XXXI. THE HEROIC COUPLET FROM DRYDEN TO CRABBE
Our setting sun, from his declining seat, Shot beams of kindness on _you_, not of heat; And, when his love was bounded in a few That were unhappy, that they might be true, Made _you_ the favourite of his last sad times, That is, a sufferer in his subjects' crimes. Thus, those first favours _you_ received, were sent, Like heaven's rewards, in earthly punishment: Yet fortune, conscious of _your_ destiny, E'en then took care to lay _you_ softly by, And wrapped _your_ fate among her precious things, Kept fresh to be unfolded with _your_ king's.
(Note recurrent _you_ and _your_ employed like pauses to vary verse. Otherwise strictly "regular.")
(_b_) Dryden ("heroic"-dramatic type at best):
Fair though you are As summer mornings, | and your eyes more bright Than stars that twinkle ¦ in a winter's night; Though you have eloquence to warm and move Cold age ¦ and praying hermits ¦ into love; Though Almahide with scorn ¦ rewards my care,-- Yet, | than to change, | 'tis nobler to despair. My love's my soul; | and that from fate is free; 'Tis that unchanged and deathless part of me.
(Observe how the alternation of central pause, strongly (|) and weakly (¦) or hardly at all (no mark) emphasised, knits and shades the verse; and how, in the first line, there is positive enjambment. Yet there is still no trisyllabic substitution. This type is continued and perfected in the great satires and didactic pieces for argument and attack, and in the _Fables_ for narrative. It admits, to relieve monotony, the Alexandrine (_Hind and Panther_, i. 23, 24))--
Their corps[e] to perish, but their kind to last, So much | the death|less plant | the dy|ing fruit | surpassed;
Can I believe eternal God could lie Disguised in mortal mould and infancy, That the great Maker of the world could die?
both combined (_Palamon and Arcite_, ii. 560-562)--
There saw I how the secret felon wrought, And treason labouring in the traitor's thought, And mid|wife time | the ri|pened plot | to mur|der brought;
and sometimes the fourteener (_Medal_, 94)--
Thou leapst o'er all eternal truths in thy Pindaric way.
(_c_) Passages from Garth, (1), and Pope, (2) and (3), to illustrate the mechanical character of the eighteenth-century couplet, the ease with which it can be shifted from decasyllabic to octosyllabic, and its peculiar construction of ridge-backed antithetic pause: