Iberia Won 5

Iberia Won 5

O cruell Mars, thou dedly god of war!

O dolorous Teusday, dedicate to thy name,

When thou shoke thy sworde so noble a man to mar!

O grounde ungracious, unhappy be thy fame,

Which wert endyed with rede blode of the same!

Most noble earl! O fowle mysuryd grounde

Whereon he gat his fynal dedely wounde!

 

Down to the end of the fifth line this is precisely the stanza of

Spenser. With the addition of two lines, one rhyming with the last,

and the other with the fifth, and of two syllables to the closing

line, it is literally that stanza. But in fact the latter addition

was often made by both Skelton and Hawes, though irregularly,

metrical cadence being then imperfectly understood, and both poets

being of the “tumbling” school. This poem was probably composed in

the year 1490. Skelton died in 1529, and an edition of his poems

in black letter appeared in 1568. I take the stanza which follows

from a poem of Hawes’s called “The History of Graunde Amoure and la

Belle Pucel,” written in 1505 and published in quarto in 1555:

 

Till that I came unto a ryall gate,

Where I saw stondynge the goodly portresse,

Whyche asked me from whence I came a-late;

To whom I gan in every thynge expresse

All myne adventure, chaunce, and busynesse,

And eke my name; I told her every dell;

Whan she herde this she lyked me right well.

 

The construction of this stanza is the same as of the former, but

the versification is rather rougher. It, like the other, is very

near the Spenserian stanza. But it is not the Spenserian stanza.

Friar Bacon and Leonardo da Vinci were very near the discovery

of steam, but they did not discover steam, or at all events they

did not apply it. The stanzas cited, however, contain the great

distinguishing peculiarity of the stanza of Spenser, which is the

reduplication of the rhyme, that closes the second and fourth

lines, in the fifth--the doubling of the stanza within itself, and

turning upon this most musical pivot. And this beauty, like so many

other great discoveries, I believe to be probably the result of

accident. Add another line to each of the foregoing stanzas, make

it rhyme with the first and third, and interpose it between the

fourth and fifth lines, and you have the exact _ottava rima_ of the

Italians. This ballet-stave is the clear germ of the Spenserian

stanza, which with a few _perfectionnemens_ is precisely as it

stands. It may be traced more directly to the ballet-stave of

eight, but either will suit equally well for illustration.

 

To make this quite intelligible to every reader, Hawes’s stanza

becomes the exact _ottava rima_ of the Italians, which Surrey

brought into England, and in which Spenser wrote two of his poems,

the rhyme of Fairfax’s _Tasso_, of Frere’s _Whistlecraft_, and

Byron’s _Don Juan_, by the insertion of the single line which I

have added here in italics:

 

Till that I came unto a royal gate,

Where I saw standing the goodly portresse,

Who askéd me from whence I came of late;

To whom I ’gan in every thing express

_The various hazards of my chequered fate_,

All mine adventure, chaunce, and busynesse,

And eke my name; I told her every dell:[B]

When she heard this she likéd me right well.

 

The stanza becomes purely Spenserian by the addition of the two

lines and one word which I here insert in italics:

 

Till that I came unto a royal gate,

Where I saw standing the goodly portresse,

Who askéd me from whence I came of late;

To whom I ’gan in every thing express

All mine adventure, chaunce, and busynesse,

_With every accident that me befel_

_Throughout my chequered life--I could no less--_

And eke my name; I told her every dell:

When she this _story_ heard she likéd me right well.

 

The ballet-stave of seven is one of the many varieties of Chaucer,

who has written in this measure four of his “Canterbury Tales,” and

composed a very long poem in it, _Troylus_, of which the following

stanza is a specimen (lib. ii. 1030.)

 

For though that the best harper upon live

Would on the beste sounid jolly harpe

That evir was, with all his fingers five

Touch aie o string, or aie o warble harpe,

Were his nailes poincted nevir so sharpe,

It shoulde makin every wight to dull

To heare is glee, and of his strokes full.

