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He wrote by preference in what I have ventured to call the normal respiratory measure, octosyllabic verse, in which one common expiration is enough and not too much for the articulation of each line. The "fatal facility" for which this verse is noted belongs to it as recited and also as written, and it implies the need of only a minimum of skill and labor.
I did not make literature of the Greeks, but I got a whole tragedy out of the Romans; it was a rhymed tragedy, and in octosyllabic verse, like the "Lady of the Lake." I meant it to be acted by my schoolmates, but I am not sure that I ever made it known to them.
'The Excursion' is accused of being lengthy, and so you will tell me that I convict myself of plagiarism, currente calamo. I have just finished a poem of some eight hundred lines, called 'The Vision of Poets, philosophical, allegorical anything but popular. It is in stanzas, every one an octosyllabic triplet, which you will think odd, and I have not sanguinity enough to defend.
These would, perhaps, have fascinated any boy, but I had such a fanaticism for methodical verse that any variation from the octosyllabic and decasyllabic couplets was painful to me.
The verse is mainly octosyllabic, sometimes blank, but the rough accentual 'rime' is also used. Decasyllabics are rare. There is also some prose in the comic part sustained by Autolicus and Conto and the aged clown Jarbus, as well as a certain amount of Spenserian archaism, and a good deal of dialect.
He wrote by preference in what I have ventured to call the normal respiratory measure, octosyllabic verse, in which one common expiration is enough and not too much for the articulation of each line. The "fatal facility" for which this verse is noted belongs to it as recited and also as written, and it implies the need of only a minimum of skill and labor.
Its being in octosyllabic rhyme is not against it, however; although he abandoned rhyme almost altogether at or before this period. The fact of the business of the scene being supernatural would account for its form. But it is mere rhyme; little more than an unmeaning jingle of verses. Any journeyman at versemaking would write such stuff.
The considerable change in the metre of Marmion as compared with the Lay is worth noticing. Here, as there, the 'introductions' are, for the most part, if not throughout, in continuous octosyllabic couplets. The batches of monorhymed octosyllables sometimes extend to even four in number, with remarkably good effect, as, for instance, in the infernal proclamation from the Cross.
As apposite to this, I may quote what he elsewhere says of octosyllabic verse: "The thought can turn itself with greater ease in a larger compass. When the rhyme comes too thick upon us, it straightens the expression: we are thinking of the close, when we should be employed in adorning the thought. It makes a poet giddy with turning in a space too narrow for his imagination."
The rejection of all superfluity, the conciseness and simplicity to which the translator is obliged by octosyllabic verse, compensate for the partial loss of that breadth of sweep for which decasyllabic verse gives more room, but of which the translator of Dante does not feel the want. One more short passage of four lines, the famous figure of the lark in the twentieth Canto of the "Paradiso":
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