APPENDIX

A: SUGGESTIONS FOR STUDY

THE student who comes to the consideration of English versification without any previous acquaintance with its principles will do well to begin by training himself to recognize the various rhythms and meters. He should take a good collection of poetry, Palgrave's Golden Treasury, Stedman's Victorian or American Anthologies, and go through its pages identifying the rhythm and the meter of the successive poems until he has attained certainty of decision. At the same time he can investigate the various forms of the stanza employed by the leading British and American lyrists. These anthologies contain only the more popular and more representative poems of the several authors; and the student will do well to select two or three poets and to examine their complete works to see if he can perceive in the lyrics omitted from the anthologies any technical reason for the comparative failure to please the public. Sometimes he will be able to discover that an undue length of line or an awkwardness of rhythm or a monotony of rime may be responsible for the lack of suc

cess.

Then as he becomes more familiar with the technic of versification and more responsive to its delicate effects, he may consider more highly specialized collections of poetry, each devoted to a single type: Child's English and Scottish Popular Ballads, Cambridge Edition, Main's Treasury of English Sonnets, Gosse's English Odes, Gleeson White's Ballads and Rondeaux, Locker's Lyra Elegantiarum. Some of these volumes are devoted to poems in the same rigid form and others are confined to lyrics animated by the same spirit.

But if the student really wishes to attain an intimate understanding of the art of verse he must attempt versemaking himself. The result of his effort may be negligible, but the effort will be its own reward. He may begin very modestly by taking any simple passage of prose for example, a newspaper account of a fire or of any other accident and rephrasing this in a succession of iambs, running on without any division into lines. Another passage may be turned into trochees, a third into anapests and a fourth into dactyls. The iambs and the trochees ought to be achieved with no great difficulty; but the succession of dactyls and of anapests will not be so easy. When a fair facility has been conquered a passage may be chosen from some public address Webster's Bunker Hill Oration or Lincoln's Gettysburg Speech-to be recast into blank verse, unrimed iambic pentameter. Another passage might be taken from a novel to be turned into trochaic tetrameter, the meter of The Song of Hiawatha.

Then the student may undertake a task calling for more or less command of form. He may find a simple story either in a newspaper or excerpted from a play or a romance; and this simple story he may turn into a ballad. The kind of ballad which he decides to experiment in ought to be consonant with the character of the theme. That is to say, the story may be treated with the naïf simplicity of the old English ballads, such as Sir Patrick Spens; it may be told with the narrative leisureliness of Longfellow's Paul Revere's Ride; it may have the swift terseness of Scott's Young Lochinvar, and of Macaulay's Battle of Ivry; it may glow with the dramatic intensity of Rudyard Kipling's Ballade of East and West; or it may be cast in couplets with the quaint color of Whittier's Maud Muller, or with the picturesque flavor of Austin Dobson's Ballad of Beau Brocade.

Other exercises of the same sort will easily suggest themselves to the student. For example, there would be profit in taking a critical statement from any one of Ar

nold's Essays in Criticism, and rewriting this in heroic couplets in the manner of Pope's Essay on Criticism. In like manner a brilliant paragraph might be picked out of one of Lowell's prose essays, - that on Thoreau, for instance, and this might be rephrased in the rapid riming anapests of his own Fable for Critics.

The composition of what the French term bouts rimés is also an admirable gymnastic. This requires the writing of a poem to a set of rimes arbitrarily chosen in advance. The student may open a book anywhere and pick out any two words; he must find a rime to each of these words; and then with these two pairs of rimes he must write a quatrain, as best he can and on any theme that the riming words may suggest to him. Of course he can borrow a commonplace thought to fill out his four lines, if the riming words do not happen to be suggestive. After a little practice with quatrains and octaves in bouts rimés, the student may venture on the composition of a sonnet to a set of prescribed lines. He must choose six words, well contrasted in their vowel-sounds. Then he must find three other words to rime with the first word of his five and with the second;

these will give him the rimes for his octave, a, b, b, a, a, b, b, a. He needs only one rime for each of the other three of his original five words; and these will give him the sextet, c, d, e, c, d, e. Here again it is quite possible that the rimes themselves may suggest a topic for the sonnet.

