Known to me well are the faces of all; their names

I remember;

commanders,

Two, two only remain, whom I see not among the

Matthew Arnold says of this translation: "it is the one version of any part of the Iliad which in some degree reproduces for me the original effect of Homer: it is the best, and it is in hexameters."

NOTE. Swinburne has rimed hexameters, but he departs from the normal by including initial unstressed syllables and masculine endings. The verses, therefore, are not hexameters imitating a classical model, but simply dactylic verses of six feet with feminine or masculine endings (§ 223); cp:

Out of the golden remote wild | west where the | sea without shore is,

Full of the sunset, and | sad, if at all, with the fulness of joy,

As a wind sets | in with the | autumn that | blows from the region of stories,

Blows with a perfume of songs and of memories beloved from a boy.

(Hesperia. Poet. Works I, 173.)

$ 225. Walt Whitman.

In one poem only (O Captain! my Captain!) does Whitman use rime and regularly constructed iambic and trochaic verses. In all his other poems he uses neither rime nor a regular rhythm, i.e. a

regular repetition of definite groups of stressed and unstressed syllables. Thus in his work we have merely the irregular rhythm of ordinary speech. In his long enumerations, e.g.: I Sing the Body Electric, 9:

Man's, woman's, child's, youth's, wife's, husband's, mo-
ther's, father's, young man's, young woman's poems,
Head, neck, hair, ears, drop and tympan of the ears,
Eyes, eye-fringes, iris of the eye, eyebrows, and the
waking or sleeping of the lids,
Mouth, tongue, lips, teeth, roof of the mouth, jaws, and
the jaw-hinges,

Nose, nostrils of the nose, and the partition,
Cheeks, temples, forehead, chin, throat, back of the
neck, neckslue etc. etc.

the effect is tiring. In many of his poems, however, he is able by a continual change between iambic and trochaic, anapaestic and dactylic rhythm, faithfully to render each change of mood and so to charm the reader by the peculiar form of his verses. Moreover he falls often enough, perhaps without being conscious of it, into regularly constructed verses. In his impressive poem To a Locomotive in Winter the first section closes with two regular iambic verses of six feet and one of five feet, the second with three of five feet:

To a Locomotive in Winter.

Thee for my recitative,

Thee in the driving storm even as now, the snow,
winter-day declining,

the

Thee in thy panoply, thy measur'd dual throbbing and

thy beat convulsive,

Thy black cylindric body, golden brass and silvery

steel, Thy ponderous side-bars, parallel and connecting rods, gyrating, shuttling at thy sides, Thy metrical, now swelling pant and roar now tapering in the distance,

Thy great protruding head-light fix'd in front, Thy long, pale, floating vapor-pennants, tinged with delicate purple,

The dense and murky clouds out-belching from thy

smoke-stack,

Thy knitted frame, thy springs and valves, the tremulous twinkle of thy wheels,

Thy train of cars behind, obedient, merrily following, Through gale or calm, now swift, now slack, yet steadily careering;

For once come serve the Muse and merge in verse,

even as here I see thee,

With storm and buffeting gusts of wind and falling

snow,

By day thy warning ringing bell to sound its notes, By night thy silent signal lamps to swing.

Fierce-throated beauty!

Roll through my chant with all thy lawless music, thy swinging lamps at night, Thy madly-whistled laughter, echoing, rumbling like an earth-quake, rousing all,

Law of thyself complete, thine own track firmly holding, (No sweetness debonair of tearful harp or glib piano

thine,)

Thy trills of shrieks by rocks and hills return'd,
Launch'd o'er the prairies wide, across the lakes,
To the free skies unpent and glad and strong.

NOTE. We must not assume that the lengths of lines and the positions of rimes vary at random in verse which seems to be based on no definite formula. The poet chooses a form or a variety of forms best fitted to communicate his thoughts and feelings, and the various verses may take their places without the poet being conscious of having a definite scheme. But the verses do not vary at random, 'for no work of art is produced at random!' (ep. Johnson, Forms of English Poetry, p. 50 f.

§ 226. Modern English Stanzas.

Of the stanzas used in ME. some are not used in NE., viz. e.g. Tristrem-stanza (§ 174), thirteenline stanzas (§ 175), twelve-line and sixteen-line tail-rime stanzas (§ 178 f.). Most of the others are, however, much used in NE. and further developed, partly by extending or shortening, partly by putting other kinds of verse to an old rime scheme. Some stanzas are copied from foreign models; the Italian terza rima, ottava rima and sonnet (§ 246 ff.) are much used in English, whilst French stanzas (§ 250) and Latin stanzas (§ 245) are little imitated. Since the number of stanzas in NE. is so great, only the most important can be given here, from which most of the others can be derived.

§ 227. Rimed Couplets and Triplets. The rimed couplet may be regarded as the simplest form of stanza when, as in the heroic couplet of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, a strong pause occurs at the end of every couplet. Instead

of couplets triplets could then be used. In the nineteenth century two-line stanzas occur, e.g. Longfellow's Annie of Tharaw (a a § 223) and D. G. Rossetti's The White Ship, which contains stanzas a a and a a a; e.g.:

The King set sail with the eve's south wind,
And soon he left that coast behind.

The Prince and all his, a princely show,
Remained in the good White Ship to go.

With noble knights and with ladies fair,
With courtiers and sailors gathered there,
Three hundred living souls we were etc.

When two, three or four consecutive couplets are connected to form a stanza, we get four-line, six-line or eight-line stanzas (aabb, aabbcc, a a b b e e d d ), e.g.:

Come live with me and be my Love,
And we will all the pleasures prove
That hills and valleys, dale and field,
And all the craggy mountains yield.

(Marlowe, The Passionate Shepherd.)
"Good night! good night!" and is it so?
And must I from my Rosa go?

--

O Rosa! say "Good night!" once more,
And I'll repeat it o'er and o'er,

Till the first glance of dawning light
Shall find us saying, still, "Good night!"

(Th. Moore, Rondeau.)

I'll ne'er blame my partial fancy,
Naething could resist my Nancy;
But to see her was to love her,
Love but her, and love for ever.
Had we never lov'd sae kindly,