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QUESTIONS AND SUGGESTIONS.

INTRODUCTORY NOTES.

1. The distinction between prose and poetry cannot be expressed in a brief definition; it can better be understood from a careful study of the extracts given below from Mr. F. H. Myers (p. 17), and Professor Masson (p. 20).

2. Poetry may be classified on the basis of either subject or form; but from the frequent blending of one subject or form with another, we must often be content to describe poetry by its prevailing character.

3. Of the various classifications of poetry that have been proposed, the following is one of the simplest and most comprehensive :

I. NARRATIVE POETRY, embracing: (a) the EPIC, as the Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained of Milton; the Iliad and the Odyssey of Homer; the Eneid of Virgil; and, on a far lower literary plane, Pollok's Course of Time; also the MOCK-EPIC, as Pope's Rape of the Lock; (b) the METRICAL ROMANCE, as Scott's Marmion and Lady of the Lake. Spenser's Faerie Queene has a didactic purpose grafted on a metrical romance; so Hudibras and Don Juan are metrical romances with a satirical purpose; (c) the BALLAD, as Chevy Chase, Cowper's Loss of the Royal George, Macaulay's Lay of Horatius, Wolfe's Burial of Sir John Moore; (d) the TALE, in which plot and incident are more elaborate than in the Ballad,-what is simply suggested in the Ballad being here developed, as Chaucer's Tales, Tennyson's Enoch Arden, Burns' Tam o'Shanter, Longfellow's Evangeline.

II. LYRIC POETRY, including (a) the SONG, religious and secular; (b) the ODE, representing the loftiest phase of intense feeling. This betrays itself in the irregular metres, as Milton's Ode on the Nativity, Wordsworth's Intimations of Immortality, Dryden's Alexander's Feast; (c) the ELEGY (the subject rather than the form is here to be considered), as Milton's Lycidas, Gray's Elegy, Shelley's Adonais, Tennyson's In Memoriam; (d) the SONNET, for which see p. 93.

III. DRAMATIC POETRY, including Tragedies, Comedies, Histories.
IV. DESCRIPTIVE POETRY, as Thomson's Seasons.

V. DIDACTIC POETRY (having instruction as its primary object), as Wordsworth's Excursion, Young's Night Thoughts. Lord Byron characterized Rogers' Pleasures of Memory as one of the most beautiful didactic poems in our language.'

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VI. PASTORAL POETRY, including the ordinary form of the Idyll (see p. 467). Thomson's Seasons may be brought under this head as well as under Descriptive poetry. Pastoral, in the sense here intended, includes poetry descriptive of external nature, and of domestic life, manners, etc.; and a thread of narrative often runs through the pastoral poem. Examples:Milton's L'Allegro and Il Penseroso; Tennyson's Idylls of the King; Burns' Cotter's Saturday Night; Keats' Endymion (pastoral with a Greek myth inter

woven); Beattie's Minstrel; Tennyson's Princess and Gardener's Daughter; Allan Ramsay's Gentle Shepherd; parts of Cowper's Task.

VII. SATIRICAL POETRY in a great variety of metres, as Prior's City and Country Mouse (a parody on Dryden's Hind and Panther); Butler's Hudibras; and much of Swift's poetry.

VIII. HUMOROUS POETRY, in various metres, as Goldsmith's Elegy on the Death of a Mad Dog; Cowper's John Gilpin; the Ingoldsby Legends, etc. 4. VERSIFICATION.-Verse is distinguished from prose by the regular recurrence of similarly accented syllables at short intervals. If we mark accented syllables by - and unaccented syllables by all the possible com"feet" in dissyllabic or binations or

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common measures are:

called the Iambus (as begin) marked in Latham's notation x a
Trochee (as battle)

Pyrrhic (as beautiful)

Spondee (as broad earth)

Of trisyllabic feet or triple measures those generally acknowledged in English are:

Verses are said to be scanned when they are divided into their component feet, or are so marked as to show the position and number of metrical accents in the lines:

"At the close of the day | when the ham | let is stíll |.” (Beattie's Hermit.)

Lines are described as monometer, dimeter, trimeter, tetrameter, pentameter, hexameter, heptameter, according as they contain 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 feet or measures. When lines have their full complement of syllables they are described as acatalectic; when the number is deficient, as catalectic; when excessive, as hypercatalectic, or hypermeter. In Latham's notation an excess of syllables is indicated by +, a deficiency by -, appended to the descriptive formula. The above line from Beattie's Hermit may be described either as anapastic tetrameter, or, using Mitford's terms, as a verse of four accents in triple measure. In the following line, though the first foot is an iambus, the most frequently recurring foot is the anapast, and the line would therefore be described as anapæstic :

"And mortals the sweets | of forget | fulness prove |.”

These lines, which are from Keats' Endymion (see p. 13), "Upon the sides of Lat | mos was outspread |

A mighty for | est; for | the moist | earth fed |,”

would be described as (1) iambic pentameters; or (2) as verses of five accents in common measure; or (3) as Pope loosely phrased it, a decasyllabic couplet. Tennyson's Locksley Hall (p. 134) may be scanned as trochaic measure; or if we set off the first syllable as a foot, we get an iambic line and better rhythm. This question is avoided (or evaded) by describing the lines as verses of eight accents in common measure.