Owing to the apparent complexity of their structure the various French forms are very useful to the student in his search for technical dexterity, — especially the rondeau and ballade. But the full profit of the grapple with their complexity is to be had only when the student abides by all the rules of the form and denies himself any privilege. A charade may be cast in the form of a ballade, with the first syllable in the first octave, the second syllable in the second octave, the third syllable in the third octave, and the whole word in the envoy.

Parody is also to be recommended, or at least deliberate

imitation, the wilful copying of the method of the chosen poet, perhaps with a playful exaggeration of his mannerisms. But useful as may be the conscious imitation of several poets having sharply diverging principles, it is not more advantageous than translation. A piece of Latin or French prose may be turned into English verse, or a foreign poem may be rendered into English as faithfully as possible with due respect for the metrical structure of the original.

These are but scattered hints to be improved by the student himself, or by the instructor. Just as the college teacher of rhetoric compels his pupils to attain to an average of facility in composition by requiring them to prepare daily themes, so the student of versification must supple his muscles by attempting all sorts of metrical exercises. But these exercises are intended chiefly to increase his appreciation and his understanding of the masterpieces of the major poets; and he must continue the constant and careful study of these poets, spying out their metrical secrets, and never failing to observe their rhythmical variety.

B: BIBLIOGRAPHICAL SUGGESTIONS

A classified list of the more important treatises on English versification will be found in Chapter VII of Gayley and Scott's Introduction to the Methods and Materials of Literary Criticism (Boston: Ginn & Co., 1899); and a chronological list of books and articles in English only is presented in T. S. Omond's English Metrists (Tunbridge Wells: Pelton, 1903).

The two most elaborate treatises in English are Guest's History of English Rhythms, new edition by W. W. Skeat (London: Bell, 1882), and Saintsbury's History of English Prosody, in three volumes (London and New York: Macmillan, 1906-1910). To be noted also are two other investigations, Verrier's Principes de la Métrique Anglaise, in three volumes (Paris: Welter, 1909-1910), and Jakob Schipper's Englische Metrik, in three volumes (Vienna,

1881-1888). A single volume condensation of Schipper's book was issued in Vienna in 1895, and the author prepared an English version of this which he called A History of English Versification (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1910).

There are shorter text-books better fitted for the beginner, written from varying points of view. The names of a few of these may be given here, although an exhaustive list would be impossible: Gummere's Handbook of Poetics (Boston: Ginn, 1891); Corson's Primer of English Verse (Boston: Ginn, 1892); Parsons's English Versification (Boston: Leach, Shewell and Sanborn, 1894); Mayor's Chapters on English Meter (Cambridge: University Press, 1886); Omond's Study of Meter (London: Richards, 1903); Bright and Miller's Elements of English Versification (Boston: Ginn, 1910), and Richardson's Study of English Rimes (Hanover, N. H., 1909). Alden's English Verse (New York: Holt, 1903) contains a well-arranged collection of examples. John Addington Symonds's papers on Blank Verse are now available in a separate volume (New York: Scribner, 1895).

Poe's, three papers on the Rationale of Verse, the Philosophy of Composition and the Poetic Principle can be found in any edition of his works. The influence of Poe is obvious in Lanier's Science of English Verse (New York: Scribner, 1880), just as the influence of Lanier is obvious in Dabney's Musical Basis of Verse (New York and London: Longmans, 1901). Dr. Holmes's very suggestive paper on the Physiology of Versification is included in his Pages from an Old Volume of Life (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin and Company, 1883). In my own Parts of Speech, Essays on English (New York: Scribner, 1901) will be found An Inquiry as to Rime and a paper On the Poetry of Place-Names.