A Study of Poetry by Bliss Perry (ereader with android TXT) 📖

“There was an old farmer in Sussex did dwell,

(_Chorus of Whistlers_)

There was an old farmer in Sussex did dwell

And he had a bad wife, as many knew well.

(_Chorus of Whistlers_)”

Or,

“The auld Deil cam to the man at the pleugh,

Rumchy ae de aidie.”

Sometimes the words of the choral refrain have a vaguely suggestive meaning:

“There were three ladies lived in a bower,

Eh vow bonnie

And they went out to pull a flower,

On the bonnie banks of Fordie.”

Sometimes the place-name, illustrated in the last line quoted, is definite:

“There was twa sisters in a bower,

Edinburgh, Edinburgh,

There was twa sisters in a bower,

Stirling for aye

There was twa sisters in a bower,

There came a knight to be their wooer,

Bonny Saint Johnston stands upon Tay.”

But often it is sheer fa�ry-land magic:

“He’s ta’en three locks o’ her yellow hair,

Binnorie, O Binnorie!

And wi’ them strung his harp sae rare

By the bonnie milldams o’ Binnorie.”

(Oxford, No.376.)

It is through the choral refrains, in fact, that the student of lyric poetry is chiefly fascinated as he reads the ballads. Students of epic and drama find them peculiarly suggestive in their handling of narrative and dramatic material, while to students of folklore and of primitive society they are inexhaustible treasures. The mingling of dance-motives and song-motives with the pure story-element may long remain obscure, but the popular ballad reinforces, perhaps more persuasively than any type of poetry, the conviction that the lyrical impulse is universal and inevitable. As Andrew Lang, scholar and lover of balladry, wrote long ago: “Ballads sprang from the very heart of the people and flit from age to age, from lip to lip of shepherds, peasants, nurses, of all the class that continues nearest to the state of natural man. The whole soul of the peasant class breathes in their burdens, as the great sea resounds in the shells cast up on the shores. Ballads are a voice from secret places, from silent peoples and old times long dead; and as such they stir us in a strangely intimate fashion to which artistic verse can never attain.” [Footnote: Encyclopaedia Brittanica, article “Ballads.”]

6. The Ode

If the ballad is thus an example of “popular” lyricism, with a narrative intention, an example of “artistic” lyricism is found in the Ode. Here there is no question of communal origins or of communal influence upon structure. The ode is a product of a single artist, working not naively, but consciously, and employing a highly developed technique. Derived from the Greek verb meaning “to sing,” the word “ode” has not changed its meaning since the days of Pindar, except that, as in the case of the word “lyric” itself, we have gradually come to grow unmindful of the original musical accompaniment of the song. Edmund Gosse, in his collection of English Odes, defines the ode as “any strain of enthusiastic and exalted lyrical verse directed to a fixed purpose and dealing progressively with one dignified theme.” Spenser’s “Epithalamium” or marriage ode, Wordsworth’s “Ode on the Intimations of Immortality,” Tennyson’s elegiac and encomiastic “Ode on the Death of the Duke of Wellington,” Lowell’s “Harvard Commemoration Ode,” are among the most familiar examples of the general type.

English poetry has constantly employed, however, both of the two metrical species of odes recognized by the ancients. The first, made up of uniform stanzas, was called “Aeolian” or “Horatian,”—since Horace imitated the simple, regular strophes of his Greek models. The other species of ode, the “Dorian,” is more complex, and is associated with the triumphal odes of Pindar. It utilizes groups of voices, and its divisions into so-called “strophe,” “antistrophe” and “epode” (sometimes called fancifully “wave,” “answering wave” and “echo”) were determined by the movements of the groups of singers upon the Greek stage, the “singers moving to one side during the strophe, retracing their steps during the antistrophe (which was for that reason metrically identical with the strophe), and standing still during the epode.” [Footnote: See Bronson’s edition of the poems of Collins. Athenaeum Press.]

It must be observed, however, that the English odes written in strictly uniform stanzas differ greatly in the simplicity of the stanzaic pattern. Andrew Marvell’s “Horatian Ode upon Cromwell’s Return from Ireland,” Collins’s “Ode to Evening,” Shelley’s “To a Skylark,” and Wordsworth’s “Ode to Duty” are all in very simple stanza forms. But Collins’s “Ode on the Superstitions of the Highlands,” Shelley’s “Ode to Liberty” and Coleridge’s “Ode to France” follow very complicated patterns, though all the stanzas are alike. The English “Horatian” ode, then, while exhibiting the greatest differences in complexity of stanzaic forms, is “homostrophic.”

To understand the “Pindaric” English ode, we must remember that a few scholars, like Ben Jonson, Congreve and Gray, took peculiar pleasure in reproducing the general effect of the Greek strophic arrangement of “turn,” “counterturn” and “pause.” Ben Jonson’s “Ode to Sir Lucius Cary and Sir H. Morison” (Oxford, No. 194) has been thought to be the first strictly Pindaric ode in English, and Gray’s “Bard” and “Progress of Poesy” (Oxford, Nos. 454, 455) are still more familiar examples of this type. But the great popularity of the so-called “Pindaric” ode in English in the seventeenth century was due to Cowley, and to one of those periodic loyalties to lawlessness which are characteristic of the English. For Cowley, failing to perceive that Pindar’s apparent lawlessness was due to the corruption of the Greek text and to the modern ignorance of the rules of Greek choral music, made his English “Pindaric” odes an outlet for rebellion against all stanzaic law. The finer the poetic frenzy, the freer the lyric pattern! But, alas, rhetoric soon triumphed over imagination, and in the absence of metrical restraint the ode grew declamatory, bombastic, and lowest stage of all, “official,” the last refuge of laureates who felt obliged to produce something sonorous in honor of a royal birthday or wedding. This official ode persisted long after the pseudo-Pindaric flag was lowered and Cowley had become neglected.

