Читать книгу English Verse - Raymond Macdonald Alden - Страница 21

I am monarch of all I survey;

My right there is none to dispute;

From the centre all round to the sea

I am lord of the fowl and the brute.

(Cowper: Verses supposed to be written by Alexander Selkirk. 1782.)

In this specimen lines 2, 5, 6, and 8 show initial truncation, the first light syllable being missing.

(With two-stress verse:)

His desire is a dureless content,

And a trustless joy;

He is won with a world of despair

And is lost with a toy. …

But true love is a durable fire,

In the mind ever burning,

Never sick, never old, never dead,

From itself never turning.

(Sir Walter Raleigh (?): Pilgrim to Pilgrim. In MS. Rawl. 85; in Schelling's Elizabethan Lyrics, p. 3.)

"The metres of the earlier years of Elizabeth's reign are so overwhelmingly iambic," Professor Schelling observes, "that this perfectly metrical, if somewhat irregular, anapæstic movement comes like a surprise. Professor Gummere, of Haverford College, calls my attention to three epigrams—printed among the poems of Raleigh, ed. Hannah, p. 55—all of them in more or less limping anapæsts, but not of this measure. It is quite possible that the time to which these verses were sung may have affected the measure." (Notes to Elizabethan Lyrics, pp. 211, 212.)

(With initial truncation:)

She gazed, as I slowly withdrew,

My path I could hardly discern;

So sweetly she bade me adieu,

I thought that she bade me return.

(Shenstone: Pastoral Ballad. 1743.)

Mr. Saintsbury praises highly the anapests of Shenstone (Ward's English Poets, vol. iii. p. 272), saying that he "taught the metre to a greater poet than himself, Cowper, and these two between them have written almost everything that is worth reading in it, if we put avowed parody and burlesque out of the question." But this is probably to be regarded as overstating the case.

(With feminine ending:)

If you go over desert and mountain,

Far into the country of sorrow,

To-day and to-night and to-morrow,

And maybe for months and for years;

You shall come, with a heart that is bursting

For trouble and toiling and thirsting,

You shall certainly come to the fountain

At length—to the Fountain of Tears.

(Arthur O'Shaughnessy: The Fountain of Tears. 1870.)

Here the extra light syllable at the end of the line is really the initial light syllable of the following line, as in the specimen on p. 29, above.

So this is a psalm of the waters—

The wavering, wandering waters:

With languages learned in the forest,

With secrets of earth's lonely caverns,

The mystical waters go by me

On errands of love and of beauty,

On embassies friendly and gentle,

With shimmer of brown and of silver.

(S. Weir Mitchell: A Psalm of the Waters. 1890.)

Here, also, the final light syllable might be said to take the place of the missing initial syllable; but the structure of the verse, with the fact that the initial anapest is always truncated and that the final syllable is never accented, indicates that the verse as it stands is the norm of the poem—three-stress anapestic, with initial truncation and feminine ending.