United States or Chad ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
They are his most original, most vivid, most powerful pieces. He is at his best when he has a story to tell, and can tell it freely in his own unhampered way, a combination of drama and narrative. In The Everlasting Mercy, written in octosyllabics, the metre of Christmas Eve, he is unflinchingly realistic, as Browning was in describing the chapel.
He writes blank verse, octosyllabics, terza-rima, sonnets, and is particularly fond of long rolling lines that have in them the music of the sea. His ideas require no enlargement of the orchestra, and he generally avoids by-paths, or unbeaten tracks, content to go lustily singing along the highway.
He surprised himself by a sudden impulse to write poetry he did so sometimes, loose, galloping octosyllabics in the vein of Scott and when he had taken his place on a boulder, near some fairy falls and shaded by a whip of a tree that was already radiant with new leaves, it still more surprised him that he should find nothing to write.
Sir Walter did not mean to mock, he merely compared two kindred spirits. "The noble poet" "kept on the business still," and broke into octosyllabics, borrowed from Scott, his descriptions of miscreants borrowed from Mrs. Radcliffe. "A Sicilian Romance" has its scene in the palace of Ferdinand, fifth Marquis of Mazzini, on the northern coast of Sicily.
Thackeray, he never attained to any special quality of note. But some of his octosyllabics, if they cannot be called equal to Prior's, fall little below Swift's. "I hate" cries he in one of the pieces,
"Not long since walking in the field, My nurse and I, we there beheld A goodly fruit; which, tempting me, I would have plucked: but, trembling, she, Whoever eat those berries, cried, In less than half an hour died!" What intolerable seesaw! Not much of Byron's "fatal facility" in these octosyllabics! In more senses than one. His last and best portrait shows him in his own gray hair.
You will admit that these last couplets are precisely of the same structure as yours, and certainly they are octosyllabics, and made use of by Butler in an octosyllabic poem, whereas yours, to be rendered of the heroic structure, should run thus: Hatching at ease succession apostolical, With many other falsehoods diabolical.
There remain some hundreds of doggerel rhymes; but his affection for that particular novel survived the fatal facility of his octosyllabics, and reappears time after time in his later writings. Next year, 1828, their tour was stopped at Plymouth by the painful news of the death of his aunt Jessie, to whom they were on their way.
Swift was soon aware of the ludicrousness of his experiment, though he never forgave Cousin Dryden for being aware of it also, and the recoil in a nature so intense as his was sudden and violent. He who could not be a poet if he would, angrily resolved that he would not if he could. Full-sail verse was beyond his skill, but he could manage the simpler fore-and-aft rig of Butler's octosyllabics.
As old Quarles put it in the plain-spoken seventeenth century, I see no virtues where I smell no sweat. The first poem, which gives its name to the volume, is written in the lively octosyllabics made famous by Christmas Eve.
Word Of The Day