I shall now take a shorter dactylic measure; and first, with alternate rhymes.
Tityrus, you laid along, In the shade of umbrageous beeches, Practise your pastoral song, As your muse in your solitude teaches. We from the land that we love From all that we value and treasure, We must as exiles remove: While, Tityrus, you at your leisure Make all the woods to resound Amaryllis’s name at your pleasure.
We see, in this example that the rhyme is a fetter to the construction. In this case, it is necessary to have three distichs which rhyme, in order to close the metre with the sentence.
We detach these distichs, or long lines, from each other, by rejecting the use of rhyme between successive distichs. We might make the two parts of the same long line rhyme thus:--
Tityrus, you in the shadow Of chestnuts stretcht in the meadow, Practise your pastoral verses In strains which your oat-pipe rehearses. We, poor exiles, are leaving All our saving and having; Leaving the land that we treasure: You in the woods at your pleasure Make them resound, when your will is, The name of the fair Amaryllis.
But these rhymes, even if written in one long line, are really two short lines with a double rhyme; and this measure, besides its difficulty, is destitute of dignity and grace.
If we take the same measure, rejecting rhyme, and keep the dactylics pure, we have such distichs as these:--
Tityrus, you in the shade Of a mulberry idly reclining, Practise your pastoral muse In the strains that your flageolet utters.
But these may be written in long lines, thus:--
Tityrus, you in the shade of a mulberry idly reclining, Practise your pastoral muse, in the strains that your flageolet utters; We from the land that we love, from our property sever’d and banish’d, We go as exiles away; and yet, Tityrus, you at your leisure Tutor the forests to ring with the name of the fair Amaryllis.
These verses are of a rhythm as familiar and distinct to the English ear as any which our poets use. Now these are _hexameters_ consisting each of five dactyls and a trochee,--the trochee approaching to a spondee, as I have seen; yet still, not being a spondee, but having its first syllable decidedly strong in comparison with the second.
