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Philomel with melody

Sing in our sweet lullaby;

Lulla, lulla, lullaby; lulla, lulla, lullaby!
Never harm, nor spell, nor charm,

Come our lovely lady nigh!

So good-night, with lullaby.

IV. Onomatopoeia.-The sound of the verse may imitate or suggest the meaning conveyed by the words. (i) To indicate movement:

Myriads of rivulets hurrying through the lawn.

Merrily, merrily, shall I live now.

And even the weariest river

Winds somewhere safe to sea.

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On a sudden open fly

With impetuous recoil and jarring sound

Th' infernal doors, and on their hinges grate

Harsh thunder.

This imitative harmony is called onomatopoe'ia; the lines are called onomatopoet'ic lines.

EXERCISE 1. Point out the nature of (i) the rime, (ii) the alliteration, and (iii) any vowel harmonies in the following:

(1) It ceased yet still the sails made on

A pleasant noise till noon,

A noise like of a hidden brook

In the leafy month of June,

That to the sleeping woods all night
Singeth a quiet tune.

(2) Behold her silent in the field,

Yon solitary Highland lass!

Reaping and singing by herself;
Stop here, or gently pass!

Alone she cuts and binds the grain,
And sings a melancholy strain;
O listen! for the Vale profound

Is overflowing with the sound.

(3) The harbor-bay was clear as glass
So smoothly it was strewn!

But on the bay the moonlight lay

And the shadow of the moon.

The rock shone bright, the Kirk no less

That stands above the rock:

The moonlight steeped in silentness

The steady weathercock.

(4) O world! O life! O time!

On whose last steps I climb

Trembling at that where I had stood before;
When will return the glory of your prime?

No more Oh, never more!

Out of the day and night

A joy has taken flight;

Fresh spring, and summer, and winter hoar, Move my faint heart with grief, but with delight No more Oh, never more!

2. Study the imitative harmony in the following:

The descent of the Knight Bedivere down the cliffs.

Dry clash'd his harness in the icy caves

And barren chasms, and all to left and right

The bare black cliff clang'd round him, as he based

His feet on juts of slippery crag that rang

Sharp smitten with the dint of armèd heels-

And on a sudden, lo, the level lake,

And the long glories of the winter moon!

CHAPTER IV. STANZA-FORMS.

LESSON LXXVI.

Combinations of Verses.-As the stress-groups of the sentence (see p. 296) join in the rhythm of the whole sentence, so the rhythmic movements of the verses are part of the larger rhythm of the stanza.

Read aloud the

following verses so that you express a metrical movement dominating the whole stanza:

I heard a thousand blended notes

While in a grove I sate reclined,

In that sweet mood when pleasant thoughts
Bring sad thoughts to the mind.

The recurring combination of verses united in a musical whole constitutes a stanza. The combination is usually marked by rime, and by separation of the written or printed lines into groups.

NOTE. A stanza is frequently called a verse. Strictly used, a verse means only a metrical line.

1. Couplet. The simplest form of the stanza is two lines rimed:

A little knowledge is a dangerous thing;

Drink deep, or touch not the Pierian spring.

Rimed couplets of iambic pentameter verse are called heroic couplets. Couplets are usually printed as a continuous poem.

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II. Triplets.-Three lines may be joined and rime

aaa:

Like an æolian harp that wakes

No certain air, but overtakes

Far thought with music that it makes.

NOTE. When the first and third lines rime and the second introduces the riming pair of the following stanza, we have terza rima, used in Dante's Divine Comedy.

III. Quatrain.-Four-line stanzas have three forms. (i) The second and fourth lines rime (aa):

O my Luve's like a red, red rose
That's newly sprung in June.
O my Luve's like the melodie

That's sweetly played in tune.

The combination of a four-accent iambic line alternating with a three-accent, with the second and fourth lines riming, constitutes the ballad stanza, the most popular form of English verse. The first and third lines are also often rimed:—

O Brignall banks are wild and fair
And Greta woods are green,
And you may gather garlands there
Would grace a summer-queen.

(ii) The riming lines (iambic tetrameter) are the first and fourth and the second and third (abba) :

Old yew that graspest at the stones
That name the underlying dead,
Thy fibres net the dreamless head,

Thy roots are wrapped about the bones.

This form of stanza is called sometimes the In Me

moriam stanza.

(iii) The riming lines are the first and second and third and fourth (a a b b):

Life! I know not what thou art,

But know that thou and I must part;
And when, or how, or where we met

I own to me's a secret yet.

NOTE. In hymns the ballad stanza is called common metre; the quatrain in which the first, second, and fourth lines are trimeter iambic with the third line tetrameter, with alternate rimes, is short metre; the quatrain in which all the lines are iambic pentameter, with alternate rimes, is long metre.

Combinations of Stanzas.-Combinations of the foregoing stanzas are very numerous; e.g., the double quatrain:

When we two parted

In silence and tears

Half broken-hearted

To sever for years.

Pale grew thy cheek and cold,

Colder thy kiss;

Truly that hour foretold

Sorrow to this.

Stanzas of unusual character can be described by the number of the lines;

e.g., a seven-line or nine-line stanza, etc.

Spenserian Stanza.-One of the most elaborate stanzas is that used by Spenser in his Faerie Queene, and imitated later by Beattie, Byron, and others. Cf. Byron's Childe Harold, IV., i:

I stood in Venice on the Bridge of Sighs;
A palace and a prison on each hand:

I saw from out the wave her structure rise

As from the stroke of the enchanter's wand:

A thousand years their cloudy wings expand,
Around me, and a dying glory smiles

O'er the far times, where many a subject land
Look'd to the wingèd Lion's marble piles,

Where Venice sate in state, throned on her hundred isles!

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