Bible Encyclopedias
Verse

Latin Metre

Very little is known about the verse-forms of the original inhabitants of Italy, before the introduction 'of Greek influences. The earliest use of poetry as a national art in Italy is to be judged by inscriptions in what is called the Saturnian metre. Already, the first Latin epic poets, Livius Andronicus in his Odyssia, Naevius in his Bellum Punicum, the Scipios in their Elogia, combined their rude national sense of folk-song with a consciousness of the quantitative rules of the Greeks. But the same writers, in their dramas, undoubtedly used Greek metres without adaptation, and it is therefore likely that the ancient Saturnian measure was already looked upon as barbarous, and it makes no further reappearance in Latin literature (cf. Gleditsch). The introduction of Greek dramatic metre marks the start of regular poetry among the Latins, which was due, not to men of Roman birth, but to poets of Greek extraction or inhabiting the Greek-speaking provinces of Italy. These writers, bearing the stamp of a widely recognized cultivation, threw the old national verse back into oblivion. Latin verse, then, began in a free but loyal modification of the principles of Greek verse. Plautus was particularly ambitious and skilful in this work, and, aided by a native genius for metre, he laid down the basis of Latin dramatic versification. Terence was a feebler and at the same time a more timid metrist. In satire, the iambic and trochaic measures were carefully adapted by Ennius and Lucilius. The dactylic hexameter followed, and Ennius, in all matters of verse a daring innovator, directly imitated in his Annales the epic measure of the Greeks. To him also is attributed the introduction of the elegiac distich, hexameter and pentameter. The dactylic hexameter was forthwith adopted as the leading metre of the Roman poets, and, as Gleditsch has pointed out, the basis upon which all future versification was to be erected was firmly laid down before the death of Ennius in 169 B.C. Lucilius followed, but perhaps with some tendency to retrogression, for the Latin critics seem to have looked upon his metre as wanting both in melody and elasticity. Lucretius, on the other hand, made a further advance on the labours of Ennius, in his study of "the rise And long roll of the Hexameter." Lest, however, this great form of verse should take too exclusive a place in the imagination of the Romans, a younger generation, with Laevius and Terentius Varro at their head, began to imitate the lyrical measures of the Greeks with remarkable success. Varro, who has been styled the earliest metrical theorist of Rome, opened up a new fie]d in this direction by the example of his Menippean satires. These poets left the rigid school of Ennius, and sought to emulate the Alexandrians of their own age: we see the result in the lyric measures used so gracefully and with such brilliant ease by Catullus. The versification of the Romans reached its highest point of polish in the Augustan age, in the writings of Tibullus, Propertius, Virgil and particularly Ovid, who is considered to mark the highest level of various excellence which has ever been reached by a master of Latin versification. In Horace has been traced a tendency to archaism in the study of verse, and in his odes and epodes he was not content with the soft Alexandrian models, but aimed at achieving more vigorous effects by an imitation of the older Greek models, such as Alcaeus and even Archilochus. After the Augustan age, it was no longer the Greek poets, ancient or recent, who were imitated, but the Augustans themselves were taken as the inapproachable models of Roman verse.

We have hitherto spoken of classical versification as it was regarded by those whom, without offence, we may describe as pedants. But there is precious evidence of the mode in which metre was regarded by poets, and by one of the greatest artists of antiquity. I'n his Art of Poetry Horace has been speaking of the need of method in composition - "tantum series juncturaque pollet" - and this reminds him that he has said nothing of the art of verse. The succeeding twenty-four lines contain all that this great poet thought it needful to supply on the subject with which Alexandrian grammarians could fill as many volumes. Although he is actually writing in dactylic hexameters, he does not mention this form of verse; he is chiefly occupied in describing, rather unscientifically, the iambic trimeter, and in praising the iamb, pes citus. He applauds, still somewhat vaguely, the stately versification of the precursors, Ennius and Accius, and blames the immodulata poemata of careless modern writers, whose laxity is condoned by popular ignorance. The only way to escape such faults is to study the Greeks by night and by day, but Horace evidently means by his exemplaria Graeca, not the scholiasts with their lists of metres and their laborious rules, but the old poets with their fine raptures. On Italian ground he points to Plautus, and laments that the Romans of his own day, fascinated by softer cadences, have lost their veneration for the vigorous beauty of the Plautinos numeros. And Horace closes with a queer suggestion, which may be taken as we please, that a poet in an age of flagging inspiration must trust to his fingers as well as his ears.

