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Chapman speak out loud and bold: Then felt I like some watcher of the skies When a new planet swims into his ken; Or like stout Cortez when with eagle eyes He stared at the Pacific--and all his men Looked at each other with a wild surmise-- Silent, upon a peak in Darien." The first eight lines rhyme: a, b, b, a, a, b, b, a; the last six: c, d, c, d, c, d. Thus the sonnet halts only at one place, the interval between the eighth and the sixth lines, where the rest is welcome, while the emphasis, instead of coming out so brazenly at the end, reaches its climax in the next to the last line, dying away gradually. The order of the eight lines in the modern sonnet is almost invariably unchanged, but the sestet is varied as the movement of the thought dictates. As to sonnet construction little can be said here or, if one wished to go into detail, so much could be said that it would fill this volume a dozen times. Keats, Wordsworth and Rossetti, to say nothing of a dozen or more modern sonneteers, are safe models to follow. One trifling suggestion seems in order. There are so many really good sonnets now that a second-rate production is a drug on the market. Except as an exercise it is altogether superfluous. A first-class sonnet must be grounded first on an idea and then rewritten and worked over until the idea has found a fit setting. Commonplaceness either in the idea or its expression is alike fatal. VII THE BALLADE AND OTHER FRENCH FORMS CHAPTER VII THE BALLADE AND OTHER FRENCH FORMS The Anglo Saxons were a hard-drinking race whose bards chanted interminable battle songs to tables of uncritical, mead-filled heroes. As a result the English language grew up without many of the finer points of verse and bare especially of all fixed forms. It was this latter lack which Austin Dobson sought to supply by imitating in English the ballade, triolet, villanelle and other verse arrangements at that time used only by the French and not very generally among them. _The Ballade_ Of these the ballade is the best known, and Dobson's "Ballade of the Pompadour's Fan" is subjoined as one of the most popular and most easily imitated. "Chicken skin, delicate, white, Painted by Carlo Van Loo, Loves in a riot of light, Roses and vaporous blue; Hark to the dainty frou-frou! Picture above if you can Eyes that would melt like the dew-- This was the Pompadour's fan!
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