Puslapio vaizdai
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Chaucer makes large use of feminine endings, made necessary by the survival of the e-termination, which was the remainder of a dozen inflections in Anglo-Saxon. In rounding out his lines, or even his stanzas, he shows easy mastery of the arts of finishing or running-on, as the case demands.

In Anelida and Arcite (272-80 and 333-41) are internal rhymes.

"Cadence" in the following (House of Fame) is a puzzle to the Chaucerians (for one conjecture see Skeat's edition of the works, III, 257):

"And neverthelesse hast set thy wyt

(Although that in thy heed ful lyte is)
To make bookes, songes, or dytees
In ryme or elles in cadence."

Tone-color, that elusive thing, midway between the highest æsthetic fact and the merest imaginative self-deception, beautifully appears in the "O Alma Redemptoris" passages of The Prioress' Tale, in the key-phrase of which Chaucer introduced the two most melodious of vowel-sounds, o and a.

Finally, this master of heroic couplet, octosyllabic couplet, stanza, and

"many an ympne for your halydayes, That highten Balades, Roundels, Virelayes"

(Legend of Good Women, 422-3).

illustrates his facile knowledge of all the prosody of his day by the jocose Rime of Sir Thopas, so swiftly interrupted by the gentle penalty of the poet's prose:

"Here the Hoost stynteth Chaucer of his Tale of Thopas:

"Na moore of this, for Goddes dignitee!'
Quod oure Hoste, 'for thou makest me
So wery of thy verray lewednesse
That, also wisly God my soule blesse,
Min eres aken of thy drasty speche.
Now swich a rym the devel I biteche!
This may wel be rym dogerel,' quod he.
'Why so,' quod I; 'why wiltow lette me
Moore of my tale than another man,
Syn that it is the beste ryme I kan?'
'By God,' quod he, 'for pleynly, at a word,
Thy drasty ryming is not worth a toord;

Thou doest noght elles but despendest tyme;
Sire, at o word, thou shalt no lenger ryme.
Lat se wher thou kanst tellen aught in geeste,
Or telle in prose somwhat, at the leeste,

In which ther be som murthe, or som doctryne."

No pioneer poet of any language can show in his verse-forms such a variety of commanding and influential achievements. It is, accordingly, amusing to remember that the late Professor Earle, on the basis of the well-known lines in the Compleynte of Venus (which is in three ballades, with one envoy) —

"And eek to me hit is a greet penaunce,
Sith rym in English hath swich scarsitee,
To folowe word by word the curiositee

Of Graunson, flour of hem that make in France"

gravely assured us that "Chaucer felt the difficulty of rhyming in English; he could not keep pace with the French rhymers." (Chaucer really left the English rhyme-art, in all of its essentials, in no need of improvement.

After Chaucer, not the deluge, but dwindling rills.) Gower used the octosyllabic couplet with fluency, though not always with poetic beauty. His Confessio Amantis is as dull and wordy as the Ormulum, without Orm's excuse of pioneer toils, and without the naïvété which gives the Ormulum a certain charm. Saintsbury thinks that Gower's octosyllables were written con amore, while Chaucer's were written against the grain; he adds the conjecture that Gower's tetrameter form probably influenced Wither, possibly Keats, and certainly William Morris, "the actual author of the greatest examples of it in English, taking bulk and merit together." If anybody is inclined to think that Keats was influenced by Gower, let him turn from Gower to The Eve of St. Mark.1 There is, however, a curiously Morrislike swing in the quotation from Gower's Medea story, cited by Saintsbury (History of English Prosody, 141).

There seems to be something unlucky in comments on this metre, Mr. R. L. Alden, in his English Verse, says that "in modern English poetry this short couplet has rarely been used for continuous narrative of a serious character, except by Byron and Wordsworth," a remark which shows how easily one forgets the most obvious things of all, such as Marmion, The Lady of the Lake, The Lay of the Last Minstrel, and Snow-Bound.

To Puttenham (1589) Gower was especially odious; Puttenham goes so far as to call him a bungler and not a poet, and to say that "to make up his rhyme" he "would for the most part write his terminant syllable with false orthography," which is, of course, a great exaggeration.

Gower, like Chaucer, rhymes indentical sounds with different meanings: laste (endure): laste (end); ungood: good.

In the fifteenth century spelling and pronunciation were in so changeable a state that poets were both advantaged and disadvantaged by the consequent freedom given them. In Skelton one finds at times a rudeness of rhymes almost as wayward as that in the anonymous ballads of his century, and amounting to little more than haphazard assonance, — for example, gentle: mantle; nept: set: violet; health: wealth: himself; jug: luck: chuck. Skelton put on record the fact that he did not care whether his

"rime be ragged,

Tattered and jagged,
Rudely raine-beaten,
Rusty and moth-eaten,"

so long as people understood and liked it; and his rapidly running verse bears out his easy theory. But his "voluble breathless doggerel," as John Churton Collins calls it, was meant, in part, to be dramatic, as put into the mouths of the common folk. At its worst it is dull and clumsy; at its best it shows the variety and force of an experimenter seeking greater freedom in number of accents, in internal rhymes, in the number of lines ending with the same rhyme, and in novel words. Skelton was a rude anticipator of Butler, Barham, and Mahony.

