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Ghost Ship. Pantheon Heliseum Tyrant's Castle. Fox Valley. Sanctuary Toolen City. Cernium Hotel Arcus. Maple Island Edelstein Scrapyard. Mirror World FriendStory. Other Features. Equipment Pet. Party Quest Exchange Quest Epics. There can be any combination of end and internal consonance with end or internal rhyme in the same poem, according to the best modern practice: the poet himself being the judge of what form is most pleasing to his inner sense of music, and that of his prospective readers.
Edna St. Vincent Millay, in The Poet and His Book, uses these pairs of words in consonance: worry, bury; withered, gathered; cluttered, spattered; quarrel, laurel; hunters, winter's; valleys, bellies. She also twice uses assonance: cupboard, upward; only, homely. Elinor Wylie uses such instances of consonance as: bloody, body; people, ripple; mourner, corner; primer, dreamer; standard, pondered; noble, trouble; music, physic; Circe, hearsay; Vulcan, falcon; languish, distinguish; lost, ghost; sword, lord; suns, bronze; and many more.
Emily Dickinson is more lavish in her use of consonance than any of these. The reason has been hinted before: the limited field of rhymes in the language, in spite of the impressive length of any rhyming dictionary. One advantage of a phonetic rhyming dictionary is that it makes the use of precise and accurate consonance possible. Words are arranged by rhyme and not by consonance; and yet the phonetic arrangement gives a start toward arriving at accurate consonance.
Thus AD is followed by AD and this by AD, so that we may proceed directly from rhyming sounds like aid to sad and then to charade. In double rhymes, O 'le, OL 'e and OL 'e follow in regular sequence; thus holy, Macaulay and folly are near neighbors. Suppose it is desired to locate all the consonance sounds possible for a line ending with holy. Look up also OUL'e and other possible vowel combinations, to make sure there are no rhyme sounds under them. And now the poet has an accurate test to see which words are in precise consonance with holy, and which are not.
Thus this most modern of all sound-repetition devices in English versification can be achieved most perfectly through the use of a phonetic rhyming dictionary. The phonetic symbols, of course, must be in precise alphabetical order. Turn, under each of the five vowels not forgetting the vowel sounds Ol, OO, and Oil come alphabetically also , to the vowel followed by the identical consonant and vowel sounds following the accented vowel in the rhymed syllable you wish consonances for; and all consonances that the lists of words afford will be found.
There is small adventure in rhyming, except in the made rhymes of two or more words more common to light verse. Compilers of rhyming dictionaries have completed the adventure long ago. There is great adventure in the use of consonance, which expands the soundrepetition resources of the language.
It is possible to write a poem where not one of the consonance couplets has been used before. The adventurous will not overlook this. Your Mental Rhyming Dictionary As times it is inconvenient or impossible to have a rhyming dictionary available.
Especially where the poet desires to write such a. The method is simple. First write down all the single, double and triple consonantal sounds you can remember. It is not necessary to write down all of them, although for your convenience the list on page 41 is approximately complete. Having jotted down as many of these as you remember, test the rhyme sound desired against this table, and write out the results. Thus, if the rhymes to aye, the long A sound, are desired, the poet would get, to begin with, of the single consonantal sounds: aye, bay, day, fay, gay, hay, jay, kay or cay, lay, may, nay or neigh, pay, ray, say, decollete for the t sound, survey for the v sound, way, yea.
Be careful, when a one-syllabled rhyme in such an instance is missing, to use ingenuity to find longer words with the desired rhyme, as decollete, survey. Then, for the double consonantal sound rhymes, the following could be added: redouble for the bl sound, bray, dray, flay, fray, gray, clay, McCrae for the cr sound, play, pray or prey, shay, risque for the sk sound, slay, dismay perhaps for the sm sound, stay, sway, they, tray, tway. In addition, the triple consonantal sounds would give: splay, spray, stray.
Altogether this has furnished thirty-nine rhymes for aye: and this is more than enough to satisfy the requirements of any formal verse. Suppose only four rhymes for the purposes of the rhyming pattern are needed, and the poet decides to use huge as one of them.
