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We find it once more, intermingling with a certain formal strain, in Drayton's Shepherds' Sirena containing the delightful song, with its subtle interchange of dactylic and iambic rhythms, so admirably characteristic of the author of the Agincourt ballad: In this pervading impulse of pure and spontaneous pastoral the soul of what is sweet and winning in things common and familiar as our household fairies blends with the fresh glamour of early love and the dainty delights of an ideal world, where despair is only less sweet than fruition, and love only less divine than chastity, where, as Drayton frankly tells us,
And so with "trochee," "dactyl," "anapest" and the rest; if we knew that accent and not quantity was what we really had in mind, it was proper enough to speak of Paradise Lost as written in "iambic pentameter," and Evangeline in "dactylic hexameter," etc.
Accent, quantity, with Iambic, Trochaic, Anapestic, and Dactylic Rhythms, are practically given in the work, which, should the student have poetic talent, would be of great use to him in making his own verses, while to the reader of poetry a knowledge of them is indispensable.
In its metrical form the poem attempts to express the lovableness of the 'eternal-womanly' by means of a lightly flowing dactylic measure, while a heavier trochaic cadence is employed to denote the nature of man: Such a scheme, in the hands of a Schiller, leads inevitably to a crescendo of rhetorical contrasts, which in the end sound somewhat flighty and forced.
"It treats," said the poet, "of that part of the history of king Arthur of England which archbishop Turpin left unwritten, together with the history of the quest of the Sangreal, the whole in heroic measure, part rhymes, part blank-verse; and in dactyles moreover, that is to say, in dactylic noun substantives, without any admission of verbs."
The irregularities consist chiefly of neglect of the laws of position, of final long vowels, of inflexional endings, and of double letters, which last, according to some grammarians, were not used until the time of Ennius. His Lyric metres are few, and very imperfectly elaborated. Those which he prefers are the Cretic and Bacchiac, though Dactylic and Choriambic systems are not wholly unknown.
That the "multiform" poet executed all these tasks with equal neatness, that he elaborated hexameters out of a language of by no means dactylic structure, and that without checking the natural flow of his style he moved with confidence and freedom amidst unwonted measures and forms are so many evidences of his extraordinary plastic talent, which was in fact more Greek than Roman; where he offends us, the offence is owing much more frequently to Greek alliteration than to Roman ruggedness.
I'll bet the old fellow, when he has the toothache, groans in dactylic hexameters and calls for his breakfast in the Ionic dialect. Bah! What's all the stuff good for anyway? I haven't any reason for trying any more." "Yes, you have." "I have? Well, what is it?" "Your father, if nothing else."
I rushed to the Great Parlour, and though then quite indifferent to such a material thing as fine printing, I actually found the poem in one of Baskerville's exquisite productions. The poem next to my dactylic Introduction was a dramatic lyric, partly blank verse and partly rhymed choruses, in the Swinburne manner.
Natural "stressers" may prefer to call iambic and anapestic units "rising" feet, to indicate the ascent of stress as one passes from the weaker to the stronger syllables; and similarly, to call trochaic and dactylic units "falling" feet, to indicate the descent or decline of stress as the weaker syllable or syllables succeed the stronger.
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