SESTINA

TO F. H.

In fair Provence, the land of lute and rose,
Arnaut, great master of the lore of love,
First wrought sestines to win his lady's heart;
For she was deaf when simpler staves he sang,
And for her sake he broke the bonds of rhyme,
And in this subtler measure hid his woe.

"Harsh be my lines," cried Arnaut, “harsh the woe,
My lady, that enthron'd and cruel rose,
Inflicts on him that made her live in rhyme!"
But through the meter spake the voice of Love,
And like a wild-wood nightingale he sang
Who thought in crabbèd lays to ease his heart.

It is not told if her untoward heart
Was melted by her poet's lyric woe,
Or if in vain so amorously he sang.

Perchance through crowd of dark conceits he rose
To nobler heights of philosophic love,

And crowned his later years with sterner rhyme.

This thing alone we know: the triple rhyme,
Of him who bared his vast and passionate heart
To all the crossing flames of hate and love,
Wears in the midst of all its storm of woe,-
As some loud morn of March may bear a rose,—
The impress of a song that Arnaut sang.

"Smith of his mother-tongue," the Frenchman sang Of Lancelot and Galahad, the rhyme

That beat so bloodlike at its core of rose,

It stirred the sweet Francesca's gentle heart

To take that kiss that brought her so much woe,
And sealed in fire her martydrom of love.

And Dante, full of her immortal love,
Stayed his drear song, and softly, fondly sang
As though his voice broke with that weight of woe;
And to this day we think of Arnaut's rhyme
Whenever pity at the labouring heart

On fair Francesca's memory drops the rose.

Ah! sovereign Love, forgive this weaker rhyme!
The men of old who sang were great at heart,
Yet have we too known woe, and worn thy rose.
Edmund Gosse (1849- )

From reading the above poem it will be seen that not rime but repetition of end words characterizes the sestina. The end-words of the first line are repeated in an order which will permit the last end-word of each stanza to be the first end-word of the next, the sequence being 123456, 615243, 364125, 532614, 451362, 246531. The three-line envoy has three of the terminal-words at the ends, the others earlier in the lines. The end-words sometimes rime, and the arrangement here outlined is not always followed. This exotic form vies with the chant royal in difficulty of structure. In theory, the end-words should be important nouns, which are turned and re-turned in the dreaming mind of the poet. The use of the verb rose for the noun in the third stanza should thus be regarded as a flaw in a careful piece of workmanship.

In conclusion, mention by name should be made of a few other structural types. Kyrielle is a term sometimes applied to a series of quatrains linked by a common

fourth line. In chain verse the last line of one stanza becomes the first line of the next; more rarely, the last word of one stanza becomes the first word of the next. The rondeau redoublé, glose, lay, virelai, Sicilian octave, and other rare forms deserve no place in an anthology of limited scope. The bibliography contains suggestions for further study.

It is interesting to note that foreign languages are still being exploited for structural forms suitable for adaptation in English. It is quite possible, for instance, that Witter Bynner, Amy Lowell, or some other modern poet may find in Japanese or Chinese poetry a form worthy of permanent cultivation in English. Experiments and innovations have been numerous of late. The extravagant restraint of the artificial forms and the unrestraint of free verse are the extreme right and the extreme left in the poetry of today.

CHAPTER IX

LIGHT VERSE

I would be the Lyric
Ever on the lip,

Rather than the Epic

Memory lets slip.

Thomas Bailey Aldrich: "Lyrics and Epics"

IN "The Day is Done" which was prefixed to The Waif, a collection of poems by minor poets, Longfellow eloquently defended the humbler poets, whom we sometimes choose to read rather than "the grand old masters,"

the bards sublime

Whose distant footsteps echo
Through the corridors of Time.

Indeed, there is more than one kind of poetry in which the lesser poets, like Longfellow and Aldrich, are the masters. This, as we have seen, is true of patriotic songs. and the French forms; and it is equally true of light verse. The great poet, Wordsworth or Milton for instance, is generally too deeply in earnest, too passionate, sometimes too unsocial to write what must seem to him mere literary small talk. In fact, the major poets who have tried to trip it on the light fantastic toe have nearly

always failed. In spite of an apparent ease, "the familiar [style] is," as Cowper pointed out, "of all styles the most difficult to succeed in." Only the poet who is also a man of the world like Holmes or Thackeray can produce these "immortal ephemera.'

The most important form of lighter poetry is that usually called vers de société. Since an example is often more enlightening than a definition, let us first examine a fairly typical poem of this kind. Bret Harte, although most people remember him only for his stories, was also a poet of considerable importance. In "Her Letter" the daughter of a gold miner who has "struck it rich" is writing from New York to her sweetheart in California.

HER LETTER

I'm sitting alone by the fire,

Dressed just as I came from the dance,
In a robe even you would admire,—
It cost a cool thousand in France;
I'm be-diamonded out of all reason,
My hair is done up in a queue:
In short, sir, "the belle of the season"
Is wasting an hour upon you.

A dozen engagements I've broken;
I left in the midst of a set;
Likewise a proposal, half spoken,

That waits on the stairs-for me yet.
They say he'll be rich,-when he grows up,-
And then he adores me indeed.

And you, sir, are turning your nose up,

Three thousand miles off, as you read.