Modern Versification

The main distinction between classical and modern versification consists in the negligence shown by the moderns to quantity, which is defined as the length or shortness of the sound of syllables, as determined by the time required to pronounce them. This dimension of sound was rigid in the case of Greek and Latin poetry, until, in what is known as the Middle Greek period, there came in a general tendency to relax the exact value of sounds and syllables, and to introduce accent, which is a measure of quality rather than of quantity. A syllable, in modern verse, is heavy or light, according as it is accented or unaccented - that is to say, according as it receives stress from the voice or not. In the word "tulip," for instance, the syllables are of equal length, but the accent is strongly upon the first. It is mainly a question of force with us, not of time as with the ancients. There is, however, an element of quantity in modern verse, as there was of accent in ancient verse. The foot, in modern verse, takes a less prominent place in itself than it did in Greece, and is regarded more in relation to the whole line of which it makes a part. A mere counting of syllables is useless. In Milton's "From haunted spring and dale, Edg'd with poplar pale," an ancient scholiast would have found it impossible to discover any harmony, for he would have had no means of measuring the value of the heavy accent on "edg'd," followed by a pause, and would have demanded another syllable in the second line to turn the whole into verse. The first poet to whom it occurred that it was needless to attach such predominant importance to quantity was Gregory of Nazianzen (d. 38g), a Christian bishop of the Greek Church. In two important poems by Gregory all prosodical discipline is found to have disappeared, and the rule of verse has come to be accentual, with a heavy stress on the penultimate syllable. About the same time, the Greek fabulist Babrius employed a choliambic metre having a strong accent on the penultimate. The poets of the transition loved to cultivate a loose iambic trimeter in twelve syllables, and shorter octosyllabic forms called "anacreontic," although they were far enough from repeating the splendid effects of Anacreon. In these the old laws of quantity were more and more generally superseded by stress, and in all this we may see the dawn of the free accentual versification of modern Europe.

Romance Languages

The prosodies of Provence, France, Italy and Spain were derived from the decayed and simplified forms of Latin verse by a slow and sometimes almost intangible transition. In these modern metres, however, when they came to be independent, it was found that all syllables in the line were of equal value, and that the sole criterion of measure was the number of these in each case. The relics of ancient versification, deprived of all the regulated principles of rhythmical art, received in return the ornament of obligatory and difficult rhyme, without which the weak rhythm itself would practically have disappeared. A new species of rhythm, depending on the varieties of mood, was introduced, and stanzaic forms of great elaboration and beauty were invented. The earliest standard work which exhibits in full the definitions of Romance versification is the Leys d'Amors of an unknown Provencal grammarian, written in 1356.1 Another medieval treatise of great importance is the De Vulgari Eloquentia, written by Dante in 1304. There is this difference between these two works, that the former, written long after the flourishing period of the troubadours, analyses what has been accomplished in the past, while the other, standing at the starting-point of Italian poetry, describes what has to be done in the future. Both of these authorities quote the ten-syllable line of five equal feet as most to be admired and as forming the basis of poetry. But the octosyllabic, almost in the earliest times, became a main favourite with the poets, and may be said to be the most frequently used of all lyrical measures in medieval Romance poetry. The earliest specimen of all, however, a mere refrain excepted, is the fragment of the Provencal "Boethius," and this is decasyllabic, like all French poems of the Charlemagne cycle. The typical French heroic verse, the alexandrine of six feet, is not found in the old epic poetry. In Provencal and early French the position of the caesura in each line was fixed by strict rules; in Italian these were relaxed. Dante gives very minute, although somewhat obscure, accounts of the essence and invention of stanzaic form (cobla in Provencal), in which ' But see the article Provençal Literature.