With the revival of Romantic imagination, however, came a new interest in the “irregular” ode, whose strophic arrangement ebbs and flows without apparent restraint, subject only to what Watts-Dunton termed “emotional law.” Wordsworth’s “Ode on the Intimations of Immortality” moves in obedience to its own rhythmic impulses only, like Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan” and Emerson’s “Bacchus.” Metrical variety can nowhere be shown more freely and gloriously than in the irregular ode: there may be any number of lines in each strophe, and often the strophe itself becomes dissolved into something corresponding to the “movement” of a symphony. Masterpieces like William Vaughn Moody’s “Ode in Time of Hesitation” and Francis Thompson’s “Hound of Heaven” reveal of course a firm intellectual grasp upon the underlying theme of the ode and upon the logical processes of its development. But although we may follow with keen intellectual delight these large, free handlings of a lyrical theme, there are few readers of poetry whose susceptibility to complicated combinations of rhyme-sound allows them to perceive the full verbal beauty of the great irregular odes. Even in such regular strophes as those of Keats’s “Grecian Urn,” who remembers that the rhyme scheme of the first stanza is unlike that of the following stanzas? Or that the second stanza of the “Ode to a Nightingale” runs on four sounds instead of five? Let the reader test his ear by reading aloud the intricate sound-patterns employed in such elegies as Arnold’s “Scholar Gypsy” (Oxford, No. 751) or Swinburne’s “Ave atque Vale” (Oxford, No. 810), and then let him go back to “Lycidas” (Oxford, No. 317), the final test of one’s responsiveness to the blending of the intellectual and the sensuous elements in poetic beauty. If he is honest with himself, he will probably confess that neither his ear nor his mind can keep full pace with the swift and subtle demands made upon both by the masters of sustained lyric energy. But he will also become freshly aware that the ode is a supreme example of that union of excitement with a sense of order, of liberty with law, which gives Verse its immortality.

7. The Sonnet

The sonnet, likewise, is a lyric form which illustrates the delicate balance between freedom and restraint. Let us look first at its structure, and then at its capacity for expressing thought and feeling.

Both name and structure are Italian in origin, “sonetto” being the diminutive of “suono,” sound. Dante and Petrarch knew it as a special lyric form intended for musical accompaniment. It must have fourteen lines, neither more nor less, with five beats or “stresses” to the line. Each line must end with a rhyme. In the arrangement of the rhymes the sonnet is made up of two parts, or rhyme-systems: the first eight lines forming the “octave,” and the last six the “sestet.” The octave is made up of two quatrains and the sestet of two tercets. There is a main pause in passing from the octave to the sestet, and frequently there are minor pauses in passing from the first quatrain to the second, and from the first tercet to the last.

Almost all of Petrarch’s sonnets follow this rhyme-scheme: for the octave, a b b a a b b a; for the sestet, either c d e c d e or c d c d c d. This strict “Petrarchan” form has endured for six centuries. It has been adopted by poets of every race and language, and it is used to-day as widely or more widely than ever. While individual poets have constantly experimented with different rhyme-schemes, particularly in the sestet, the only really notable invention of a new sonnet form was made by the Elizabethans. Puttenham’s Arte of English Poesie (1589) declares that “Sir Thomas Wyatt the elder and Henry Earl of Surrey, having travelled into Italy and there tasted the sweet and stately measures and style of the Italian poesie,… greatly polished our rude and homely manner of vulgar poesie…. Their conceits were lofty, their style stately, their conveyance cleanly, their terms proper, their metre sweet and well-proportioned, in all imitating very naturally and studiously their Master Francis Petrarch.”

This is charming, but as a matter of fact both Wyatt and Surrey, with natural English independence, broke away from the strict Petrarchan rhyme form. Wyatt liked a final couplet, and Surrey used a rhyme-scheme which was later adopted by Shakspere and is known to-day as the “Shaksperean” form of sonnet: namely, three quatrains made up of alternate rhymes—a separate rhyme-scheme for each quatrain—and a closing couplet. The rhymes consequently run thus: a b a b c d c d e f e f g g. To the Petrarchan purist this is clearly no sonnet at all, in spite of its fourteen five-beat, rhyming lines. For the distinction between octave and sestet has disappeared, there is a threefold division of the first twelve lines, and the final couplet gives an epigrammatic summary or “point” which Petrarch took pains to avoid.

The difference will be still more clearly manifest if we turn from a comparison of rhyme-structure to the ordering of the thought in the Petrarchan sonnet. Mark Pattison, a stout “Petrarchan,” lays down these rules in the Preface to his edition of Milton’s Sonnets: [Footnote: D. Appleton & Co., New York, 1883.]

“a. A sonnet, like every other work of art, must have its unity. It must

be the expression of one, and only one, thought or feeling.

“b. This thought or mood should be led up to, and opened in the early

lines of the sonnet; strictly, in the first quatrain; in the second

quatrain the hearer should be placed in full possession of it.

“c. After the second