Читать книгу English Verse - Raymond Macdonald Alden - Страница 44

In the morning, O so early, my beloved, my beloved,

All the birds were singing blithely, as if never they would cease:

'Twas a thrush sang in my garden, "Hear the story, hear the story!"

And the lark sang "Give us glory!" and the dove said "Give us peace."

(Jean Ingelow: Give us Love and Give us Peace.)

Fair is our lot—O goodly is our heritage!

(Humble ye, my people, and be fearful in your mirth!)

For the Lord our God Most High

He hath made the deep as dry,

He hath smote for us a pathway to the ends of all the Earth!

(Kipling: A Song of the English.)

In both these specimens the full accent regularly recurs in only the alternate feet. Thus while the first specimen is technically eight-stress trochaic, there are in the normal reading of it only four full accents to the line. In other words the first, third, fifth, and seventh feet are regularly pyrrhics. (See p. 55.) The same thing appears in the specimen from Kipling: ye, and, in (in line 2) are accented only in a distinctly secondary fashion. Some have suggested, for such rhythms as these, the recognition of a foot made up of one stressed and three unstressed syllables. Lanier represents such measures (in The Science of English Verse) in four-eight time.

Fear death?—to feel the fog in my throat,

The mist in my face,

When the snows begin, and the blasts denote

I am nearing the place,

The power of the night, the press of the storm,

The post of the foe;

Where he stands, the Arch Fear in a visible form,

Yet the strong man must go.

(Browning: Prospice.)

Here the tendency is to use iambi and anapests in alternate feet; see especially lines 2, 3, and 5.

All we have willed or hoped or dreamed of good, shall exist;

Not its semblance, but itself; no beauty, nor good, nor power

Whose voice has gone forth, but each survives for the melodist

When eternity affirms the conception of an hour.

The high that proved too high, the heroic for earth too hard,

The passion that left the ground to lose itself in the sky,

Are music sent up to God by the lover and the bard;

Enough that He heard it once: we shall hear it by-and-by.

(Browning: Abt Vogler.)

Here we have a hexameter which is neither iambic nor anapestic, but a combination of the two rhythms. So in the following specimens dissyllabic and trisyllabic feet are used interchangeably.

When the lamp is shatter'd

The light in the dust lies dead—

When the cloud is scatter'd

The rainbow's glory is shed.

When the lute is broken,

Sweet tones are remember'd not;

When the lips have spoken,

Loved accents are soon forgot.

(Shelley: The Flight of Love.)

The sea is at ebb, and the sound of her utmost word

Is soft at the least wave's lapse in a still small reach.

From bay unto bay, on quest of a goal deferred,

From headland ever to headland and breach to breach,

Where earth gives ear to the message that all days preach.

(Swinburne: The Seaboard.)

England, none that is born thy son, and lives, by grace of thy glory, free,

Lives and yearns not at heart and burns with hope to serve as he worships thee;

None may sing thee: the sea-bird's wing beats down our songs as it hails the sea.

(Swinburne: The Armada, vii.)

This life of ours is a wild Æolian harp of many a joyous strain,

But under them all there runs a loud perpetual wail, as of souls in pain.

(Longfellow: The Golden Legend, iv.)

Come away, come away, Death,

And in sad cypress let me be laid;

Fly away, fly away, breath;

I am slain by a fair cruel maid.

My shroud of white, stuck all with yew,

O prepare it!

My part of death, no one so true

Did share it.

(Shakspere: Twelfth Night, II. iv.)

The characteristic irregularity in this stanza is the variation from trochaic to iambic rhythm. In this case the variations are in part due, no doubt, to the fact that the words were written for music.

Maud with her exquisite face,

And wild voice pealing up to the sunny sky,

And feet like sunny gems on an English green,

Maud in the light of her youth and her grace,

Singing of Death, and of Honor that cannot die,

Till I well could weep for a time so sordid and mean

And myself so languid and base.

(Tennyson: Maud, I. v.)

In this specimen the characteristic rhythm of lines 1, 4, and 5 is dactylic, that of the remainder anapestic-iambic.

The trumpet's loud clangor

Excites us to arms

With shrill notes of anger

And mortal alarms.

The double double double beat

Of the thundering drum

Cries, hark! the foes come;

Charge, charge, 'tis too late to retreat.

The soft complaining flute

In dying notes discovers

The woes of helpless lovers,

Whose dirge is whispered by the warbling lute.

(Dryden: Song for St. Cecilia's Day, 1687.)

In this famous stanza the rhythm changes for obvious purposes of imitative representation.

Children dear, was it yesterday

(Call yet once) that she went away?

Once she sate with you and me,

On a red gold throne in the heart of the sea,

And the youngest sate on her knee.

She combed its bright hair, and she tended it well,

When down swung the sound of a far-off bell.

She sighed, she looked up through the clear green sea;

She said, "I must go, for my kinsfolk pray

In the little gray church on the shore to-day.

'Twill be Easter-time in the world—ah me!

And I lose my poor soul, Merman! here with thee."

I said, "Go up, dear heart, through the waves;

Say thy prayer, and come back to the kind sea-caves!"

She smiled, she went up through the surf in the bay.

Children dear, was it yesterday?

… Down, down, down!

Down to the depths of the sea!

She sits at her wheel in the humming town,

Singing most joyfully.

Hark what she sings: "O joy, O joy,

For the humming street, and the child with its toy!

For the priest, and the bell, and the holy well;

For the wheel where I spun,

And the blessed light of the sun!"

And so she sings her fill,

Singing most joyfully,

Till the spindle drops from her hand,

And the whizzing wheel stands still.

She steals to the window, and looks at the sand,

And over the sand at the sea;

And her eyes are set in a stare;

And anon there breaks a sigh,

And anon there drops a tear,

From a sorrow-clouded eye,

And a heart sorrow-laden,

A long, long sigh,

For the cold strange eyes of a little mermaiden,

And the gleam of her golden hair.

(Matthew Arnold: The Forsaken Merman.)

Then the music touch'd the gates and died;

Rose again from where it seem'd to fail,

Storm'd in orbs of song, a growing gale;

Till thronging in and in, to where they waited,

As 'twere a hundred-throated nightingale,

The strong tempestuous treble throbbed and palpitated;

Ran into its giddiest whirl of sound,

Caught the sparkles, and in circles,

Purple gauzes, golden hazes, liquid mazes,

Flung the torrent rainbow round:

Then they started from their places,

Moved with violence, changed in hue,

Caught each other with wild grimaces,

Half-invisible to the view,

Wheeling with precipitate paces

To the melody, till they flew,

Hair, and eyes, and limbs, and faces,

Twisted hard in fierce embraces,

Like to Furies, like to Graces,

Dash'd together in blinding dew.

(Tennyson: Vision of Sin.)