Of Montmorenci. Why so sad a moan?
Life is the rose's hope while yet unblown;
The reading of an ever-changing tale;
The light uplifting of a maiden's veil;
A pigeon tumbling in clear summer air;
A laughing school-boy, without grief or care,
Riding the springy branches of an elm.

O for ten years, that I may overwhelm
Myself in poesy! so I may do the deed
That my own soul has to itself decreed.

(Keats, Sleep and Poetry 85 ff.)

I rode one evening with Count Maddalo
Upon the bank of land which breaks the flow
Of Adria towards Venice: a bare strand
Of hillocks, heaped from ever-shifting sand,
Matted with thistles and amphibious weeds,

Such as from earth's embrace the salt ooze breeds,
Is this; an uninhabited sea-side,

Which the lone fisher, when his nets are dried,
Abandons; and no other object breaks

The waste, but one dwarf tree and some few stakes
Broken and unrepaired, and the tide makes

A narrow space of level sand thereon,

Where 'twas our wont to ride while day went down.
(Shelley, Julian and Maddalo 1 ff.)

And with light lips yet full of their swift smile,
And hands that wist not though they dug a grave,
Undid the hasps of gold, and drank, and gave,
And he drank after, a deep glad kingly draught:
And all their life changed in them, for they quaffed
Death; if it be death so to drink, and fare

As men who change and are what these twain were.
And shuddering with eyes full of fear and fire

And heart-stung with a serpentine desire

He turned and saw the terror in her eyes

That yearned upon him shining in such wise

As a star midway in the midnight fixed.

Their Galahault was the cup, and she that mixed;
Nor other hand there needed, nor sweet speech
To lure their lips together; each on each
Hung with strange eyes and hovered as a bird
Wounded, and each mouth trembled for a word;
Their heads neared, and their hands were drawn in one,
And they saw dark, though still the unsunken sun
Far through fine rain shot fire into the south;
And their four lips became one burning mouth.

(Swinburne, Tristram of Lyonesse I, end.).

$214. Four-bar and Four-beat Verses. The couplet, consisting of two four-bar verses (§§ 123. 153. 182. 185), was much less used after the introduction of the heroic couplet. In NE. the initial unstressed syllable is always present, and the ending is generally masculine; the rhythm is fairly regular: xxlxxlxx1××1(x); cp. Inscription on Shakespeare's tomb:

Good frend, for Jesus sake forbeare
To digg the dust encloased heare:

Bleste be the man that spares thes stones
And curst be he that moves my bones.

In humourous poems with their affected rimes feminine endings are more frequent; cp. Butler's Hudibras I, 1ff.:

When civil fury first grew high,

And men fell out they knew not why;
When hard words, jealousies, and fears,
Set folks together by the ears,

And made them fight, like mad or drunk
For Dame Religion, as for punk;

Whose honesty they all durst swéar for,
Though not a man of them knew wherefore;
When Gospel-Trumpeter, surrounded
With long-eared rout, to battle sounded,
And pulpit, drum ecclesiastic,

Was beat with fist, instead of á stick;

Then did Sir Knight abandon dwelling
And out he rode a-colonelling.

Enjambement and rime-breaking are rare in Butler; each couplet generally stands alone. The same is true of Burns' Tam o' Shanter; cp. 1. 59ff.: But pleasures are like poppies spread

You seize the flow'r, its bloom is shed;
Or like the snow falls in the river

A moment white, then melts for ever;
Or like the borealis race,

That flit ere you can point their place;
Or like the rainbow's lovely form
Evanishing amid the storm.

Nae man can tether time nor tide;

The hour approaches Tam maun ride;

That hour, o' night's black arch the key-stane,
That dreary hour, he mounts his beast in;
And sic a night he taks the road in

As ne'er poor sinner was abroad in.

W. Morris's short rimed couplets in the Earthly Paradise remind the reader of Chaucer owing to the frequent use of emjambement and rime-breaking; but the unstressed initial syllable is always present; cp. The Ring given to Venus 1 ff.: The story of this chronicle

Doth of an ancient city tell,

Well built upon a goodly shore.

The wide lands stretched behind it bore
Great wealth of oil and wine and wheat.
The great sea carried to its feet
The dainty things of many lands.
There the hid miners' toiling hands
Dragged up to light the dull blue lead,
And silver white, and copper red,
And dreadful iron; many a time

The sieves swung to the woman's rhyme
O'er gravelly streams that carried down

The golden sand from caves unknown etc.

By the side of this strict four-bar verse, in which unstressed and stressed syllables follow one another regularly, so that the verse has always eight syllables when the ending is masculine (××××××××), we find in NE. a more freely constructed verse of four beats, in which the number of syllables varies from 7 to 12, since, as in ME., the initial unstressed syllable may be omitted and two unstressed syllables may come together: (x)(x)×|(×)××|(×)××|(×)x(x), so that the verse has an anapaestic rather than an iambic rhythm. This four-beat verse is also generally written in couplets, sometimes mixed with alternate rime.

Some parts of Spenser's Shepherd's Calendar are written in this verse. In Milton's L'Allegro and Il Penseroso two unstressed syllables rarely come together, but the initial unstressed syllable is often omitted, so that the rhythm is almost trochaic; cp. e.g.:

Stráight mine eye hath caught new pleasures
Whilst the landscape round it measures;
Rússet lawns and fallows grey,

Where the nibbling flocks do stray;
Mountains, on whose barren breast
The labouring clouds do often rest;
Méadows trim with daisies pied,
Shallow brooks and rivers wide;
Tówers and battlements it sees
Bósom'd high in tufted trees,
Where perhaps some Beauty lies,
The Cynosure of neighbouring eyes.

Coleridge used the freer four-beat verse in

Christabel; e.g.:

They passed the hall, that echoes still,

Páss as lightly as you will!

The brands were flat, the brands were dying,

Amid their own white ashes lying;

But when the lady passed, there came

A tongue of light, a fit of flame;
And Christabel saw the lady's eye,

And nothing else saw she thereby

Save the boss | of the shield | of Sir Leoline tall,
Which hung in a murky old niche | in the wall.
O softly tread, said Christabel,

My father seldom sleepeth well.

Coleridge thought that he had discovered something new, for he says in his preface:

"I have only to add, that the metre of the Christabel is not, properly speaking, irregular, though it may seem so from its being founded on a new principle: namely that of counting in each line the accents, not the syllables. Though the latter may vary from seven to twelve, yet in each line the accents will be found to be only four. Nevertheless this occasional variation in number of syllables