Page:The Life of William Morris.djvu/314

ÆT. 39] metre,—for the English language, like the Latin, has developed too widely and changed too deeply in structure to revert to its Saturnians,—but forms essentially based on the same metrical principles. Of the experiments in this direction—still no more than tentative efforts amid the overwhelming predominance of the normal rhymed iambic metres—"Love is Enough" is one of the first and the most successful.

It was not indeed from any such wide and general considerations that Morris was led to essay its use. He simply went by known facts. As he had followed the metres of Chaucer for his narrative poems, he followed the metres of the earliest English plays for this dramatic poem. In these he found the alliterative Middle English verse, freed from the rigid rules which had governed it up to the close of the fourteenth century, and adapted to the changed modulation of a language which had by that time dropped its weak vowel-endings; but at the same time cramped and slightly vulgarized by an attempt to add the foreign enrichment of rhyme. For this metre, he instinctively felt, rhyme was unsuited, unless where it was desired, for special occasions, to raise it by this additional ornament to a lyric tension. But rhyme was for the metre a purely artificial importation: the solution, then, was quite simple: do away with the rhymed endings, and there is left a verse as elastic and varied as the regular alliterative verse native to England, less difficult to write, and better adapted to modern vocabulary and intonation of speech. The experiment has remained an isolated one. He never repeated it himself; for his translation of "Beowulf," a tour de force executed for a special object, keeps as closely as possible to the original metre of early English poetry, with its rigid metrical laws, and its mouldings (if a metaphor