III. THE STANZA

"Where virtue wants and vice abounds, there wealth is but a baited hook,To make men swallow down their bane, before on danger deep they look."

(Catalectic:)

Love took up the glass of Time, and turn'd it in his glowing hands;Every moment, lightly shaken, ran itself in golden sands.Love took up the harp of Life, and smote on all the chords with might;Smote the chord of Self, that, trembling, pass'd in music out of sight.

(Tennyson:Locksley Hall.1842.)

Open then I flung the shutter, when, with many a flirt and flutter,In there stepped a stately raven of the saintly days of yore.Not the least obeisance made he; not an instant stopped or stayed he;But, with mien of lord or lady, perched above my chamber door,—Perched upon a bust of Pallas, just above my chamber door.

(Poe:The Raven.1845.)

Night, in utmost noon forlorn and strong, with heart athirst and fasting,Hungers here, barred up forever, whence as one whom dreams affright,Day recoils before the low-browed lintel threatening doom and casting Night.

(Swinburne:Night in Guernsey.)

In the last line of this specimen we have a nine-accent verse,—very rare in English poetry.

The tendency of all eight-accent lines being to break up into halves of four accents, the distinction between four-stress and eight-stress verse may be at times only a question of printing. Thus, Thackeray'sSorrows of Werthermight be regarded as eight-stress trochaic, though commonly printed in short lines:

"Werther had a love for CharlotteSuch as words could never utter.Would you know how first he saw her?She was cutting bread and butter."

Ere frost-flower and snow-blossom faded and fell, and the splendor of winter had passed out of sight,The ways of the woodlands were fairer and stranger than dreams that fulfil us in sleep with delight;The breath of the mouths of the winds had hardened on tree-tops and branches that glittered and swayedSuch wonders and glories of blossomlike snow, or of frost that out-lightens all flowers till it fade,That the sea was not lovelier than here was the land, nor the night than the day, nor the day than the night,Nor the winter sublimer with storm than the spring: such mirth had the madness and might in thee made,March, master of winds, bright minstrel and marshal of storms that enkindle the season they smite.

(Swinburne:March.)

Onward and onward the highway runs to the distant city, impatiently bearingTidings of human joy and disaster, of love and of hate, of doing and daring.

(Longfellow:Golden Legend, iv. 1851.)

The breathlessly continuous character of such long anapestic or dactylic lines may of course be interrupted, by way of relief, by the substitution of iambi or trochees. In the specimen from Swinburne such a resting-place is found in line 3, where a light syllable is omitted afterwinds. In the specimen from Longfellow the wordshigh-way,distant,human, of course, fill the places of complete dactyls.

In the morning, O so early, my beloved, my beloved,All the birds were singing blithely, as if never they would cease:'Twas a thrush sang in my garden, "Hear the story, hear the story!"And the lark sang "Give us glory!" and the dove said "Give us peace."

(Jean Ingelow:Give us Love and Give us Peace.)

Fair is our lot—O goodly is our heritage!(Humble ye, my people, and be fearful in your mirth!)For the Lord our God Most HighHe hath made the deep as dry,He hath smote for us a pathway to the ends of all the Earth!

(Kipling:A Song of the English.)

In both these specimens the full accent regularly recurs in only the alternate feet. Thus while the first specimen is technically eight-stress trochaic, there are in the normal reading of it only four full accents to the line. In other words the first, third, fifth, and seventh feet are regularly pyrrhics. (See p.55.) The same thing appears in the specimen from Kipling:ye,and,in(in line 2) are accented only in a distinctly secondary fashion. Some have suggested, for such rhythms as these, the recognition of a foot made up of one stressed and three unstressed syllables. Lanier represents such measures (inThe Science of English Verse) in four-eight time.

Fear death?—to feel the fog in my throat,The mist in my face,When the snows begin, and the blasts denoteI am nearing the place,The power of the night, the press of the storm,The post of the foe;Where he stands, the Arch Fear in a visible form,Yet the strong man must go.

(Browning:Prospice.)

Here the tendency is to use iambi and anapests in alternate feet; see especially lines 2, 3, and 5.

All we have willed or hoped or dreamed of good, shall exist;Not its semblance, but itself; no beauty, nor good, nor powerWhose voice has gone forth, but each survives for the melodistWhen eternity affirms the conception of an hour.The high that proved too high, the heroic for earth too hard,The passion that left the ground to lose itself in the sky,Are music sent up to God by the lover and the bard;Enough that He heard it once: we shall hear it by-and-by.

