United States or Poland ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
According to the high Stoic doctrine, there was no mean between virtue and vice. All men indeed received from nature the starting-points for virtue, but until perfection had been attained they rested under the condemnation of vice. It was, to employ an illustration of the poet-philosopher Cleanthes, as though Nature had begun an iambic line and left men to finish it.
With Shakespeare, he says, "prose comes in whenever the subject, being more familiar, is unsuited to the majestic English iambic."
The impression made by such a scene on such a company is heightened by a rare atmospheric calm. The heart of each gazer fills with emotion, at first unutterable except by indefinite exclamation; when one of the company says, "A fairer face of evening cannot be." These words, making a smooth iambic line, give some utterance, and therefore some relief, to the feeling of all. Then another adds,
I used to keep this old volume close to my pillow; and I amused myself when I awoke in the morning by reciting its jingling contrasts of iambic and trochaic and dactylic metre, and thinking what a charming occupation it must be to "make up" verses. I made my first rhymes when I was about seven years old.
Whether we called the metre of the Prologue rhymed couplets of iambic pentameter, or rhymed couplets of ten-syllabled, five-stressed verse, the music, at least, was clear enough.
However, he was so moved by the heat of youth and passion, that he wrote a quantity of iambic verses against Scipio, in the bitter, sarcastic style of Archilochus, without, however, his license and scurrility.
The oratorical mould in which all Latin poetry except satire and comedy is to a great extent cast, is visible from the beginning in tragedy. Weighty sentences follow one another until the moral effect is reached, or the description fully turned. The rhythm seems to have been much more often trochaic than iambic, at least than trimeter iambic, for the tetrameter is more frequently employed.
If he had not paused before "ipsi prodeant," he would have at once seen that an iambic had escaped him, "prodeant ipsi" would sound in every respect better. But at present I am speaking of the whole kind. "Cur clandestinis consiliis nos oppugnant? Cur de perfugis nostris copias comparant inter nos?"
This is precisely the "four-stressed iambic" metre of In Memoriam, and it even preserves the peculiar rhyme order of the In Memoriam stanza: "And hence no force, however great, Can draw a cord, however fine, Into a horizontal line Which shall be absolutely straight."
GREEK MUSIC AND LYRIC POETRY. It was not until the minds of the Greeks had been elevated by the productions of the epic muse, that the genius of original poets broke loose from the dominion of the epic style, and invented new forms for expressing the emotions of a mind profoundly agitated by passing events; with few innovations in the elegy, but with greater boldness in the iambic metre.
Word Of The Day