SESTINA TO F. H. In fair Provence, the land of lute and rose, "Harsh be my lines," cried Arnaut, “harsh the woe, It is not told if her untoward heart Perchance through crowd of dark conceits he rose And crowned his later years with sterner rhyme. This thing alone we know: the triple rhyme, "Smith of his mother-tongue," the Frenchman sang Of Lancelot and Galahad, the rhyme That beat so bloodlike at its core of rose, It stirred the sweet Francesca's gentle heart To take that kiss that brought her so much woe, And Dante, full of her immortal love, On fair Francesca's memory drops the rose. Ah! sovereign Love, forgive this weaker rhyme! From reading the above poem it will be seen that not rime but repetition of end words characterizes the sestina. The end-words of the first line are repeated in an order which will permit the last end-word of each stanza to be the first end-word of the next, the sequence being 123456, 615243, 364125, 532614, 451362, 246531. The three-line envoy has three of the terminal-words at the ends, the others earlier in the lines. The end-words sometimes rime, and the arrangement here outlined is not always followed. This exotic form vies with the chant royal in difficulty of structure. In theory, the end-words should be important nouns, which are turned and re-turned in the dreaming mind of the poet. The use of the verb rose for the noun in the third stanza should thus be regarded as a flaw in a careful piece of workmanship. In conclusion, mention by name should be made of a few other structural types. Kyrielle is a term sometimes applied to a series of quatrains linked by a common fourth line. In chain verse the last line of one stanza becomes the first line of the next; more rarely, the last word of one stanza becomes the first word of the next. The rondeau redoublé, glose, lay, virelai, Sicilian octave, and other rare forms deserve no place in an anthology of limited scope. The bibliography contains suggestions for further study. It is interesting to note that foreign languages are still being exploited for structural forms suitable for adaptation in English. It is quite possible, for instance, that Witter Bynner, Amy Lowell, or some other modern poet may find in Japanese or Chinese poetry a form worthy of permanent cultivation in English. Experiments and innovations have been numerous of late. The extravagant restraint of the artificial forms and the unrestraint of free verse are the extreme right and the extreme left in the poetry of today. CHAPTER IX LIGHT VERSE I would be the Lyric Rather than the Epic Memory lets slip. Thomas Bailey Aldrich: "Lyrics and Epics" IN "The Day is Done" which was prefixed to The Waif, a collection of poems by minor poets, Longfellow eloquently defended the humbler poets, whom we sometimes choose to read rather than "the grand old masters," the bards sublime Whose distant footsteps echo Indeed, there is more than one kind of poetry in which the lesser poets, like Longfellow and Aldrich, are the masters. This, as we have seen, is true of patriotic songs. and the French forms; and it is equally true of light verse. The great poet, Wordsworth or Milton for instance, is generally too deeply in earnest, too passionate, sometimes too unsocial to write what must seem to him mere literary small talk. In fact, the major poets who have tried to trip it on the light fantastic toe have nearly always failed. In spite of an apparent ease, "the familiar [style] is," as Cowper pointed out, "of all styles the most difficult to succeed in." Only the poet who is also a man of the world like Holmes or Thackeray can produce these "immortal ephemera.' The most important form of lighter poetry is that usually called vers de société. Since an example is often more enlightening than a definition, let us first examine a fairly typical poem of this kind. Bret Harte, although most people remember him only for his stories, was also a poet of considerable importance. In "Her Letter" the daughter of a gold miner who has "struck it rich" is writing from New York to her sweetheart in California. HER LETTER I'm sitting alone by the fire, Dressed just as I came from the dance, A dozen engagements I've broken; That waits on the stairs-for me yet. And you, sir, are turning your nose up, Three thousand miles off, as you read. |