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The unity, however, thus aimed at, and achieved, is very different from the cyclic or architectonic unity described above, and of a much less definite character. It remains to say a few words concerning the language of the Calender and the rough accentual metre in which parts of it are composed, since both have a particular bearing upon Spenser's attitude towards pastoral in general.
His peculiar prosody is plainly deliberate. Only a very few lines are wholly quantitative, and none are wholly accentual, except where accent and quantity happen to coincide. Much of the pronunciation of modern Italian may be traced in his remarkable accentuation of some words; like Italian, he both throws back the accent off a long syllable and slides it forward upon a short one.
The borrowing of foreign words always entails their phonetic modification. There are sure to be foreign sounds or accentual peculiarities that do not fit the native phonetic habits. They are then so changed as to do as little violence as possible to these habits. Frequently we have phonetic compromises.
Secondly, every variation creates not only a change in its own unit, but a wave of disturbance all along the line. Also, every variation from the type indicates a point of accentual stress; the syncopated measure, for instance, is always strongly accented. All these facts would seem to be connected with the view of the importance of movement sensations in building up the group feeling.
In the 'May' we return to the four-beat accentual measure, this time applied to a discussion by the herdsmen Palinode and Piers of the lawfulness of Sunday sports and the corruption of the clergy. Here we have a common theme treated from an individual point of view.
The lungs supply air to the larynx, which modifies the stream into whisper or voice; and this air is then moulded by the plastic oral organs into syllables which singly or in accentual combinations constitute words. Co-ordination implies perfect mental control of physical actions. And this in turn means perfect obedience of the physical organs of speech to the brain messages that are received.
It introduces the fable of the oak and the briar, in which, since he ascribes it to Tityrus, a name he transferred from Vergil to Chaucer, Spenser presumably imagined he was imitating that poet, though it is really no more in the style of Chaucer than is the roughly accentual measure in which the eclogue is composed.
Even in our accentual and rhythmic language no analysis can find the secret of the beauty of a verse; how much less, then, of those phrases, such as prose is built of, which obey no law but to be lawless and yet to please?
Popular accentual verse persisted, then, while the more cultivated Roman public acquired and then gradually lost, in the course of centuries, its ear for the quantitative rhythms which originally had been copied from the Greeks.
We are on the very verge of the accentual Latin poetry of the Middle Ages, and the affinity is made closer by the free use of initial and terminal assonances, and even of occasional rhyme.
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