J. Schipper

“ As a general rule, the syllables which stand in an arsis are, just because they bear the metrical stress, of course more strongly accented than those which stand in a thesis.
Occasionally, however, a thesis-syllable may be more strongly accented than an arsis-syllable in the same line which only carries the rhythmical accent, but neither the word-accent nor the logical accent of the sentence. ”

“ The third species of rhyme, to use the word still in its widest sense, is known as alliteration (German Stabreim or Anreim) . It is common to all Teutonic nations, and is found fully developed in the oldest poetical monuments of Old Norse, Old High German, Old Saxon, and Old English. Even in classical poetry, especially in the remains of archaic Latin, it is not unfrequently met with, but serves only as a means for giving to combinations of words a rhetorical emphasis, and is not a formal principle of the metre bound by strict rules, as it is in Teutonic poetry. ”

“ In the even-beat metres on the other hand the regular succession of thesis and arsis is the ruling principle of the versification, on which the rhythmic accent depends, and it is the poet’s task to choose his words according to that requirement. The difficulties to be surmounted in order to bring the word-accent into conformity with the verse-accent will frequently drive the poet using this kind of rhythm to do violence to the accented and, more frequently still, to the unaccented syllables of the word. ”

“ King James VI was a contemporary of the last poets who wrote in alliterative lines in the North and therefore undoubtedly had heard such poems read by reciters who had kept up the true tradition of their scansion. We have here then the very best proof we can desire not only of the four-beat rhythm of the line, but also of the fact that unaccented words, although they may alliterate intentionally, as they do often in poems of the fifteenth century, or unintentionally, as earlier, do not get a full accent in consequence of the alliteration, as some scholars have thought, but remain unaccented. ”

“ Now, however, it is almost the universal custom to use arsis to indicate the syllable uttered with a raised or loud voice, and thesis to indicate the syllable uttered with lower or soft voice. From the practice of beating time the term ictus is also borrowed; it is commonly used to designate the increase of voice which occurs at the strong, or so-called rhythmical accent.
All rhythm therefore in our dancing, poetry, and music, comes to us from ancient times, and is of the same nature in these three arts: it is regular order in the succession of different kinds of motion. ”

“ One of the syllables of the individual word is always marked off from the rest by a greater force of tone, and these others are again differentiated from each other by subordinate gradations of intensity of utterance, which may sometimes be so weak as to lead to a certain amount of indistinctness, especially in English. In the Teutonic languages, the root-syllable, as the most important element of the word, and that which conveys the meaning, always bears the chief accent, the other syllables bearing accents which are subordinate to this chief accent. ”

“ It is quite out of the question to suppose these Southern works, with their very irregular use of alliteration and metre, to have had any influence on the metrical form of the very numerous alliterative poems written in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries in the Midland and Northern districts of England. It is, however, not at all likely that alliterative poetry should have sprung up there without any medium of tradition, and that it should have returned to the strict forms of the Old English models. ”

“ What distinguishes clearly undoubted examples of the lengthened verse is that in each hemistich we find three beats and three feet of equal and independent value. But, as in the usual two-beat hemistich of the normal line, both beats need not be equally strong, so in the three-beat hemistich the three beats do not always stand on the same footing as regards stress, nor does the position of the stronger beat require to be always the same in the two hemistichs. The beats which are accompanied by alliteration are, generally speaking, stronger than those without alliteration. ”

“ The strophe in ancient poetry, and the stanza in mediaeval and modern analogues and derivatives of that poetic form, are combinations of single lines into a unity of which the lines are the parts. The word strophe [180] in its literal sense means a turning, and originally denoted the return of the song to the melody with which it began. The melody, which is a series of musical sounds arranged in accordance with the laws of rhythm and modulation, has in poetry its counterpart in a parallel series of significant sounds or words arranged according to the laws of rhythm ”

“ Rhyme was not in use as an accessory to metre in Latin till the quantitative principle had given way to the accentual principle in the later hymns of the Church, and it has passed thence into all European systems of metre.
In our poetry it serves a twofold purpose: it is used either simply as an ornament, or as a tie to connect single lines into the larger metrical unity of stanza or stave, by the recurrence of similar sounds at various intervals. ”

“ In no case is an unaccented syllable or even a syllable with a secondary accent allowed to take part in the alliteration. This fact, that secondarily accented syllables are debarred from alliterating, is another proof that it is better to look on them as belonging to the thesis rather than to the arsis of the verse.
The Principles of Alliteration.
§ 33. Quality of the Alliteration. It is an all but invariable rule that the correspondence of sounds must be exact and not merely approximate. A g must alliterate to a g, not to a c, a d to a d, not to a t, and so on. ”

“ The judicious use of run-on lines is often resorted to for the purpose of avoiding monotony. Another metrical licence connected with the line-end, which is adopted for the same purpose, is rhyme-breaking. This occurs chiefly in rhyming couplets, and consists in ending the sentence with the first line of the couplet, instead of continuing it (as is usually done) till the end of the second line. Thus the close connexion of the two lines of the couplet effected by the rhyme is broken up by the logical or syntactic pause occurring at the end of the first line. ”

