of the transition-period when the AngloSaxon alliterative verse, with its four beats to the line, was giving way before the metrical verse borrowed or imitated from Latin, French, or Italian. James VI. of Scotland named the rhythm tumbling verse. These rhythmical lines have usually four beats, i. e., four strongly-accented syllables, to the line; but sometimes there are only three beats. The four-beat line has a strongly-marked cæsura. E. g.: My ragged rontes all shiver and shake, As doen high Towers in an earthquake: They wont in the wind wagge their wrigle tayles, Perk as a Peacock; but now it avales.* SPENSER: Shepherd's Calendar, February. Note the alliteration in the above; also in the following ballad: Wandering thus wearilye, all alone, up and downe, With a rude miller he mett at the last: The King and, the Miller of Mansfield. *Rontes, young bullocks; it avales, it droops, declines. |