Heavily hangs the tiger-lily.
Now it is not very difficult to perceive the defects of this extremely beautiful thing in the eyes of a syllabic-accentualist, as this critic (whether knowing it or not) probably was.
The syllabists have always, by a perhaps natural though perhaps also irrational extension of their arithmetical prepossession, disliked lines of irregular length on the page. Bysshe would have barred stanzas; a very few years before Tennyson's book, Crowe, then Public Orator at Oxford, had protested against the exquisite line-adjustments of the seventeenth century. To the pure accentualists the thing might seem an unholy jumble, accented irregularly, irregularly arranged in number, seemingly observing different rhythms in different parts.
Now see how it looks under the foot system:
A spi|rit haunts | the year's | last hours
Dwelling | amid | these yel|lowing bowers:
To himself | he talks;
For at e|ventide, list|ening ear|nestly, At his work | you may hear | him sob | and sigh In the walks; Earth|ward he bow|eth the hea|vy stalks Of the moul|dering flowers: Hea|vily hangs | the broad | sunflower O|ver its grave | in the earth | so chilly; Hea|vily hangs | the hol|lyhock, Hea|vily hangs | the ti|ger-lily—
the feet being sometimes, at the beginning of the lines, monosyllabic, and of course of one long syllable only (Ēarth-|, Hēa-|, Ō-|); sometimes dissyllabic, iambic mainly, but occasionally at least semi-spondaic—
Ă spīr|ĭt hāunts | thĕ yēar's | lā̆st hōurs;
often trisyllabic, and then always anapæstic—
Fŏr ăt ē|vĕntĭde līst|ĕnĭng ēarn|ĕstlȳ̆.
Even so early in the present book this should need little comment; but it may be the better for some. It is an instance of substitution carried out boldly, but unerringly; so that, iamb and anapæst being the coin of interchange and equivalence, the rhythm is now iambic, now anapæstic chiefly, the two being not muddled, but fluctuant—a prosodic part-song. And the foot system brings this out straightforwardly and on its general principles, with no beggings or assumptions whatever for the particular instance. Moreover, the structure of the piece may be paralleled freely from the songs in Shakespeare's plays.[23]
Such application possible always and everywhere.
It is indeed sometimes said that such methods of scansion as these may apply very well to nineteenth-century poets, but that they are out of place in regard to older ones. This is demonstrably false. The method applies alike, and in like measure obviates all difficulties, in examples of the thirteenth, fourteenth, fifteenth, sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries. It is as applicable to the early and mostly anonymous romancers and song-writers as to Tennyson, it accommodates Shakespeare as well as Browning. To Milton as to Shelley, to Dryden and Pope as to the most celebrated of our modern experimenters, say to Miss Christina Rossetti or Mr. Swinburne, it "fits like a glove." The rules in the next chapter, and the subjoined examples fully scanned in Chapter VI., will show its application as a beginning; the whole contents of this volume must give the fuller illustration and confirmation.[24]
FOOTNOTES:
[15] The most recent, perhaps, and the most unfortunate competitor is "stress-unit"—for there are most certainly feet (i.e. constitutive divisions of lines) which include no stress at all.
[16] A full account of these would occupy a book bigger than the larger History. Among the latest and most curious attempts on the subject is one to mark off certain metrical rhythms as "accentual," certain others as "quantitative." This (which partly results from the superfluous anxiety to discover and isolate the sources of length and shortness) makes something very like a chimera or a hotch-potch of English verse.
[17] In metrical quantity, not in vowel sound.
[18] Of Anglo-Saxon and very early Middle English poetry. See Scanned Conspectus and Book II.
[19] Except, to speak paradoxically, when it is nothing at all. The pause-foot or half-foot, the "equivalent of silence," is by no means an impossible or unknown thing in English poetry, as, for instance, in Lady Macbeth's line, I. v. 41—
Under | my bat|tlements. | ʌ Come, | you spirits,
where | spĭrīts, | though not actually impossible, would spoil the line in one way, and "come," as a monosyllabic foot, in another.
[20] The exceptions, and probably the only ones, are to be found, if anywhere, in some modern blank verse, where two tribrachs, or a tribrach and an iamb or anapæst, succeed each other.
[21] It is difficult to see how this effect can be avoided by those who think that accents or stresses, governing prosody, vary in Milton from eight to three.
[22] Having already called it "an odious piece of pedantry," the critic (Blackwood's Magazine, April 1849) adds: "What metre, Greek or Roman, Russian or Chinese, it was intended to imitate we have no care to inquire: the man was writing English and had no justifiable pretence for torturing our ears with verse like this."
[23] Such as "Under the Greenwood Tree."
[24] For cautions and additions, as well as explanations, see Glossary, especially under "Foot," "Stress-unit," "Quantity," etc.
CHAPTER V
RULES OF THE FOOT SYSTEM
§ A. Feet
(These Rules are not imperative or compulsory precepts, but observed inductions from the practice of English poets. He that can break them with success, let him.)
Feet