But no fourth rhyming sound. The huge rhyme sound would then have to be discarded and some other sound tried. Try a double rhyme, ended. Using this mental rhyming dictionary, the poet discovers:. Here are at least eighteen rhyming mates, which can be used as the 2 rhyme in a ballade, which requires fourteen rhyming mates. So even if the rhyming dictionary is left behind, a mental rhyming dictionary can always be improvised, once the mechanism is learned.
A series of lines arranged formally as a part of a poem is called a stanza. Stanza forms may be rigid, with a fixed order of sequence as to line length, meter, or rhyme; or they may be mere divisions of a poem, corresponding to the paragraphs of prose.
The simplest stanza is one of two lines, called a couplet. The word couplet is used to mean either a two-line poem, or a two-line stanza that is, a part of a poem; and this is equally true of triplets or tercets, quatrains and so on. It may be rhymed: "Where are you going, my pretty maid?
Mother Gooses Nursery Rhymes. Naturally, if our stanza has only two lines, it can be rhymed in only one way: each line followed immediately by its rhyming mate. This is called rhyming in couplets, and is indicated by 1, 1.
The second rhyme sound used in the poem would be designated by 2, the third by 3, and so on. Thus a series of couplet stanzas, if rhymed, would be rhymed 1, 1; 2; 3, 3; and so on. This is called couplet rhyming, a term used of any lines rhymed in this fashion, even when not divided into separate couplet stanzas. Five-foot iambic lines rhymed couplet fashion are called heroic couplets. This was the favorite measure employed by Dryden and Pope, who enriched the language with many polished quotations: Vice is a monster of so frightful mien As, to be hated, needs but to be seen; Yet seen too oft, familiar with her face, We first endure, then pity, then embrace.
An Essay on Man, Alexander Pope. These pairs of lines are not stanzas, much less complete two-line poems. Thus couplet is used with the third meaning of a method of rhymingthe 1, 1; 2, 2 method. A couplet need not be rhymed: it may be an unrhymed two-line poem, or two-line stanza. It may be in any rhythm or combination of rhythms. The Triplet or Tercet A group of three lines, whether a complete poem or a stanza, is called a triplet, or tercet.
This is not as common a form as the couplet or the four-line form, the quatrain. An example is: A still small voice spake unto me, 1 "Life is so full of misery, 1 Were it not better not to be?
It is clear that with three lines to work from, theJines in such a group might be rhymed 1, 1, 2, in which the third line rhymes with nothing in the triplet; or 1, 2, 2; or 1, 2, 1.
In the case of groups of triplet stanzas, the rhymes may be interlocked: Make me thy lyre, even as the forest is: What if my leaves are falling like its own! The tumult of thy mighty harmonies Will take from both a deep autumnal tone, Sweet though in sadness. Be thou, Spirit fierce, My spirit! Be thou me, impetuous one! Drive my dead thoughts over the universe Like withered leaves to quicken a new birth!
And, by the incantation of this verse, Scatter, as from an unextinguished hearth Ashes and sparks, my words among mankind! Be through my lips to unawakened earth 1 2 1 2 3 2 3 4 3 4 5 4. The trumpet of a prophecy! O wind, 5 If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind? This interlocked rhyming, where the unrhymed middle line of one triplet becomes the rhymed first and third lines of the next, the whole ending with a thirteenth and fourteenth line rhyming with the unrhymed central line of the preceding triplet, is a special Italian verse stanza form, called terza rima.
As Shelley used it, it might be regarded as an apt variation of the Shakespearean sonnet. It may be constituted of less or more triplets, always followed by such a concluding couplet. Notice, in the hands of this master, the rhyming devices. Is-harmonies illustrates rhyming a primary accent with a secondary one: and the secondary one is an indeterminate sound, more often rhymed with seas than with is, which gives it the effect of partial consonance.
Fierce-universe is consonance, not rhyme, as is birth-hearth-earth, long defended as an "eye rhyme," but admissible as consonance. The same is true of mankind-wind-behind. It is incorrect to pronounce the noun wind as if it were the verb to wind; wind here rhymed with thinned, and is in consonance with behind. Triplets may be in any rhythm, including free verse or polyrhythm. And they may be unrhymed: I have had playmates, I have had companions, In my days of childhood, in my joyful school-days; All, all are gone, the old familiar faces.
I have been laughing, I have been carousing, Drinking late, sitting late, with my bosom cronies; All, all are gone, the old familiar faces. In this poem Lamb invented his own patternunrhymed six-foot trochaic in the main, with seven feet in the fifth line; and with the terminal line of each triplet a refrain, repeated without alteration.
