create it, and that a soul created could not be alive and dead at the same time. But he leaps to the implication intended by the hyperbole. Similarly, the innuendo insinuated by the statement that a monk is not pale as a forpined ghost depends for its success upon the probability that the reader will jocosely leap to the conclusion that the monk is the cxact opposite, all that he was not said to be, a wine-bibber and purplenosed. But both Chaucer and the reader are aware of many alternatives of complexion for jovial men, between the pallid and the purple. The irony of "Go, teach eternal wisdom how to rule " depends, likewise, upon a common understanding between speaker and hearer, by which the illogical exaggeration is accepted with a grain of salt, because at the same time recognized as a reduction to absurdity or impossibility. The oxymoron, such as Chaucer's

"Smale fowles maken melodye

That slepen al the night with open eye,"

depends upon a similar mock-logic; and the euphemism is but the converse of hyperbole, or if humorous, of the same sophistical kin as the litotes. None of these figures is essentially creative; but when wedded with poetic figures, metaphor, simile, synecdoche, metonymy, as in most of the examples given above, they enhance the emotional and imaginative effect, by their deviation from the processes of work-a-day reasoning.

(3) Rhetorical Figures. Of rhetorical figures it is unnecessary to say more than that they, too, when used in poetry, attract not by their creative quality, for they have none. Some attract by the direct imitation of emotional outcry: as in the exclamation (or ecphonesis), the interrogation (or erotesis), the broken utterance (or aposiopesis). All three of these are employed in the exquisite

"Had ye been there, for what could that have done?"

of Milton's elegy. Others owe their charm and power to some artistic arrangement of sentence or paragraph as in the iteration

"For Lycidas is dead, dead ere his prime,

Young Lycidas, and hath not left his peer.
Who would not sing for Lycidas?'

Of antithesis, balance, parallelism, climax, and anticlimax, the same statement holds true. They are not figures of poetry, but of rhetorical arrangement.

Of course all these accentuations of the usual method of excited utterance, and these departures from the careless order of conversational speech, are common to the prose of practical literature. But the devices of the former or emotional kind appear frequently in poetry,

as if playing the part of waves on which the fleet of imagery really poetic― may fare afloat. Devices of the latter or ordering kind serve as winds to marshal battle-ship and cockle-shell to the haven that is the heart.

7. THE RHYTHM OF VERSE: FOOT AND METRE

Verse depends upon the rhythm of sounds, their quality and pitch, and their harmony or consonance.

Rhythm in Verse. — The recurrence of identity at regular time or space intervals which pleases us when it characterizes thought and natural movements and forms, and which the musician, architect, painter, and sculptor aim to reproduce and emphasize in the materials of their various arts, the poet attempts to represent in the materials of language. He feels the rhythmic swing of thought or mood or action, and he translates this into language of a corresponding rhythmical beat. There is a rhythm of emotional diction in all speech; but since experience has taught men that certain rhythmical sequences are more suitable than others to the representation of particular moods, these sequences have been favored by the poets; have been, so to speak, singled out and conventionalized. They were undoubtedly suggested to our forefathers by the regular beat of the words which they chanted to the time of their choral dances. First originated the dance for some solemn or festival occasion of love or war, labor or religion, in which all marched together — one, two, three, four steps forward, and one, two, three, four, back. Soon accompanying emotional utterances were timed to the marching, such as ha-ah, há-ah, ha-ah, ha! Then, in course of time, words were chanted in syllables alternately accented and unaccented according as the steps were heavy or light. When, later still, the chanted words came to be separated from the dance, there arose the independent song or story recited to a musical accompaniment. And, last of all, the verse divorced from music stood by itself. Now the difference between a verse-utterance of this kind and an utterance in prose, so far as the form is concerned, lies principally in the rhythm; that is to say, in the regularity with which the accented syllables recur. If we mark the accents of the sentence beginning "Now the difference," above, we have "Now the difference between a verse-utterance of this kind and an utterance in prose." It will be noticed that there is no uniform quality of movement up to, or down from, each accent; and no regular interval of time between the successive accents. But if we recast the sentence thus:

"The difference between a line of poetry and prose," we note that the rhythm regularly ascends to the stress; and that the syllables capable of receiving accent have been ordered so that each is separated from the next by a light or unstressed syllable. From such a process of rhythmical arrangement as this there result first the foot and second the metre. The Foot. The foot in English poetry is the smallest possible independent combination of accented and unaccented syllables regularly recurring in a poem ; and by its regular and continuous recurrence the foot determines the rhythm of the whole. The character of the rhythm depends, therefore, in English upon the composition of this unit, the foot. In Greek and Roman verse, on the other hand, the measurement was entirely by time, the accent was not regarded, and the unit was not the foot, as in English, but the short syllable (~), two of which were equal to a long (__). A foot of two longs (______) was called a spondee; of a long and two shorts (__~ ~) a dactyl; of two shorts and a long (~ ~ __) an anapæst; of a long and a short (_ ~) a trochee; of a short and a long (~ __) an iambus; of two shorts (~~) a pyrrhus; of a long, two shorts, and a long (___ ~ ~ ___) a choriambus ; of a short, long, short () an amphibrach; of a long and three shorts (_ ~~~) a pæon. Feet of different lengths might, moreover, be arranged in a fixed order to make a verse.

