Like a Poet hidden

In the light of thought,
Singing hymns unbidden,

Till the world is wrought

To sympathy with hopes and fears it heeded not:

Like a high-born maiden
In a palace tower,
Soothing her love-laden

Soul in secret hour

With music sweet as love,-which overflows her bower:

Like a glow-worm golden

In a dell of dew,
Scattering unbeholden

Its aërial hue

Among the flowers and grass, which screen it from the view:

Like a rose embowered

In its own green leaves,
By warm winds deflowered,
Till the scent it gives

Makes faint with too much sweet these heavy-wingèd thieves.

Sound of vernal showers

On the twinkling grass,
Rain-awaken'd flowers,

All that ever was

Joyous and clear and fresh, thy music doth surpass.

Teach us, Sprite or Bird,

What sweet thoughts are thine:

I have never heard

Praise of love or wine

That panted forth a flood of rapture so divine.

Chorus Hymeneal,

Or triumphal chant,

Matched with thine would be all

But an empty vaunt,

A thing wherein we feel there is some hidden want.

What objects are the fountains

Of thy happy strain?

What fields or waves or mountains?

What shapes of sky or plain?

What love of thine own kind? what ignorance of pain?

With thy clear keen joyance

Languor cannot be:

Shadow of annoyance

Never came near thee:

Thou lovest-but ne'er knew love's sad satiety.

Waking or asleep

Thou of death must deem

Things more true and deep

Than we mortals dream

Or how could thy notes flow in such a crystal stream?

We look before and after,

And pine for what is not;

Our sincerest laughter

With some pain is fraught;

Our sweetest songs are those that tell of saddest thought.

Yet if we could scorn

Hate, and pride, and fear;

If we were things born

Not to shed a tear,

I know not how thy joy we ever should come near.

Better than all measures

Of delightful sound,
Better than all treasures

That in books are found,

Thy skill to poet were, thou scorner of the ground!

Teach me half the gladness

That thy brain must know,
Such harmonious madness

From my lips would flow

The world should listen then-as I am listening now.

Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822)

CHAPTER IV

THE TRIPLE METERS

Before the poet begins to write . . . he should ask himself whether his natural impulse is towards the weighty iambic movement, whose primary function is to state, or towards those lighter movements which we still call, for want of more convenient words, anapæstic and dactylic, whose primary function is to suggest.-Theodore Watts-Dunton in "Poetry," Encyclopædia Britannica (Eleventh Edition)

IN discussing the elementary phenomena of English poetics, we have had occasion to explain briefly the triple measures, anapestic and dactylic. The main purpose of this chapter is to group representative poems with the view of affording a somewhat extended acquaintance with the use and possibilities of these rhythms. For reasons explained in the preceding chapter, poems purely anapestic or dactylic are rare. The movement of a poem is, however, decidedly triple when fifty per cent of the feet contain two unstressed syllables.

A poem in a triple meter tends, in unskilled hands, to be wordy, for important thoughts are carried chiefly by accented syllables of which it has a relative scarcity. With appropriate subject-matter and in the hands of true poets the triple rhythms lend themselves, however, to the production of remarkable word music. In these measures Shelley and Swinburne achieved faultless works

of art, and the major nineteenth century poets were generally successful.

The anapestic meter seems especially adapted to subjects involving movement or action. We quote a poem which in content and spirit is well suited to the expression it receives. Few widely known poems-outside of light verse are as purely anapestic as the one below. Sennacherib was an Assyrian king who invaded Palestine. Ashur and Baal were high gods in the religion of the Assyrians. See 2 Kings, xix: 35.

THE DESTRUCTION OF SENNACHERIB

The Assyrian came down like the wolf on the fold,
And his cohorts were gleaming in purple and gold;
And the sheen of their spears was like stars on the sea,
When the blue wave rolls nightly on deep Galilee.

Like the leaves of the forest when Summer is green,
The host with their banners at sunset were seen;
Like the leaves of the forest when Autumn hath blown.
The host on the morrow lay withered and strown.

For the angel of Death spread his wings on the blast,
And breathed in the face of the foe as he pass'd;
And the eyes of the sleepers wax'd deadly and chill,
And their hearts but once heaved, and forever grew still!

And there lay the steed with his nostril all wide,
But through it there rolled not the breath of his pride;
And the foam of his gasping lay white on the turf,
And cold as the spray of the rock-beating surf.