native essay on "Style in Literature": "Each phrase in literature is built of sounds, as each phrase in music consists of notes. One sound suggests, echoes, demands, and harmonizes with another; and the art of rightly using these concordances is the final art in literature. It used to be a piece of good advice to all young writers to avoid alliteration; and the advice was sound, in so far as it prevented daubing. None the less for that, was it abominable nonsense, and the merest raving of the blindest of the blind who will not see. The beauty of the contents of a phrase, or of a sentence, depends implicitly upon alliteration and upon assonance. The vowel demands to be repeated. The consonant demands to be repeated; and both cry aloud to be perpetually varied. You may follow the adventures of a letter through any passage that has particularly pleased you; find it perhaps denied a while, to tantalize the ear; find it fired at you again in a whole broadside; or find it pass into congenerous sounds, one liquid or labial melting away into another." CHAPTER VI THE STANZA Verse-to the true poet― is no clog. It is idly called a trammel and a difficulty. It is a help. It springs from the same enthusiasm as the rest of his impulses, and is necessary to their satisfaction and effect. Verse is no more a clog than the condition of rushing upward is a clog to fire, or than the roundness and order of the globe is a clog to the freedom and variety that abound within its sphere. Verse is no dominator over the poet, except inasmuch as the bond is reciprocal, and the poet dominates over the verse. - LEIGH HUNT: What is Poetry? EPIC, idyllic and narrative poems, as well as didactic, descriptive and satiric verse, are usually written continuously without subdivision into minor parts of a rigid length. They may be set off into books or cantos; but they are not cut up into stanzas. That is to say, they may have a series of chapters, but they are not measured off into equal paragraphs. Lyric poetry, including the ballad and often also the story in verse, is generally composed of a succession of stanzas identical in structure and uniform in length. Thus the stanza is the unit, of which the sequence constitutes the poem. It is a part of the whole; and yet it is complete in itself. It resembles the paragraph of prose-composition, except that it has uniformity of length and of structure. In the majority of the poems written in the modern languages, rime is employed to make the framework of the stanza clearly perceptible to the ear. Rime not only marks off the ends of the several lines, it serves also to organize and to coördinate the stanza itself. It sustains the architecture of the often elaborate form. This is an added reason why rime should be exact and perfect, so that the ear may the more readily perceive the scheme of the stanza, however complex this may be. And as this apprehension and retention of the skeleton of the structure imposes more or less burden upon the ear, there is a certain disadvantage in a stanza which is too protracted in length, or too complicated in arrangement. This must ever be borne in mind, in spite of the fact that some stanzaic constructions which are neither short nor simple, have a sweeping amplitude gratefully welcomed by the ear. The stanza may be any length, from two lines to a dozen or more. A succession of couplets, each complete in itself, might seem to be unduly monotonous to carry a story satisfactorily. Yet the couplet is the simple form chosen by Whittier to tell about "Maud Muller" and "Barbara Frietchie." In the first, the sense is generally coincident with the couplet:— Maud Muller on a summer's day Bcneath her torn hat glowed the wealth In the second, the poet sometimes lets the thought run on from couplet to couplet: Up from the meadows rich with corn, The clustered spires of Frederick stand The couplet is also the form preferred by Austin Dobson for his "Ballad of Beau Brocade": First great George was buried and gone ; The British bard, it must be noted, allowed himself the liberty of an occasional triplet to interrupt the current of his couplets: Out spoke Dolly the chambermaid, Firing then, out of sheer alarm, Hit the Beau in the bridle arm. Button the first went none knows where, But it carried away his solitaire ; Button the second a circuit made, Glanced in under the shoulder-blade ; Down from the saddle fell Beau Brocade. The triplet has also served as a stanza, generally tied together by a single rime, as in Longfellow's "Maidenhood": Maiden! with the meek, brown eyes, Like the dusk in evening skies! Thou whose locks outshine the sun, Standing, with reluctant feet, Longfellow's triplets are trochaic tetrameters with the final short syllable dropped. In "A Toccata of Galuppi's," Browning employs triplets of trochaic octameter, also cutting off the final short syllable: As for Venice and her people, merely born to bloom and drop, Here on earth they bore their fruitage, mirth and folly were the crop : What of soul was left, I wonder, when the kissing had to stop? Sometimes the poet has chosen to avoid the triple repetition of the same sound in leaving the middle line of the three unrimed; and sometimes he has carried over into the second triplet the terminal sound of this second line. This is what Browning has done in the “Statue and the Bust": There's a palace in Florence, the world knows well, And a statue watches it from the square, And this story of both do our townsmen tell. Ages ago, a lady there, At the farthest window facing the East The bridesmaids' prattle around her ceased; This same method of linking the triplets together into a chain is to be found also in Morris's "Defence of Guinevere":— But, knowing now that they would have her speak, As though she had there a shameful blow, And feeling it shameful to feel ought but shame |