Читать книгу English Verse - Raymond Macdonald Alden - Страница 78

She sat, and sewed, that hath done me the wrong

Whereof I plain, and have done many a day;

And, whilst she heard my plaint in piteous song,

She wished my heart the sampler, that it lay.

The blind master, whom I have served so long,

Grudging to hear that he did hear her say,

Made her own weapon do her finger bleed,

To feel if pricking were so good in deed.

(Sir Thomas Wyatt: Of his love that pricked her finger with a needle, in Tottel's Songs and Sonnets. pub. 1557.)

This ottava rima is a familiar Italian stanza made classic by Ariosto and Tasso, and introduced into England by Wyatt, together with the sonnet and other Italian forms. Professor Corson says, "Such a rhyme-scheme, especially in the Italian, with its great similarity of endings, is too 'monotonously iterative'; and the rhyming couplet at the close seems, as James Russell Lowell expresses it, 'to put on the brakes with a jar.'" (Primer of English Verse, pp. 89 f.)

O! who can lead, then, a more happie life

Than he that with cleane minde, and heart sincere,

No greedy riches knowes nor bloudie strife,

No deadly fight of warlick fleete doth feare;

Ne runs in perill of foes cruell knife,

That in the sacred temples he may reare

A trophee of his glittering spoyles and treasure,

Or may abound in riches above measure.

(Spenser: Virgil's Gnat, ll. 121–128. 1591.)

For as with equal rage, and equal might,

Two adverse winds combat, with billows proud,

And neither yield (seas, skies maintain like fight,

Wave against wave oppos'd, and cloud to cloud);

So war both sides with obstinate despite,

With like revenge; and neither party bow'd:

Fronting each other with confounding blows,

No wound one sword unto the other owes.

(Daniel: History of the Civil War, bk. vi. ab. 1600.)

Thus sang the uncouth swain to the oaks and rills,

While the still morn went out with sandals gray;

He touch'd the tender stops of various quills,

With eager thought warbling his Doric lay:

And now the sun had stretch'd out all the hills,

And now was dropt into the western bay:

At last he rose, and twitch'd his mantle blue:

To-morrow to fresh woods, and pastures new.

(Milton: Lycidas; Epilogue. 1638.)

This is a single stave of the ottava rima, at the close of the varying metrical forms of Lycidas. Professor Corson says: "The Elegy having come to an end, the ottava rima is employed, with an admirable artistic effect, to mark off the Epilogue in which Milton … speaks in his own person."

They looked a manly, generous generation;

Beards, shoulders, eyebrows, broad, and square, and thick,

Their accents firm and loud in conversation,

Their eyes and gestures eager, sharp, and quick,

Showed them prepared, on proper provocation,

To give the lie, pull noses, stab and kick;

And for that very reason, it is said,

They were so very courteous and well-bred.

(John Hookham Frere: The Monks and the Giants. 1817.)

With every morn their love grew tenderer,

With every eve deeper and tenderer still;

He might not in house, field, or garden stir,

But her full shape would all his seeing fill;

And his continual voice was pleasanter

To her, than noise of trees or hidden rill;

Her lute-string gave an echo of his name,

She spoilt her half-done broidery with the same.

(Keats: Isabella. 1820.)

As boy, I thought myself a clever fellow,

And wished that others held the same opinion;

They took it up when my days grew more mellow,

And other minds acknowledged my dominion:

Now my sere fancy "falls into the yellow

Leaf," and Imagination droops her pinion,

And the sad truth which hovers o'er my desk

Turns what was once romantic to burlesque.

(Byron: Don Juan, canto iv. st. 3. 1821.)

Of the ottava rima, as used by Frere and Byron, Austin Dobson says: "It had already been used by Harrington, Drayton, Fairfax, and (as we have seen) in later times by Gay; it had even been used by Frere's contemporary, William Tennant; but to Frere belongs the honor of giving it the special characteristics which Byron afterward popularised in Beppo and Don Juan. Structurally the ottava rima of Frere singularly resembles that of Byron, who admitted that Whistlecraft was his 'immediate model.' … Byron, taking up the stanza with equal skill and greater genius, filled it with the vigor of his personality, and made it a measure of his own, which it has ever since been hazardous for inferior poets to attempt." (Ward's English Poets, vol. iv. p. 240.) Byron may indeed be said—in the words of the present specimen—to have turned what was commonly a romantic stanza "to burlesque."