The high that proved too high, the heroic for earth too hard,The passion that left the ground to lose itself in the sky,Are music sent up to God by the lover and the bard;Enough that He heard it once: we shall hear it by-and-by.

(Browning:Abt Vogler.)

Here we have a hexameter which is neither iambic nor anapestic, but a combination of the two rhythms. So in the following specimens dissyllabic and trisyllabic feet are used interchangeably.

When the lamp is shatter'dThe light in the dust lies dead—When the cloud is scatter'dThe rainbow's glory is shed.When the lute is broken,Sweet tones are remember'd not;When the lips have spoken,Loved accents are soon forgot.

(Shelley:The Flight of Love.)

The sea is at ebb, and the sound of her utmost wordIs soft at the least wave's lapse in a still small reach.From bay unto bay, on quest of a goal deferred,From headland ever to headland and breach to breach,Where earth gives ear to the message that all days preach.

(Swinburne:The Seaboard.)

England, none that is born thy son, and lives, by grace of thy glory, free,Lives and yearns not at heart and burns with hope to serve as he worships thee;None may sing thee: the sea-bird's wing beats down our songs as it hails the sea.

(Swinburne:The Armada, vii.)

This life of ours is a wild Æolian harp of many a joyous strain,But under them all there runs a loud perpetual wail, as of souls in pain.

(Longfellow:The Golden Legend, iv.)

Come away, come away, Death,And in sad cypress let me be laid;Fly away, fly away, breath;I am slain by a fair cruel maid.My shroud of white, stuck all with yew,O prepare it!My part of death, no one so trueDid share it.

(Shakspere:Twelfth Night, II. iv.)

The characteristic irregularity in this stanza is the variation from trochaic to iambic rhythm. In this case the variations are in part due, no doubt, to the fact that the words were written for music.

Maud with her exquisite face,And wild voice pealing up to the sunny sky,And feet like sunny gems on an English green,Maud in the light of her youth and her grace,Singing of Death, and of Honor that cannot die,Till I well could weep for a time so sordid and meanAnd myself so languid and base.

(Tennyson:Maud, I. v.)

In this specimen the characteristic rhythm of lines 1, 4, and 5 is dactylic, that of the remainder anapestic-iambic.

The trumpet's loud clangorExcites us to armsWith shrill notes of angerAnd mortal alarms.The double double double beatOf the thundering drumCries, hark! the foes come;Charge, charge, 'tis too late to retreat.The soft complaining fluteIn dying notes discoversThe woes of helpless lovers,Whose dirge is whispered by the warbling lute.

(Dryden:Song for St. Cecilia's Day, 1687.)

In this famous stanza the rhythm changes for obvious purposes of imitative representation.

Children dear, was it yesterday(Call yet once) that she went away?Once she sate with you and me,On a red gold throne in the heart of the sea,And the youngest sate on her knee.She combed its bright hair, and she tended it well,When down swung the sound of a far-off bell.She sighed, she looked up through the clear green sea;She said, "I must go, for my kinsfolk prayIn the little gray church on the shore to-day.'Twill be Easter-time in the world—ah me!And I lose my poor soul, Merman! here with thee."I said, "Go up, dear heart, through the waves;Say thy prayer, and come back to the kind sea-caves!"She smiled, she went up through the surf in the bay.Children dear, was it yesterday?... Down, down, down!Down to the depths of the sea!She sits at her wheel in the humming town,Singing most joyfully.Hark what she sings: "O joy, O joy,For the humming street, and the child with its toy!For the priest, and the bell, and the holy well;For the wheel where I spun,And the blessed light of the sun!"And so she sings her fill,Singing most joyfully,Till the spindle drops from her hand,And the whizzing wheel stands still.She steals to the window, and looks at the sand,And over the sand at the sea;And her eyes are set in a stare;And anon there breaks a sigh,And anon there drops a tear,From a sorrow-clouded eye,And a heart sorrow-laden,A long, long sigh,For the cold strange eyes of a little mermaiden,And the gleam of her golden hair.