“ Wherever we have intelligible words following each other in groups marked by a rhythmical order which is at once recognizable as intentionally chosen with a view to symmetry, there we may be said to have poetry, at least on its formal side. Poetical rhythm may accordingly be defined as a special symmetry, easily recognizable as such, in the succession of syllables of differing phonetic quality, which convey a sense, and are so arranged as to be uttered in divisions of time which are symmetrical in their relation to one another. ”

“ THE ALLITERATIVE VERSE IN OLD ENGLISH
§ 14. General remarks. It is highly probable that alliteration was the earliest kind of poetic form employed by the English people. There is no trace in the extant monuments of the language of any more primitive or simpler system. A predilection for alliteration existed even in prose, as in the names of heroes and families like Scyld and Sceaf, Hengist and Horsa, Finn and Folcwald, pairs that alliterate in the same way as the family names of other Teutonic nations: the names of the three sons of Mannus, Ingo, Isto, Irmino, conform to this type. ”

“ In early times the function of executive artist was commonly discharged by the creative artist himself. In the second place, the Plastic arts have no concern with the relations of time; a work of painting or sculpture presents to the beholder an unchanging object or represents a single moment of action. The Rhythmic arts, on the other hand, are, in their very essence, connected with temporal succession. Dancing implies a succession of movements of the human body, Music a succession of inarticulate sounds, Poetry a succession of articulate sounds or words and syllables. ”

“ Accent is generally defined as ‘the stronger emphasis put on a syllable, the stress laid on it’, or, as Sweet [4] puts it, ‘the comparative force with which the separate syllables of a sound-group are pronounced.’ According to Brücke [5] it is produced by increasing the pressure of the breath. The stronger the pressure with which the air passes from the lungs through the glottis, the louder will be the tone of voice, the louder will be the sound of the consonants which the stream of air produces in the cavity of the mouth. This increase of tone and sound is what is called ‘accent’. ”

“ Westphal [2] gives a similar explanation: ‘That the stamp of the foot or the clap of the hands in beating time coincides with the strong part of the measure, and the raising of the foot or hand coincides with the weak part of it, originates, without doubt, in the ancient orchestic.’ At the strong part of the bar the dancer puts his foot to the ground and raises it at the weak part. This is the meaning and original Greek usage of the terms ‘arsis’ and ‘thesis’, which are nowadays used in an exactly opposite sense. ”

“ The refrain is of popular origin, arising from the part taken by the people in popular songs or ecclesiastical hymns by repeating certain exclamations, words, or sentences at the end of single lines or stanzas. The refrain generally occurs at the end of a stanza, rarely in the interior of a stanza or in both places, as in a late ballad quoted by Ritson, Ancient Songs and Ballads, ii. 75.
In Old English poetry the refrain is used in one poem only, viz. in Deor’s Complaint, as the repetition of a whole line. In Middle and Modern English poetry the refrain is much more extensively employed. ”

“ Shakespeare, preferred feminine endings in some periods of their literary career, so that it is possible to use the proportion of masculine and feminine endings occurring in a play, compared with others of the same poet, as a means of ascertaining the date of its origin.
It is also to be observed that in certain epochs or kinds of poetry feminine endings are more in favour than in others. In the eighteenth century they are very scarce, whereas they become more frequent again in the nineteenth century. ”

“ It was a rule in Provençal poetry (observed often in Old French also) that it must agree in form with the concluding part of the preceding stanza. It was also necessary that with regard to its tenor it should have some sort of connexion with the poem; although, as a rule, its purpose was to give expression to personal feelings. The tornada is either a sort of farewell which the poet addresses to the poem itself, or it contains the order to a messenger to deliver the poem to the poet’s mistress or to one of his patrons; sometimes these persons are directly praised or complimented. ”

“ As a rule, both where the rhyme in the same stanza is single and where it is varied, all the stanzas have different rhymes, and only the rhyme-system, the arrangement of rhymes, is the same throughout the poem. It is, however, very rarely and only in Modern English literary poetry that the several stanzas are strictly uniform with regard to the use of masculine and feminine rhyme; as a rule the two kinds are employed. ”

“ The history of the primitive alliterative line follows very different lines of development in the various Teutonic nations. In Old High German, after a period in which the strict laws of the verse were largely neglected, it was abandoned in favour of rhyme by Otfrid (circa 868) . In Old English it kept its place as the only form of verse for all classes of poetical composition, and continued in use, even after the introduction of Romanic forms of metre, during the Middle English period, and did not totally die out till the beginning of the seventeenth century. ”

“ Full-rhyme or end-rhyme therefore is a characteristic of modern European poetry, and though it cannot be denied that unrhymed verse, or blank verse, is much used in English poetry, the fact remains that this metre is an exotic product of the Renaissance, and has never become thoroughly popular. ”