Her passionate Romeo:
O Love and O Love's delight!

"And it stirs us still in spite
Of its 'ever so long ago,'
That voice in the scented night;
O Love and O Love's delight!"

The second lines of each stanza rhyme and the first and third lines of
the first stanza are alternated as refrains.

The sestina has six six-line stanzas and an envoy: in the stanzas the
final words of each line remain the same throughout, though the order is
changed. In the three-line envoy the six words must appear again and in
an established order. The sestina is a trifle too long to quote, but
one of the best and sanest examples is to be found in Kipling's Seven
Seas--"The Sestina of the Tramp Royal." Swinburne's sestinas though
"poetic" are very cloudy in meaning.

The pantoum, another involved arrangement, is made up of four-line
stanzas in which the second and fourth lines of the first verse are used
as the first and third lines of the second verse, and so on _ad
infinitum_ until the weary author ends by repeating the first and third
lines of the whole production as the second from the last and the last
of the concluding stanza.

There is great good for the beginner in writing these French forms even
if he takes up the work only as an exercise. Their construction is so
certain and fixed that an error is glaring. Though it may be
brow-wrinkling to build a ballade, it is a simple matter to see its
faults.

There is also value in these forms for the advanced student. They embody
suggestions for new stanza forms and fresh verse in general. The use of
the ballade variant may be found in Kipling. When varied the triolet
may give exactly the right ring for some idea which refuses to fit
itself into the conventional molds. When one has served his
apprenticeship he may arrange and rearrange as he sees fit, bending the
stanza to his purpose. Of the forms he is not the slave but the master.

VIII

THE SONG

CHAPTER VIII

THE SONG

A variety of verse which has great vogue now and which has so developed
as to be considered almost as individual as the rondeau or sonnet is the
modern "song."

Formerly the "song" was written to music or at least written that it
might be set to music, but now it must sing itself. It may dress in
sober iambics if it pleases, but there must be a lilt and go to the
words to suggest music. Among the best examples of this form open to the
reader are the songs of Robert Burns. Though w