Any poet may make his own pattern for any poem he wishes; and, if it finds favor, it may become a standard pattern. The Quatrain A quatrain is a stanza or poem of four lines.
This is the most popular brief stanza in English versification, and has a variety of familiar rhyme schemes. Ordinary ballad meter was originally seven-foot iambic rhymed couplets:.
As normally printed today, this becomes a quatrain, with the first and third lines unrhymed, and only the second and fourth rhyminga rhyme scheme that may be used with other meters as well, and with any number of feet to each line: As Robin Hood in the forest strayed, All under the greenwood tree, He was aware of a brave young man, As fine as fine might be. Almost as popular is the quatrain rhymed on alternate lines: A violet by a mossy stone 1 Half-hidden from the eye!
Quatrains may be rhymed couplet-wise: Tiger, tiger, burning bright 1 In the forests of the night, 1 What immortal hand or eye 2 Could frame thy fearful symmetry? Note that this is not indented: that is, that line two is set directly under line one. The purpose of indentation is primarily to show the rhyme scheme: lines rhyming with each other may be normally set beneath each other, as in the two previous examples.
Indentation is used either to show identities of rhyme, or to center briefer lines in a stanza or poem. The In Memoriam stanza is built upon a four-foot iambic pattern, rhymed as follows: Ring out old shapes of foul disease; Ring out the narrowing lust of gold; 1 2 1 2 3 2. Edward Fitzgerald's translation or recreation of the quatrains or Rubdiydt of Omar Khayyam has one of the most famous quatrain rhyme patterns in the language, using five-foot iambic lines: The Moving Finger writes; and, having writ, 1 Moves on: nor all your Piety nor Wit 1 Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line 2 Nor all your Tears wash out a Word of it.
Other possible quatrain rhyme arrangements are: 1, 1, 1, 1; 1, 1, 1, 2; 2, 2, 2, 2; 1, 2, 1, 1; 1, 2, 3, 1; 1, 1, 2, 3; 1, 2, 3, 3; 1, 2, 2, 3; and no doubt others.
Hereafter, no additional rhyming patterns will be listed, since by now it should be understood that none is forbidden. As for the number of feet to the line in these quatrains, the number for the better-known patterns is as follows: Ballad Meter, 4, 3, 4, 3. Called also Long Meter in hymns. In Memoriam, 4, 4, 4, 4. Rubdiydt, 5, 5, 5, 5. Short Meter in hymns , 3, 3, 4, 3.
This last was popular in the sixteenth century as Poulter's measure. These four are all in iambic lines. Of course, any metric foot or combination of feet may be employed. It need not be repeated again that the quatrain, as any other stanza, may be unrhymed or may be in polyrhythm. Adelaide Crapsey invented one containing 1, 2, 3, 4 and 1 iambic feet respectively in the lines:.
Triad, Adelaide Crapsey. A rhymed cinquain is used in one of Shelley's best-known odes: Hail to thee, blithe Spirit! Notice how the indentation centers the briefer lines, as well as indicating, in the first four, rhyming mates.
The number of feet here is 3, 3, 3, 3, 6. A terminal six-foot iambic line is called an Alexandrine; this was constantly used with iambic five-foot lines as a terminal.
Shelley uses this pattern throughout his poem To a Skylark. Foe, another master craftsman, altered his rhyme and meter pattern from stanza to stanza in his greatest lyrics. The familiar love song To Helen "Helen, thy beauty is to me" has, in his three cinquains or fiveline stanzas, these three different rhyme arrangements; 1,2, 1, 2, 2; 3, 4, 3, 4, 3; 5, 6, 6, 5, 6. To his inner musical ear, these changes were more musical than regularity could have been.
A six-line stanza is called a sextet or sestet. Here is an example: Fear no more the heat o' the sun 1 Nor the furious winter's rages; 2 Thou thy worldly task hast done, 1 Home art gone and ta'en thy wages: 2 Golden lads and girls all must, 3 As chimney-sweepers, come to dust. The trochaic pattern here is four-foot lines.
One of the favorite stanzas of Robert Burns has the iambic pattern of 4 , 4 , 4 , 2,4, 2; as in his To a Field-Mouse:. The consonance beastie, breastie, hasty, chase thee was to be expected in the hands of a master.