"Maecenas a avis edite

Thus: :

regibus,"

where the first foot contains four units of time, the second six, the third six, and the fourth two. The prose accent is not observed at all, but the time-units must always follow the same order.

It must not be supposed that in English metres time plays no part whatever. Both accent and time enter into the composition of the English verse-unit, for the feet are always, in theory, at least, of the same length, and the accent of each foot preserves the same position in relation to the unaccented time-interval: that is to say, to the time occupied by the light syllables between the accents. The stress, as the verse-accent is called, may and sometimes does lengthen the pronunciation of the syllable upon which it falls. And since we measure our line of poetry, or verse, by the number of regularly recurring stresses, it is not strange that we ordinarily speak of the stressed syllables as long and of the others as short. But it must be remembered that the unaccented syllables in English are not equally short in conversational utterance, nor is each of them naturally one-half the length of a stressed syllable. We simply aim to write and read our verses in such a way as to keep the unaccented syllable or syllables within approximately the

same length of utterance, so that the stress may recur at regular intervals. In the line

"And the bay-was white | with sillent light,"

'And' and 'the' are both short, but 'and' probably takes longer to say than 'the'. Both together, however, are supposed to occupy no more time than the single syllable 'was' in the next foot. So also 'was' and 'with' are read as equal in length with 'lent'; but there is no doubt that 'lent' is naturally longer than either of them. The character of the foot in English, then, depends more upon the regular position of the stress in relation to the interval of unstressed syllables than upon the equality of the short syllables one to another or their proportion to the stressed in length. There are usually not more than two unstressed syllables in a foot; but occasionally we find as many as three, for instance, in Kipling's The Last Chantey,

"Calling to the angels and the | souls in their degree;"

and in Fuzzy-Wuzzy,

"He's an india-rubber | idiot on a | spree,"

where the four-syllabled feet, accent and all, are approximately equal in length to the first, of two syllables and the last of one. There may even be four unstressed syllables. Still we may as well continue to use the names of classical 'quantity' feet for the simpler kinds of 'stress' foot. Those names, dactyl, etc., gained the right of way when our Elizabethan poets were trying to regulate English verse by Latin custom; and not even yet have any good substitutes, indicating the accentual principle, been coined. In symbolizing the rhythm we may, however, substitute the sign of a stress (▲) for the sign of a long syllable (___).

English Feet. — The commonest foot in English is the iamb (~/). For it the anapast is sometimes substituted as in the following from The Prisoner of Chillon:

"There are seven pillars of Gothic mould."

Of all our rhythms the iambic appears to be the best adapted to serious, stately, continued narrative or dramatic or reflective verse. Note, for instance, the Idylls of the King, Comus, and Il Penseroso. It is the rhythm of our greatest poems. The anapæst (~~) (sister of the iamb, for the stress holds in both the same position in relation to the unstressed syllables of the foot) may be used by itself for both light and serious verse, but it is generally strengthened by the coöperation of the iamb. The ascending movement, at first rapid, then sustained, is singularly

suited to the expression of enthusiasm, exalted contemplation, successful effort, as in Bayard Taylor's National Ode,

'I galloped, Dirck galloped, we galloped all three."

The trochee (~) has a rapid and tripping effect as in

and in many lines of L'Allegro; but it is also adapted to thoughtful and somewhat reminiscent narrative or address, for instance, in Arnold's Forsaken Merman,

"Call her | once before you | go,"

and in his Rugby Chapel; also in Hiawatha.

The dactyl (~) is in English still more hurried and bounding than its sister the trochee, with which it is often associated. It has a gracious swing, but even when well handled, as by Longfellow in the Evangeline,

"This is the forest primeval, the | murmuring | pines and the | hemlocks," the protracted use of it is liable to be monotonous. Its most felicitous employment is in conjunction with the trochee, in the reflective or narrative lyric, as in The Blue and the Gray,

"These in the | robings of | glory,"

or The Charge of the Light Brigade,

"Half a league; | half a league; | half a league | onward."

Such are the feet principally found in English verse.

The spondee (/), two longs in Latin, would give us a line of successive stresses in English, and therefore cannot be consecutively employed. While we occasionally designate a word like corn-crake or farewell a spondee, or feet like "rocks, caves," spondaic, such feet in our verse of alternating stressed and unstressed syllables become trochaic or iambic. We may talk, however, of the spondaic effect of a verse that abounds in successive heavy and sonorous syllables. Note, for instance, Tennyson's line on the burial of the Great Duke. Scanned in the classical manner,

"With an empire's | lamen|tation,"

the movement is spondaic; but the rhythm by accent is trochaic.