Читать книгу English Verse - Raymond Macdonald Alden - Страница 60

Yet those lips, so sweetly swelling,

Do invite a stealing Kiss.

Now will I but venture this;

Who will read, must first learn spelling.

(Sir Philip Sidney: Astrophel and Stella, Song ii. ab. 1580.)

Let the bird of loudest lay,

On the sole Arabian tree,

Herald sad and trumpet be,

To whose sound chaste wings obey.

(Shakspere: The Phœnix and the Turtle, 1601.)

Though beauty be the mark of praise,

And yours of whom I sing, be such

As not the world can praise too much,

Yet is't your virtue now I raise.

(Ben Jonson: Elegy, in Underwoods. 1616.)

Lord, in thine anger do not reprehend me,

Nor in thy hot displeasure me correct;

Pity me, Lord, for I am much deject,

And very weak and faint; heal and amend me.

(Milton: Psalm vi. 1653.)

Away, those cloudy looks, that lab'ring sigh,

The peevish offspring of a sickly hour!

Nor meanly thus complain of fortune's power,

When the blind gamester throws a luckless die.

(Coleridge: To a Friend. ab. 1795.)

Twelve struck. That sound, by dwindling years

Heard in each hour, crept off; and then

The ruffled silence spread again,

Like water that a pebble stirs.

(Rossetti: My Sister's Sleep. 1850.)

I hold it true, whate'er befall;

I feel it when I sorrow most;

'Tis better to have loved and lost

Than never to have loved at all.

(Tennyson: In Memoriam, xxvii. 1850.)

Sweet after showers, ambrosial air,

That rollest from the gorgeous gloom

Of evening over brake and bloom

And meadow, slowly breathing bare

The round of space, and rapt below

Thro' all the dewy-tasselled wood,

And shadowing down the horned flood

In ripples, fan my brows and blow

The fever from my cheek, and sigh

The full new life that feeds thy breath

Throughout my frame, till Doubt and Death,

Ill brethren, let the fancy fly

From belt to belt of crimson seas

On leagues of odor streaming far,

To where in yonder orient star

A hundred spirits whisper "Peace."

(Tennyson: ibid., lxxxiv.)

This stanza (abba in four-stress iambics) is commonly known as the "In Memoriam stanza," from its familiar use by Tennyson. Tennyson is indeed said to have invented it for his own use, not knowing of its earlier appearance in the works of Jonson and Rossetti. Professor Corson has an interesting passage on the poetic quality of the stanza: "By the rhyme-scheme of the quatrain, the terminal rhyme-emphasis of the stanza is reduced, the second and third verses being most closely braced by the rhyme. The stanza is thus admirably adapted to that sweet continuity of flow, free from abrupt checks, demanded by the spiritualized sorrow which it bears along. Alternate rhyme would have wrought an entire change in the tone of the poem. To be assured of this, one should read, aloud of course, all the stanzas whose first and second, or third and fourth, verses admit of being transposed without affecting the sense. By such transposition, the rhymes are made alternate, and the concluding rhymes more emphatic." Compare the stanza quoted above from section xxvii. with the transposed form:

"I feel it when I sorrow most;

I hold it true, whate'er befall;

'Tis better to have loved and lost

Than never to have loved at all."

On the passage quoted from section lxxxiv. Professor Corson also observes: "The four stanzas of which it is composed constitute but one period, the sense being suspended till the close. The rhyme-emphasis is so distributed that any one, hearing the poem read, would hardly be sensible of any of the slightest checks in the continuous and even movement of the verse. … There is no other section of In Memoriam in which the artistic motive of the stanza is so evident." (Primer of English Verse, pp. 70–77.)