The metrical accent is to be carefully distinguished from the elocutionary stress or emphasis. In the first line above quoted from Endymion,—

Upon the sides of Latmos was outspread, we must of course, in reading,

be careful not to emphasize" 'upon." This frequent conflict between metrical accent and the emphasis led Coleridge to introduce in his Christabel what he erroneously supposed was an entirely new basis of scansion,-the number of emphatic syllables in a line. The total number of syllables in the lines of that poem varies from 7 to 12; but Coleridge regards the number of emphases (or "accents as he calls them) as uniformly 4:

""Tis the middle of night by the castle clock,

And the owls have awakened the crowing cock;
Tú—whit!—tú—whoo!

And hark, again! the crowing cock

How drowsily ít crew."

There is no difficulty in scanning these lines in the ordinary way :— ""Tis the mid | dle of night | by the cas | tle clock,” etc.

Except in particular lines of the poem, the iambic movement prevails, and the verse may therefore be classified as irregular iambic tetrameter.

As studies in trochaic movement, see Longfellow's Hiawatha, p. 370; and Swinburne's By the North Sea, p. 167.

Campbell's well-known poem, The Exile of Erin, is generally cited as an example of Amphibrachic verse :

"There came to the beach a | poor exile | of Érin |,

The dew on | his thín robe | was heavy | and chíll | ;"

but Dr. Bain points out that it may be scanned as continuous dactylic

metre:

"There came to the | beach a poor | exile of | Érin,

The dew on his thin robe lay | heavy and chill."

The last two syllables of the first line taken with the first syllable of the second line may be conceived to form a dactyl. On this view, dactylic verse would be much more frequent in our poetry than has been generally supposed.

As an acknowledged example of dactylic verse, we have The Bridge of Sighs, which is called dactylic by Hood himself :

Take her up | tenderly |" etc. (Dactylic dimeter.)

For DACTYLIC HEXAMETER see Longfellow's Evangeline, with introductory note, p. 235; see also portions of Tennyson's Maud :

"Maud with her | venturous | climbing and | tumbles and | childish | escapes" etc.

OTHER IMITATIONS OF THE ANCIENT CLASSICAL METRES :

Ancient elegiacs (alternate hexameter and pentameter):

"In the hexameter | rises the | fountain's | silvery | column, |
In the pentameter | aye | falling in | melody | back."

(Coleridge.)

Tom Hood censures these oft-quoted lines because (1) the first feet of both lines are less dactyls than anapæsts; (2) because the cæsura (see 8, below) is not the worthier cæsura; (3) because, according to ancient rule, a monosyllable was inadmissible as the final word of a pentameter.

Alcaics (from Tennyson, who has enriched our language with many new forms of melodious verse):

To Milton.

"O mighty-mouthed inventor of harmonies,
O skilled to sing of Time or Eternity,

God-gifted organ voice of England,

Milton, a name to resound for ages,” etc.

Various Horatian metres are imitated in Father Prout's Reliques.

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5. RHYME is a recurrence of sound in the closing syllable or syllables of different verses. Rhyme may be single, as source, course;" double, as story,' 'glory;" triple, as readily," steadily." The rule is laid down by Guest and other critics that in double and triple rhymes the unaccented syllables must rhyme perfectly, and not, - as we generally find them in Butler's Hudibras and in Swift's Letter to Sheridan,—with accents misplaced.

In Shelley's Cloud we find in alternate lines the middle word rhyming with the final one :

I bring fresh showers for the thirsting flowers
From the seas and the streams;

I bear light shade for the leaves when laid
In their noon-day dreams."

So in Father Prout's Bells of Shandon (see FOURTH BOOK, p. 24); and occasionally in Coleridge's Ancient Mariner, p. 352–358.

Verses having this peculiarity are called Leonine, from Leoninus, the inventor, who was a canon of the Church of St. Victor in Paris, in the twelfth century.

6. The term BLANK VERSE is distinctively applied to rhymeless iambic pentameter verse, though rhymeless verse may be found in other measures; for example, in Longfellow's Hiawatha, which is trochaic. Examples of Blank Verse proper :-Milton, p. 21; Wordsworth, p. 36; Shakspeare, p. 48; Byron, p. 66; Cowper, p. 387.

7. MOST FREQUENT RHYME COMBINATIONS :

a. Rhyming iambic tetrameters, often varied with rhyming iambic trimeters:-Wordsworth, p. 116; Newman, p. 158; Burns, p. 215; Scott, p. 220-223; Moore, p. 251. Varied with rhyming pentameters, Byron, p. 231, 232.

b. If two rhymeless iambic tetrameters alternate with two rhyming iambic trimeters, we get a 4-line stanza in Service Metre or Ballad Metre, which also may be thrown into the form of a 7-iambic couplet. For an example of Ballad Metre with occasional Leonine verses (5), see Coleridge, p. 352-358.

c. Heroic couplets, - iambic pentameters rhyming in successive lines: Keats, p. 14; Pope, p. 23; Burns, p. 295; Dryden, p. 335–339.

d. Elegiac Stanza, iambic pentameters rhyming alternately, and the sense closed with every fourth line;-Dryden's Annus Mirabilis, and his Heroic Stanzas on the Death of Oliver Cromwell; Gray's Elegy (FOURTH READER, p. 287).

e. Rhyme Royal,- -seven iambic pentameters, the first five rhyming at varying intervals, and the last two in succession. Examples may be found in Chaucer; this combination was also frequently used by the early Eliza bethans.