SONG from THE LAND OF HEART'S DESIRE

The wind blows out of the gates of day,
The wind blows over the lonely of heart,
And the lonely of heart is withered away
While the faeries dance in a place apart,
Shaking their milk-white feet in a ring,
Tossing their milk-white arms in the air;

For they hear the wind laugh and murmur and sing

Of a land where even the old are fair,

And even the wise are merry of tongue;

"But I heard a reed of Coolaney say,

When the wind has laughed and murmured and sung,
The lonely of heart is withered away."

William Butler Yeats (1865-)

For the last two centuries the lyric, which includes the song, has been the predominant type of poetry. This anthology is therefore concerned chiefly with lyric poetry. Of this important type, Professor Bliss Perry has written in his admirable Study of Poetry: "The lyric is the commonest, and yet, in its perfection, the rarest type of poetry; the earliest, and yet the most modern; the simplest, and yet in its laws of emotional association, perhaps the most complex; and it is all these because it expresses, more intimately than other types of verse, the personality of the poet." In the chapters which follow we shall study the meter, style, and subject matter of the lyric. Once again, however, in the chapter on the ballad, we shall return to the poem which is sung and note once more the debt of later poetry to the folk-song and the folk-ballad.

CHAPTER III

THE DUPLE METERS

Trōchee trips from long to shōrt;

From long to long in solemn sort

Slow spōndee stalks; strong foot! yeà ill able
Evěr to come up with Dactyl trisyllable.

Iambics march from shōrt to lōng;

With ǎ leap and ǎ bound the swift Anăpăsts thrōng.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge:

"Metrical Feet: Lesson for a Boy"

ALL persons acquainted with musical notation will recall that every normal composition consists of certain small units-bars-of equal length. Just as one finds in music common time, three-fourths time, and the like, one recognizes in poetry certain regularly recurring minor units. These units are based not, as in music, upon time, but upon the accent of English words. In prose, accented and unaccented syllables occur in an irregular order; in poetry, the arrangement is usually alternate and normally regular. In the following lines, from a song in Alfred Noyes's romantic epic Drake, the accented syllables are marked with an a and the unaccented with an x -conventional symbols which will be employed throughout this study:

a

a | x a | x a x
The moon is up:
The stars are bright:

The notation here, it will be observed, agrees exactly with the pronunciation of everyday speech. The words could not conceivably be accented in any other than the indicated way. The unit, it will also be noticed, consists of two syllables, the first unaccented, the second accented. This, or any similar minor unit of poetry, is called a foot. The marking or determination of feet is called scansion. The foot ra is known as an iamb, or an iambus; and the meter of the above selection is consequently described as iambic.

The determination of stress is, however, not usually as easy as in this mechanically perfect passage. Consider the lines:

In the first of these lines in is unaccented; in the second, it is accented. These examples show an important characteristic of English accent-the fact that it is largely relative. As in the case of in here, many short words or syllables are accented or unaccented according to the stress received by the adjacent syllables. These and other

irregularities will be more fully discussed below. They are, of course, not a fault, for they contribute to the flexibility of English poetry.

The question of time in English verse is much mooted. The analogy with music is suggestive, but may be carried too far. In the system of scansion, known to all who have read Vergil's Eneid in the original, length of syllable rather than accent is the criterion. This system cannot be applied to English poetry-especially in an elementary treatise. A word like strength manifestly requires for its utterance more time than a word like the; but, when the two occur together, the longer word normally receives the accent:

My strength is as the strength of ten.

Even with the long word through in an unaccented position, no one would hesitate to read the following line as we have marked it:

a

x ax a | x a Through broad and fen the Norfolk men.

Most authorities thus agree that in English verse time is, in comparison with accent, of slight or at least secondary importance and need be considered chiefly in avoiding heavy syllables in unaccented positions-a fault which has been referred to as marring "The StarSpangled Banner." In many treatises on versification, the symbols ✓ and are used to denote unaccented and accented syllables respectively. These symbols are derived from classical prosody and should not be used in

English with their usual names short and long, except with the understanding that these terms have no necessary reference to the amount of time required for pronouncing a syllable.

In addition to the iambic there are three other frequently occurring feet: the trochee (ax), the anapest (xxa), and the dactyl (axx). These are respectively exemplified in the three lines below. The corresponding adjectives are trochaic, anapestic, and dactylic.

a

Ꮖ a | x Ꮖ ax Ꮖ a x x
And his cohorts were gleaming in purple and gold.

The four types of feet thus far exemplified are all which need consideration in an elementary study. The numerous additional types listed in treatises on versification have no real place in English except in imitations of Latin and other foreign rhythms. A few of these exotic feet are the pyrrhic (xx), the spondee (aa), the amphibrach (xax), the amphimacer (axa), the anapestic pæon (xxxa), and the dactylic pæon (axxx). Attempts at employing these feet, as well as imitations of the classical meters, are usually, by the ordinary reader, felt to be either free verse or approximations at various combinations of the four familiar meters.

The four English meters-iambic, trochaic, anapestic, dactylic-may be divided according to two criteria. The iambic and anapestic meters are, in the first place, some