Harvard University Press The Principles of English Versification

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a * scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1922 edition. Excerpt: ...gave it a peculiar melody, and, partly for this reason and partly from the length and subject of the poem, almost preempted it for elegiac purposes.1 Characteristic stanzas metrically are these: Calm and deep peace in this wide air, These leaves that redden to the fall; And in my heart, if calm at all, If any calm, a calm despair. And all we met was fair and good, And all was good that Time could bring, And all the secret of the Spring Moved in the chambers of the blood. 1 On its origin and the twenty-five poems in it by seventeen different poets, from Ben Jonson to Clough and Rossetti, before the publication of In Memoriam, see E. P. Morton in Modern Language Notes, 24 (1909), pp. 67 ff. Now fades the last long streak of snow, Now burgeons every maze of quick About the flowering squares, and thick By ashen roots the violets blow. One of the peculiarities of the stanza is the increased emphasis which the rime of the third verse receives from its proximity to that of the second; and this is noticeable both when there is a logical pause after the third verse and when there is none: 'Thou makest thine appeal to me: I bring to life, I bring to death: The spirit does but mean the breath: I know no more.' And he, shall he... I sometimes hold it half a sin To put in words the grief I feel; For words, like Nature, half reveal And half conceal the Soul within. Run-on stanzas are very frequent; especially remarkable is the periodic movement of the four stanzas of I LXXXVI, leading up to the last line--A hundred spirits whisper ' Peace.' "By the rhyme-scheme of the quatrain," says Corson, "the terminal rhyme-emphasis of the stanza is reduced, the second and third verses being the most closely braced by the rhyme. The stanza is thus admirably adapted to the...