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T is refreshing at last to have some

one say, as Mr. S. H. Clark does in his excellent "Notes on Rhyme" in the August number of this magazine, that "verse is not prose, and never should be read as such." For many years elocutionists have taught their pupils when reading poetry to "break up the jingle of the verse," to conceal as much as possible the rhyme and rhythm (1), as if these things were blemishes to be covered up instead of beauties to receive their proper setting. Such teachers have always overlooked the fact that the poet's object (2) in writing verse instead of prose is to give his thought the added charm of poetic form, and that it is the reader's business to interpret the form of a poem as well as the thought.

There is, however, one poin' in Mr. Clark's paper which it seems to me is open to discussion. He says:

"It would seriously mar the movement of the following stanza of Shelley's 'Skylark' to throw the accent entirely upon the second syllable of 'profuse:'

“Hail to thee, blithe spirit!—

Bird thou never wert-
That from heaven, or near it,
Pourest thy full heart

In profuse strains of unpremeditated art.'

"Correct pronunciation demands that the accent shall fall on fuse, but the metre demands the accent on pro; and in this poem the rhythm is a most important factor as manifesting the feeling."

Here Mr. Clark touches on an interesting point in the matter of scansion, which I imagine is but little understood by most readers of English poetry.

"The metre demands the accent on pro," says Mr. Clark. To decide this question it is necessary to analyze the metrical structure of the stanza, and in doing so we find that the first four lines are essentially trochaic. They present one or two irregularities, however. The second foot of the fourth line (thy full) is an iambus. Perhaps the second foot of the first line (thee, blithe) might be called a spondee, though I should prefer to call it a trochee. In the third line it is necessary to pronounce "heaven" as a monosyllable, otherwise the second foot of the line (heaven, or) is a dactyl. Now the last line, if we accept Mr. Clark's statement, is an iambic line throughout;—an iambic hexameter (3). But if we read the line with no thought of scanning it; in other words, if we allow it to scan itself, we find that the second foot (fuse strains) becomes a spondee, and the first (In pro) becomes-what? a foot which is seldom mentioned in connection with English verse, but which has its counterpart in Greek and Latin, namely, a foot of two short, or, in English, two unaccented syllables, known as the pyrrhic.

That the pyrrhic occurs very frequently in English poetry the following examples selected almost at random from the greatest English poets will serve to show: