God moves in a mysterious way
His wonders to perform :

He plants his footsteps in the sea,
And rides upon the storm.

An Alexandrine followed by a septenary that rhymes with it (POULTER'S MEASURE) is a favorite metre of some sixteenth-century poets:

When Summer took in hand the Winter to assail,

With force of might, and virtue great, his stormy blasts to quail.

This measure, with each line broken in two, and (usually) with additional rhyme, is the SHORT METRE of hymns:—

Teach me, my God and King,

In all things thee to see ;
And what I do in anything,

To do it as for thee.

OCTOSYLLABIC or eight-syllable verse (iambic).

From all that dwell below the skies,
Let the Creator's praise arise;

Let the Redeemer's name be sung

Through every land, by every tongue.

In the foregoing quatrain the verses are rhymed in couplets. In many other hymns in octosyllabic verse, they are rhymed alternately. Either form is called in hymn books LONG METRE.

"For the Angel of Death | spread his wings | on the blast,
And breathed | in the face | of the foe | as he passed;
And the eyes of the sleepers waxed deadly and chill,
And their hearts | but once heaved, | and for ever grew still !"

THE SPENSERIAN STANZA (eight iambic pentameters followed by an Alexandrine, with the scheme of rhymes ababbcbcC): –

Yet to the remnants of thy splendor past
Shall pilgrims, pensive, but unwearied throng;
Long shall the voyager, with th' Ionian blast,
Hail the bright clime of battle and of song;
Long shall thine annals and immortal tongue
Fill with thy fame the youth of many a shore;
Boast of the aged! lesson of the young!
Which sages venerate and bards adore,

As Pallas and the Muse unveil their awful lore.

THE SONNET, a poem complete in exactly fourteen lines, rhymed according to one of the following schemes:

(a) PETRARCHAN. Scheme of rhyme (often varied):

cdcdcd

abba, abbacdecde

cdedce

The poetry of earth is never dead:

When all the birds are faint with the hot sun,
And hide in cooling trees, a voice will run
From hedge to hedge about the new-mown mead;
That is the Grasshopper's — he takes the lead

In summer luxury he has never done
With his delights; for when tired out with fun
He rests at ease beneath some pleasant weed.
The poetry of earth is ceasing never:

On a lone winter evening when the frost

Has wrought a silence, from the stove there shrills
The Cricket's song, in warmth increasing ever,
And seems to one in drowsiness half lost,
The Grasshopper's among some grassy hills.

a.

b.

b.

a.

a.

b.

b.

a.

C.

d.

e.

C.

d.

e.

The first eight lines are called the OCTAVE, the last six the SESTET; and in the strict Petrarchan sonnet, the beginning of the sestet marks a turn in the thought.

(b) SHAKSPERIAN. Scheme of rhyme (three quatrains, and a couplet which may be used for driving home the thought) ababcdcd efefgg:

That time of year thou may'st in me behold
When yellow leaves, or none, or few do hang
Upon those boughs which shake against the cold,
Bare ruin'd choirs, where late the sweet birds sang.

In me thou seest the twilight of such day
As after sunset fadeth in the west,

Which by and by black night doth take away,
Death's second self, that seals up all in rest.

In me thou seest the glowing of such fire,

That on the ashes of his youth doth lie,
As the deathbed whereon it must expire,
Consumed with that which it was nourished by:
This thou perceiv'st, which makes thy love more strong,
To love that well which thou must leave ere long.

Poetry and Music.

a.

b.

α.

b.

C.

d.

C.

d.

e.

f.

e.

f. g.

g.

- In even so short and bare an account of versification as this, it should be made clear that there is wide difference of opinion about the very foundation of verse. Some writers, seeing the marked likeness between verse and music, carry that likeness further than the facts appear to warrant, and strive to measure the quantity of syllables, the duration of pauses, and even the pitch, or height of tone. Most persons, however, believe that the measurement of pitch belongs to music only. Certainly the fact that a person may have a good ear for music and a bad ear for verse, or a good ear for verse and a bad ear for music, should make us shy of accepting what may be called the musical theory of verse.

INDEX