In the ballads of the fifteenth and following centuries, as in the popular sentimental songs and music-hall jingles of our own day, no nicety of rhyme was asked or given; it was enough that the ear be caught by any recurrent similarity. In Barbara Allen we have the assonantal dwellin': Allen (compare Scott's Helvellyn: yelling and Wordsworth's sullen: pulling); in Fair Helen green: e'en: tying; in Sir Patrick Spens deep: feet; mourn: storm; in The Dragon of Wantley warrant ye: Wantley; and so on, indefinitely. In the gem of all the English ballads, A Lyke

Wake Dirge, the beauty of thought and word is such that even the modern reader does not stop to notice the rhyme passe: last. Everything was subordinated to the prime requisite of a lyric: the effective expression of feeling; and so it made no difference whether there were the prodigality of internal rhyme, or scarcely any good rhyme at all or what number of syllables occurred in the line, so long as the number of beats was usually preserved. Coleridge's insistence that the line should be measured by its stresses, not its syllables, was anticipated in the old English ballads over and over again. So, too, was the "common metre" of the later hymn-writers; virtually a seven-stressed iambic line, indifferently with or without rhymes at the fourth stresses. It was not strange that the ballads, when repopularized by Percy and Scott, were the very groundwork of the Romantic revival in England at the beginning of the nineteenth century.1 The great charm of the ballads is the charm of all romantic poetry in English, when at its best: the combination of unity with variety, of fixity with freedom, in which English verse is supreme in all literature.

The refrains of the ballads are sometimes bound to the stanzas by rhyme, but usually, and preferably, not; for the refrain, like Hebrew parallelism, is in itself an idea-rhyme.

Perhaps the worst constructive fault chargeable against the ballads is an occasional excessive use of internal rhyme, which so easily degenerates into doggerel, as in the later American religious "classic" of the seventeenth century: Michael Wigglesworth's Day of Doom. Internal rhyme, when freely used, demands the genius of a Coleridge or a Poe to make it endurable. And Coleridge and Poe, unlike the authors of the Nutbrowne Maide and the Day of Doom, knew enough to vary it. All iterations, too near together, become wearisome after a little, like Gawain Douglas' "Vertew, quhais trew sweit dew ouirthrew al vice" or Swinburne's "sad bad mad glad" Villon. Tricks should be concealed, not magnified.

1 Sometimes the modernness of old folk-poetry is startling, as in the beautiful swing of a stanza from the part of Eve in a Coventry play:

"Alas that ever that speech was spoken

That the false angel said unto me;

Alas, our Maker's bidding is broken,

For I have touched his own dear tree."

VII

THE ELIZABETHANS AND THE RHYME

CONTROVERSY

EVERY reader of Palgrave's Golden Treasury has recognized, a hundred times, the appropriateness of giving the first page to Thomas Nash's poem on Spring. In its artless spontaneity it suggests the first song-sparrows, twittering on the trees before the snow has melted beneath. The general scansion of most of the lines, if you must hunt it out, is the familiar iambic pentameter; but the start is a trochee, and the voice falls, here and there, into three strong stresses in each half-line, the caesura emphasized by the prodigal internal-rhymes. It is the very expression of that license in law of which each springtide reminds

us anew:

"Spring, the sweet Spring, is the year's pleasant king;
Then blooms each thing, then maids dance in a ring,
Cold doth not sting, the pretty birds do sing,

Cuckoo, jug-jug, pu-we, to-witta-woo!

Free as the poem is, the mono-rhymes are perfect, according to the modern standard, with the exception of meet: sit. Nash's contemporaries, however, suggest an earlier method. In Wyatt we have cruelty: liberty: extremity; washeth: departeth: perceiveth: plaineth: fleeth: appeareth: feareth; reason: season: condition: fashion; forgetfulness: cruelness: readiness: fearfulness (in every case the accent on the last syllable). If Wyatt and ✔Surrey had had their way, the eye would have had as much to do with rhyme as the ear. Some of Wyatt's lines seem to the modern reader almost unscannable. Here, for instance, is a part of his translation of Petrarch's sixty-first sonnet:

"I will not in my gráve be búriéd,

Nor ón my tómb your náme have fíxed fást,
As crúel caúse that did the spírit soon háste
From th' únhappý bones, bý great síghs stirréd."

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