A popular pattern using an unusual trochaic 4, 4, 2, 4, 4, 2 measure was used by Whittier: And if I should live to be 1 The last leaf upon the tree 1 In the spring, 2 Let them laugh, as I do now, 3 At the old, forsaken bough 3 Where I cling. This may be used in longer stanzas, with a scheme such as 1, 1, 1, 2, 3, 3, 3, 2, a variant of this being popularized by Tennyson: Willows whiten, aspens quiver, 1 Little breezes dusk and shiver 1 Through the wave that runs for ever 1 By the island in the river 1 Flowing down to Camelot.
This stanza is called a tail rhyme stanza and is a mere elaboration of the pattern of The Last Leaf. Certain Other Stanzas It may seem like profanation to some, to subject to the critical scalpel such a masterpiece as Keats's Ode to a Grecian Urn. But the. Here are five ten-line stanzas. Each opens with a 1, 2, 1,2 sequence.
Thereafter there are differences. The first and last have the next six lines 3, 4, 5, 4, 3, 5; the fourth and fifth use instead 3, 4, 5, 3, 4, 5; while the second has 3, 4, 5, 3, 5, 4. A famous seven-lined stanza is called Rhyme Royal. Here is a typical use by Chaucer: To you, my purse, and to none other wight 1 Complain I, for ye be my lady dear. This has a terminal couplet rhyming 3, 3, which breaks the flow of the narrative somewhat. To avoid this, the Canopus stanza points a way out: The night's mysterious wings pulsed thru the dark, 1 The night's mysterious noises cracked and shivered, 2 And where their fingers met a visible spark 1 Seemed to leap forth at them, and pulsed and quivered 2 Throughout them both.
Their thickened tongues were dumb, 3 The pretty words of star-lore undelivered, 2 The pretty words that found no breath would come. Note here also that the use of some feminine or double rhymes with single or masculine rhymes is effective. This is especially effective in a Shakespearean sonnet.
Ottava rima is an Italian stanza adopted in English by many poets. It is an eight-line stanza, composed of a sestet rhymed alternately, followed by a terminal rhyming couplet.
The Italians use their heroic meter, eleven syllables to the line, in it; the English prefer iambic five-foot measure. But "why then publish? Why read? To make some hour less dreary. Again note the use of double and single rhymes in the same stanza, quite often effective.
The Spenserian stanza was invented by Edmund Spenser, and has long been used in serious dignified verse. The eight opening five-foot iambic lines are terminated by an Alexandrine, or six-foot iambic line; the pattern may be seen in this opening of Keats's poem, which uses the stanza throughout: St. Agnes' Eveah, bitter chill it was!
Agnes, John Keats. Terza rima is an iambic rhythm, usually of five feet to the line. It is usually written continuously, and not in stanzas. It consists of groups of three lines, rhymed 1, 2, 1; but the rhyming sound of the middle line, 2, becomes the first and third line of the next group; and so on. The end of the canto or poem is a couplet, tying up the rhyme sound left loose as the central line terminal sound in the preceding triplet. Thus it is a sort of chain verse, its rhyme scheme proceeding: 1,2, 1; 2, 3, 2; 3, 4, 3; 4, 5, 4; n-1, n, n-1; n, n.
Shelley, in his Ode to the West Wind, used this in fourteen-line groups, separating the triplets and concluding couplet as if they were separate stanzas. It is advisable for the poet or versifier to spend some time in the. Scansion will indicate the meter employed; and the numeral system 1, 1, 2, 2 will mark for you the rhyming pattern. Let your attention be directed especially to ingenious devices for securing variety within a formal pattern. The sonnet, which will be reached in the study of lyric poetry, has been used often and successfully as a stanza.
In polyrhythmic or free verse, the stanza division follows the poet's inner mandate of where each group of lines should end, as if it were a paragraph in prose.
Sapphics and Other Classic Forms Elegiac verse, according to the classical models, consists of lines alternately dactylic hexameter and dactylic pentamenter; and then this difference is explained away by saying that the shorter lines have six accents, but omit the unaccented syllables in the third and sixth feet. Coleridge indicates the method: In the hexameter rises the fountain's all-silvery radiance; In the pentameter aye falling in melody back.
