Читать книгу English Verse - Raymond Macdonald Alden - Страница 18

On the ground

Sleep sound:

I'll apply

To your eye,

Gentle lover, remedy.

When thou wak'st,

Thou tak'st

True delight

In the sight

Of thy former lady's eye.

(Shakspere: Puck's Song in Midsummer Night's Dream, III. ii. ab. 1595.)

What I hate,

Be consecrate

To celebrate

Thee and Thy state,

No mate

For Thee;

What see For envy In poor me?

(Browning: Song in Caliban upon Setebos. 1864.)

In the usual printing of Caliban upon Setebos this song is brought into the form of the five-accent lines. It is evidently intended, however, to be read in two-accent groups. Professor Moulton has remarked interestingly that Browning gives the unique figure of Caliban not only a grammar but a prosody of his own.

Though my rime be ragged,

Tattered and jagged,

Rudely raine-beaten,

Rusty and moth-eaten;

If ye take wel therewith,

It hath in it some pith.

(John Skelton: Colyn Cloute. ab. 1510.)

This is a specimen of what Mr. Churton Collins calls "that headlong voluble breathless doggrel which, rattling and clashing on through quick-recurring rhymes, … has taken from the name of its author the title of Skeltonical verse." (Ward's English Poets, vol. i. p. 185.) The number of accents, as well as the number of syllables, is irregular, being quite as often (perhaps more often) three as two.