able to give. But if so, it is to be hoped that he will write more poetry on the same method, so that the counting of syllables may become as natural and instinctive a[Pg 37] process with us as it evidently is with him. He has already had the courage to explore the possibilities of English quantitative verse; yet though some of the poetry he wrote according to that system was of remarkable beauty, the experiment was perhaps too alien to the rhythmical genius of our language to be altogether satisfactory. But his new syllabic experiment, being no mere leap in the dark, but a natural development of the medium we have inherited from Chaucer and Milton, deserves our welcome, and is all the more likely to achieve lasting success.

[Pg 36]

[Pg 37]

In discussing the structure of English metre, I have taken my examples from blank verse, because that is the oldest and most highly elaborated of our verse-forms. But besides blank verse there are three other fundamental rhythms, each with a history and future possibilities of its own. If a musical analogy be permissible, rhythms of the blank verse kind (with or without rime, and[Pg 38] whatever may be the number of feet to the line) may be said to be in duple time. But there is another rhythmical variety, which is sometimes not easy to distinguish from duple time, yet is essentially different.

[Pg 38]

This seven-stressed couplet, in which so many of our ballads are written, may be said to be in common time. The first, third, fifth and seventh stresses are generally stronger than the three intervening stresses, thus producing a kind of rhythmical undulation, which gives the line swiftness and lightness. The Elizabethans used this metre frequently in the form of rimed couplets. Chapman’s translation of the Iliad, for example, is written in it. Blake in his prophetic books was the first, so far as I know, to dispense with[Pg 39] rime, and to give the line variety by frequently changing the position of the cæsura, which normally follows the fourth stress. The following lines are from the Book of Thel.

[Pg 39]

Shelley uses this metre lyrically in two of his most beautiful poems, taking the liberty of omitting the minor even[Pg 40] stresses, and the light syllables that precede them, whenever it suits his purpose.

[Pg 40]

He concludes with the completely filled-out structure:

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