the Romance poetries excelled from the first. The stanza was a group of lines formed on a regular and recurrent arrangement of rhymes. It was natural that the poets of Provence should carry to an extreme the invention of stanzaic forms, for their language was extravagantly rich in rhymes. They invented complicated poetic structures of stanza within stanza, and the canto as written by the great troubadours is a marvel of ingenuity such as could scarcely be repeated in any other language. The extreme fulness and elaboration of the Provencal poets, however, has been serviceable as placing a very high ideal of structural skill before the poets of all succeeding times, and it was of immense value in directing the experiments of the earliest poet-artists of Italy and France.

In French poetry, successive masters corrected the national versification and drew closer round it the network of rules and principles. The alexandrine was invented in the 12th century, as a counterpart to the hexameter of the ancients, by Alexander de Bernay. A great part is played in French metre by masculine and feminine verse: the former is a verse which closes with a letter which is not e mute; the latter a verse which closes with e mute, or with e mute followed by s, or by the consonants nt. Masculine rhyme is that which combines two masculine verses, and feminine that which unites two feminine verses; and in regular verse such couplets must be alternated. Elision is the rule by which, in the scansion of a verse, the letter e at the end of a word is suppressed when it immediately precedes e mute or a non-aspirated h. These and other immutable rules were laid down by Malherbe, and by Boileau in his Art Fatigue (1674), and for more than a century they were implicitly followed by all writers of verse. It was the genius of Victor Hugo which first enfranchised the prosody of France, not by rebelling against the rules, but by widening their scope in all directions, and by asserting that, in spite of its limitations, French verse was a living thing. The richness of Hugo's rhymes is proverbial, and the boldness and flow of his alexandrines exceeded everything which had been so much as dreamed of before his time. The revolution he brought about proved universal, and disciples like Theophile Gautier could say, in the face of the critics and grammarians of the classic school, "If we suspected that Victor Hugo had written a single bad verse, we should not dare to admit it to ourselves, in a cellar, without a candle." Boileau and Hugo, therefore, have been the two lawgivers of the French Parnassus. The rules of French verse being, in fact, very severe, and weakness, excess of audacity and negligences of all sorts being very harshly repressed, it is not surprising that, as the personal authority of Hugo declined, various projects were started for lightening the burden of prosodical discipline. Since 1880 those projects have been numerous, and a great many poets of genuine inspiration have written in different forms of what is called "free verse." Teutonic. - In very early times the inhabitants of the Germanic countries developed a prosodical system which owed nothing whatever to classical sources. The finest examples of this Teutonic verse are found in Icelandic and in AngloSaxon. The line consisted of two sections, each containing two strongly stressed syllables, and of these four long syllables three were alliterated. It is plain that there can be detected in ancient Teutonic verse but three severe and consistent rules, viz. that the section, the strong accentuation, and above all the alliteration must be preserved. We find this to be the case in High and Low German, Icelandic, Anglo-Saxon, and in the revived alliterative English poetry of the 14th century, such as "Piers Plowman." There are differences, however, which depend on such facts as that the Icelandic poems are mainly lyrical and the Anglo-Saxon epics are narrative. As time went on, under the pressure of south European practice, alliteration ceased to be regarded as the sole and sufficient ornament of Teutonic verse, and rhyme was occasionally used, but this was a concession which proved fatal to the type. With this use of rhyme, the High German poetry begins to cease, while England becomes the centre of Teutonic metrical composition. In Icelandic poetry there was a highly artificial verse-system known as court-verse (drottkvaett), which consisted of alliterative groups of two lines each, arranged in staves of eight lines. When we consider primitive Teutonic verse closely, we see that it did not begin with any conscious art, but, as Vigfussen has said, "was simply excited and emphatic prose" uttered with the repetition of catchwords and letters. The use of these was presently regulated. Alliteration of stressed root-syllables formed the basis of Teutonic verse, as quantity had formed the basis of Greek verse. A study of the "Heliand" and the "Lay of Hildebrand" in Old German, of the "Atli" and "Harbard" lays in Icelandic, and of the writings attributed to Beowulf, Cxdmon and Cynewulf in Anglo-Saxon, will show the general unity and the local divergences of this class of verse.

