rapidly written is found in the imperfect internal rhyme in the next-to-the-last line of the third stanza: "And summer pools could hardly cool The fever on my brow." The consecutive high: sky: joy: boy of the last stanza indicates that in Hood's day the ǝi sound of joy, etc., no longer existed.1 Hood, by the way, once produced what is a strong candidate even when we remember the later cacophonies of the Brownings for the place of the worst rhyme (not jocosely intended) in the language. It occurs in his imaginative poem The Elm Tree, evidently written under the influence of Coleridge: 1 A parody is a sort of elaborated rhyme, in which there is a series of contrasts between the ideas of the one poem and those of the other, place by place. Thus Miss Carolyn Wells begins her parody of Hood's Past and Present: and ends it with "I remember, I remember The flat where I was born: The little air-shaft where the sun "I live in first-floor chambers now, With nothing to annoy, But still I'm farther off from heaven X MODERN RHYME INFLUENCES in poetry cannot infallibly be traced; "For who has sight so keen and strong That it can follow the flight of song?" But after Wordsworth came Bryant; after Shelley Poe; and after Keats Tennyson. Bryant in turn affected the youthful Longfellow, until he came under the power of Heine; nor would the pre-Raphaelite school of English poets have been quite the same had Tennyson never written Mariana, The Sisters, and St. Agnes' Eve. Neither can schools of poetry be neatly assigned to chronological limits. Rogers, who may be considered the last survival of the eighteenth-century school, died as late as 1855; Wordsworth was still poet-laureate in 1850; and Hunt, whom the Quarterly Review, in its famous onslaught on Keats, had declared to be much superior to him, though possessing all his characteristic faults, survived until the eve of the American Civil War. The first American poem to win and retain a place in the history of English literature was Bryant's Thanatopsis-in every way a dignified piece of blank verse. But when it orginally appeared (in The North American Review for September, 1817) it was in a form very different from that in which it has so long been known. It began with four four-line iambic pentameter stanzas, rhymed abab. Then came, by an abrupt change, in blank verse to the end, the germ of the poem as we have it at present. In this original shape the now famous beginning and ending were lacking; the rhymed stanzas were weak; and between them and the added blank verse there was no more unity of form than would have been shown had a page of Gray's Elegy been com bined with a page of Blair's Grave, as constituting a single poem.1 Some of the earlier and less important poems of Longfellow, both in rhyme and in blank verse, were, as had been said, immediately affected by the work of Bryant. Longfellow's was always a receptive mind; and when, before he was twenty, he was beginning his poetical career, Bryant loomed large on the American literary horizon. But Longfellow soon turned to the kind of work by which he is best known, and which does not in the least suggest his eminent predecessor. It is interesting to note that no poet of rank, since the dismal days of the Elizabethan anti-rhymers, so extensively and so successfully experimented in other unrhymed measures than blank verse. To an Old Danish Song-Book (trochaic), The Grave (translated from Old English), Tegner's Drapa (“in the spirit of the old Norse poetry"), The Children of the Lord's Supper (hexameter), and other translated or original pieces, showed his fondness for such work before the two long poems 1 The rhymed introduction, as originally printed, was as follows: "THANATOPSIS "Not that from life, and all its woes The hand of death shall set me free; "Ah, when I touch time's farthest brink, It chills my very soul to think On that dread hour when life must end. "This bitter cup at first was given When angry justice frown'd severe, And 't is th' eternal doom of heaven That man must view the grave with fear. "Yet a few days, and thee The all-beholding sun shall see no more . . etc. The poem closed with the broken line "And make their bed with thee." . by which his fame was so widely spread: Evangeline and Hiawatha. The hexameters of Evangeline, with some occasional roughness, proved to have a fitness for idyllic description not discovered by previous experimenters in a verse-form that was, and is, generally unsuitable for English use.1 Its employment by Longfellow as the vehicle (in The Courtship of Miles Standish) for detailed humor we now see to have been a mistake; indeed, humor was never one of Longfellow's strongest powers. The four-stressed trochaics of Hiawatha, with their fitness for the parallelisms and repetitions so germane to the Indian mind and so advantageous in a poem needing to include explanatory translations, proved to be, as Longfellow said when he hit on the metre while reading the Kalevala, exactly suitable for the designed purpose. Longfellow's fondness for freeing himself from the fetters of rhyme also appeared in some of his rhymed work; for instance, in parts of The Saga of King Olaf, where the movement sometimes dominates the technically rhyming syllables. Of all Longfellow's unrhymed poems the best is The Bells of Lynn, with its melodious refrain. In his finest lyric of all, My Lost Youth, though the poem itself is otherwise rhymed throughout, he found a prose recurrence ready to his hand, constituting one of the most effective thought-markers to be found in modern verse. When Emerson, the prophet and poet of individualism, idealism, and optimism, wished to preach or portray with special conciseness, he fell naturally into a rhythmical form of expression. Writing, as he always did, "for thought, and not praise," he was careless concerning the number of stresses in the line, or the nature and arrangement of rhymes. Few poets have used a greater variety of lilts. Like the old improvisatori, he chanted until he had sung his song. Sometimes he was as regular as in the Concord Hymn; sometimes as loose as in the Earth-Song of Hamatreya. The music of Good-Bye, or The Rhodora, is so 1 Swinburne declared himself unable to scan Arnold's hexameters, and said: "At best what ugly bastards of verse are these self-styled hexameters! how human tongues or hands could utter or could write them except by way of burlesque improvisation I could never imagine, and never shall." unquestionable that we are left certain that Emerson's roughness in verse was due either to indifference to externals or to a sense of satisfaction in Saxon straightforwardness of expression. Excessive strength sometimes pleases by its very force, just as undue mellifluousness cloys. Thus the rhyme-uses of the leader of the Transcendental school of American poets were free in the extreme — freer, on the whole, than those of his associates and followers. Of all the school, Jones Very was the truest master of form, and the only one who could be trusted to write a first-rate sonnet. The strength of The Dial contributors lay in prose; deeply influenced by Coleridge, there was no Coleridge among them. Yet two bits from The Dial, aside from Emerson's contributions, have justly passed into the collections of familiar quotations, and both are rhymed. One is Cranch's "Thought is deeper than all speech, What unto themselves was taught;' the other Ellen Sturgis Hooper's ance; "I slept, and dreamed that life was beauty; wars: Some of Emerson's more unusual rhymes are mace: conveys: blaze; use: (noun) muse; romance: clans; vice: ties; remorse; oreads: arcades; patriots: roots; libraries: dictionaries; woods: roads; coats: spots; zones: towns; cavaliers: travellers; fairies: contraries; resorts: thoughts; hours: years: doors; tones: cotyledons; Nemesis: redresses; Nemesis: redresses; heats: violets; solitudes: underwoods; bells: daffodels (sic): science : clairvoyunites: opposites; rude: wood; gloom: come; cloud: blood; foot: fruit; foot: note; shoot: compute; not: mote: note; shoon: on; none: union (compare Milton's alone: union); sun: dominion; go: whereto; antipode: glowed; odd: period; beyond: bound; lost: coast; thought: not; power: emperor; cow: caribou; come: hum: martyrdom; atmosphere: air; seer: philosopher; are: war; art: bard; Porto Rique (sic): seek; hope: up; honey: agrimony; waste: passed (this was a good rhyme in Shakespeare's day); swamp: lamp; dark: clerk (surviving English |