United States or United Arab Emirates ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Few could forget, after once hearing them, the stanzas at the close of “Deutschland,” in which he warns the King of Prussia not to incur the irredeemable hell which the injured poet can create for him—the singing flames of a Dante’s terza rima! “Kennst du die Hölle des Dante nicht, Die schrecklichen Terzetten? Wen da der Dichter hineingesperrt Den kann kein Gott mehr retten.
The lines are not separated into trios, but run into one another, clinging very properly to the rhymes, which, interlinking all the stanzas by carrying the echo still onward, bind each canto into one whole, just as our Spenserian form does each stanza into a whole of nine lines. Whether stanzas, strictly speaking, or not, shall we say our mind frankly about the terza rima?
They are commonly of an allegorical nature, containing allusions to real persons, and are for the most part composed in terza rima, diversified in the more complex examples by the introduction of octaves and lyrical measures . Of this primitive form is a poem by the Genoese Baldassare Taccone, bearing the superscription 'Ecloga pastorale rapresentata nel Convivio dell' III. Sig'r. Io.
A further reason for complexity of composition is given by the troubadour Peire d'Auvergne: "He is pleasing and agreeable to me who proceeds to sing with words shut up and obscure, to which a man is afraid to do violence." The similar safeguard of Dante's terza rima will occur to every student.
I give Dante my highest praise when I say of his Divine Comedy that it is, in all senses, genuinely a Song. In the very sound of it there is a canto fermo; it proceeds as by a chant. The language, his simple terza rima, doubtless helped him in this. One reads along naturally with a sort of lilt.
Terza rima keeps the attention suspended too long, keeps it ever on the stretch for something that is to come, and never does come, until at the end of the canto, namely, the last rhyme. The rhymes cannot be held down, but are ever escaping and running ahead. It looks somewhat like an artificial contrivance of the first rhymers of an uncultivated age.
Yet this must be attempted; for Shelley is the only English poet who has successfully handled that most difficult of metres, terza rima. His power over complicated versification cannot be appreciated except by duly noticing the method he employed in treating a structure alien, perhaps, to the genius of our literature, and even in Italian used with perfect mastery by none but Dante.
The second piece, Filena, runs to four acts, and has lyrical songs introduced into the terza rima. It appears to be a sufficiently shameless and somewhat formless farce, which, being quite alien from the spirit of the regular pastoral, need not be examined in detail.
The play itself, which is in five acts, and contains characters alike Olympian, Arcadian, and rustic, besides a hermit and a slave, is composed in a variety of metres terza rima, octaves both sdrucciole and piane, and in the style alike of Poliziano and Lorenzo, hendecasyllables both blank and with rimalmezzo, and lyrical stanzas.
The main movement of Poliziano's poem is intrusted to the traditional octave stanza, but we find passages of terza rima. There are also choral passages which suggest the existence of the frottola, the carnival song and the ballata. The play is introduced by Mercury acting as prologue. This was in accordance with time honored custom which called for an "announcer of the festival."
Word Of The Day