—­Coleridge.

The Spenserian stanza consists of nine lines:  the first eight are iambic pentameters, and the last line is an iambic hexameter or Alexandrine.  Burns makes use of this stanza in The Cotter’s Saturday Night. The following stanza from that poem shows the plan of the rhymes:—­

O Scotia! my dear, my native soil! 
  For whom my warmest wish to Heaven is sent! 
Long may thy hardy sons of rustic toil
  Be blest with health, and peace, and sweet content! 
  And oh! may Heaven their simple lives prevent
From luxury’s contagion, weak and vile! 
  Then, howe’er crowns and coronets be rent,
A virtuous populace may rise the while,
And stand a wall of fire around their much beloved isle.

EXERCISES

A. Scan the following:—­

Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting: 
The soul that rises with us, our life’s star,
  Hath had elsewhere its setting,
    And cometh from afar: 
  Not in entire forgetfulness,
  And not in utter nakedness,
But trailing clouds of glory do we come
    From God, who is our home.

—­Wordsworth.

Into the sunshine,
  Full of light,
Leaping and flashing
  From morn to night!

—­Lowell.

B. Name each verse in the following stanza:—­

  Hear the sledges with the bells—­
          Silver bells! 
What a world of merriment their melody foretells! 
  How they tinkle, tinkle, tinkle,
  In the icy air of night! 
While the stars that oversprinkle
  All the heavens seem to twinkle
    With a crystalline delight—­
  Keeping time, time, time,
  In a sort of Runic rhyme
To the tintinnabulation that so musically wells
  From the bells, bells, bells, bells,
    Bells, bells, bells—­
From the jingling and the tinkling of the bells.

—­Poe.

+117.  Kinds of Poetry.+-There are three general classes of poetry:  narrative, lyric, and dramatic.

A.  Narrative poetry, as may be inferred from its name, relates events which may be either real or imaginary.  Its chief varieties are the epic, the metrical romance or lesser epic, the tale, and the ballad.

An epic poem is an extended narrative of an elevated character that deals with heroic exploits which are frequently under supernatural control.  This kind of poetry is characterized by the intricacy of plot, by the delineation of noble types of character, by its descriptive effects, by its elevated language, and by its seriousness of tone.  The epic is considered as the highest effort of man’s poetic genius.  It is so difficult to produce an epic that but few literatures contain more than one.  Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, Virgil’s Aeneid, the German Nibelungenlied, the Spanish Cid, Dante’s Divine Comedy, and Milton’s Paradise Lost are important epics found in different literatures.