THE PAUSES.

Sings darkling, and, in shadiest covert hid,

Tunes her nocturnal note.

301

'Move' and 'bird' both give a sufficient break; while 'hid' makes one marked enough to need a comma for grammatical purposes.

Take another passage, from Mr. Swinburne's 'Atalanta in Calydon ':

These things are in my presage, and myself

Am part of them and know not; but in dreams
The gods are heavy on me, and all the fates
Shed fire across my eyelids mixed with night,
And burn me blind, and disilluminate
My sense of seeing, and my perspicuous soul
Darken with vision; seeing, I see not, hear
And hearing am not holpen.

Six of these eight lines are cases of the purely metrical pause occurring at a point where the sense breaks, but not so as to need punctuation marks.

No doubt Milton has lines like

Now in loose garlands thick thrown off, the bright

Pavement, that like a sea, &c. (Paradise Lost, III. 362) —

where there is no such break in sense between the adjective 'bright' and its noun 'pavement' as to justify the final pause above defined; but there are few such lines in Milton, the vast majority following the canon now laid down.

In Shakespeare, especially in the later plays, verses end with words that cannot, by any natural reading, be paused upon. In neighbouring lines of the Tempest,' we find

and-

I will resist such entertainment till
Mine enemy has more power;

Make not too rash a trial of him, for
He's gentle and not fearful.

Further on, in the same play, we meet with—
You cram these words into mine ears against
The stomach of my sense;

and

Weigh'd between loathness and obedience, at
Which end o' the beam should bow.

*

Byron is notorious for his carelessness in metre, and accordingly abounds in such lines.

* Even at its best, the serious poetry of Byron is often so rough and loose, so weak in the screws and joints which hold together the framework of verse, that it is not easy to praise it enough without seeming to condone or to extenuate such faults as should not be overlooked or forgiven. (Swinburne.)

Such as, before me, did the Magi, and
He who, &c. (Manfred.')

I did not visit on

The innocent creature. (Marino Faliero.')
Souls that dare look the Omnipotent tyrant in
His everlasting face. (Cain.')

Let him but vanquish, and

Me perish! (Sardanapalus.')

Be he richest of

Such rank as is permitted. ("Two Foscari.')
Had not thy justice been so tempered with
The mercy which is Thy delight, as tc
Accord a pardon. ('Cain.')

And as

For duty, as you call it. ('Werner.')

A hateful and unsightly molehill to

The eyes of happier men. (Deformed Transformed.')

That Byron, though indulging in this practice, was aware of its metrical impropriety, is shown by his conscious use of it in Don Juan for comic purposes. In the first stanza of the dedication, we meet—

Although 'tis true that you turn'd out a Tory at
Last.

Throughout the poem, such pauses as the following are

common :

Instead of quarrelling, had they' been both' in

Their senses.

(I. 25.)

Which ancient mass-books often are', and this' all
Kinds of grotesques illumined. (I. 46.)

And I must say, I ne'er could see the very

Great happiness of the Nil Admirari. (V. 100.)
Pity' that' so few' by

Poets and private tutors are exposed. (V. 131.)
There lies, yclept despatches, without risk or

The singeing of a single inky whisker. (V. 151.)

II. The Middle Pause, or Casura.-Every verse, or line, if it go beyond four 'measures' or accents, should have a rest to the voice about the middle; e.g., in an ordinary blank verse, this pause should divide it into two sections, one of two, and the other of three accents. Thus: if one word contain three accents of the verse, that word must not occupy the centre, but come at the beginning or the end.

In illustration, Shakespeare supplies a breach, and Matthew Arnold an example, of this rule, and that with the same word:

THE CESURA.

And what impossibility would slay

303

(All's well that ends well.')

When true, the last impossibility.

We are familiar with this pause, or Cæsura, in the common ballad metre of seven accents, where it is marked out by dividing each verse into two separate parts. In some early Elizabethan books of poetry, this form of printing was followed even in verses of only five accents.

For the Cæsura, a slighter break in sense will often have to serve for the final pause: put negatively, the rule is that the Cæsura shall not occur in the middle of a word.

There are far more violations of this rule to be found than of the rule of the Final Pause, due probably to the fact that the Cæsura has no longer any visible representation in printing. But attention to it is found prevalent in all melodious poets, when they deal in long verses; e.g., Tennyson in Locksley Hall'.

