And she makes all the haste she can: the man's lost. She was no lawful prize, therefore no bond-woman. Before we leave the matter of rhythmic changes, the writer of blank verse should be cautioned against unusual rhythms which arrest the attention without any special reason. Why did Browning phrase the following line so that it is slowed up by extra stresses? Richer than that gold snow Jôve rained on Rhodes. Or why clutter up this passage with so many lingual obstructions? Spark-like 'mid unearthed slope-side fig tree-roots That roof old tombs. (Ring and Book, I.) Mr. T. Sturge Moore's phrasing in the second line following seems to me, again, unnecessarily awkward. In semblance of a haughty queen of eld It, despite broad day visible, audible. (Sea is Kind.) Effects like these, to pass unchallenged, must in some way be appropriately suggestive of the thing said. One more possible blemish in blank verse is the unintentional introduction of rime or assonance at the ends of lines. The first three of the lines which follow are perfectly rimed; the fourth is in assonance with them; and assonance binds together the fifth and sixth. Pure as the sea-mist is my love of thee, Bright Venus be my witness! Thou art she Thou knowst all. But, if thou pitiest One who because of his unworthiness . . . (H. V. Sutherland: Sappho and Phaon.) An annoying blemish of this sort may very easily escape the attention of the poet."1 We come now to consider the last and one of the most important matters in regard to blank verse-the conflict of the sense phrases with the line structure. What constitutes a cesura, or a run-on line is determined usually in metrical studies merely by the punctuation of the passage as printed. Lines with any kind of grammatical pause are called end-stopped, and lines printed without any are called run-on or enjambed. It is to be noted, however, that there are different degrees of pauses and different degrees of association in the enjambment of lines. For instance, in the following examples. from Blake's early verses, phrases are ruthlessly split by the line structure without any regard to the closeness of their familiar grammatical association. O Thou who passest through our valleys in Sit down, and in our mossy valleys, on Some bank beside a river clear, throw thy (To Summer.) and, while thou drawest the Blue curtains of the sky, scatter thy dew. (To the Evening Star.) This, of course, is carrying enjambment too far; the line structure becomes only apparent to the eye. Enjambment which divides strictly associated words belongs only in dramatic verse-if, indeed, there-in which a colloquial impres 11 Milton has admitted a number of rimed couplets in Paradise Lost, probably, as Lowell thinks, unintentionally. There is a fine climactic effect, however, in the rimes in the passage I, 185-191. sion is sought. There are many passages in Henry VIII, for example, where extreme enjambment, combined with a free use of light endings inclines the actor to render the lines as merely rhythmical prose. In contrast to enjambment of this sort, may be cited some lines from Milton in which the proportion of run-on lines (fifteen out of eighteen) is unusually large, but which may be easily read without obliterating the line structure. Meanwhile the winged heralds, by command Of sovereign power, with awful ceremony And trumpet's sound, throughout the host proclaim At Pandemonium, the high capital Of Satan and his peers. Their summons called By place or choice the worthiest: they anon To mortal combat, or career with lance), Thick swarmed, both on the ground and in the air, (Paradise Lost, I, pp. 752-769.) The reader may feel that there are in this quotation varying degrees of separation in the enjambment, and that in his own reading he would prefer to make fewer run-on lines than the printer has indicated. The question then, of just what constitutes a run-on line, and of how many of them there should be, is not to be easily and arbitrarily determined. In general, if we judge merely by the printed punctuation, it appears that Milton's practice in Paradise Lost was to make fiftyeight per cent of his lines run over without any punctuation, twenty-five per cent to pause with merely a comma at the end, and seventeen per cent he made definitely end-stopped.12 So large a proportion of run-on lines is not usual in blank verse. Milton's practice is a means of gaining variety in long sweeps of a very even rhythm. Modern verse varies more in rhythm, but has fewer run-on lines. Tennyson and Browning made about one line out of three run over. Shelley, however, whose verse has much rhythmical variety, followed Milton in enjambing more than half of his lines. It is worth while to observe the distinction between lines that are merely comma-stopped and those which have more positive pauses at the end. Too great a use of either kind will make for monotony in blank verse. Perhaps a good practice to suggest would be a fairly even distribution of one-third of each kind, run-on, comma-stopped, and full-stopped. The struggle of phrasing with meter is regulated quite as much by the number and position of the cesuras as by the question of enjambment. The nature of the cesura is also a determining factor in the struggle of phrasing with the rhythmical pattern. Most poets have preferred the cesura that comes in the middle of the second or third foot of a pentameter (i. e., in a ten-syllable line, after the fourth or sixth syllable), e. g. As dreadful as the shout of one who sees To one who sins, || and deems himself alone And all the world asleep, || they swerved and brake. (Tennyson: Coming of Arthur.) Swinburne is peculiar in preferring the cesura after the third foot (i. e., after the seventh syllable), e. g. Would God my heart were greater; but God wot. (Chastelard.) Pauses after the first syllable of a line and just before the last are least used by English poets. The interruption which 12 These figures are from E. P. Morton's tables, Technique of English Non-Dramatic Blank Verse (diss.) 1910. these cesuras make in the rhythmic continuity is very obtrusive. The pause after the first syllable is especially conspicuous if the word thus set off is phrased with the preceding line, as in Milton's The Ionian gods of Javan's issue held Gods, yet confessed later than Heaven and Earth. (Paradise Lost, I, 509.) Compare with this the slighter disturbance in the rhythm of the following pair of lines, Contending, and removed his tents far off; Then, || from the mountain hewing timber tall. (Ibid., XI, 728.) When the rhythm of a passage is broken by many short phrases, pauses after the first and before the last syllable do not much trouble the scansion; e. g. "O King," she cried, "and I will tell thee: few, (Tennyson: Coming of Arthur.) How the position of the cesura varies from line to line may be observed by studying the three long extracts quoted earlier in the chapter as illustrations of different types of rhythmic change from the regular iambic-or still better, by reading several pages at random from Milton or Tennyson. This phase of the study involves the personal judgment of the reader, for no two of us would agree exactly on where to make pauses that are too slight to be marked by punctuation. The musician has the advantage of the poet here; he may indicate his varying degrees of pause with some subtlety, while the poet has merely the choice of putting in or leaving out a comma. A study of the punctuation of the best blank verse shows that the full stops come more often near the middle of the lines than toward the end; that the position of all the pauses |