line. Now it is perhaps as near to Finnish verse as English verse can be
made. But the Finnish verse is more musical, and it is much more flexible,
and the rules of it can be better carried out than in English. There is
much more to be thought about than the placing of four trochaic feet to a
line. Not only must the verse be trochaic, it must also be alliterative,
and it must also be, to some extent, rhymed verse--a matter which
Longfellow did not take into consideration. That would have doubled his
difficulty. To make verse trochaic, alliterative and rhymed, is very
difficult indeed--that is, to do it well. Only one liberty is allowed; it
is not necessary that the rhyme shall be regular and constant; it is
necessary only that it should be occasional. But the interest of Finnish
verse does not end here. I have not yet mentioned the most important law
of Finnish poetry--the law of parallelism or repetition. Parallelism is
the better word. It means the repetition of a thought in a slightly
modified way. It is parallelism especially that makes so splendid the
English translation of the Bible, and the majesty of such passages in the
Book of Common Prayer as the Funeral Service. So that Finnish poetry is
anything but very simple. We may now sum it up thus--trochaic verse of
eight syllables, with alliteration and rhyme, a caesura in the same part
of every line, and every line reiterated in parallelism.

A little above I mentioned the English of the Bible. Long ago I explained
why that English is so beautiful and so strong. But remember that much of
the best of the Bible, in the original Hebrew, was not prose but verse,
and that the fine effects have been produced by translating the verse into
musical prose. The very effect can be produced by translating the
"Kalevala" into prose. Occasionally the passages are of surprising beauty,
and they are always of surprising strangeness.

It is in parallelism especially that Finnish poetry offers a contrast to
Japanese, but there is no reason whatever why, in the longer poems of
Japanese poetry, parallelism could not be used. All things have value
according to place and time, and this has value--provided that it has a
special effect on a special occasion. All through the "Kalevala," all
through five hundred pages, large pages, the parallelism is carried on,
and yet one never gets tired. It is not monotonous. But that is because
the subject is so well adapted to this form of poetry. See