Form all curves like softness drifted,-
Wave-kissed marble roundly dimpling,
Far-off music slowly winged,

Gently rising, gently sinking,

Bright, O bright Fedalma!

To appreciate anything so exotic as this one must cultivate an ear for it, just as for the experiments with classical quantities made by Robert Bridges.

Assonance has been used for rime frequently in the free and easy versifying of the old ballads; and many of the doubtful rimes quoted in this chapter from Mrs. Browning and others are really cases of assonance. Unintentional assonance between succeeding rimes offends the ear and shows lack of finish. One of Keats's early attempts is guilty of this blemish:

Or a white Naiad in a rippling stream;
Or a rapt Seraph in a moonlight beam;
Or again witness what with thee I've seen,
The dew of fairy feet swept from the green,
After a night of some quaint jubilee
Which every elf and fay had come to see.

(Epistle to G. F. Mathew.)

CHAPTER VIII

MELODY OR TONE-COLOR

Every reader of poetry knows the experience of being haunted by lines or stanzas of a peculiarly satisfying beauty. His analysis of the rhythm and of the imagery evoked may fail to discover the reason for this appeal. There seems to be a magic in the sheer sound of the words which exalts certain passages of English verse into the order of preeminent excellence. This melody in words, which makes phrases like, "Trailing clouds of glory," "in fairy lands forlorn,” “A damsel with a dulcimer," stand out in our memories, is called tone-color.1 We hear it in lines like,

Thick as autumnal leaves that strew the brooks
In Vallombrosa.

(Paradise Lost.)

Where the bright seraphim in burning row

Their loud uplifted Angel trumpets blow.

(Milton: At a Solemn Music.)

O wild West Wind, Thou breath of Autumn's being.

(Shelley: Ode to West Wind.)

O my Luve's like a red, red rose

That's newly sprung in June.

(Burns: A Red Red Rose.)

Melody, or tone-color, in verse, is the same thing as timbre or quality in music-the characteristic which distinguishes the tone of the flute, violin, or cornet when producing notes of the same pitch, duration, and intensity. It is by their peculiarly individual timbre that we chiefly recognize different sounds; that we can tell two peals of bells apart, or 1 Adopted from German tonklang, tonfarbe

distinguish the voices of our friends. It is for the production of an individual timbre in his instrument that the virtuoso strives.

This melodic quality in verse is one of the five oranges which Stevenson's juggler, the poet, must keep in the air at the same time. Two of the other four, the form of the sentence and the choice of the exact word for the meaning, do not concern the study of versification; the remaining two, the rhythm of the phrase and the movement of the verse pattern, have already been discussed. The difference in sensitiveness of readers to certain of these elements is what causes such diversity of opinion and preference in regard to the poets. A reader who cares more for variation in the rhythm of the individual line than for sweeps of rhythm through a verse paragraph, or for the sheer melody of words, will hold the blank verse of Shakespeare higher than that of Milton. And all of Poe and Lanier and much of Coleridge and Swinburne will fail to interest a reader deaf to tone-color. Tone-color in poetry is a general name for all the technical embellishment of sound effects. It includes the obvious devices of rime, the repetition of words, the use of refrain lines or refrain stanzas; the less obvious ornaments of alliteration, assonance, onomatopoeia; and the extremely subtle effects of vowel and consonantal sequence. The use of rime and assonance at the ends of lines was discussed in the last chapter; they will be taken account of here only in relation to the other elements of melody.

The repetition of words and phrases is a rhetorical device that must be used but sparingly in prose, but in verse it may become an important and frequently occurring trick of technique. In the old ballads the repeating of a phrase with some slight addition-what is called "incremental repetition"-was perhaps originally the result of seeking rimes in rapid composition, but it has come to be one of the marks of the ballad style, e. g.

2 Stevenson: On the Technical Element of Style in Literature.

O lang, lang may the ladies sit,
Wi' their fans into their hand,
Before they see Sir Patrick Spens
Come sailing to the strand!

And lang, lang may the maidens sit
Wi' their gowd kames in their hair,
A-waiting for their ain dear loves!
For them they'll see nae mair.

(Sir Patrick Spens.)

Incremental repetition is used in modern verse chiefly in imitations of the archaic ballad manner, in such poems as The Ancient Mariner and Christabel. The repetition of single words, however, has been very widely used by numerous poets as a device for linking together the lines of a stanza. This iteration of an identical sound and meaning is, like rime, an aid to the structural effect. In Tennyson's In Memoriam are many examples of this, the repetition binding together sometimes two rimed lines, and sometimes two unrimed. Here it binds together two stanzas:3

Thine are these orbs of light and shade;
Thou madest Life in man and brute;
Thou madest Death; and lo, Thy foot
Is on the skull which Thou hast made.

Thou wilt not leave us in the dust:
Thou madest man, he knows not why,

He thinks he was not made to die;

And Thou hast made him: Thou art just.

Almost any page of Swinburne will show examples of iteration, for he is especially fond of all the more obvious effects of tone-color. His iteration is more usually for musical effect than for the rhetorical parallelism that aids the expression of meaning.

This as well as the following examples from Swinburne are quoted in Professor C. Alphonso Smith's monograph, "Repetition and Parallelism in English Verse." 1894.

I have put my days and dreams out of mind
Days that are over, dreams that are done.

(Triumph of Time.)

Delight, the rootless flower,

And love, the bloomless bower;
Delight that lives an hour,

And love that lives a day.

(Before Dawn.)

More often Swinburne prefers a chiastic arrangement in these repetitions:

Laurel is green for a season, and love is sweet for a day;

But love grows bitter with reason, and laurel outlives not May.

(Hymn to Proserpine.)

Not a breath shall there sweeten the seasons hereafter
Of the flowers or the lovers that laugh now or weep,

When as they that are free now of weeping and laughter

We shall sleep.

(A Forsaken Garden.)

Sometimes a number of successive lines may have each an iterated word, e. g.

I shall sleep, and move with the moving ships,
Change as the winds change, veer in the tide;
My lips will feast on the foam of thy lips,

I shall rise with thy rising, with thee subside.

(Triumph of Time.)

A special effect may be produced by unifying a whole passage by the use of a frequently repeated sound. The infinite iteration of the waves is suggested in the first stanza of Rossetti's Sea-Limits by this means:

Consider the sea's listless chime;

Time's self it is made audible,-
The murmur of the earth's own shell,