Latin, has in our own tongue attained an importance not paralleled in any other modern language. There are other fixed forms of foreign growth which have also taken root in English versification, most of them having been imported from France. They have not succeeded, any of them, in winning equality with the sonnet, but they afford to the lyrist the same opportunity for working within prescribed bounds. They have the fascination of apparent difficulty, the overcoming of which is likely to give pleasure to the listener and delight to the artist. And each of them has possibilities of its own, now serious and now comic. Of these imported forms, the least important is the triolet. It is an artificial stanza with its brief lines and its treble repetition of the refrain; but it lends itself readily to frank fun with a flavor of personality. Although it had been known earlier in English literature, it attracted no attention until it was revived by Austin Dobson,-to whom, more than to any other poet, these imported fixed forms owe their vogue with our verse-makers. The triolet is at its best when it is used for epigram, for a single swift thrust of satire; but it can also carry playful humor with a faint hint of sentiment. Although its multiplied refrains tend to make it monotonous if heard too often, Alphonse Daudet, in French, and Austin Dobson, in English, have ventured on triolet-sequences, not without a certain measure of success in both cases. The triolet is a stanza of eight lines, preferably brief, containing only two rimes, arranged a, b, a, a, a, b, a, b, with the first line repeated as the fourth and again as the seventh, and with the second line repeated as the eighth. Here, as an example, is one stave of the triolet-sequence which Austin Dobson entitled "Rose-Leaves": I intended an ode, And it turned into triolets. It began à la mode. I intended an ode, But Rose crossed the road With a bunch of fresh violets; I intended an ode, And it turned into triolets. Here is another from the same set of little lyrics; and in this second example the smiling lyrist has been able to suggest a more distinct differentiation of meaning in the several repetitions of the refrain:— Rose kissed me to-day. Will she kiss me to-morrow? Let it be as it may, Rose kissed me to-day; But the pleasure gives way To a savor of sorrow; Rose kissed me to-day, Will she kiss me to-morrow? Henley, borrowing the hint from Dobson's rondeau after Voiture, rimed a triolet on the triolet itself: But by its undue weight and by its condescending bluster this example proves that the triolet is really not so very easy, after all: or at least it is evidence that Henley himself could not rival the apparent ease of Dobson. Part of the heaviness of Henley's specimen is due to the riming of triolet on the last syllable, which has not quite emphasis enough for this, just as part of the lightness of the first of Dobson's two specimens is the result of the triple-riming triolets and violets. It is sad to have to record that a pedantic friend persuaded the poet that triolets was not yet an English word, and that it therefore retained its French pronunciation, which forbade its mating with violets, whereupon Dobson transmogrified his lightsome lyric, and despoiled it of not a little of its levity as well as of most of its truth: I intended an Ode, And it turned to a Sonnet. I intended an Ode; But Rose crossed the road In her latest new bonnet. I intended an Ode, And it turned to a Sonnet. One cause of the gossamer unsubstantiality of "Rose-Leaves" is the brevity of the line, adjusting itself to the brevity of the stanza itself. For the triolet the meter must not be too long; and his choice of anapestic dimeter is added evidence of the delicacy of Dobson's intuitive feeling for propriety of rhythm. His anapestic dimeter is far better for the purpose in hand than Henley's trochaic tetrameter. The triolet loses a little of its lightness even when the line is lengthened from anapestic dimeter to anapestic trimeter, as in this triolet of Bunner's: A pitcher of mignonette, In a tenement's highest casement: Queer sort of flower-pot-yet Is a garden in heaven set, To the little sick child in the basement- In the tenement's highest casement. And there is in this example, charming as it is in feeling, a regrettable lapse from the rigor of the rules, in that the fourth and seventh lines are slightly varied in wording from the first. Perhaps it must be said also that the sentiment in Bunner's triolet is almost too serious for so tricksy a form. Yet, as is shown in these two triolets by Mme. Duclaux (A. Mary F. Robinson), an even deeper emotion has been expressed in this stanza : All the night and all the day I think upon her lying dead, Of sun or moon's her golden head; All the night and all the day What can heal a broken heart? It may not be fanciful to see in the triolet the source of the captivating stanza which Swinburne devised for his lovely lyric, " A Match." He gave up the repetition of the first line as the fourth; and he em ployed a third rime for the third and fourth lines linked in a couplet: If I were what the words are, And love were like the tune, With kisses glad as birds are If you were queen of pleasure And teach his feet a measure, And find his mouth a rein; A little more substantial than the triolet and yet closely akin in restriction of rime and in repetition of refrain are the rondel and the rondeau. The rondel has two accepted forms in English, both of which are due to the example set by Dobson, who has adapted the French original to the requirements of our English tongue with the same certainty of touch that Horace revealed when he modified the Greek sapphic stanza to fit the needs of Latin. In the fuller form, the rondel consists of fourteen lines with only two rimes, the first and second lines being repeated as the seventh and eighth and again as the thirteenth and fourteenth. The more serious possibility of the rondel is revealed in Bunner's 66 Ready for the Ride "1: 1 By permission from Poems by H. C. Bunner, copyrighted, 1884, by Charles Scribner's Sons. |