make use of rhyme. By these means the senses are stimulated, the emotions aroused, and the mind made ready for the reception of the poet's thought. In the second respect the poet is more like the painter. He deals with 'the concrete rather than with the abstract. His aim is to enable the reader to construct a series of visual images, whereby he shall behold the world of fact or the world of imagination in a new, fresh, and beautiful light. He does this by means of illustration, example, figure, - by using words that are potent to awake in us delightful associations.

Many who will read these words have no difficulty in appreciating poetry. They have learned as children to love and understand it. Those to whom poetry still seems a strange and unnatural sort of composition will find that they come nearer to the appreciation of its beauty if they put themselves into the receptive mood of children, and simply let themselves be delighted by the charm of its pictures and its pleasing sounds and measures. They will also be helped by understanding better the ways in which sounds are so combined as to please the ear, and by trying themselves so to combine words; and those who have already learned to enjoy verse will find that study and experiment of this sort will increase their enjoyment. The side of the poet's art that has to do with the awakening of delightful associations is not a proper subject for study here; the simpler side the more mechanical side of verse we shall now take up in its main outlines.

49. Accents in Verse. — One marked point in which verse differs from prose is in the use of rhyme. But rhyme is not essential to verse, for much poetry is not rhymed. All English poetry, however, is rhythmical or metrical; that is, the accents which we naturally give to the words occur, not in any order, as in prose, but at regular, or approximately regular, intervals, as in the lines that follow:

(1) The curfew tolls the knell of parting day.

(2) Say that health and wealth have missed me.

(3) For a laggard in love and a dastard in war
Was to wed the fair Ellen of brave Lochinvar.

(4) This is the forest primeval. The murmuring pines and the hemlocks.

In

Here, in (1) and (2), we can scarcely read the words without emphasizing every other syllable; and, in (3) and (4), without emphasizing every third syllable. (1) and (3) the verses begin with the unaccented syllables; in (2) and (4), with the accented syllables. In each case the pleasing quality of the line arises from the fact that the ear comes to understand the system, and expects to find the accent recurring regularly. It is like keeping step to a drum. An

1 Metre is more regular than rhythm. Writing is rhythmical when the accent tends to recur with something like regularity. In metre it recurs, as in music, at approximately regular intervals.

arrangement of accents according to a system is called metre.1

In order that we may gain the pleasure that comes from metre, it is necessary that as a rule the natural accents we give to words should occur according to some simple system. It does not offend the ear, however, when the verse accent occasionally falls upon a syllable to which we should naturally give only a slight accent, as in

Music when soft voices die
Vibrates in the memory.

We should certainly not naturally say "memory," and we do not accent this third syllable strongly in verse; but our sense of the metre leads us to accent it lightly, just as, to help out the metre, we throw a light stress on the comparatively unimportant word in.

1 It should be noticed that the poems of certain modern writers, such as Walt Whitman, have, strictly speaking, no metre, though they often have a rough but beautiful rhythm, e.g.:

"There was a child went forth every day:

And the first object he look'd upon, that object he became,

And that object became part of him for the day, or a certain part of

the day, or for many years, or stretching cycles of years.

*

*

*

*

*

The horizon's edge, the flying sea crow, the fragrance of salt marsh and shore weed,

These became part of that child who went forth every day, and who now goes, and will always go forth every day."

-WALT WHITMAN.

50. Lines and Feet. — Poetry consists of a series of lines or verses. With each line we begin again to arrange the accents according to a system, though the system may vary from line to line. For convenience' sake we sometimes regard the syllables in each line as divided into several groups, each of which contains one, and only one, accented syllable. It is customary to call such a group a foot, just as in music we call a similar group of notes a bar or measure.

The basis of Latin and Greek poetry was to a large degree quantity, not accent. Syllables were felt to be either long or short, and the essence of classical verse was that it combined long syllables and short syllables according to some regular system. In marking the metre of Latin or Greek verses, it is customary to use two symbols, a straight line to indicate a long syllable, and a curved line to indicate a short syllable, and to indicate the close of a group or foot by a vertical line. Thus we represent the metre of the first line of the Æneid by the following formula:

In English we frequently use the same symbols, though we mean by them not long syllables and short syllables (for in English we cannot regularly distinguish syllables in this way), but accented syllables and unaccented syllables. Another way is to use the

1 A verse is, strictly speaking, a line. The term is sometimes loosely applied to a stanza or group of lines.

curved line to indicate the unaccented syllable, and a diagonal line that by which an accent is usually denoted to mark the accented syllable. Thus, one may show the metre of the line, "Now sleeps the crimson petal, now the white," by either of the following formulæ :

It should be noticed that in a given line, or group of lines, the time given to the pronunciation of each foot is the same. Here again it is plain that poetry is a kind of music.

Sometimes a line ends with an incomplete foot,

e.g.:

Up and down the | village | streets.

Such lines are technically called catalectic, or cut-off.

EXERCISE 24

Indicate the accents in the following lines, and mark off the feet.

(1)

O Solitude! where are the charms
That sages have seen in thy face?

(2) O tell her, Swallow, thou that knowest each,
That bright and fierce and fickle is the South,
And dark and true and tender is the North.