Читать книгу English Verse - Raymond Macdonald Alden - Страница 71

Humblest of herte, hyest of reverence,

Benigne flour, coroune of vertues alle,

Sheweth unto your rial excellence

Your servaunt, if I durste me so calle,

His mortal harm, in which he is y-falle,

And noght al only for his evel fare,

But for your renoun, as he shal declare.

(Chaucer: Compleynte unto Pite. ab. 1370.)

And on the smale grene twistis sat

The lytil suete nyghtingale, and song

So loud and clere, the ympnis consecrat

Of luvis use, now soft now lowd among,

That all the gardynis and the wallis rong

Ryght of thaire song, and on the copill next

Of thaire suete armony, and lo the text.

(James I. of Scotland: The King's Quhair, st. 33. ab. 1425.)

For men have marble, women waxen, minds,

And therefore are they form'd as marble will;

The weak oppress'd, the impression of strange kinds

Is form'd in them by force, by fraud, or skill:

Then call them not the authors of their ill,

No more than wax shall be accounted evil,

Wherein is stamp'd the semblance of a devil.

(Shakspere: The Rape of Lucrece, st. 178. 1594.)

In a far country that I cannot name,

And on a year long ages past away,

A King there dwelt in rest and ease and fame,

And richer than the Emperor is to-day:

The very thought of what this man might say

From dusk to dawn kept many a lord awake,

For fear of him did many a great man quake.

(William Morris: The Earthly Paradise; The Proud King. 1868.)

The "rime royal" stanza is one of Chaucer's contributions to English verse, and about 14,000 lines of his poetry are in this form. Its use by King James in the King's Quhair was formerly thought to be the source of the name; but it seems more likely that the name, like the form, was of French origin, and is to be connected with such terms as chant royal and ballat royal, familiar in the nomenclature of courtly poetry (see Schipper, vol. i. p. 426). The stanza was used by Chaucer with marvellous skill for purposes of continuous narrative, and was a general favorite among his imitators in the fifteenth century, being used by Lydgate, Occleve, Hawes, Dunbar, then by Skelton, and by Barclay in the Ship of Fooles. It appears popular as late as the time of Sackville's part of the Mirror for Magistrates (1563).[9] Later than Shakspere's Rape of Lucrece it is rarely found. (But see Milton's unfinished poem on The Passion, where he used a form of the rime royal with concluding alexandrine.)

Strictly speaking, the "rime royal" is always in five-stress verse, but in the following specimen the same rime-scheme appears in the irregular six-or-seven-stress verse of one of the Mysteries.

The story sheweth further, that, after man was blyste,

The Lord did create woman owte of a ribbe of man,

Which woman was deceyvyd with the Serpentes darkned myste;

By whose synn ower nature is so weake no good we can;

Wherfor they were dejectyd and caste from thence than

Unto dolloure and myseri and to traveyle and payne,

Untyll Godes spryght renuid; and so we ende certayne.

(Prologue to Norwich Whitsun Play of the Creation and Fall. In Manly's Specimens of the Pre-Shaksperean Drama, vol. i p. 5.)