 

This, like the other, becomes the perfect _ottava rima_ by the

addition of a single line, which I have likewise marked in

italics:--

 

For though that the best harper upon live

Would on the beste sounid jolly harpe

That evir was, with all his fingers five

Touch aie o string, or aie o warble harpe,

_And with Glaskyrion the Briton strive_,

Were his nailes poincted nevir so sharpe,

It shoulde makin every wight to dull

To heare his glee, and of his strokes full.

 

The addition refers to a celebrated ancient Welsh harper mentioned

with honour by Chaucer himself in his _Boke of Fame_. I shall

not further meddle by patchwork with the illustrious Father of

English Poetry. But, as in the former case, by the addition of

two lines and one word I could at once convert his stanza into

that of Spenser. The _ottava rima_ was not then invented, nor for

many years after Chaucer wrote, not having made its appearance

until the days of Boiardo and Berni, nor been brought to perfection

until the lyre was held by the master hands of Ariosto and Tasso.

The secret of the great resemblance of this stanza as employed by

Chaucer to that subsequently invented by his Italian successors

is, that both delved in the same mine and wrought upon the same

material--the Sicilian sonnet, first introduced and naturalized in

Europe by Chaucer’s great contemporary, Petrarch. So perfect was

this instrument, the sonnet, at its discovery, that the fine taste

of Petrarch adhered to it throughout life with marvellous tenacity,

and at this day Wordsworth has without change written nearly half

his poetry in it. I believe Chaucer, who either copied or adapted

many of his modes of versification from Petrarch, to have moulded

his ballet-staves both of seven and eight, by squaring them with

the first half of the Sicilian or Petrarcan sonnet, with which they

are nearly identical. The Italian successors of Petrarch in the

same way took the first half of the sonnet, transposing the first

and second lines, and inserting another line between the fourth and

fifth lines. Thus simply is derived the far-famed _ottava rima_.

 

In real fact and truth, Chaucer has had nearly as much share in

the formation of what is known as the stanza of Spenser as Spenser

himself. That stanza is purely the ballet-stave of eight with three

close rhymes--with the simple addition by Spenser of an Alexandrine

at the close, rhyming with the last verse of the ballet-stave.

There are some who trace these ballet-staves to the Latin rhymed

church iambics, and the germ of the ballet-stave of eight has been

sought in a Latin hymn written by the German monk, Ernfrid, in the

ninth century; but they are to be traced more probably (at least in

their more perfect shape) to the Romance poetry of the Provençals.

The first instance I meet with of the use of the ballet-stave of

eight in English verse is in the elegy on the death of our first

Edward, written from internal evidence shortly after that period.

The rhymes and their arrangement are precisely as in the stanza of

Spenser, but the verse is octosyllabic:

 

Alle that beoth of huerte trewe

A stounde herkneth to my song

Of duel that deth hath diht us newe

That maketh me syke and sorrow among. &c.

 

Chaucer was the first who wrote this stanza in the heroic

line of ten syllables, and his contribution to the stanza is

therefore quite as important as Spenser’s addition of the closing

Alexandrine. In this stanza Chaucer has written the whole of the

Monk’s Tale, and how entirely it is the stanza of _Childe Harold_,

with the exception of the Alexandrine at the end, may be seen from

the following example:--

 

His wif his lordes, and his concubines

Ay dronken, while her appetitis last,

Out of thise noble vessels sondry wines;

And on a wall this King his eyen cast,

And saw an hand armles that wrote ful fast,

For fere of whiche he quoke, and siked sore.

This hand that Balthasar so sore aghast,

Wrote _Mane techel phares_ and no more.

 

The _Faëry Queen_ stanza must be regarded as a felicitous discovery

rather than invention, and even the merit of the addition becomes

diminished by the consideration that Alexandrine verse had become

a great favourite amongst his contemporary poets before he used

it. It was the favourite metre of a Howard and a Sidney at the

commencement of the era of Elizabeth, and is frequently met in our

alliterative poems, both early English and Anglo-Saxon. Yet Dr.

Johnson has most erroneously represented Spenser as the inventor of

the Alexandrine! But so fortunate was Spenser’s completion of the

stanza, that all the attempts of Phineas Fletcher, Giles Fletcher,

Prior, and even Milton, to improve on it were unavailing, and it

may now be regarded as one of the special glories of England.