Читать книгу English Verse - Raymond Macdonald Alden - Страница 41

(Catalectic:)

Love took up the glass of Time, and turn'd it in his glowing hands;

Every moment, lightly shaken, ran itself in golden sands.

Love took up the harp of Life, and smote on all the chords with might;

Smote the chord of Self, that, trembling, pass'd in music out of sight.

(Tennyson: Locksley Hall. 1842.)

Open then I flung the shutter, when, with many a flirt and flutter,

In there stepped a stately raven of the saintly days of yore.

Not the least obeisance made he; not an instant stopped or stayed he;

But, with mien of lord or lady, perched above my chamber door—

Perched upon a bust of Pallas, just above my chamber door.

(Poe: The Raven. 1845.)

Night, in utmost noon forlorn and strong, with heart athirst and fasting,

Hungers here, barred up forever, whence as one whom dreams affright,

Day recoils before the low-browed lintel threatening doom and casting Night.

(Swinburne: Night in Guernsey.)

In the last line of this specimen we have a nine-accent verse—very rare in English poetry.

The tendency of all eight-accent lines being to break up into halves of four accents, the distinction between four-stress and eight-stress verse may be at times only a question of printing. Thus, Thackeray's Sorrows of Werther might be regarded as eight-stress trochaic, though commonly printed in short lines:

"Werther had a love for Charlotte

Such as words could never utter.

Would you know how first he saw her?

She was cutting bread and butter."