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as five-stress iambic, rhyming aa. The familiar measure of English ballad poetry, "The King has written a braid letter, And signed it wi' his hand, And sent it to Sir Patrick Spence, Was walking on the sand" is alternating four-stress and three-stress iambic, rhyming ab cb. The In Memoriam stanza,
And so was the music of the "blank" or unrhymed five-stress lines of Marlowe and Shakspere and Milton, and as we listened it was easy to believe that "stress" and "quantity" and "syllable," all playing together like a chime of bells, are concordant and not quarrelsome elements in the harmony of modern English verse.
The one point which the late Chaucerians preserved of their master's metric was the five-stress character of his decasyllabic line; but in Spenser's day all memory of the syllabic e had long since vanished, and the only rhythm to be extracted from Chaucer's verse was of a four-stress type.
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