... Down, down, down!Down to the depths of the sea!She sits at her wheel in the humming town,Singing most joyfully.Hark what she sings: "O joy, O joy,For the humming street, and the child with its toy!For the priest, and the bell, and the holy well;For the wheel where I spun,And the blessed light of the sun!"And so she sings her fill,Singing most joyfully,Till the spindle drops from her hand,And the whizzing wheel stands still.She steals to the window, and looks at the sand,And over the sand at the sea;And her eyes are set in a stare;And anon there breaks a sigh,And anon there drops a tear,From a sorrow-clouded eye,And a heart sorrow-laden,A long, long sigh,For the cold strange eyes of a little mermaiden,And the gleam of her golden hair.

(Matthew Arnold:The Forsaken Merman.)

Then the music touch'd the gates and died;Rose again from where it seem'd to fail,Storm'd in orbs of song, a growing gale;Till thronging in and in, to where they waited,As 'twere a hundred-throated nightingale,The strong tempestuous treble throbbed and palpitated;Ran into its giddiest whirl of sound,Caught the sparkles, and in circles,Purple gauzes, golden hazes, liquid mazes,Flung the torrent rainbow round:Then they started from their places,Moved with violence, changed in hue,Caught each other with wild grimaces,Half-invisible to the view,Wheeling with precipitate pacesTo the melody, till they flew,Hair, and eyes, and limbs, and faces,Twisted hard in fierce embraces,Like to Furies, like to Graces,Dash'd together in blinding dew.

(Tennyson:Vision of Sin.)

Even in metre exhibiting no marked irregularities, it is of course rather exceptional than otherwise to find all the feet in a verse conforming to the type-foot of the metre. Departures from the typical metre may be conveniently classified in five groups: Deficiency in accent; excess of accent; inversion of accent; light syllable added to dissyllabic foot; light syllable omitted in trisyllabic foot.

Deficiency of accent is the most common of all the variations, if we understand by "accent" such syllabic stress as would be ordinarily appreciable in the reading of the word in question. It would be safe to say that in English five-stress iambic verse, read with only the ordinary etymological and rhetorical accents, twenty-five per cent of the verses lack the full five stresses characteristic of the type. In many cases, too, a foot with deficiency in stress is compensated for by another foot in the same verse showing excess of stress. Feet thus deficient in stress may conveniently be calledpyrrhics, the pyrrhic being understood as made up of two unstressed syllables. This term has never become fully domesticated in English prosody, and some object to its use on the ground that we have no feet wholly without stress. Its use in the sense just indicated, however, seems to be an unquestionable convenience.

Excess of accent, while less common than deficiency of accent, is even more easily recognizable. The foot containingtwo stressed syllables, even though one of the stresses may be distinctly stronger than the other, may conveniently be called aspondee.

Inversion of accent is exceedingly familiar, especially at the beginning of the verse and after the medial pause. It consists, technically speaking, in the substitution of a trochee for an iambus or an iambus for a trochee (the latter very rarely).

A light syllable inserted in dissyllabic measure is not unusual, though by no means so common as the variations previously enumerated. Such a syllable is frequently spoken of as "hypermetrical"; or, the variation may be considered as the substitution of an anapest for an iambus, in iambic measure, or the substitution of a dactyl for a trochee, in trochaic measure.

The omission of one of the two light syllables from the foot in trisyllabic verse is so common as to make it difficult to find pure anapestic or dactylic verse in English. This fact is due in part to preference for dissyllabic measures, and in part to the usual indifference, in all Germanic verse, to accuracy in the number of light syllables. The variation may frequently be regarded as involving a prolongation of the light syllable of the foot, or a pause equal to the time of the omitted syllable; technically speaking, it consists in the substitution of an iambus for an anapest, or a trochee for a dactyl.

Examples of all these variations may best be found in the specimens of verse included in the preceding pages. A few specimens of detail are added here, for the sake of greater clearness.

To further this, AchitophelunitesThe malcontents of all the Israelites,Whose differing parties hecould wisely joinFor several ends to serve the same design;The best (and ofthe princes some were such)Who thought the power of monarchytoo much;Mistaken men and patriots intheir hearts,Not wicked, butseduced by impious arts;By these the springs of propertywere bent,And wound so high they crack'd the government.

(Dryden:Absalom and Achitophel, I.)

And tenlow wordsoft creep in onedull line.

(Pope:Essay on Criticism.)

Rocks, caves, lakes, fens, bogs, dens, and shades of death.

(Milton:Paradise Lost, II. 621.)

See, seewhere Christ'sblood streamsin the firmament!

(Marlowe:Faustus, sc. xvi.)

