While by one creature’s death another lives!
Contemporary masters of elegiac and epistolary verse often deal with the metre more harshly and arbitrarily still. Thus Donne, the great Dean of St Paul’s, though capable of riming with fine sonority and richness, chooses sometimes to write as though in sheer defiance of the obvious framework offered by the couplet system; and the same refusal to stop the sense with the couplet, the same persistent slurring of the rime, the same broken and jerking movement, are plentifully to be matched from the epistles of Ben Jonson. In later and weaker hands this method of letting the sentence march or jolt upon its way in almost complete independence of the rime developed into a fatal disease and decay of the metre, analogous to the disease which at the same time was overtaking and corrupting dramatic blank verse. A signal instance, to which we shall have to return, is the Pharonnida of William Chamberlayne, (1659) a narrative poem not lacking momentary gleams of intellect and imagination, and by some insatiate students, including Southey and Professor Saintsbury, admired and praised in spite of its (to one reader at least) intolerable tedium and wretched stumbling, shuffling verse, which rimes indeed to the eye but to the ear is mere mockery and vexation. For example: —
Some time in silent sorrow spent, at length
The fair Pharonnida recovers strength,
Though sighs each accent interrupted, to
Return this answer:— ‘Wilt, oh! wilt thou do
Our infant love such injury — to leave
It ere full grown? When shall my soul receive
A comfortable smile to cherish it,
When thou art gone? They’re but dull joys that sit
Enthroned in fruitless wishes; yet I could
Part, with a less expense of sorrow, would
Our rigid fortune only be content
With absence; but a greater punishment
Conspires against us — Danger must attend
Each step thou tread’st from hence; and shall I spend
Those hours in mirth, each of whose minutes lay
Wait for thy life? When Fame proclaims the day
Wherein your battles join, how will my fear
With doubtful pulses beat, until I hear
Whom victory adorns! Or shall I rest
Here without trembling, when, lodged in thy breast,
My heart’s exposed to every danger that
Assails thy valour, and is wounded at
Each stroke that lights on thee — which absent I,
Prompted by fear, to myriads multiply.’
The tendency which culminated in this kind of verse was met by a counteracting tendency in the majority of poets to insist on the regular emphatic rime-beat, and to establish the rime-unit — that is the separate couplet — as the completely dominant element in the measure, the ‘heroic’ measure as it had come to be called. The rule is nowhere so dogmatically laid down as by Sir John Beaumont, the elder brother of the dramatist, in an address to King James I: —
In every language now in Europe spoke
By nations which the Roman Empire broke,
The relish of the Muse consists in rime:
One verse must meet another like a chime.
Our Saxon shortness hath peculiar grace
In choice of words fit for the ending place,
Which leave impression in the mind as well
As closing sounds of some delightful bell.
Milton at nineteen, in a passage of his college Vacation Exercise, familiar to Keats and for every reason interesting to read in connexion with the poems expressing Keats’ early aspirations, showed how the metre could still be handled nobly in the mixed Elizabethan manner: —
Hail native Language, that by sinews weak
Didst move my first endeavouring tongue to speak,
········
I have some naked thoughts that rove about
And loudly knock to have their passage out;
And wearie of their place do only stay
Till thou hast deck’t them in thy best array;
That so they may without suspect or fears
Fly swiftly to this fair Assembly’s ears;
Yet I had rather if I were to chuse,
Thy service in some graver subject use,
Such as may make thee search thy coffers round,
Before thou cloath my fancy in fit sound:
Such where the deep transported mind may soare
Above the wheeling poles, and at Heav’ns dore
Look in, and see each blissful Deitie
How he before the thunderous throne doth lie,
Listening to what unshorn Apollo sings
To th’ touch of golden wires, while Hebe brings
Immortal Nectar to her Kingly Sire:
Then passing through the Spheres of watchful fire,
And mistie Regions of wide air next under,
And hills of Snow and lofts of piled Thunder,
May tell at length how green-ey’d Neptune raves,
In Heav’ns defiance mustering all his waves;
Then sing of secret things that came to pass
When Beldam Nature in her cradle was;
And last of Kings and Queens and Hero’s old,
Such as the wise Demodocus once told
In solemn Songs at King Alcinous feast,
While sad Ulisses soul and all the rest
Are held with his melodious harmonie
In willing chains and sweet captivitie.
But the strictly closed system advocated by Sir John Beaumont prevailed in the main, and by the days of the Commonwealth and Restoration was with some exceptions generally established. Some poets were enabled by natural fineness of ear and dignity of soul to make it yield fine rich and rolling modulations: none more so than Andrew Marvell, as for instance in his noble poem on the death of Cromwell. The name especially associated in contemporary and subsequent criticism with the attainment of the admired quality of ‘smoothness’ (another name for clipped and even monotony of rime and rhythm) in this metre is Waller, the famous parliamentary and poetical turncoat who could adulate with equal unction first the Lord Protector and then the restored Charles. By this time, however, every rimer could play the tune, and thanks to the controlling and suggesting power of the metre itself, could turn out couplets with the true metallic and epigrammatic ring: few better than Katherine Philips (‘the matchless Orinda’), who was a stickler for the strictest form of the couplet and wished even to banish all double endings. Take this from her elegy on the death of Elizabeth, Queen of Bohemia (1662): —
Although the most do with officious heat
Only adore the living and the great,
Yet this Queen’s merits Fame so far hath spread,
That she rules still, though dispossest and dead.
For losing one, two other Crowns remained;
Over all hearts and her own griefs she reigned.
Two Thrones so splendid as to none are less
But to that third which she does now possess.
Her heart and birth Fortune