These pauses, being rests from the effort of articulation, afford the means of getting over consonant clashes and vowel hiatuses; the rest coming in at that point gives time for easily shaping the vocal organs to pronounce the new consonant or vowel (see MELODY). This helps the difficulty in Gray's line :

The lowing herd || winds slowly o'er the lea; 'rd' followed by 'w' is not a very easy combination, but the difficulty is concealed by the metrical pause between them. By this means also, two accented syllables may stand together, either inside a line, or at the end of one and the opening of the next; an arrangement that has a specific and appreciable effect. In the following lines from Paradise Lost (II. 106), this advantage and the former one are combined :

:

He ended frowning, and his look denounced'
Desperate revenge.

From Lear,' we get this effect in Cæsura :

Humanity must perforce' || prey' on itself.

A third point is that if the middle pause occur after an unaccented syllable, the measure following can more readily remain complete; this is how, with the final pause also, an extra syllable may be attached to a line, and yet the following one open as if no departure from the regular form had been made. In 'King John' there occurs :— Thou slave, thou wretch, thou cow'ard! Thou little valiant, great in villainy!

Of the Casural variety of this, Chaucer is full :—

Thou schul'dest nev'ere || out of this grovë' pace'.

It is obvious that there may be great variety in the markedness of the sense break corresponding to these pauses, and also in the position

of the Casural pause among the syllables making up the line. As a source of variety, there must be added the many possible placings of the grammatical stops in the lines of a poem; this is what Milton meant in the famous preface by the expression- the sense variously drawn out from one verse into another'.

It is by the numerous combinations of measures with pauses that metrical effect, strictly so called, is reached. No more is necessary to that kind of effect; a poet may display great metrical skill without, for example, securing the melody of easy arrangements of vowels and consonants. But there are adjuncts of metre, such as Alliteration and Rhyme, which greatly enrich it.

ALLITERATION.

This is now merely a fanciful analogy. Alliteration, which means the recurrence at short intervals of the same initial letter, may be described as a metrical ornament. Attempted, more or less, in the poetry of almost all languages, it was especially used, as the main feature of versification, in the Old German, Anglo-Saxon, and Scandinavian poetry. According to strict usage, two or three words in one line, and one word in the next, began with the same letter; as is seen in this extract from the wellknown poem of the 14th century, Piers Ploughman' :

There preached a pardoner

As he a prieste were;
Brought forth a bull

With many bishop's seals.

In later English poetry, it is curious to note how often alliteration is found, even to perfection, as in the verses of Spenser, Milton, Coleridge, Shelley, Tennyson, &c. A few examples may be given :

The bush my bed, the bramble was my bower,
The woods can witness many a woful stowre,
Of man's first disobedience, and the fruit
Of that forbidden tree, whose mortal taste.
The fair breeze blew; the white foam flew,
The furrow followed free.

Like a glowworm golden

In a dell of dew.

And on a sudden, lo! the level lake
And the long glories of the winter moon.
Extensive harvests hang the heavy head.

ALLITERATION IN ENGLISH POETRY.

305

That there is something naturally pleasing in such conjunctions, is evident from their frequency in current sayings and proverbs. For instance: Life and limb,' Watch and ward,' Man and mouse,''Far fowls have feathers fair'. An extreme case of Alliteration is found in the line—

Let lovely lilacs line Lee's lonely lane—

where every syllable begins alike. (See Dr. Longmuir's Edition of Walker's Rhyming Dictionary, p. xxix.)

To get full alliterative effect, this line shows that the similarly opening syllables should be accented; it is too strong an effect to put obviously on weak syllables, and, by retarding them, obliterates the metrical movement.

It is pointed out by Mr. J. A. Symonds that Milton runs an alliteration right through whole periods, and even strengthens the effect by taking in cognate consonants: e.g., to help an alliteration on 'f,' he will take in ‘v,' ‘p,’ and 'b'. This is most obtrusively done when he repeats the same word, or grammatical varieties of it.

Paradise Regained (III. 119-120) is a prolonged example of these points in Milton :

Think not so slight of glory, therein least

Resembling thy great Father. He seeks glory,
And for his glory all things made, all things
Orders and governs; nor content in heaven,
By all his angels glorified, requires
Glory from men, from all men, good or bad,
Wise or unwise, no difference, no exemption.
Above all sacrifice, all hallowed gift,
Glory he requires, and glory he receives,
Promiscuous from all nations, Jew or Greek,
Or barbarous, nor exception hath declared ;
From us, his foes pronounced, glory he exacts.

RHYME.

Rhyme may be called metrical in a wide sense, as determining a recurrence of sound in the closing syllable or syllables of different verses. It is a poetical ornament peculiar to poetry subsequent to the classical period, and by no means universally employed. The blank verse, in which so much of English poetry is written, discards it altogether. Possibly, it was a sense of the comparative paucity of English rhymes, as well as veneration for classical models, that caused Ben Jonson, Milton and others to rebel against its