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31

was evidently for onomatopoeia. Melody carried so far we may admire, but the extravagance of Swinburne's

So glowed their aweless amorous plenilune,

in the description of Iseult's eyes-is hard to accept. A sheer love of melody may lead even so great an artist as Keats into an occasional ambiguity of meaning. Critics have been troubled over his description of Madelein asleep,

Blissfully haven'd both from joy and pain;
Clasp'd like a missal where swart Paynims pray;
Blinded alike from sunshine and from rain,

As though a rose should shut, and be a bud again.
(Eve of St. Agnes.)

Wasn't the poet perhaps thinking less of the puzzling connection between missals and Paynims, than the echo of sounds in Blissfully, missal, and pain, clasp'd, Paynims, pray, rain? Keats more usually combines clarity of meaning, aptness of figure, and richness of melody without a sacrifice of one at the expense of the others. And this should always be the ideal aim of the poet.

Melody in poetry is neither an end in itself nor a meaningless embellishment, but an important aid to intensify the æsthetic emotion evoked by the rhythm and the ideas, images, and suggestions of the words.

31 Wordsworth has an interesting remark, in the preface to his edition of 1815, on the word broods, in the line,

Over his own sweet voice the Stock-dove broods.

"The stock-dove is said to coo, a sound well imitating the note of the bird; but, by the intervention of the metaphor broods, the affections are called in by the imagination to assist in marking the manner in which the bird reiterates and prolongs her soft note, as if herself delighting to listen to it, and participating of a still and quiet satisfaction, like that which may be supposed inseparable from the continuous process of incubation."

PART II

TECHNIQUE OF SPECIAL VERSE FORMS

CHAPTER IX

STANZA FORMS

Verse, like prose, has a paragraph structure. In the continuous forms like couplets or blank verse, there is no way of making this stand out. Verse written in stanzas, however, can show this paragraph structure. A stanza is any definite arrangement of a limited number of lines usually bound together by a rime scheme. Ordinarily, verse arranged in stanzas is so phrased that there is some sort of grammatical pause at the end of each line so that the line unit may be clear to the listener. As the rime, however, may be relied upon to define the line-structure, such phrasing is not at all a necessity. Some poets, in fact, with the simpler stanza forms, try particularly to make the sense run beyond the line. But it is seldom we find that the sense period does not coincide with the stanza, i. e., the stanza usually embodies a complete sentence or paragraph.

Ideally, one may say that the successive stanzas of a short poem should have a cumulative effect, with the climax in the last stanza. A fine example is George Herbert's Virtue:

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