Come, dear children, let us away;
Down and away below.

Now my brothers call from the bay;

Now the great winds shorewards blow;
Now the salt tides seawards flow;

Now the wild white horses play,

Champ and chafe and toss in the spray.
Children dear, let us away.
This way, this way.

This stanza may be described as a blending of trochaicdactylic with a trochaic movement which is freely phrased with long and extra accented syllables. Some of the lines I should scan thus:

| Come, dear children, | let us a- | way

The stanza that follows is more purely trochaic than the first, except for the line,

| "Margaret! | Margaret!"

which occurs twice.

The third and fourth stanzas use trisyllabic variation more freely. Lines like,

and,

And the little gray | church on the | windy | shore,

Feed in the ooze of their | pasture- ground,

anticipate the triple rhythm toward which the poem is tending. But trochaic lines with long syllables continue to make part of the rhythm, e. g.

| Where great whales come | sailing | by.
3 3 3 3 3 3 4

The fifth stanza, after the first three lines, runs into an iambic-anapestic rhythm which has more triple than duple feet. Two of the lines are pure anapestics. Here is the whole stanza.

Children dear, was it yesterday

(Call yet once) that she went away?

Once she sate with you and me,

On a red gold throne in the heart of the sea,

And the youngest sate on her knee.

She combed its bright hair and she tended it well,

When down swung the sound of the far-off bell.

She sigh'd, she look'd up through the clear green sea.'
She said: "I must go, for my kinsfolk pray

In the little gray church on the shore to-day.
"Twill be Easter-time in the world-ah me!
And I lose my poor soul, Merman! here with Thee."
I said: "Go up, dear heart, through the waves.
Say thy prayer, and come back to the kind sea-caves."
She smiled, she went up through the surf in the bay.
Children dear, was it yesterday?

But

The next stanza is much in the same movement. after that comes a more irregular stanza, the chief meter of which is trimeter. This is a transition to the new meter and rhythm of the last two stanzas of the poem: These are in anapestic dimeter, as I should read them, and are phrased in a way to give a peculiarly individual music. A possible scansion in musical notation, which has its advantages here, would be this:

phrased with heavy and extra accented syllables, anticipates the rhythm of several lines in the final stanza, e. g.

When sweet airs come seaward.

This final stanza is in an almost regular triple rhythm, but it contains ten or more phrases of a rhythm like that of the expression The winds blow, which make the stanza unique in its verse tune. Here is the reading I should give it:

CHAPTER XIX

FREE VERSE OR VERS LIBRE

The history of every art shows periods of revolt from conventionalities, from standards, and even from laws. Critical wars have been waged over poetic diction, verse forms have been worn out by the poets and dropped from use, and rhythms which one age eyed askance as innovations, another has later scorned as dully old-fashioned. At present the

poets are engaged in one more of these quarrels over formthis time as to how much form is necessary, or, in fact, whether any is necessary at all.

This recent development of free verse is a natural reaction following the kind of poetry written between 1880 and 1910. The successors of Tennyson and Swinburne constituted a group of poets of as high a degree of technical skill in difficult fixed rhythms and meters as any period can show. A radical change in type was to be expected. And this prosodic revolt is made more prominent by the fact that along with it has developed a revolt toward an absolute realism in point of view and in diction. The adherents of the old and of the new schools belabor one another with words.

One side claims that fixed forms are monotonous, and that all possibilities of further development in them have been exhausted; the other side claims that vers libre is utterly without art, that it is the refuge of the lazy poet. Both sides present as proof of their points the most execrable examples of the type they wish to villify; when one writer condemns all vers libre by quoting some silly eccentricity, a vers librist retorts with "Mary had a little lamb."

It seems hardly necessary for the present author to defend fixed verse from the charge of obviousness and monotony