Translation from Schiller, Samuel Taylor Coleridge. It is significant that none of the five greatest examples of elegiac poetrythat based upon death, or reflections upon deathin the English language, use this form. The Greek dactylic hexameter, the classic model as the iambic five-foot line is in English, is far more complicated, according to the prosodists, than it sounds.
There are six feet. The fifst four are dactyls or spondees. The fifth must be a dactyl; otherwise, if a spondee appears here, the verse is called spondaic. The last is a spondee or a trochee. A diagram makes this clearer. This may be written in English, with an accent basis instead of a quantity basis that is, long and short syllables.
Hendecasyllabics were eleven-syllabled lines composed of a spondee, a dactyl, and trochees. Alcaics, named from the lyric poet Alcaeus, a contemporary of Sappho, are of several kinds. The first variety has a five-foot line, consisting of a spondee or iamb, an iamb, a long syllable, and two dactyls.
Here is the pattern:. What are the names of these feet? The first is an epitrite first, second, third or fourth epitrite, depending upon the Jocation of the short syllable ; two choriambi or choriambs as above; and a bacchius. This technique does not often produce poetry in English; more often, it produces prosody or verse. For an Alcaic ode, each strophe consists of four lines. The first two are eleven-syllabled Alcaics of the first kind; the third an especial form of iambic two-foot of nine syllables, described as hypercatalectic; and the fourth a ten-syllabled Alcaic of the second kind.
Tennyson tried to catch it in: O mighty-mouthed inventor of harmonies, O skilled to sing of time or eternity,. Milton, Alfred Tennyson. Sapphics are named after the poet Sappho, who is said to have used the form with high skill. A sapphic line consists of five equal beats, its central one of three syllables, and the rest of two each. Certain English poets have essayed this meter. In the examples given, the accent sign means a syllable described as long; the other symbol means one described as short.
A choriambic line consists of a spondee, three choriambi and an iamb. A galliambic line is composed of iambs, one of which drops its final syllable, the next foot to the last being an anapest. Indentation The purpose of indentation is primarily to indicate the rhyme scheme. Indenting a line means sinking it inward by an increased blank space in the left-hand margin.
Every paragraph in prose is indented at its beginning. An early indentation of poetry was similar to this, and consisted in indenting only the first line of each stanza. Where the poet desires to impress the reader with his rhyme scheme, indenting of lines rhymed is proper: Yet this inconstancy is such As you too shall adore: I could not love thee, Dear, so much, Loved I not Honour more.
The following indentation is improper and essentially illiterate: That which her slender waist confined Shall now my joyful temples bind: No monarch but would give his crown His arms might do what this has done. On a Girdle, Edmund Waller. Needless to say, the poet set this up without indentation. The motive for such misindentation seems to be the following foggy thinking on the part of the versifier: a Some poems by great poets are indented.
Once the motive for indentation is learnedto show the similarity of rhyme sounds terminating lines indented to the same pointthis error will be avoided. A second purpose of indentation is to center short lines in the. Though diligent and zealous, he Became a slave to jealousy. Considering her beauty, 'Twas his duty To be that! Here the first, third, fourth and sixth indentations indicate rhyming changes; the second and fifth are to center briefer rhyming lines. The object is to make the poem appear as presentable as possible, considering the rhyme scheme and length of line.
Recall the indentation of Shelley's To a Skylark, already given. As to sonnets, there are only two proper ways to present them: indenting for rhyme and omitting indentation. The Italian and Shakespearean form would then have the following indentation, if this is used to indicate the rhyme scheme: Italian Sonnet 1 2 2 1 1 2 2 1 3 4 5 3 4 5 Shakespearean Sonnet 1 2 1 2 3 4 3 4 5 6 5 6 7 7. It is more usual to set up sonnets without indentation. The original method of indenting the Shakespearean sonnet consisted of twelve lines without indentation and an identation for the concluding couplet.
All this assumes that the poet wishes to impress on the reader the rhyming scheme and the poet's fidelity in following it. But this is initiating the reader into the irrelevant laboratory work of the poet, and has its many disadvantages, since the reader primarily wishes to know what the poet has to say, not the devices by which he increases his effectiveness.
