Higher still and higher From the earth thou springest The blue deep thou wingest, And singing still dost soar, and soaring ever singest. In the golden lightning Of the sunken sun, O'er which clouds are bright'ning, Thou dost float and run; Like an unbodied joy whose race is just begun. The pale purple even Melts around thy flight; Like a star of heaven In the broad daylight Thou art unseen, but yet I hear thy shrill delight, Keen as are the arrows Of that silver sphere, Whose intense lamp narrows In the white dawn clear Until we hardly see-we feel that it is there. All the earth and air With thy voice is loud, From one lonely cloud The moon rains out her beams, and Heaven is overflowed. What thou art we know not; What is most like thee? From rainbow clouds there flow not Drops so bright to see As from thy presence showers a rain of melody. Like a Poet hidden In the light of thought, Till the world is wrought To sympathy with hopes and fears it heeded not: Like a high-born maiden Soul in secret hour With music sweet as love,—which overflows her bower: Like a glow-worm golden In a dell of dew, Its aërial hue Among the flowers and grass, which screen it from the view: Like a rose embowered In its own green leaves, By warm winds deflowered, Makes faint with too much sweet these heavy-wingèd thieves. Sound of vernal showers All that ever was Joyous and clear and fresh, thy music doth surpass. Teach us, Sprite or Bird, What sweet thoughts are thine: I have never heard Praise of love or wine That panted forth a flood of rapture so divine. Chorus Hymeneal, Or triumphal chant, Matched with thine would be all But an empty vaunt, A thing wherein we feel there is some hidden want. What objects are the fountains Of thy happy strain? What fields or waves or mountains? What shapes of sky or plain? What love of thine own kind? what ignorance of pain? With thy clear keen joyance Languor cannot be: Shadow of annoyance Never came near thee: Thou lovest-but ne'er knew love's sad satiety. Waking or asleep Thou of death must deem Things more true and deep Than we mortals dream Or how could thy notes flow in such a crystal stream? We look before and after, And pine for what is not; Our sincerest laughter With some pain is fraught; Our sweetest songs are those that tell of saddest thought. Yet if we could scorn Hate, and pride, and fear; If we were things born Not to shed a tear, I know not how thy joy we ever should come near. Better than all measures Of delightful sound, That in books are found, Thy skill to poet were, thou scorner of the ground! Teach me half the gladness That thy brain must know, From my lips would flow The world should listen then- -as I am listening now. Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822) CHAPTER IV THE TRIPLE METERS ... Before the poet begins to write . . . he should ask himself whether his natural impulse is towards the weighty iambic movement, whose primary function is to state, or towards those lighter movements which we still call, for want of more convenient words, anapastic and dactylic, whose primary function is to suggest.―Theodore Watts-Dunton in “Poetry,” Encyclopædia Britannica (Eleventh Edition) IN discussing the elementary phenomena of English poetics, we have had occasion to explain briefly the triple measures, anapestic and dactylic. The main purpose of this chapter is to group representative poems with the view of affording a somewhat extended acquaintance with the use and possibilities of these rhythms. For reasons explained in the preceding chapter, poems purely anapestic or dactylic are rare. The movement of a poem is, however, decidedly triple when fifty per cent of the feet contain two unstressed syllables. A poem in a triple meter tends, in unskilled hands, to be wordy, for important thoughts are carried chiefly by accented syllables of which it has a relative scarcity. With appropriate subject-matter and in the hands of true poets the triple rhythms lend themselves, however, to the production of remarkable word music. In these measures Shelley and Swinburne achieved faultless works |