"Refrain," as well. Ah, hapless plight! That makes them eight-The port's in sight: When maids command, what can't we do! You bid me try! AUSTIN DOBSON. Swinburne's "rondel" has eleven lines, Villon's twelve. Here are the rhyme variants: aba refrain-bab-aba refrain. When the refrain is more than one line it rhymes with the b line: abb-aab refrain-abba refrain. The triolet consists of eight lines with two rhymes. One refrain occurs three times, here in the line order repeating line I three times: My maid purchased that And it turned to a bonnet. A. STODART-Walker, Moxford Book of Verse. In all these forms it will be seen that the refrain is the most important and difficult to achieve: it must be spoken as an integral part of the thought and yet remain clearly a repetition. It is like the delight of watching a juggler play with balls. Each time it seems they must drop, and yet again they rise out of his hand. But other refrains exist of a very different character. There is the "bourdon" or 'drone," a low-pitched refrain hummed by the speaker under his breath to the bass of a musical accompaniment. Kingsley has an ineffective example in Lorraine Lorrèe," generally omitted in modern editions. Sometimes a "burden" consists of one or more words, as in the "Toll slowly" of The Rhyme of the Duchess May by Mrs. Browning, or Tennyson's “Oriana.” All such refrains must cut across the line with a monotonous music of their own. Only as the emotional stress of the form grows, the refrain swells with it, and fades, and dies, forming a musical echo to the sense. It must never be incorporated with the line, but must space and phrase the poem. A third form is seen in the double refrain of The Lady of Shalott. There the refrain is part of the narrative and varies in significance and stress according to its meaning and place in the verse: Listening, whispers, "'Tis the fairy She saw the helmet and the plume, And round about the prow she wrote, And her eyes were darken'd wholly, Turn'd to tower'd Camelot. LORD TENNYSON, The Lady of Shalott. This is not quite satisfactory; the refrain is a little intrusive and not musical enough in itself to decorate the lines. But it helps to mark strophic form and so it is popular, where a more formal structure would pass unnoticed. In comedy the absurd intervention of the refrain adds to the charm of the metre. The compression required by some of the shorter poems, more especially the triolet, is favourable to perfect point and wit, and the form is irresistible when it is successfully achieved. Many freer variants give delightful stanzas. Here is a very modern example where the stress varies most beautifully in each repetition: I heard a bird at dawn But I didn't listen to him, For he didn't sing to me. I didn't listen to him, For he didn't sing to mè And the wind was on the lea; I was singing at the time Just as prettily as he. I was singing all the time, About the dew upon the lawn And he sang upon a tree. JAMES STEPHENS, The Rivals. Many gain their first introduction to poetry through satyric verse. It lacks the profoundest music of poetry, but it is a means of making the value of form clear to many who have never understood that verse is more than a convenient way of arranging words. The faults of formal verse, its excessive reliance on sound, and its thin significance, become a positive advantage from this point of view. When the workmanship is good and the restraint of rule truly observed the result may be a very perfect thing. One English work remains as the crown of all such poetry: FitzGerald's Omar, that blend of pathos and cynicism, of wit and philosophy, of irony and passion, which serves to lay bare a vanished civilisation to our sympathy and understanding. The form is perfect; always the three rising founts of rhyme, falling into pearls in the fourth line; always the twisted smile of half-ironical regret striking across the graver beauty of the ever-varying quatrain. Years of loving labour went to the perfecting of so beautiful a thing, and it stands as one of the glories of our more formal poetry, whether we reckon it as a translation, or as a reincarnation of its original. The last verse sums up in itself the whole genius of satyric poetry: And when Thyself with shining Foot shall pass, CHAPTER X THE SINGING OF ENGLISH WORDS It was usual in the middle of the last century to regard English as an unmusical, inharmonious language, unsuited for the art of the singer. When an English song was to be given, the student was taught that a special pronunciation must be adopted; English could not be sung as it was spoken. It would be interesting to examine the origin of so strange a belief. In part it may arise from the ghastly attempts at translation which were used on the operatic stage; here is a specimen from Aïda: Yet is there hope from this foul deed There could indeed be little object in endeavouring to make these sentiments plain to any audience. The high standard of English dramatic and lyric verse made translations as a whole impossible, unless they could attain to something of the beauty of original verse. To reach such a standard without modifying the incidence of the musical pattern in the words was almost impossible. The majestic "Factum Est" of the Messe des Morts, for instance, reached in translation the pidgin-English form, "Done it is." Again, English does not lend itself readily to the divorce of sound and sense, so common in formal operatic and even oratorio singing, with its constant melodic repetitions and figure writing. Where a single word was used to vocalise a long series of successive notes, or where an entire cadenza was |