Quantis, et quam funestis concurritur iris, Stat dubius cui se parti concedat Olympus, Et flammæ vibrant, et vera tonitrua rauco Excidit attonitis mens omnis, et impetus omnis, SAMUEL BARROW, M. D. ON PARADISE LOST. WHEN I beheld the Poet blind, yet bold, Heaven, Hell, Earth, Chaos, all; the argument I lik'd his project, the success did fear; Through that wide field how he his way should find, Or if a work so infinite he spann'd, Might hence presume the whole creation's day į. Thou hast not miss'd one thought that could be fit, So that no room is here for writers left, That majesty which through thy work doth reign, Draws the devout, deterring the profane. And things divine thou treat'st of in such state Where could'st thou words of such a compass find? Well might'st thou scorn thy readers to allure The poets tag them, we for fashion wear. And while I meant to praise thee must commend. In number, weight, and measure, needs not rhyme. THE measure is English heroic verse without rhyme, as that of Homer in Greek, and of Virgil in Latin; rhyme being no necessary adjunct or true ornament of poem or good verse, in longer works especially, but the invention of a barbarous age, to set off wretched matter and lame metre; graced - indeed since by the use of some famous modern poets, carried away by custom, but much to their own vexation, hindrance, and constraint to express many things otherwise, and for the most part worse than else they would have expressed them. Not without cause therefore some both Italian and Spanish poets of prime note have rejected rhyme both in longer and shorter works, as have also long since our best English tragedies, as a thing of itself, to all judicious ears, trivial and of no true musical delight; which consists only in apt numbers, fit quantity of syllables, and the sense variously drawn out from one verse into another, not in the jingling sound of like endings, a fault avoided by the learned ancients both in poetry and all good oratory. This neglect then of rhyme so little is to be taken for a defect, though it may seem so perhaps to vulgar readers, that it rather is to be esteemed an example set, the first in English, of ancient liberty recovered to heroic poem, from the troublesome and modern bondage of rhyming'. |