English Metre

The first writer in whom there has been discovered a distinct rebellion against the methods of AngloSaxon versification is St Godric, who died in 1170. Only three brief fragments of his poetry have been preserved, but there is no doubt that they show, for the first time, a regular composition in feet. A quotation will show the value of St Godric's invention "Sainte I Nicholaes, Godes J druth, Tymbre us I faire I scone I hus, At thy I burth, I at thy I bare, Sainte J Nicholaes, I bring uswel thare." From this difficult stanza down to the metres of modern English the transition seems gradual and direct, while the tradition of Anglo-Saxon alliterative prosody is abruptly broken. The fragments of St Godric appear to be independent of one another, and therefore indicate that the division of lines into feet is not accidental. They are much less dubious, and more firm as the basis of an hypothesis, than the famous quatrain' about the singing of the monks of Ely, which is perhaps a little earlier in date than the fragments of St Godric. This has much picturesque beauty, but if it is carefully examined the actual scheme of it as metre seems to evade detection. The Ely singer warbled, not knowing what he sang, but St Godric knew perfectly well, and must have been a deliberate innovator. There is still more definition of feet in the Poema Morale, printed by Dr Morris, which is supposed to date from about 1200. In longer pieces, and particularly in the Ormulum, and in the Brut of Layamon, which belong to the early part of the 13th century, we find, on the whole, less definite abandonment of the Anglo-Saxon system of prosody, but nevertheless a prominence given both to rhyme and to rhythm. In Layamon, particularly, the recognition of a recurrent verse of four accents is unquestionable. The place of this poet in the history of prosody is very carefully noted by Guest, who remarks that in Anglo-Saxon verse, the syllables which take the alliteration are always accented, while in the later metres, where alliteration was combined with rhyme, the former is often thrown upon an unaccented syllable. "Layamon appears to take a middle course. It would seem he gave accents both to his rhyming and his alliterative syllables; but the former were often obliged to content themselves with a false accent." An advance was made about fifty years later in Genesis and Exodus, a poem published by Professor Skeat, which has such great value in the proof it gives of the extension of verbal melody, that Saintsbury has said that "it contains more of the kernel of English prosody, properly so called, than any [other] single poem before Spenser." The phenomenon which we meet with in all these earliest attempts at purely English verse is the unconscious determination of writers, who had no views about prosody, to follow their national instinct in the direction of grouped feet and rhymes. This is further emphasized in Horn and Havelok, and in the smoother octosyllabics of the 14th-century metrical romances, where the rhymes become very frequent, with an 1 Merie sungen Oe muneches binnen Ely, Oa Cnut ch[in]ing reu oer by; "Rowe8, cni[h]tes, noer the land and here we fes muneches sang." occasional short line or bob, to prevent monotony of effect. Few of these romances have much literary value, but their prosodical value is very great, for we see in them the normal movement of English verse becoming fixed to certain principles beyond any possibility of escape "So fair J he spakI e him withal, He lightI ed downI e in I the hall, Bounde I his mare I among I them all, And to J the boardI e won." This, from Sir Percevale, is, it must be allowed, an unusually correct example; the uncouth 14th-century writers did not commonly arrive at their effect without much more irregularityand wavering than this, but the design is evident even in their worst examples. Between 1210 and 1340 not a single English poem of importance is known to have been written in the old alliterative measure of the Anglo-Saxons. But at the latter date there set in a singular reaction in favour of alliteration, a movement which culminated, after producing some beautiful romances, in the satires of Langland. Those writers, and they were many, who preserved foot-scansion and rhyme, during this alliterative reaction, became ever closer students. of contemporary French verse, and in the favourite octosyllabic metre "the uncompromising adoption of the French, or syllabically uniform, system is the first thing noticeable" (Saintsbury). This tendency of Middle English metre culminates in the work of John Gower, which is singularly polished in its rhyming octosyllabics, although unquestionably nerveless still, and inelastic.