The modern tendency is to eliminate the indentation in all poems. If poems are printed similarly to prose, the indentation will be the same as prose, to indicate paragraph openings, or to insert a quotation. The distinction is simple: In narrative poetry, the poet tells us a story as if he had been a spectator, but not a participant, in the events. In dramatic poetry, the poet lets the characters of the story speak their own words.
In lyric poetry, the poet speaks his own moods, thoughts and aspirations. These, like all definitions, define from the centers, not from the boundaries. A long-winded narrative in the first person, telling the poet's own adventures, might be classed with reason as any of the three: narrative poetry because it tells a story; dramatic, like a long dramatic monologue; and lyric, because the poet himself is speaking.
This attitude classification is not of primary importance. A fourth division, didactic poetry, that which teaches or points a moral, was once popular and is still encountered. It is regarded at best as a low flight of poetry. Epic, Metrical Romance, Tale An epic is a long narrative poem, dealing with heroic events, usually with supernatural guidance and participation in the action. Epics are divided into natural or folk epics, and literary epics. There is a suggested theory that folk epics are preceded by and composed of folk ballads.
The earliest known epics exhibit little or no trace of any welding or amalgamating process. The earliest literary remains in Greece are of the epic type, of three varieties. Epics of personal romance and war center around the semimythical blind bard Homer, with his Iliadthe story of the flight of Helen of Sparta with her Trojan lover, Paris; the war of Greeks against Trojans to avenge this; the anger of Greek Achilles and its effects; the defeat of Troyand the Odyssey, telling the world wanderings of Grecian Odysseus after the sack of Troy, and of his return to his native Ithaca.
Epics dealing with the mysteries of religion center around the mythical singer Orpheus. Epics of a didactic nature center around the name of Hesiod. Scholars state that many lost epics in all three fields preceded the epics now remaining. They originated before the invention of writing and were transmitted orally, with inevitable changes and additions from time to time. Literary epics are a later attempt to catch the charm of the ancient epics; and as a rule they are a lower flight.
Spenser's Faerie Queene has lost most of its charm for many modern English readers; even Milton's Paradise Lost, which sought to express English Puritanism as Dante had sought to express medieval Catholicism, is largely dull to modern readers.
Stories in verse preceded stories in prose. Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, the narrative metrical romances and tales of Scott, Byron and others, preceded the novel and the short story in English. But prose has become the popular medium, as it is the more natural one, and the long poetic narrative today usually seems artificial. Ballad The ballad, the brief story in verse, alone retains some general popularity.
The name meant first a folk song-and-dance, like the. It came to mean the folksong that tells a brief storyat first to be sung, later to be said or read. The Germanic bards or scalds, the gleemen, harpers, minstrels, troubadours, and minnesingersrs were a distinguished lotthe oral literature and music of races in the pre-bookish age.
The chief figures in the ballads at first were noble, since nobles were the patrons of the singers. Later on, the lower classes became vocalthe oppressed Saxons in the Robin Hood ballads, and many early ballads in which a commoner ends by marrying one of noble lineage.
The technique at first was simple, often with a simple refrain that the hearers might chorus. In English, the first ballad meter was seven-foot iambic lines, rhymed in couplets. A variant of this is the Scottish ballad Edward, Edward, with a pause between the invoked names taking the place of a foot in alternate lines: "Quhy does zour brand sae drop wi' bluid, Edward, Edward? Quhy does zour brand sae drop wi' bluid, and quhy sae sad gang zee, O?
If modern poetry gave us more of such red meat instead of caviar canapes, it would hold a wider popularity than it now has. The rhythm is much freer than centuries of later iambic versification. The modern versifier can learn much of the way to sprinkle anapests in an iambic pattern, and of more important devices in versification, from old English folk ballads, as from that other depository of English folk verse, Mother Goose.
Folk ballads originate among people largely pre-bookish; certain American mountaineers and certain Negroes still commemorate thrilling events with folk ballads, like the one within our memory on The Sinking of the Titantic. Literary ballads are more successful than literary epics. The stanza form is almost invariably simple.
Yet it is worthwhile to study the slight elaborations of the ballad meter that Coleridge employedwith stanzas ranging from four to nine ballad half-lines. There are many more successful literary ballads. Dramatic Poetry Like storytelling, drama is largely a lost field to poetry, purely because of the unnaturalness of poetic drama as usually written.
