Bitter constraint and sad occasion dear
Compels me to disturb your season due ;
For Lycidas is dead, dead ere his prime;
Young Lycidas; and has not left his peer;
Who would not sing for Lycidas? He knew
Himself to sing and build the lofty rhyme..
He must not float upon his watery bier
Unwept, and welter to the parching wind,
Without the meed of some melodious tear.

The lines have five accents with the exception of the fourth. In the next paragraph there are two short lines, and in the entire poem fourteen, thrown in at irregular intervals, sometimes as in the case of the line, "The glowing violet," giving a beautiful effect. The rhyme in the opening runs, a-b-c-c-b-bd-e-b-d-e-b-f-b, in which no order can be found only the general idea of binding the whole by the rhymes on b: "Sear, year, dear, peer, bier, tear." last eight lines of the poem follow the rhyme law of the "ottava rima." Nowhere else is the rhyme repeated so often as it is in the opening invocation. The irregular features of the poem are similar to the Italian " canzone."

The

Wordsworth's ode on Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood is in eleven stanzas, varying in length from eight to thirty-nine lines, each of which treats a subdivision of the main theme. Of the two hundred and three lines, nearly one half are iambic pentameters. The others vary from six-accent to two-accent lines, thirty-nine being

four-accent lines. The rhymes come in such order as pleases the poet. There is no stanzaic law, but the entire poem is far from lawless. The parts cohere into an organic whole which is one of the strongest muniments to Wordsworth's title of poet. The second stanza will illustrate the free meter of the ode:

The Rainbow comes and goes,

And lovely is the rose,

The moon doth with delight

Look round her when the heavens are bare;
Waters on a starry night

Are beautiful and fair,

The sunshine is a glorious birth;

But yet I know where'er I go

That there hath passed away a glory from the earth.

The successful use of irregular meter demands great poetic energy and the possession of some fine ideas. The effect in Southey's Thalaba, written in loose iambics, is exceedingly tame, and so are many of the Pindaric odes of the seventeenth century. We see that though poetry at the bottom is a regular acoustic structure, it admits in all its parts irregularities not simply for the sake of variety and breaking up monotony, but because they are expressive. The feeling varies and the form with it in true harmony. The deviations from the rule, metrical or stanzaic, are dictated by the artistic sense and are justified by their effect. The same principle holds in all arts and in nature itself, which pro

duces no absolutely symmetrical trees or mountains. Modulated variety on a basis of uniformity is the secret of beauty in music, architecture, and poetry. Lawless variety is not expressive of anything but a wealth of material. The artist has the power to combine strains of sound so as to be infinitely suggestive of thought-thought of which very likely he was not himself conscious. We can only point out a few of the elements which he does combine to make an Il Penseroso or an ode on Intimations of Immortality. We recognize the product as something germane to the spirit of man, whether or not it is regular in form and conforms to laws critics have deduced or invented. It may follow precedent or it may not. Possibly the spirit of an age may demand a new form for the expression of thought moods that are peculiar to it. But the new form is only a combination of the old elements, emphasizing some and minimizing others according to the poet's peculiar powers. He may even neglect the underlying element, the metrical accent beat, as Whitman did, and produce something that will appeal to a few by virtue of the presence of other elements. The regular metrical beat alone is ineffectual because it may be mechanical. Vowel assonance or tone-color alone is tiresome, and stanzaic form alone would be valueless. It is the individual combination, different perhaps for each singer, that is expressive of a certain mood, of a certain attitude toward the world,

which could be exactly embodied in no other form.

The poem as a whole falls under one of a number of different heads distinguished by tenor and scope, as the epic, the ballad, the ode; or by form, as the sonnet and the ballade. A full examination of any of these would involve a study of comparative literature and of literary history. In the following chapters brief definitions and a few illustrations will give a general idea of the meanings and limitations of these words. What has been said will give the student some idea of the many elements that are combined to make a poem, and of the complicated and difficult nature of the art of verse even on its technical side.

CHAPTER II

THE BALLAD

THE word "ballad" is derived from the root bal, meaning to dance, which is also seen in the words "ballet" and "ball." The derivation takes us back to a time when the public singing or recitation of verse was accompanied by rhythmical movements of the body, but it does not throw any light on the modern meaning of the word nor upon the origin or history of the early English ballad. Dancing in the form of processional maneuvers or graceful movements of the limbs was a part of ancient worship and of the expression of grief or exultation. David "danced and sang before the Lord." The Greek processional ode was accompanied with rhythmical movements of the singers. Our own Indians have their ghost dances, their snake dances, and the like, in which howling and jumping and gesticulation have about equal parts. The negroes of the South sway the body from side to side and stamp in accurate time when singing hymns. A survival of this original habit is seen in the games of children when they sing Round the Mulberry Tree and the like. Possibly the expression "gave him a song and

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