It is, however, to Chaucer that we turn for far greater contributions to English verse. He it was who first, with full. consciousness of power as an artist, adopted the use of elaborate stanzas, always in following of the French; he it was who first gained freedom of sound by a variation of pause, and by an alternation of trochaic and iambic movement. It is the lack. of these arts which keeps Gower and his predecessors so stiff. In particular Chaucer, in his first period, invented rime-royal, a stanzaic form (in seven decasyllabic lines, rhymed a b a b b c c), peculiarly English in character, which was dominant in our literature for more than two hundred years; it was used in the long romance of Troilus and Creseide, where English metre for the first time displays its beauty to the full. The importance of rime-royal is displayed in the fact that its sixth and seventh lines actually form the decasyllabic couplet, which is commonly held to be a later discovery of Chaucer's, in The Legend of Good Women. This is the heroic verse, in which The Canterbury Tales are mainly composed, and this metre of five accents, with couplet-rhyme, became so powerful in the future history of English poetry that it may almost be taken as the central and most characteristic of our verse-forms, as the alexandrine couplet is in French and Dutch prosody. It seems to have been originally called riding-rhyme, the name by which Gascoigne describes it (1575).

It is impossible here to do more than indicate very briefly those fluctuations which English prosody underwent when the learned and vivid example of Chaucer was withdrawn. The metres of Lydgate and his successors were discordant and feeble; their ears had learned but very incorrectly the lesson of the master. Lydgate, in particular, went back to an earlier type, and showed himself more skilful in the old eight-syllable measure than in the new decasyllable. More interesting to the prosodical student than the work of these or later Chaucerians is the influence exercised throughout the 15th and early 16th centuries by the popular ballads, of which "Chevy Chase" is believed to be the oldest surviving example, while "The Tale of Gamelyn" is the longest. The introduction of the loose, elastic ballad-quatrain, with its melodious tendency to refrain, was a matter of great importance in the metamorphosis of British verse. The degenerate forms employed by the English 15th-century poets in attempting more regular prosody were in some measure connected by the greater exactitude of the Scotch writers, particularly of Dunbar, who was by far the most accomplished metrist between Chaucer and Spenser.

But Wyatt (1503-1542) was long considered the father of modern English verse, and though we now plainly enough perceive that before his day all the essential discoveries and inventions had been made, he nevertheless deserves great honour as a pioneer. He introduced, from France and Italy, the prosodical principles of the Renaissance - order and coherency, concentration and definition of sound - and that although his own powers in metre were far from being highly developed. He and his more gifted disciple Surrey introduced into English verse the sonnet (not of the pure Italian type, but as a quatorzain with a final couplet) as well as other short lyric forms. To Surrey, moreover, we owe the introduction from Italian of blank verse, the rhymeless metre of five accents, which has taken so prominent a place in subsequent English poetry.

With the heroic couplet, with blank verse, and with a variety of short lyric stanzaic measures, the equipment of British verse might now be said to be complete. For the moment, however, towards the middle of the 16th century, all these excellent metres seemed to be abandoned in favour of an awkward couplet of fourteen feet, which may have had some relation with the French alexandrine. It was always, as Saintsbury says, "a very uncertain and risky metre, settling down with a dangerous acquiescence into doggerel and sing-song." It was to break up this nerveless measure that the remarkable reforms of the close of the century were made, and the discoveries of Wyatt and Surrey were brought, long after their deaths, into general practice. In drama, the doggerel of an earlier age retired before a blank verse, which was at first entirely pedestrian and mechanical, but struck out variety and music in the hands of Marlowe and Shakespeare. But the central magician was :Spenser, in whom there arose a master of pure verse whose range and skill were greater than those of any previous writer of English, and before whom Chaucer himself must withdraw. It is not too much to say that Spenser took all the elements of English verse, as they had existed in more or less timid and undeveloped shape for four centuries, and that he moulded them together into an instrument capable, for the first time, of expressing, or accompanying, every passion, every emotion, every variety of sentiment or instinct, which stirs the human breast. His great work was that of solidification and emancipation, but he also created a noble form which bears his name, that Spenserian stanza of nine lines closing with an alexandrine, which lends itself in the hands of great poets, and great poets only, to magnificent narrative effects.