O great,just, good God! Miserable me!

(Browning:The Ring and the Book, VI.)

A tree'shead snaps—and there,there, there, there, there!

(Browning:Caliban upon Setebos.)

Thou detestable maw, thou womb of death,Gorged withthe dearest morsel of the earth.

(Shakspere:Romeo and Juliet, V. iii. 45 f.)

Finds tongues in trees,books inthe running brooks,Sermonsin stones, and good in every thing.

(As You Like It, II. i. 16 f.)

The watery kingdom whose ambitious headSpits inthe face of heaven.

(Merchant of Venice, II. vii. 44 f.)

Long lines of cliffbreakinghave left a chasm.

(Tennyson:Enoch Arden.)

There whirled her white robe like a blossomed branchRapt tothe horrible fall: a glance I gave,No more; but woman-vested as I wasPlunged; andthe flooddrew; yetI caught her; thenOaringone arm,...

(Tennyson:The Princess.)

Stabbed throughthe heart's affections to the heart!Seethed likea kid in its own mother's milk!Killed witha word worse than a life of blows!

(Tennyson:Merlin and Vivien.)

He flowedRight forthe polar star, past Orgunje,Brimming, and bright, and large; then sands begin,...

(Matthew Arnold:Sohrab and Rustum.)

Let me see, let me see, is not the leaf turn'd down?

(Shakspere:Julius Cæsar, IV. iii. 271.)

Leviathan, which God of all his worksCreated hugest that swimthe ocean stream.

(Milton:Paradise Lost, I. 201 f.)

This passage was one of those where Bentley made himself ridiculous in his edition of Milton. "To smooth it" he changed the lines to read—

"Leviathan, whom God the vastest madeOf all the kinds that swim the ocean stream,"—

not perceiving, what Cowper pointed out, that Milton had designedly used "the wordhugestwhere it may have the clumsiesteffect.... Smoothness was not the thing to be consulted when the Leviathan was in question."

So he with difficultyand labour hardMoved on, with difficultyand labour he.

(ib.II. 1021 f.)

The sweepOf some precipitous rivulet tothe wave.

(Tennyson:Enoch Arden.)

The sound of many a heavily gallopinghoof.

(Tennyson:Geraint and Enid.)

I wish that somewhere in the ruin'd folds,...Or the dry thickets, I could meet with herThe Abominable, that uninvited came.

(Tennyson:Œnone.)

Do you seethis square old yellow book I tossI' the air, and catch again, and twirl aboutBy the crumpled vellum covers; pure crude fact—

(Browning:The Ring and the Book, I.)

That plantShall never wave its tangles lightly and softlyAs a queen's languid and imperial arm.

(Browning:Paracelsus, I.)

A distinction should be made between these hypermetrical syllables which change the character of the foot from dissyllabic to trisyllabic, and syllables (in a sense hypermetrical) which are slurred or elided in the reading. The wordradiance, for example, is regarded as trisyllabic in prose, but in the verse—

"Girt with omnipotence, with radiance crowned,"

it is made dissyllabic by instinctive compression, and in no proper sense makes an anapest of the fifth foot. Of the samecharacter are the numerous cases where a vowel is elided before another vowel—especially the vowel of the articlethe.[7]On the elisions of Milton's verse, see Mr. Robert Bridges'sMilton's Prosody; on those of Shakspere's verse, see Abbott'sShakespearian Grammar. In modern verse the use of elision and slurring is ordinarily that found in common speech.

As a vision of heaven from the hollows of ocean, that none but a godmight see,Rose outof the silenceof things unknownof a presence, a form,a might,And we heard as a prophet that hearsGod's message against him, and maynot flee.

(Swinburne:Death of Richard Wagner.)

See also specimens on pp.42,43,48, above.

Mr. Mayor considers the question as to how far substitution of other than the typical foot may be carried in a verse, without destroying the genuineness of the fundamental rhythm. His conclusions are these:

(1) The limit of trochaic substitution is three feet out of five, with the final foot iambic; or two out of five, if the fifth foot is inverted.

(2) A spondee is allowable in any position; the limit is four out of five, with either the fourth or fifth foot remaining iambic.

(3) A pyrrhic may occur in any position; the limit is three out of five, with the other feet preferably spondees.

(4) The limit for trisyllabic substitution is three out of five.

(Chapters on English Metre, chap. V.)

