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Updated: May 16, 2025
But in France, in the age of remaniement, even the versification had changed from assonance to rhyme, from the decasyllabic line to the Alexandrine in the decadence, while a plentiful lack of seriousness and a love of purely fanciful adventures in fairyland take the place of the austere spirit of war.
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 gigantic nature of Payne's achievement will be realised when we mention that The Arabian Nights contains the equivalent of some twenty thousand decasyllabic lines of poetry, that is to say more than there are in Milton's Paradise Lost, and that he has rendered faithfully the whole of this enormous mass in accordance with the intricate metrical scheme of the original, and in felicitous and beautiful language.
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":
Blank verse, although originally remodelled by Surrey upon the versi sciolti of the Italians, has departed widely from Italian precedent, first by its decasyllabic structure, whereas Italian verse consists of hendecasyllables; and, secondly, by its greater force, plasticity, and freedom.
The blank verse of Shakspere and Lessing seemed to promise best, and so he set about practicing upon it. At first the meter gave him great difficulty; he could not subdue his strong passion and his wild tropes to the even tenor of the decasyllabic cadence. Then followed his decision to publish his play piecemeal in the Thalia, an unfortunate decision as it proved.
Pope likewise, though he "lisped in numbers," could never, for all of his cleverness, learn to sing. The age of the Augustans, in the first quarter of the eighteenth century, was an age of prose, of reason, of good sense, of "correctness." The decasyllabic couplet, so resonant in Dryden, so admirably turned and polished by Pope, was its favorite measure. The poets played safe.
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.
These poems are written in what would be decasyllabic couplets were they reducible to metre in other words, in the barbarous caesural jangle in which many poets of the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries imagined that they reproduced the music of Chaucer, and which, refashioned however almost beyond recognition by a born metrist, we shall meet again in the Shepherd's Calender.
If a book and not a chapter were allowed about this curious, and on the whole rather neglected and undervalued, Fifth Act of the eighteenth century, many of its minor literary phenomena would have to be noticed: such as the last state of periodicals before the uprising of the Edinburgh Review, and the local literary coteries, the most notable of which was that of Norwich, with the Aldersons, Sayers the poet, who taught Southey and others to try blank verse in other measures than the decasyllabic, William Taylor, the apostle of German literature in England, and others.
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