It was at this moment that a final attempt was made to disestablish the whole scheme of English metre, and to substitute for it unrhymed classic measures. In the year 1579 this heresy was powerful at Cambridge, and a vigorous attempt was made to include Spenser himself among its votaries. It failed, and with this failure it may be said that all the essential questions connected with English poetry were settled.

There is enough to fill a score of volumes in the mode in which the poets from Spenser downwards have employed the laws of English verse, but he was the latest of the legislators who laid down the framework of those laws. It is not possible in this place to enter into such themes as the rise and fall of Elizabethan dramatic blank verse; the perfection of the song and the development of the sonnet; the extraordinary virtuosity of Milton; the contest between enjambement (which permits the extension of the sentence beyond the limits of the distich) and the couplet as introduced by Waller; the victory of that couplet, and its use from 1670 to 1800; the slow growth of ode, which had been one of Spenser's inventions; the revivals of prosodical taste in the 19th century; the extraordinary advance in freedom of anapaestic movement.

It may generally be remarked in connexion with the very various, copious and often chaotic criticism of English verse, that it has been a misfortune, from the earliest times, that pedantic and chimerical theories have too often invaded the study of metre. They had tended, from the times of the Alexandrian grammarians down to our own, to treat as a dead thing that vivid and elastic art of poetry whose very essence is its life.

In modern times not a few theorists have allowed themselves to diverge into the most extraordinary chains of musical and even of mathematical conjecture and have been easily led, in the practice of their ingenious learning, to forget that what they are talking about is the vehicle in which tremulous and ardent thoughts are conveyed to the hearts of men. The poet knows the law by instinct, but he treats it as a living guide; he varies the pause, he manipulates the accent, he gives the vital element of freedom to the verse which he has founded upon discipline. It is extremely doubtful whether any youthful poet was even helped by prosodical instruction; his earliest measures are imitative; he does not compose consciously in "tribrachs" and "iambs"; he would gape in astonishment if asked to define the "pyrrhichian hypothesis"; his bursts of enthusiasm are not modified by a theory of "trisyllabic equivalence." The old formula of verse, "variety in unity," holds good in all languages, countries and times; the delicate rapture involved in a brilliant combination of rhyme and metre is a matter which is regulated, indeed, on a consideration of the laws of prosody, but depends on other and wider qualities of a moral and an aesthetic order.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Richard Bentley, Schediasma de metris Terentianis (Cambridge, 1726); R. Volkmann, Rhetorik and Metrik der Griechen and Romer (ed. Gleditsch, Berlin, 1901);1901); Wilhelm Christ, Metrik der Griechen and Romer (2nd ed., Leipzig, 1879); J. L. Ussing, Graesk og romersk Metrik (Copenhagen, 1893); Edwin Guest, A History of English Rhythms (new edition, edited by W. W. Skeat; London, 1882); George Saintsbury, A History of English Prosody (3 vols., London, 1906-9); J. Schipper, Englische Metrik (2 vols., Bonn, 1881); J. B. Mayor, Chapters on English Metre (Cambridge, 1901); T. S. Omond, English Verse-Structure (London, 1897); Metrical Rhythm (London, 1905); Theodore de Banville, Petit traite de prosodie francaise (2nd ed., Paris, 1872); Robert de Souza, Le Rhythme poe'tique (Paris, 1892); L. E. Kestner, A History of French Versification (Oxford, 1903); T. Casini, Le Forme metriche italiane (Florence, 1900); E. Benot, Prosodia Castellana i versification (3 vols., Madrid, 1902). (E. G.)