There is a field for drama in natural free verse, which may yet be widely used. Classic drama was divided into tragedy, a play ending in death, and comedy, a play not ending in death. This division was unworkable and has been abandoned today. Thespis, reputed father of Grecian drama, never permitted more than one actor on the stage at one time, with a chorus to interpret the action to the audience.
This rigid convention was shattered by Aeschylus, who added a second actor. Sophocles added a third; but classic Greek drama never permitted a fourth. The typical Shakespearean play had five acts, the climax occurring during the third act, the solution at the end.
This usually meant a dragging fourth act, which only Othello among the great tragedies avoided. Shakespeare and most other English verse dramatists used a five-foot iambic line, most often in blank or unrhymed verse. None of these conventions are more sacred than the one-actor convention of Thespis.
The dramatic monologue, or dramatic lyric, sprung from the speeches of Thespis's actor and the unnatural soliloquy of classic and English drama, is the one form of drama in verse which preserves considerable popularity. Robert Browning made this field peculiarly his own, with such magnificent dramatic vignettes as My Last Duchess, Andrea del Sarto, Caliban upon Setebos and so many more.
His tremendous The Ring and the Book is, within a brief framework, ten immense dramatic monologues: the same group of facts, as seen through the eyes of ten differing personalities.
Such dramatic monologues may be in any rhythm, any line length, and with or without rhyme. Success comes in proportion to the naturalness of the speech, the universality and depth of the emotion displayed, and the accuracy in character drawing.
Lyric Poetry: Ode, Elegy, Pastoral Perhaps the earliest, and certainly the most enduringly popular type of poetry, is the lyric. As the name indicates, it meant originally poetry to be sung to the lyrea dance at first accompanying this. The ode, the most exalted form of lyric poetry, had strict rules. The Greek Pindaric ode had three movements: a strophe, in which the chorus moved from a given spot toward the right; the antistrophe, following the same versification pattern, and to the same tune, in which the chorus moved correspondingly to the left; and the concluding epode, different in structure, sung to a different tune, and with the chorus standing still.
Efforts to revive this form in English have not succeeded. In English, the ode is a dignified lyric on some high theme, with constant progress in its stanzas toward its conclusion.
Familiar odes in English include Wordsworth's: Our birth is but a sleep and- a forgetting; The Soul that rises with us, our life's Star, Hath elsewhere its setting And cometh from afar; Not in entire forgetfulness, And not in utter nakedness, But trailing clouds of glory do we come From God, who is our home.
Heaven lies about us in our infancy! Ode on the Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood and also the great odes by Shelley and Keats already referred to.
An elegy is a formal expression of the poet's grief at death, whether general or centered about the death of an individual. It has no more definite a pattern in English than the ode.
Milton, in Lycidas, uses an iambic measure, with lines of differing lengths, and a f luidic rhyme scheme. Shelley, in Adonais, chose the Spenserian stanza.
Tennyson, in In Memoriam, selected the quatrain pattern already encountered. Whitman, in his major Lincoln threnody, "When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloomed, wrote in magnificent polyrhythmic verse. Gray's familiar Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard, alone among these a meditation upon death in general, used alternate-rhymed five-foot iambic lines. There are many familiar short elegies in the language.
The pastoral is a reflective lyric upon some aspect of nature, formerly concerned with shepherd life, whence its name. As city living increasingly replaces country living, some form of city lyric may supplant the pastoral, if it does not die without offspring. It is best to reserve the word for a lyric intended to be set to music. This calls for a knowledge, on the part of the poet, of the human voice in music, and the ease or difficulty with which the various sounds are produced.
Certain consonants and combinations of consonants are singable only with great difficulty. A line like: The gross-sized much-touched scratch will itch is not easily singable. The terminal consonants m, n, I, r are sung with ease; s, z, ch, sh, as terminals, with difficulty. Of the vowels, broad a, long o, long a, ou are easiest to sing, though no vowel is really difficult. The words chosen should always end, and as far as possible include, only sounds which open the mouth, instead of closing it.
Simple words are to be preferred to complicated ones; definite precise words to indefinite abstract ones; emotion-evoking words to intellectualized ones. The lyric canon in English is one of the glories of its literature. After the dawn-hour lyrics before the Elizabethan age, the golden song of Campion Shall I come, sweet Love, to thee, When the evening beams are set?
Shall I not excluded be, Will you find no feigned let? Thomas Campion.
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