or should not occur at the end of a line, couplet, or even stanza—though in the last-named case rather special reasons are required for its omission. Not every line need necessarily have any pause at all.
Blank verse specially dependent on pause.
24. The effect of blank verse depends more upon pause-variation than upon anything else; and by this variation, accompanied by stop or overrun ("enjambment") at the end of the line, verse-paragraphs are constituted, which can contain verse-clauses or sentences, in like manner brought into existence by pauses.
§ E. Line-Combination
Simple or complex.
25. Lines, composed as above of feet, can be used in English either continuously on the same or equivalent patterns, or in batches of two or more.
Rhymes necessary to couplet.
26. The batches of two almost necessarily require rhyme to indicate and isolate them, especially if the individual lines are of the same length. Other batches [stanzas] might, as far as any a priori objection goes, consist of unrhymed lines, symmetrically correspondent, or irregular [Pindaric].
Few instances of successful unrhymed stanza.
27. It is, however, found in practice, despite the examples of Campion, Collins, and one or two others, that rhymeless batching or stanza-making is very seldom successful. [28]
Unevenness of line in length.
28. There is neither a priori objection nor a posteriori inconvenience to be urged against the construction of stanzas or batches in lines of very uneven length.
Stanzas to be judged by the ear.
29. Every stanza-scheme must undergo, and is finally to be judged by, the test of the ear, and that only.
Origin of commonest line-combinations.
30. The commonest and oldest line-combinations—octosyllabic couplet, "common" or "ballad" measure, "long" and "short" measure, etc.—in some cases demonstrably, in all probably, result from the breaking up of the old long line ("fifteener" or "fourteener"), which itself came from the metricalising of the O.E. double stave.
§ F. Rhyme
Rhyme natural in English.
31. It is natural to English poetry—i.e. Middle and Modern English, or English poetry proper—to rhyme; and, except in the case of blank verse, no unrhymed measure for the last seven centuries has ever produced large quantities of uniformly satisfactory quality.
It must be "full,"
32. Rhyme in English must be "full," i.e. consonantal (on the vowel and following consonant or consonants), not merely assonantal (on the vowel only). Assonance by itself is insufficient.
and not identical.
33. It should not, according to modern usage, be identical—that is to say, the rhyming syllables should not consist of exactly the same vowels and consonants. But exceptions to this may be found in good poets, especially when the words are not the same.
General rule as to it.
34. Good rhyme has necessarily varied, at different times, with pronunciation; but a certain rough rule may be seen prevailing not uncommonly, that vowels in rhyme may take the value which they have in words other than those actually employed.[29]
Alliteration.
35. What is sometimes called "head-rhyme" (i.e. "alliteration") has now no place in English as rhyme at all, nor does it constitute either metre or stanza; but it is a permissible, and often a very considerable, ornament to verse.
Single, etc., rhyme.
36. Rhyme is either single (on the last syllable only), double (on the two last), or triple (on the three last). Beyond three the effect would be burlesque, and this is hard to keep out of triple rhyme, and even sometimes seems to menace the double.
Fullness of sound.
37. In serious poetry the fuller in sound the single rhyme is the better.
Internal rhyme permissible,
38. Rhyme is usually at the end of the line; but it may be "internal"; that is to say, syllables at one or even more than one place within the line may rhyme to the syllable at the end or to each other, and syllables within one line may rhyme to those at corresponding places within another.
but sometimes dangerous.
39. But this has a dangerous tendency to break the lines up.
§ G. Miscellaneous
Vowel-music.
40. The effect of English poetry at all times, but especially for the last hundred years, has been largely dependent on Vowel-music. This is by no means limited to the practice of what used to be called "making the sound suit the sense," though the two sometimes coincide. Vowel-music, not without occasional assistance from consonants, establishes a sort of accompaniment to the intelligible poetry—a prosodic setting.
"Fingering."
41. In the management of this, as of rhyme, pause, enjambment, and even the selection and juxtaposition of feet themselves, the poet often, if not as a rule in the best examples, uses particular sleights of fingering and execution parallel to those of the musical composer and performer. The results of this may appear to constitute verse-sections different from the feet. But these, however, never supersede feet, and are always resolvable into them; nor do they ever supply criteria for anything except the individual line or passage. They stand to prosody proper very much as delivery or elocution does to rhetoric. The conveniences of this "fingering," or poetic elocution, as well as sense and other things, may sometimes bring about alternative scansions, but all these connect themselves with and are obedient to the general foot system.[30]
Confusion of rhythms intolerable.
42. Despite this possibility of alternative scansion, and the other and commoner possibility of substitution of individual feet, iambic and trochaic, dactylic and anapæstic, metre or rhythm remain entirely distinct. Any system which regards these as merely different names for the same thing is self-condemned as
