before Milton on a wrong path.1 Surrey, however, avoided Love that liveth and reigneth in my thought, Taketh his flight; whereas he lurks, and plains The reforms of Surrey may be considered under 2 The only exception is in the sonnet on Sardanapalus Did yield, vanquisht for want of martial art. Surrey seems purposely to have made the rhythm in this sonnet of a rugged character. In the sonnet on the Psalms of Wyatt he uses an anapest in the first line and a tribrach in the second The great Macedon, that out of Persia chased Dărius, of whose huge power all Asia rangfollowing Chaucer, who in his Wife of Bath writes :— As was the sepulchre of him, Darius. 1 =Trochee a weak The lines in which he throws the accent on Love, that liveth and reigneth in my thought. The soote seasón, that bud and bloom forth brings. The swift swallów, pursueth the fliës smale. To Wyatt's Psalms should Christians then purchase. Of just Davíd, by perfect penitence. As proud Windsór, where I in lust and joy. 2. His verses as a rule contain ten syllables, or at Some, that watched with the murd'rer's knife where we must suppose that he intended a strong emphasis to be thrown on the first syllable; the other in the epitaph on Clere Norfolk sprung thee, Lambeth holds thee dead, where the first syllable may perhaps be expanded into a disyllable, "No-r," as in "fire," fier. 3. Besides marking clearly the movement of the iambus Surrey also defined harmoniously the place of the rhythmical pause, both in the middle of the verse and at its rhyming close. It will be observed that in the specimen of Chaucer's verse cited above, the cæsura is clearly marked and beautifully varied; but that in the verse of Lydgate and Barclay the cæsura either often falls after a weak syllable, or is followed by a redundant syllable; while, though Wyatt usually pauses after the fourth syllable, he seems to have had no difficulty in reconciling his ear to such an unrhythmical line as Wherewithal unto the heart's forest he fleéth, which is probably meant to have the distributed cæsura after the words "wherewithal" and " forest," but cannot be read so as to sound musically. Surrey, on the con 3. trary, in the great majority of his verses, pauses after the fourth syllable, having marked emphatically the iambic accentuation in the second foot. Occasionally, but comparatively seldom, the cæsura is after the fifth syllable, as in the lines Itself from travail | of the day's unrest. With form and favour | taught me to believe And sawst thy cousin | crowned in thy sight. The infrequency of this movement, which is common in Pope, points to the slow but steady persistence with which the Teutonic element in the language asserted its supremacy; for it will be observed that, in all the examples adduced, the words immediately preceding the cæsura are derived from the French, and in Chaucer's time would have been accented on the last syllable, e.g. travail, favoúr (faveur), virtúes (vertu), cornét (cornette, or Latin, corneta), venom (venín, venenum), cousín (cousin). The number of trochaic feet in the language was, therefore, much less than at present. On the other hand, Surrey often places the cæsura after the sixth syllable, and this movement is combined most musically with the ordinary pause, as may be seen from the following beautiful sonnet : The soote seasón, ❘ that bud and bloom forth brings, The turtle to her mate | hath told her tale. The hart hath hung his old head on the pale; The swift swallów | pursueth the flies smale; Winter is worn that was the flowers' bale. "" 2 4. Not the least important of Surrey's improvements was his rejection of weak syllables for the purposes of rhyme. All his predecessors had been accustomed to the cheap device of making their consonances either out of the final syllable of words retaining the ancient inflections of verbs, expressing an abstract quality, or derived from the French, and so preserving the accent on the last syllable against the genius of the English language. Thus Wyatt rhymes-(1) "fleéth," "appearéth," "fearéth"; (2) "forgetfulness," "cruelness," "readiness," "fearfulness (3) "reason," "seasón," "conditión," "fashión." 3 Another serious blot in Wyatt's versification is his practice of employing words that make a double rhyme, where only a single rhyme is intended, such as "reasón seasón," "mountains fountains." + These defects are carefully avoided by Surrey. He scarcely ever ends a verse with a trisyllabic word in which the tonic accent naturally falls on the first syllable; he never rhymes on the syllable "eth,” representing the ancient inflection of verbs, or on the "ing" of the present participle, or on the "on" of words derived from the French; he never uses a double-rhyming word at the close of a line. The words which, as a rule, he selects for his rhymes are either full-sounding monosyllables or disyllabic words forming a regular iambus, such as "restrain," "delight," "embrace," "restore," "return." 1 See sonnet beginning, "The long love that in my thought doth harbour," cited above, p. 90. 2 Sonnet beginning, "My galley, charged with forgetfulness." See above, P. 52. 3 See sonnet beginning, "Each man tells me I change of my devise" (Works, Nott, vol. ii. p. 7). * In the sonnet beginning, "Each man tells me,” etc., and “Like to these unmeasurable mountains" (p. 53), it is plain that the double rhyme is not intended, as the corresponding rhyming words in the second quartet are, in the former instance, "condition, fashion"; in the latter, "plains' "remains." and 5 Curiously enough, the second, fourth, and sixth verses in the first of his poems present examples of this kind of rhyme. "Lustiness," "cruelness," "healthfulness," are made to rhyme together (Works, vol. i. p. 1). I believe the only other rhymes of the kind are in his elegant little lyric, "Of the Happy Life," in which " 'governance" and "continuance" are made to rhyme, and in the next stanza the second verse ends with the word "simpleness" (Works, p. 43). 5. 5. To his other merits as a poetical inventor Surrey adds the distinction of having been the first to make use in English of decasyllabic blank verse. Warton supposes him to have obtained the suggestion of this novelty from Trissino's Italia Liberata, but Dr. Nott has shown that this poem was not published till after Surrey's death, and infers with probability that if the English poet was indebted to a foreign original, this was Molza's translation of Virgil, published in Venice in 1541.1 I am strongly of opinion that Surrey was led to make the experiment in imitation of Molza, nor do I think that there is any probability in Nott's conjecture that the translation was, in the first instance, made in blank Alexandrine verse. But whether Surrey's idea was original or derived, he is entitled to the highest praise for the skill with which he applied the new principle, the effect of which was to protract the rhythmical period, and to diversify the harmony of the verse by the constant variation of the place assigned to the cæsura. Of the merits of the translation as a whole I shall speak in a subsequent chapter, but in the meantime the following passage will show the extent to which the art of metrical composition was advanced by the genius of this fine poet : Then from the seas the dawning 'gan arise. The hunting staves with their broad heads of steel; Of scenting hounds a kennel huge likewise. And at the threshold of her chamber door The Carthage lords did on the queen attend. 1 Surrey's Works, vol. i. p. cc. 2 Nets. |