Professor Corson discusses the æsthetic effect of these changes from the typical metre: "The true metrical artist ... never indulges in variety for variety's sake.... All metrical effects are to a great extentrelative—and relativity of effect depends, of course, upon having a standard in the mind or feelings.... Now the more closely the poet adheres to his standard—to the even tenor (modulus) of his verse—so long as there is no logical nor æsthetic motive for departing from it, the more effective do his departures become when they are sufficiently motived. All non-significant departures weaken the significant ones.... The normal tenor of the verse is presumed to represent the normal tenor of the feeling which produces it. And departures from that normal tenor represent, or should represent, variations in the normal tenor of the feeling. Outside of the general law ... of the slurring or suppression of extra light syllables, which do not go for anything in the expression, an exceptional foot must result in emphasis, whether intended or not, either logical or emotional.... A great poet is presumed to have metrical skill; and where ripples occur in the stream of his verse, they will generally be found to justify themselves as organic;i.e.they are a part of the expression."

(Primer of English Verse, pp. 48-50.)

On the æsthetic symbolism of various metrical movements, see G. L. Raymond'sPoetry as a Representative Art, pp. 113 ff.

FOOTNOTES:[6]The names of the several kinds of feet are of course borrowed from classical prosody, where they are used to mark feet made up not of accented and unaccented, but of long and short syllables. The different significance of the terms as applied to the verse of different languages has given rise to some confusion, and it is proposed by some to abandon the classical terms; their use, however, seems to be too well established in English to permit of change. Some would even abandon the attempt to measure English verse by feet, contending that its rhythm is too free to admit of any such measuring process; thus, see Mr. J. M. Robertson, in the Appendix toNew Essays toward a Critical Method, and Mr. J. A. Symonds in hisBlank Verse. See also in Mr. Robert Bridges'sMilton's Prosody, Appendix G "On the Use of Greek Terminology in English Prosody." (1901 ed. p. 77.)[7]On the historical problem of the distinction between elided and genuinely hypermetrical syllables in the French and English decasyllabic verse, see Motheré:Les théories du vers héroique anglais et ses relations avec la versification française(Havre, 1886).

[6]The names of the several kinds of feet are of course borrowed from classical prosody, where they are used to mark feet made up not of accented and unaccented, but of long and short syllables. The different significance of the terms as applied to the verse of different languages has given rise to some confusion, and it is proposed by some to abandon the classical terms; their use, however, seems to be too well established in English to permit of change. Some would even abandon the attempt to measure English verse by feet, contending that its rhythm is too free to admit of any such measuring process; thus, see Mr. J. M. Robertson, in the Appendix toNew Essays toward a Critical Method, and Mr. J. A. Symonds in hisBlank Verse. See also in Mr. Robert Bridges'sMilton's Prosody, Appendix G "On the Use of Greek Terminology in English Prosody." (1901 ed. p. 77.)

[7]On the historical problem of the distinction between elided and genuinely hypermetrical syllables in the French and English decasyllabic verse, see Motheré:Les théories du vers héroique anglais et ses relations avec la versification française(Havre, 1886).

The stanza, or strophe, is the largest unit of verse-measure ordinarily recognized. It is based not so much on rhythmical divisions as on periods either rhetorical or melodic; that is, a short stanza will roughly correspond to the period of a sentence, and a long one to that of a paragraph, while in lyrical verse the original idea was to conform the stanza to the melody for which it was written. Thus Schipper observes: "The word strophe properly signifies aturning, and originally indicated the return of the song, as sung, to the melody with which it began." Schipper defines a stanza as a group of verses of a certain number, so combined that all the stanzas of the same poem will be identical in the number, the length, and the metre of the corresponding verses; in rimed verse, also, the arrangement of the rimes will be identical. (SeeGrundriss, p. 268.)

The form of a stanza, then, is determined and described (the fundamental metre being assumed) by the number of verses, the length of verses, and the arrangement of rimes. The usual and convenient method of indicating these conditions is to represent all the verses that rime together by the same letter, while the number of feet in the verse is written like an algebraic exponent. Thus a quatrain in "common metre" (four-stress and three-stress lines), riming alternately, is represented by the formulaa4b3a4b3.

The appearance of the stanza in English verse is always the sign of foreign influence. The West Germanic verse, as far back as we have specimens of it, is uniformlystichic(that is, marked by no periods save those of the individual verse), notstanzaic.[8]On the other hand, we find the stanza in the Old Norse verse. Sievers's view is that originally the two sorts of verse existed side by side, the stanzaic being preferred for chorus delivery, the stichic for individual recitation; one form at length crowding out the other.

