And she prayed to the angels

To keep me from harm,

To the queen of the angels

To shield me from harm.

The same method is to be observed also in "Annabel Lee":

For the moon never beams, without bringing me dreams
Of the beautiful Annabel Lee;

And the stars never rise, but I feel the bright eyes
Of the beautiful Annabel Lee;

And so, all the night-tide, I lie down by the side
Of my darling, my darling — my life and my bride,
In her sepulchre there by the sea,

In her tomb by the sounding sea.

And in "Ulalume," the principle seems to have been carried to an even further extreme:

Our talk had been serious and sober,

But our thoughts they were palsied and sere,
Our memories were treacherous and sere,

For we knew not the month was October,
And we marked not the night of the year,
(Ah, night of all nights in the year!)
We noted not the dim lake of Auber

(Though once we had journeyed down here),
Remembered not the dank tarn of Auber

Nor the ghoul-haunted woodland of Weir.

This stanza has a magic melody, even if its meaning is vague and uncertain; it steals over us like a strain of music. And its insinuating charm is due to dexterity of rhythmic variation, to adroitness in invention of rime, and, above all, to tone-color, to the choice and to the contrast of the mere sounds.

Perhaps this chapter cannot end better than with a pregnant quotation from Stevenson's most illumi

native essay on "Style in Literature": "Each phrase in literature is built of sounds, as each phrase in music consists of notes. One sound suggests, echoes, demands, and harmonizes with another; and the art of rightly using these concordances is the final art in literature. It used to be a piece of good advice to all young writers to avoid alliteration; and the advice was sound, in so far as it prevented daubing. None the less for that, was it abominable nonsense, and the merest raving of the blindest of the blind who will not see. The beauty of the contents of a phrase, or of a sentence, depends implicitly upon alliteration and upon assonance. The vowel demands to be repeated. The consonant demands to be repeated; and both cry aloud to be perpetually varied. You may follow the adventures of a letter through any passage that has particularly pleased you; find it perhaps denied a while, to tantalize the ear; find it fired at you again in a whole broadside; or find it pass into congenerous sounds, one liquid or labial melting away into another."

CHAPTER VI

THE STANZA

Verse to the true poet is no clog. It is idly called a trammel and a difficulty. It is a help. It springs from the same enthusiasm as the rest of his impulses, and is necessary to their satisfaction and effect. Verse is no more a clog than the condition of rushing upward is a clog to fire, or than the roundness and order of the globe is a clog to the freedom and variety that abound within its sphere. Verse is no dominator over the poet, except inasmuch as the bond is reciprocal, and the poet dominates over the verse. - LEIGH HUNT: What is Poetry?

EPIC, idyllic and narrative poems, as well as didactic, descriptive and satiric verse, are usually written continuously without subdivision into minor parts of a rigid length. They may be set off into books or cantos; but they are not cut up into stanzas. That is to say, they may have a series of chapters, but they are not measured off into equal paragraphs. Lyric poetry, including the ballad and often also the story in verse, is generally composed of a succession of stanzas identical in structure and uniform in length. Thus the stanza is the unit, of which the sequence constitutes the poem. It is a part of the whole; and yet it is complete in itself. It resembles the paragraph of prose-composition, except that it has uniformity of length and of structure.

In the majority of the poems written in the modern languages, rime is employed to make the framework of the stanza clearly perceptible to the ear. Rime not only marks off the ends of the several lines, it serves also to organize and to coördinate the stanza

itself. It sustains the architecture of the often elaborate form. This is an added reason why rime should be exact and perfect, so that the ear may the more readily perceive the scheme of the stanza, however complex this may be. And as this apprehension and retention of the skeleton of the structure imposes more or less burden upon the ear, there is a certain disadvantage in a stanza which is too protracted in length, or too complicated in arrangement. This must ever be borne in mind, in spite of the fact that some stanzaic constructions which are neither short nor simple, have a sweeping amplitude gratefully welcomed by the ear.

The stanza may be any length, from two lines to a dozen or more. A succession of couplets, each complete in itself, might seem to be unduly monotonous to carry a story satisfactorily. Yet the couplet is the simple form chosen by Whittier to tell about "Maud Muller" and "Barbara Frietchie." In the first, the sense is generally coincident with the couplet:

Maud Muller on a summer's day
Raked the meadow sweet with hay.

Bcneath her torn hat glowed the wealth
Of simple beauty and rustic health.

In the second, the poet sometimes lets the thought run on from couplet to couplet:

Up from the meadows rich with corn,
Clear in the cool September morn,

The clustered spires of Frederick stand
Green-walled by the hills of Maryland.

The couplet is also the form preferred by Austin Dobson for his "Ballad of Beau Brocade":

Seventeen hundred and thirty-nine —
That was the date of this tale of mine.

First great George was buried and gone;
George the Second was plodding on.

The British bard, it must be noted, allowed himself the liberty of an occasional triplet to interrupt the current of his couplets:

Out spoke Dolly the chambermaid,
(Tremulous now and sore afraid,)
"Stand and deliver, O Beau Brocade !"

Firing then, out of sheer alarm,

Hit the Beau in the bridle arm.

Button the first went none knows where,
But it carried away his solitaire ;

Button the second a circuit made,

Glanced in under the shoulder-blade ;

Down from the saddle fell Beau Brocade.

The triplet has also served as a stanza, generally tied together by a single rime, as in Longfellow's "Maidenhood":

Maiden! with the meek, brown eyes,
In whose orbs a shadow lies

Like the dusk in evening skies!

Thou whose locks outshine the sun,
Golden tresses, wreathed in one,
As the braided streamlets run!

Standing, with reluctant feet,
Where the brook and river meet,
Womanhood and childhood fleet !