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It is a love lament, and the insertion of a song in a complicated lyrical measure in a plain stanzaic setting is evidently copied from the Calender.
Each stanzaic form has its conveniences, its "fatal facility," its natural fitness for singing a song or telling a story or turning a thought over and over into music. Intellectual readers will always like the epigrammatic "snap" of the couplet, and Spenser will remain, largely because of his choice of stanza, the "poet's poet."
The ideas expressed here can be found in no other war-poet; they are idiosyncratic to the highest degree; yet the verse-forms in which they are written are stanzaic, as traditional as the most conservative critic could desire.
It renounces metre or rather endeavors to renounce it, for it does not always succeed. It professes to do away with rhyme and stanza, although it may play cunningly upon the sounds of like and unlike words, and it may arrange phrases into poetic paragraphs, which, aided by the art of typography, secure a kind of stanzaic effect.
We discover that precisely similar stanzaic patterns like similar metrical patterns are often used to express diametrically opposite feelings, let us say, joy and sorrow, doubt and exultation, victory and defeat. The "common metre" of English hymnology is thus seen to be a rough mould into which almost any kind of religious emotion may be poured.
Bullen, Schelling, Rhys, Braithwaite, and other modern collectors of the Elizabethan lyric have ravaged these volumes and many more, and have shown how the imported Italian pastoral tallied with the English idyllic mood, how the study of prosody yielded rich and various stanzaic effects, how the diffusion of the passion for song through all classes of the community gave a marvelous singing quality to otherwise thin and mere "dildido" lines.
These lines correspond to the plain stanzaic frames in which Spenser set his lyrics in the Shepherd's Calender: The poem, in common with the whole class of allegorical pastorals, is undoubtedly open to the charge of artificiality, since, in truth, the pastoral garb can never illustrate, but only distort and obscure subjects drawn from other orders of civilization.
Reynolds had probably glanced at proofs of the genuine poem; his preface is a close imitation of Wordsworth's introduction, and the stanzaic form in which the two pieces are written is identical. On the other hand, the main parody is made up of allusions to previous poems by Wordsworth, and shows no acquaintance with the story of Peter Bell.
Something of our contemporary impatience with fixed stanzaic forms is due perhaps to the failure to recognize that the greater poets succeed in making over every kind of poetic pattern in the act of employing it, just as a Chopin minuet differs from a Liszt minuet, although both composers are using the same fundamental form of dance music.
But Collins's "Ode on the Superstitions of the Highlands," Shelley's "Ode to Liberty" and Coleridge's "Ode to France" follow very complicated patterns, though all the stanzas are alike. The English "Horatian" ode, then, while exhibiting the greatest differences in complexity of stanzaic forms, is "homostrophic."
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