United States or Heard Island and McDonald Islands ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
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.
They are conveniently indicated by using letters of the alphabet to correspond with each rhyme-sound, whenever repeated. Thus the rhymed couplet "Around their prows the ocean roars, And chafes beneath their thousand oars" may be marked as "four-stress iambic," rhyming aa; the heroic couplet "The zeal of fools offends at any time, But most of all the zeal of fools in rhyme"
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,
"Now rings the woodland loud and long, The distance takes a lovelier hue, And drown'd in yonder living blue The lark becomes a sightless song" is four-stress iambic, rhyming ab ba.
Word Of The Day