whole people repeated in chorus single words, or verses, or whole stanzas . . . or in the pauses of the chief singer, they answered him with some repeated cry.. This became finally a regular form." Through the Provençal poetry these refrains came into England. They are common in the old folk-song, and the reader is familiar with them in many modern ballads; cf. also the Epithalamion. The refrain may be in another tongue: cf. Byron's Maid of Athens.

But the prevailing method of combining verses is by end-rime; and here we distinguish between stanzas where the verses are homogeneous, and stanzas made up of verses with a varying number of accents, though rarely with varying movement. It would require a volume to catalogue all the combinations in our poetry ; any one can easily determine the form of a stanza for himself by noting the order of rimes. A decidedly different effect is made by two stanzas which may be alike in movement and number of verses, but unlike in rime-order. Thus the common four-stress quatrain with alternate rime (the number four being very popular in lyric poetry) :

"How happy is he born and taught

That serveth not another's will;
Whose armour is his honest thought,

And simple truth his highest skill,”

has a quite different effect from the arrangement of the In Memoriam stanza, a combination found in Ben Jonson, Prior, Lord Herbert of Cherbury, and others:— "Now rings the woodland loud and long,

The distance takes a lovelier hue,
And drown'd in yonder living blue

The lark becomes a sightless song."

The first we denote by the letters abab; the second by abba. Still another variation is aaba, the stanza made popular in Fitzgerald's translation of the quatrains of Omar Khayyam.

But of these the simplest and by all odds the most popular is the first, —abab; or with only two rimes, abcb. Here, too, we may note another division of the simple stanza (cf. Schipper, p. 84). The rimes b b mark each the end of a "Period,"-i.e., they denote the necessary rime of the quatrain, and hence divide it into equal parts. Two verses make a period, two periods make a quatrain (if of this form), because one period exactly repeats the conditions of the other. To mark the end of this period, a different ending is often employed: thus, if a a (or a c) are masculine, b b will be feminine, and vice versa. Thus abcb (Burns):—

"The merchant, to secure his treasure,
Conveys it in a borrowed name;
Euphelia serves to grace my measure,
But Chloe is my real flame.”

Still more marked is the period when b b are verses with fewer or more stresses than a a (a c), as was the case with the divided Septenary (common measure) already noted, in which bb have fewer accents than a a (c); a case where b b have more is

"Art thou pale for weariness

Of climbing heaven and gazing on the earth,
Wandering companionless

Among the stars that have a different birth?" – Shelley.

--

The quatrain, most popular of stanzas and the simplest, is also common in five-stress verse. The rimeorder a bab is that of our most read poem, the Elegy. Dryden used it in Annus Mirabilis, in imitation of Davenant's Gondibert; and we have seen even sixstress verse so combined. But there are more complicated forms. Thus to a quatrain we add a couplet, and so have the three-part stanza, consisting of two periods and the couplet; or we can combine differently—say aabccb, the form of Shakspere's song in Hen. VIII. -Orpheus with his lute; or, with varying verse-lengths," of Wordsworth's Three years she grew in sun and shower. Thence we pass to the far more intricate combinations of lyric stanzas, combinations which we shall not here attempt to analyze. The study of these forms is of more importance for our early poetry than for modern, and is of too special a nature for our attention. Many treatises, from Dante's De vulgari Eloquentia down to the dissertations of to-day, have been written on this subject: they are well summed up by Schipper in. his Metrik, §§ 134-145.

It will be enough for our purposes if we simply name a few prominent English stanzaic forms. Thus the favorite stanza of Chaucer, the Rime Royal of his Troilus and some of the Canterbury Tales, has for its scheme a babbcc,-e.g. (Prioresses Tale) :

"My conning is so wayk, O blisful quene,

For to declare thy grete worthinesse,
That I ne may the weighte nat sustene,
But as a child of twelf monthe old, or lesse,
That can unnethes any word expresse,
Right so fare I, and therfor I you preye,

Gydeth my song that I shal of you seye."

Somewhat different is the stanza of his Monk's Tale: ab a b b c bc. Now if we add c to this, we have the famous Spenserian Stanza, -ababbcbcc,—the last line being an Alexandrine, the rest, like Chaucer's entire stanza, five-stress "iambic" verse. Cf. Faery Queene:

“And, more to lulle him in his slumber soft,

A trickling streame from high rock tumbling downe,
And ever-drizling raine upon the loft,

Mixt with a murmuring winde, much like the sowne
Of swarming bees, did cast him in a swowne.
No other noise, nor people's troublous cries,
As still are wont t' annoy the walled towne,
Might there be heard: but carelesse Quiet lyes
Wrapt in eternall silence far from enimies."

Mr. Arnold has justly praised the "fluidity" of the Spenserian stanza. Thomson (Castle of Indolence) and Byron (Childe Harold) have added to its popularity. Simpler than the above is the easy pace of the stanza (Ottava Rima), used by Spenser in some minor poems, and chosen by Byron for his Don Juan, and by Keats for his Isabella: abababcc.

It remains to mention two other kinds of stanza what we may call the run-on stanza, and the irregular (and also regular) combinations of verses in the Ode. The Terza Rima of Dante's great poem was copied by Surrey (cf. the first poem in Tottel's Misc., ed. Arber), but without making it popular. Byron used it in his Prophecy of Dante, and Shelley in his Ode to the West Wind, though often the manner of printing conceals the metre. The stanzas of three lines are interlaced thus aba-bcb-cdc-ded, etc.

66

"O wild West Wind, thou breath of Autumn's being,
Thou from whose unseen presence the leaves dead
Are driven like ghosts from an enchanter fleeing,

Yellow and black and pale and hectic red,
Pestilence-stricken multitudes! O thou
Who chariotest to their dark wintry bed

The winged seeds, where they lie cold and low
Each like a corpse within its grave, until

Thine azure sister of the Spring shall blow," etc.

Cf. also some of the French forms of verse mentioned below.

The Ode is mostly written in arbitrary stanzas of varying verse-lengths: cf Wordsworth's Immortality Ode. But there is also a regular arrangement: cf. the elaborate "Pindaric" Odes of Gray, - The Progress of Poetry and The Bard.1 For classical exactness, see the Choruses of Swinburne's Erechtheus, where the elaborate structure of Strophe, Antistrope and Epode is managed with great ability; the same is true of other Odes by Swinburne.

§ 2. THE SONNET.

There are certain combinations of verse in which a single element of rime-arrangement dominates the entire poem. Most practised and best known of these is the Sonnet. This word, as Mr. T. H. Caine (Sonnets of Three Centuries) has pointed out, meant originally "a little strain," and was used by Italian poets "to denote

1 There are nine stanzas so arranged that the first, fourth, and seventh are alike in construction; likewise the second, fifth, and eighth; and the third, sixth, and ninth.