Читать книгу English Verse - Raymond Macdonald Alden - Страница 49

Let me see, let me see, is not the leaf turn'd down?

(Shakspere: Julius Cæsar, IV. iii. 271.)

Leviathan, which God of all his works

Created hugest that swim the ocean stream.

(Milton: Paradise Lost, I. 201 f.)

This passage was one of those where Bentley made himself ridiculous in his edition of Milton. "To smooth it" he changed the lines to read—

"Leviathan, whom God the vastest made

Of all the kinds that swim the ocean stream,"—

not perceiving, what Cowper pointed out, that Milton had designedly used "the word hugest where it may have the clumsiest effect. … Smoothness was not the thing to be consulted when the Leviathan was in question."

So he with difficulty and labour hard Moved on, with difficulty and labour he.

(ib. II. 1021 f.)

The sweep

Of some precipitous rivulet to the wave.

(Tennyson: Enoch Arden.)

The sound of many a heavily galloping hoof.

(Tennyson: Geraint and Enid.)

I wish that somewhere in the ruin'd folds, …

Or the dry thickets, I could meet with her

The Abominable, that uninvited came.

(Tennyson: Œnone.)

Do you see this square old yellow book I toss I' the air, and catch again, and twirl about By the crumpled vellum covers; pure crude fact—

(Browning: The Ring and the Book, I.)

That plant

Shall never wave its tangles lightly and softly As a queen's languid and imperial arm.

(Browning: Paracelsus, I.)

A distinction should be made between these hypermetrical syllables which change the character of the foot from dissyllabic to trisyllabic, and syllables (in a sense hypermetrical) which are slurred or elided in the reading. The word radiance, for example, is regarded as trisyllabic in prose, but in the verse—

"Girt with omnipotence, with radiance crowned,"

it is made dissyllabic by instinctive compression, and in no proper sense makes an anapest of the fifth foot. Of the same character are the numerous cases where a vowel is elided before another vowel—especially the vowel of the article the.[7] On the elisions of Milton's verse, see Mr. Robert Bridges's Milton's Prosody; on those of Shakspere's verse, see Abbott's Shakespearian Grammar. In modern verse the use of elision and slurring is ordinarily that found in common speech.