man sat in unwomanly rags
Plying her needle and thread--
Stitch! Stitch! Stitch!
In poverty, hunger and dirt;
And still with a voice of dolorous pitch
She sang the "song of the shirt."

Here the first and third lines are unrhymed, the second and fourth, the
fifth and seventh, and the sixth and eighth lines rhyme alternately in
couplets. If the beginnings of the verses are noticed it will be seen
that the indentations of the lines correspond with the rhymes.

Rhymes are not always used in poetry. Most of Shakespeare's plays are
written in _blank verse_, which is unrhymed iambic pentameter, called
_heroic verse_. _Hiawatha_ and _Evangeline_ are not rhymed, the former
being trochaic tetrameter and the latter largely dactylic hexameter.

Frequently appeal is made to the ear by a similarity of sound at the
beginning of words. This is known as _alliteration_. In early English
poems this was of prime importance and subject to rigid rules, but more
recently it has been used without rule, subject merely to the author's
will. This is seen to a marked degree in many writers. Here are several
lines taken from Poe's _The Bells_:

What a world of _m_erriment their _m_elody foretells,
What a _t_ale of _t_error now their _t_urbulency _t_ells.
In a mad expostulation with the dea_f_ and _f_rantic _f_ire.

In many cases alliteration is very skilfully handled, as where Whittier
uses the liquid consonants to make more smooth and harmonious to the ear
the line that tells the friendliness of the brooklet whose murmurings
could not be heard in winter, but--

"The music of whose _li_quid _li_p
Had been to us companionship"

during the long summer days.

The number of verses in a stanza varies from two to an indefinite
number. When there are two verses the stanza is called a couplet; a
three line stanza is called a tercet; a four line stanza, a quatrain.
The five line stanza is not common, but six is a frequent number.

_Kinds of Poetry_

Poems may be classified as epic, lyric and dramatic.

The word _epic_ is by some writers restricted in its application, but it
is preferred here to use it in a broad sense to include various forms of
narrative poetry, and to use the term greater, or heroic, epic to
designate the smaller class of narratives which the older writers knew
as epics. Thomas Arnold's definition of the greater epic is: "The
subject of the Epic Poem must be some one, gr