Читать книгу English Verse - Raymond Macdonald Alden - Страница 59

Þe grace of god ful of miȝt

Þat is king and ever was,

Mote among us aliȝt

And ȝive us alle is swet grace.

(From the Harleian Ms. 913. In Mätzner's Altenglische Sprachproben, vol. i. p. 125.)

Furnivall prints this in long lines with internal rime, which of itself seems to form the short-line stanza from the long lines.

Of al this world the wyde compas

Hit wol not in myn armes tweyne.—

Who-so mochel wol embrace

Litel thereof he shal distreyne.

(Chaucer: Proverb. ab. 1380.)

When youth had led me half the race,

That Cupid's scourge me caus'd to run,

I looked back to meet the place

From whence my weary course begun.

(Earl of Surrey: Description of the restless state of a lover. ab. 1545.)

Weep with me, all you that read

This little story;

And know, for whom a tear you shed

Death's self is sorry.

(Ben Jonson: Epitaph on Salathiel Pavy. 1616.)

And now the weary world's great medicine, Sleep,

This learned host dispensed to every guest,

Which shuts those wounds where injured lovers weep,

And flies oppressors to relieve the opprest.

(Sir William Davenant: Gondibert, Bk. i. Canto 6. 1651)

Now like a maiden queen she will behold

From her high turrets hourly suitors come;

The East with incense and the West with gold

Will stand like suppliants to receive her doom.

(Dryden: Annus Mirabilis, stanza 297. 1667.)

The boast of heraldry, the pomp of power,

And all that beauty, all that wealth e'er gave,

Await alike the inevitable hour.

The paths of glory lead but to the grave.

(Gray: Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard. 1751.)

To Davenant's Gondibert is usually traced the use of this "heroic" stanza (abab in iambic five-stress lines) in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In his preface the author said: "I believed it would be more pleasant to the reader, in a work of length, to give this respite or pause, between every stanza, … than to run him out of breath with continued couplets. Nor doth alternate rime by any lowliness of cadence make the sound less heroic, but rather adapt it to a plain and stately composing of music." Dryden followed Davenant in using the stanza for his Annus Mirabilis, saying in his preface: "I have chosen to write my poem in quatrains, or stanzas of four in alternate rhyme, because I have ever judged them more noble, and of greater dignity, both for the sound and number, than any other verse in use amongst us. … I have always found the couplet verse most easy (though not so proper for this occasion), for there the work is sooner at an end, every two lines concluding the labor of the poet; but in quatrains he is to carry it further on, and not only so, but to bear along in his head the troublesome sense of four lines together." Dryden did not use the stanza again, however, and it is obviously unsuited to a long narrative poem. Saintsbury says: "With regard to the nobility and dignity of this stanza, it may safely be said that Annus Mirabilis itself, the best poem ever written therein, killed it by exposing its faults. … It is chargeable with more than the disjointedness of the couplet, without the possibility of relief; while, on the other hand, the quatrains have not, like the Spenserian stave or the ottava rima, sufficient bulk to form units in themselves." (Life of Dryden, Men of Letters Series, p. 34.)

It is hard to say what Mr. Saintsbury means in speaking of the Annus Mirabilis as the best poem ever written in the heroic quatrain, when we remember that it is the quatrain of Gray's Elegy. On the possible sources of his use of it, see Gosse's Life of Gray, in the Men of Letters Series, p. 98 (also his From Shakespeare to Pope, p. 140). Mr. Gosse refers to the use of the quatrain by Sir John Davies in the Nosce Teipsum (1599), with which Gray was familiar, and (in addition to Davenant, Dryden, and Hobbes's Homer) to the Love Elegies of James Hammond, published 1743. "It is believed that the printing of Hammond's verses incited Gray to begin his Churchyard Elegy, and to make the four-line stanza the basis of most of his harmonies. … The measure itself, from first to last, is an attempt to render in English the solemn alternation of passion and reserve, the interchange of imploring and desponding tones, that is found in the Latin elegiac; and Gray gave his poem, when he first published it, an outward resemblance to the text of Tibullus by printing it without any stanzaic pauses." Mr. Gosse neglects the elegies of William Shenstone, which were also in the quatrain, and some of which had apparently been published before the Churchyard Elegy. On this matter see Beers's Romanticism in the Eighteenth Century, p. 137, where Shenstone is said to have borrowed the stanza from Hammond, and Gray from Shenstone. Shenstone, in his Prefatory Essay on Elegy, defended the metrical form and referred to the elegies of Hammond. "Heroic metre, with alternate rhyme, seems well enough adapted to this species of poetry; and, however exceptionable upon other occasions, its inconveniencies appear to lose their weight in shorter elegies, and its advantages seem to acquire an additional importance. The world has an admirable example of its beauty in a collection of elegies not long since published." (Chalmers's English Poets, vol. xiii. p. 264.)

For there was Milton like a seraph strong,

Beside him Shakespeare bland and mild;

And there the world-worn Dante grasped his song,

And somewhat grimly smiled.

(Tennyson: The Palace of Art. 1833.)