Clasp and lighten in climes that brighten with day when day that was here is done,

Call aloud on their children, proud with trust that future and past

are one.

(England: An Ode.)

Swinburne used this same difficult rhythm for two more poems, the Birthday Ode (1891) and the Threnody.

These illustrations will suffice to show what musical effects may be produced by intricately woven patterns of dupletriple rhythm. But an analysis of Swinburne's great examples in these patterns reveals so consummate a mastery as to discourage the thought of future developments. Poems written in such rigid form are not very common in English. They are not only difficult to do, but they have a certain artificiality, which, though it may charm the ear attuned to classic poetry, almost inevitably distracts the attention from the qualities of the poem other than the rhythmical.

The greater number of poems in duple-triple rhythm are freely varied, with a natural and easy phrasing. Browning, for example, has dozens of them in the shorter meters. And some poets have felt that the genius of the rhythm lies in this freedom of phrasing. They have consequently made the rhythm vary with the changes in thought. They have combined different meters and movements in the same poem, and often have blended the duple-triple with straight duple and straight triple. Tennyson's Revenge is one of the finest of this type of poem. The opening line,

At Flores in the A- | zores Sir | Richard | Grenvill | lay,

announces the rhythm in which it is chiefly written. From the third stanza on, changes in meter are introduced. There are trimeters, pentameters, and heptameters used to vary the hexameter base; there are even one or two dimeters. The tenth and fourteenth stanzas have a pentameter base, and the ninth is in heptameters. And the rhythm changes as well as the meter; it becomes more trisyllabic in some

stanzas, returns to the rhythmic motive of the opening line, and concludes in anapestics. Here are two of the stanzas which have departed considerably from the rhythmic and metrical scheme upon which the poem is chiefly built:

VII

And while | now the great San | Philip | hung a- | bove us | like a | cloud

Whence the thunder bolt will fall

Long and loud,

Four galleons drew away

From the Spanish fleet that day,

And two upon the | larboard and | two u- pon the starboard | lay,

And the battle | thunder | broke | from them | all.

IX

And the sun went down, and the stars came out far over the summer

sea,

But never a moment ceased the fight of the one and the fifty-three. Ship after ship, the whole night long, their high-built galleons came, Ship after ship, the whole night long, with her battle-thunder and flame;

Ship after ship, the whole night long, drew back with her dead and her shame.

For some were sunk and many were shatter'd, and so could fight

us no more

God of battles, was ever a battle like this in the world before?

Tennyson here, as always, is careful of his punctuation. His pauses are not merely for the sake of grammar, but are a part of the rhythmic effect. The unpunctuated continuity of the second line in the ninth stanza contrasts with the divided rhythm of the next three.

Arnold's Forsaken Merman is another poem in which different meters and rhythms are most musically combined. The feeling that pervades the first third of it is trochaic, freely blended with suggestions of trochaic-dactylic. The poem begins:

Come, dear children, let us away;
Down and away below.

Now my brothers call from the bay;

Now the great winds shorewards blow;
Now the salt tides seawards flow;
Now the wild white horses play,

Champ and chafe and toss in the spray.
Children dear, let us away.
This way, this way.

This stanza may be described as a blending of trochaicdactylic with a trochaic movement which is freely phrased with long and extra accented syllables. Some of the lines I should scan thus:

| Come, dear children, | let us away...

4

2 4 2 2 2 2 4

The stanza that follows is more purely trochaic than the first, except for the line,

"Margaret! | Margaret!"

which occurs twice.

The third and fourth stanzas use trisyllabic variation more freely. Lines like,

and,

And the little gray | church on the | windy | shore,

Feed in the ooze of their | pasture-ground,

anticipate the triple rhythm toward which the poem is tending. But trochaic lines with long syllables continue to make part of the rhythm, e. g.

| Where great whales come | sailing | by.

3 3 3 3 3 3 4

The fifth stanza, after the first three lines, runs into an iambic-anapestic rhythm which has more triple than duple feet. Two of the lines are pure anapestics. Here is the whole stanza.

Children dear, was it yesterday

(Call yet once) that she went away?

Once she sate with you and me,

On a red gold throne in the heart of the sea,
And the youngest sate on her knee.

She combed its bright hair and she tended it well,

When down swung the sound of the far-off bell.
She sigh'd, she look'd up through the clear green sea.
She said: "I must go, for my kinsfolk pray

In the little gray church on the shore to-day.
"Twill be Easter-time in the world-ah me!
And I lose my poor soul, Merman! here with Thee."
I said: "Go up, dear heart, through the waves.
Say thy prayer, and come back to the kind sea-caves."
She smiled, she went up through the surf in the bay.
Children dear, was it yesterday?

But

The next stanza is much in the same movement. after that comes a more irregular stanza, the chief meter of which is trimeter. This is a transition to the new meter and rhythm of the last two stanzas of the poem: These are in anapestic dimeter, as I should read them, and are phrased in a way to give a peculiarly individual music. A possible scansion in musical notation, which has its advantages here, would be this:

phrased with heavy and extra accented syllables, anticipates the rhythm of several lines in the final stanza, e. g.

When sweet airs come seaward.

This final stanza is in an almost regular triple rhythm, but it contains ten or more phrases of a rhythm like that of the expression The winds blow, which make the stanza unique in its verse tune. Here is the reading I should give it: