Where strangers would have shut the many doors
That many friends had opened long ago.

Edwin Arlington Robinson (1869- )

In his paraphrase of a Persian poem, The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám, Edward Fitzgerald has made famous another four-line stanza, which rimes aaba. The popularity of the Rubáiyát in its day was due in part to a second vogue of melancholy poetry in the last half of the nineteenth century. We quote a few of the best stanzas:

Come, fill the Cup, and in the fire of Spring
Your Winter-garment of Repentance fling:
The Bird of Time has but a little way
To flutter and the Bird is on the Wing.

A Book of Verses underneath the Bough,
A Jug of Wine, a Loaf of Bread-and Thou
Beside me singing in the Wilderness-
Oh, Wilderness were Paradise enow!

Oh, my Beloved, fill the Cup that clears
To-day of past Regret and future Fears:

To-morrow!-Why, To-morrow I may be
Myself with Yesterday's Sev'n thousand Years.

The Moving Finger writes; and, having writ,
Moves on: nor all your Piety nor Wit

Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line
Nor all your Tears wash out a Word of it.

And those who husbanded the Golden grain,
And those who flung it to the winds like Rain,
Alike to no such aureate Earth are turn'd

As, buried once, Men want dug up again.

The eight-line stanza known as ottava rima, riming abababcc, is more common in Italian, from which it was borrowed, than in English. The form is best adapted to satire; admirable examples are Byron's "Beppo," "The Vision of Judgment," and Don Juan. Whittier's "Ichabod" and Browning's "The Lost Leader" contain no more scathing denunciation than "The Vision of Judgment," in which Byron expresses his opinion of Robert Southey and George III.

In the first year of freedom's second dawn

Died George the Third; although no tyrant, one
Who shielded tyrants, till each sense withdrawn
Left him nor mental nor external sun;

A better farmer ne'er brush'd dew from lawn,
A worse king never left a realm undone!
He died-but left his subjects still behind,
One half as mad-and t'other no less blind.

He died! his death made no great stir on earth:
His burial made some pomp; there was profusion
Of velvet, gilding, brass, and no great dearth

Of aught save tears-save those shed by collusion.
For these things may be bought at their true worth;
Of elegy there was the due infusion—
Bought also; and the torches, cloaks, and banners,
Heralds, and relics of old Gothic manners

Form'd a sepulchral melodrame. Of all

The fools who flock'd to swell or see the show,

Who cared about the corpse? The funeral
Made the attraction, and the black the woe.

There throbb'd not there a thought which pierced the pall;
And when the gorgeous coffin was laid low,

It seem'd the mockery of hell to fold
The rottenness of eighty years in gold.

The rime royal stanza, in seven lines riming ababbcc, owes its name- so it is said—to the fact that King James I of Scotland, a poetic follower of Chaucer, used it. Chaucer himself, for whom the stanza should have been named, used it with consummate skill in his Troilus, The Parliament of Fowls, and in several of the Canterbury Tales. Notable poems employing the rime royal stanza are Shakespeare's Lucrece and Wordsworth's "Resolution and Independence." In more recent times the stanza has been frequently used by two ardent admirers of Chaucer-William Morris and John Masefield. Morris prefixed the following poem to The Earthly Paradise.

AN APOLOGY

Of Heaven or Hell I have no power to sing,
I cannot ease the burden of your fears,
Or make quick-coming death a little thing,
Or bring again the pleasure of past years,
Nor for my words shall ye forget your tears,
Or hope again, for aught that I can say,
The idle singer of an empty day.

But rather, when aweary of your mirth,
From full hearts still unsatisfied ye sigh
And, feeling kindly unto all the earth,
Grudge every minute as it passes by,

Made the more mindful that the sweet days die-
-Remember me a little then, I pray,

The idle singer of an empty day.

The heavy trouble, the bewildering care

That weighs us down who live and earn our bread
These idle verses have no power to bear;
So let me sing of names rememberèd,
Because they, living not, can ne'er be dead,
Or long time take their memory quite away
From us poor singers of an empty day.

Dreamer of dreams, born out of my due time,
Why should I strive to set the crooked straight?
Let it suffice me that my murmuring rhyme
Beats with light wing against the ivory gate,
Telling a tale not too importunate

To those who in the sleepy region stay,
Lulled by the singer of an empty day.

Folk say, a wizard to a northern king

At Christmas-tide such wondrous things did show
That through one window men beheld the spring,
And through another saw the summer glow,
And through a third the fruited vines a-row,
While still, unheard, but in its wonted way,
Piped the drear wind of that December day.

So with this Earthly Paradise it is,
If ye will read aright, and pardon me,
Who strive to build a shadowy isle of bliss

Midmost the beating of the steely sea,

Where tossed about all hearts of men must be;

Whose ravening monsters mighty men shall slay,
Not the poor singer of an empty day.

William Morris (1834-1896)

John Masefield uses rime royal in Dauber, The Widow in the Bye Street, and The Daffodil Fields. Although Masefield received his poetic inspiration from

Chaucer, his use of rime royal has little of the Chaucerian melody and charm which Morris often recaptured; in fact, the stanza gives an entirely different effect, that of vividness and power. We quote the opening stanzas of The Widow in the Bye Street:

Down Bye Street, in a little Shropshire town,
There lived a widow with her only son:
She had no wealth nor title to renown,
Nor any joyous hours, never one.

She rose from ragged mattress before sun
And stitched all day until her eyes were red,
And had to stitch, because her man was dead.

Sometimes she fell asleep, she stitched so hard,
Letting the linen fall upon the floor;
And hungry cats would steal in from the yard,
And mangy chickens pecked about the door,
Craning their necks so ragged and so sore
To search the room for bread-crumbs, or for mouse
But they got nothing in the widow's house.

Mostly she made her bread by hemming shrouds
For one rich undertaker in the High Street,
Who used to pray that folks might die in crowds
And that their friends might pay to let them lie sweet;
And when one died the widow in the Bye Street
Stitched night and day to give the worm his dole.
The dead were better dressed than that poor soul.

The Spenserian stanza, named for Edmund Spenser, who first used it in The Faërie Queene, is the most stately and impressive stanzaic form in English poetry. It consists of nine lines riming ababbcbcc. Its rime scheme is identical with the first nine lines of the Spenserian sonnet. The ninth line, which contains six feet and is called an