Remember Christ our Savior
Was born on Christmas day:
To save us all from Satan's power
When we were gone astray.

This is the same rime-scheme as we find in Longfellow's "The Village Blacksmith," in Willis's "Unseen Spirits," and in Poe's "Annabel Lee." With the first, third, and fifth lines riming together, the form seems to be rare.

Sometimes the six-line stanza is made up of three consecutive couplets, a, a, b, b, c, c, as in Bunner's "Forfeits "1: —

Sometimes it is composed of a quatrain with alternate rimes followed by a couplet, a, b, a, b, c, c, as in this "Song" of Shelley's:

1 By permission from Poems, by H. C. Bunner, copyrighted, 1884, by Charles Scribner's Sons.

Rarely, rarely comest thou,
Spirit of Delight!

Wherefore hast thou left me now

Many a day and night?
Many a weary night and day

'Tis since thou art fled away.

One of the most effective arrangements of rimes in the six-line stanza is that which we see in Longfellow's "Seaweed," in Hood's "Progress of Art," and in Holmes's "The Last Leaf." The scheme is a, a, b, c, c, b:

I saw him once before,

As he passed by the door,
And again

The pavement stones resound,
As he totters o'er the ground
With his cane.

Effective also is the restriction to two rimes only, as in Longfellow's " Prelude,” a, b, a, a, a, b:—

Before me rose an avenue

Of tall and sombrous pines;

Abroad their fan-like branches grew,
And, when the sunshine darted through,
Spread a vapor, soft and blue,

In long and sloping lines.

The six-line stanza was a special favorite of Longfellow's. In "The Cumberland" he essayed still another rime-scheme, a, b, a, c, c, b: —

Next morn, as the sun rose over the bay,

Still floated our flag at the mainmast head.
Lord, how beautiful was Thy day!

Every waft of the air

Was a whisper of prayer,
Or a dirge for the dead.

Burns made frequent use of another six-line stanza with only two rimes, a, a, a, b, a, b, as in his lines "To a Mouse"

:

The seven-line stanza is not frequently found, far less frequently than the stanza of five lines. It may be a quatrain and a couplet with a final line riming with either pair of the lines of the quatrain, as in Swinburne's resonant invocation "To Walt Whitman in America":

Till the motion be done and the measure
Circling through season and clime,
Slumber and sorrow and pleasure,
Vision of virtue and crime;

Till consummate with conquering eyes,
A soul disembodied, it rise

From the body transfigured of time.

The seven-line stanza may, of course, have many other arrangements of its rime-scheme. Rossetti, for example, in "Love's Nocturn," chose to limit himself to two rimes, a, b, a, b, b, a, b:—

Master of the murmuring courts

Where the shapes of sleep convene!

Lo! My spirit here exhorts

All the powers of my demesne
For their aid to woo my queen.
What reports

Yield thy jealous courts unseen.

Tennyson, in his "Fatima," rimes his first four lines together and his last three, -a, a, a, a, b, b,b:

O Love, Love, Love! O withering might!
O sun, that from thy noonday height
Shudderest when I strain my sight,
Throbbing thro' all thy heat and light,
Lo, falling from my constant mind,

Lo, parch'd and wither'd, deaf and blind,
I whirl like leaves in roaring wind.

But the fourfold repetition of the first rime and the threefold repetition of the second combine to give the stanza an air of artificiality. There is a lack of the apparent ease and spontaneity, which most easily capture our interest. Indeed, "Fatima," for all its poetic and psychologic power, seems to be one of Tennyson's less successful experiments.

CHAPTER VII

THE SONNET

In the most successful pieces of poetical composition, the struggle between matter and form is not visible. Expression and thought are adapted and mutually helpful. But even single lines. . . of this perfection are rare. What we usually find is metrical skill surpassing power of thought. . . or, on the other hand, expression laboring with an idea which it is unable to embody. This conflict, which takes place in that part of poetic effort which falls within the domain of Art, is most perceptible in the sonnet, for the reason that this is the one form, which, in our language, has been brought within the control of fixed rules.-MARK PATTISON, Introduction to Milton's Sonnets.

THE stanza has been considered in the previous chapter as a constituent part of a longer poem, as a single link of a lengthening chain. Yet it may be independent; it may stand forth alone as a poem complete in itself. There are very brief lyrics in a single stanza of ten lines, or of five or even of two. The couplet is the shortest possible form of the stanza, and it has often served for epigram. There is, for example, Gay's epitaph on himself:

Life is a jest, and all things show it.

I thought so once, and now I know it.

And here is the inscription which Pope wrote for the collar of a dog that belonged to the Prince of Wales:

I am his Highness' dog at Kew;

Pray, sir, tell me, whose dog are you?

These are pretty trifles only, crackling with wit; but the couplet has also served to present airier fancies