The Dyers Hand and Other Essays

In this, a very early poem, one can note already the speed and the use of feminine rhymes which were to become Byron's forte. Feminine rhymes are as possible in a five-foot line as in a four-foot but, at this date, the tune of the Pope couplet was still too much in his ear to allow him to use them. There are only three couplets with feminine rhymes in English Bards and Scotch Reviewers and only one in Hints from Horace.

Frere was not a great poet, but his perception of the comic possibilities of an exact imitation in English of Italian ottava- rima was a stroke of genius. Italian is a polysyllabic language, most of its words end on an unaccented syllable and rhymes are very common. Italian ottava-rima, therefore, is usually hendecasyllabic with feminine rhymes and, because three rhymes can be found without any effort, it became a maid-of- all-work stanza which would fit any subject. An Italian poet could use it for comic or satirical purposes, but he could also

be serious and pathetic in it. There is nothing comic, for ex­ample, about this stanza from Gerusalemme Liberata.

Lei nel partir, lei nel tornar del sole Chiama con voce mesta e prega e flora; Come usignol cut villan duro invole Dal nido i figli non pennuti ancora Che in miserabil canto afflite e sole Piange le notte, e n'empie, boschi e Vara. Alfin col nuovo di rinchiude alquanto I lumi; e il sonno in lor serpe fra il pianto.

When English poets first copied the stanza, they instinctively shortened the lines to decasyllabics with masculine rhymes.

All suddenly dismaid, and hardess quite He fled abacke and catching hastie holde Of a young alder hard behinde him pight, It rent, and streight aboute him gan beholde What God or Fortune would assist his might. But whether God or Fortune made him bold It's hard to read; yet hardie will he had To overcome, that made him less adrad.

("Vergil's Gnat.")

The frequent monosyllables, the abruptness of the line end­ings and the absence of elision completely alter the movement. Further, because of the paucity of rhymes in English, it is al­most impossible to write a poem of any length in this stanza without either using banal rhymes or padding the line in order to get a rhyme. If, from Chaucer to Sackville, it was not ottava-rima but rhyme-royal which was the staple vehicle for a long poem, one reason, at least, was that rhyme-royal calls for only one rhyme triplet, not two. So far as I know, the first English poet to combine ottava-rima with the high style was Yeats who, in his later years, wrote many of his finest poems in it. He gets round the rhyming problem by a liberal use of half-rhymes and by ending lines with words which are almost dactyls, so that the rhyming syllable is only lighdy ac­cented. For example, in the opening stanza of "Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen," only two of the lines rhyme exactly.

Many ingenious lovely things are gone That seemed sheer miracle to the multitude, Protected from the circle of the moon That pitches common things about. There stood Amid the ornamental bronze and stone An ancient image made of olive wood— And gone are Phidias' famous ivories And all the golden grasshoppers and bees.

Frere was the first fully to realize (though, as W. P. Ker has pointed out, there are anticipations in Gay's "Mr. Pope's Welcome from Greece") that the very qualities of the stanza which make it an unsuitable vehicle for serious poetry make it an ideal one for comic verse since in English, unlike Italian, the majority of double or triple rhymes are comic.

Our association of the word romantic with the magical and dreamlike is so strong that we are apt to forget that the literary period so classified is also a great age for comic poetry. The comic verse of poets like Canning, Frere, Hood, Praed, Bar- ham, and Lear was a new departure in English poetry, and not least in its exploitation of comic rhyme. Indeed, before them, the only poets I can think of who used it intentionally and frequently were Skelton and Samuel Butler.

The very qualities of English ottava-rima which force a serious poet to resort to banal rhymes and padding are a stimu­lus to the comic imagination, leading to the discovery of comic rhymes and providing opportunities for the interpolated com­ment and conversational aside, and Byron developed this deliberate looseness of manner to the full.

An Arab horse, a stately stag, a barb New broke, a camelopard, a gazelle.

No—none of these will do—and then their garb! Their veil and petticoat—Alas! to dwell

Upon such things would very near absorb A canto—then their feet and ankles—well,