The great organizer of the stanza is, of course, the element of rime. While unrimed stanzas are familiar in classical verse, the two innovations, rime and stanza, were introduced together into English verse, under both Latin and French influences, and have almost invariably been associated. For notes on the history of the beginnings of stanza-forms in English, see therefore under Rime, in the following section.

Truth may seem, but cannot be;Beauty brag, but 'tis not she;Truth and beauty buried be.

(Shakspere:The Phœnix and the Turtle.1601.)

O praise the Lord, his wonders tell,Whose mercy shines in Israel,At length redeem'd from sin and hell.

(George Sandys:Paraphrase upon Luke i.ab. 1630.)

Love, making all things else his foes,Like a fierce torrent overflowsWhatever doth his course oppose.

(Sir Jno. Denham:Against Love.ab. 1640.)

Children, keep up that harmless play:Your kindred angels plainly sayBy God's authority ye may.

(Landor:Children Playing in a Churchyard.1858.)

Whoe'er she be,That not impossible SheThat shall command my heart and me;Where'er she lie,Lock'd up from mortal eyeIn shady leaves of destiny:...—Meet you her, my Wishes,Bespeak her to my blisses,And be ye call'd, my absent kisses.

Whoe'er she be,That not impossible SheThat shall command my heart and me;

Where'er she lie,Lock'd up from mortal eyeIn shady leaves of destiny:...

—Meet you her, my Wishes,Bespeak her to my blisses,And be ye call'd, my absent kisses.

(Crashaw:Wishes for the Supposed Mistress.1646.)

I said, "I toil beneath the curse,But, knowing not the universe,I fear to slide from bad to worse."And that, in seeking to undoOne riddle, and to find the true,I knit a hundred others new."

I said, "I toil beneath the curse,But, knowing not the universe,I fear to slide from bad to worse.

"And that, in seeking to undoOne riddle, and to find the true,I knit a hundred others new."

(Tennyson:The Two Voices.1833.)

Like the swell of some sweet tune,Morning rises into noon,May glides onward into June.

(Longfellow:Maidenhood.1842.)

Whenas in silks my Julia goes,Then, then (methinks) how sweetly flowsThat liquefaction of her clothes.

(Herrick:To Julia.1648)

The fear was on the cattle, for the gale was on the sea,An' the pens broke up on the lower deck an' let the creatures free—An' the lights went out on the lower deck, an' no one down but me.

(Kipling:Mulholland's Contract.)

A spending hand that alway poureth outHad need to have a bringer in as fast;And on the stone that still doth turn aboutThere groweth no moss. These proverbs yet do last:Reason hath set them in so sure a place,That length of years their force can never waste.When I remember this, and eke the caseWherein thou stand'st, I thought forthwith to write,Bryan, to thee. Who knows how great a grace,...

A spending hand that alway poureth outHad need to have a bringer in as fast;And on the stone that still doth turn about

There groweth no moss. These proverbs yet do last:Reason hath set them in so sure a place,That length of years their force can never waste.

When I remember this, and eke the caseWherein thou stand'st, I thought forthwith to write,Bryan, to thee. Who knows how great a grace,...

(Sir Thomas Wyatt:How to use the court and himself therein, written to Sir Francis Bryan.ab. 1542.)

Theterza rimais, strictly speaking, a scheme of continuous verse rather than a stanza, each tercet being united by the rime-scheme to the preceding. Its use in English has always been slight, and always due to conscious imitation of the Italian. No successful attempt has been made to use it for a long poem, as Dante did in theDivina Commedia. Wyatt's specimen is the earliest in English; he chose the form for his three satires imitating those of Alamanni.

Once, O sweet once, I saw with dread oppressedHer whom I dread; so that with prostrate lyingHer length the earth Love's chiefe clothing dressed.I saw that riches fall, and fell a crying:—Let not dead earth enjoy so deare a cover,But decke therewith my soule for your sake dying;Lay all your feare upon your fearfull lover:Shine, eyes, on me, that both our lives be guarded:So I your sight, you shall your selves recover.

(Sir Philip Sidney:Thyrsis and Dorus, in theCountess of Pembroke's Arcadia. ab. 1580.)

Back to Index Next