Rhyme royal

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The rhyme royal ("royal rhyme"; also royal stanza ) is a stanza form of English poetry.

It consists of seven verses in a heroic verse (a form of iambic Five lifter ) designated meter with the rhyme scheme [ababbcc]. So the stanza can either be divided into a terzine and two pair of rhymes ([aba: bb: cc]) or in a four-line and a three-line ([abab: bcc]) can be divided. This allows the rhyme royal a lot of leeway, especially in epic poems.

The form was invented by Geoffrey Chaucer (hence also called Chaucer stanza ), who developed it by omitting the seventh line from the eight-syllable French ballad stanza (ababbcbc). Chaucer used them in some of his early poems ( The Parliament of Fowles ), in Troilus and Criseyde, and in four of his Canterbury Tales .

The name of the stanza is probably due to the fact that King James I of Scotland used it in his Chauceresque poem The Kingis Quaire (shortly before 1424).

Numerous English poets have used the form after Chaucer, including:

An example from Wyatt's They flee from me that sometime did me seek :

They flee from me that sometime did me seek
With naked foot, stalking in my chamber.
I have seen them gentle, tame, and meek,
That now are wild and do not remember
That sometime they put themself in danger
To take bread at my hand; and now they range,
Busily seeking with a continual change.

At the end of the 16th century, the stanza form lost its importance. Recent attempts at resuscitation by Thomas Chatterton , William Morris , John Masefield, and Emma Lazarus have been without echo. Modified forms can be found - partly with Alexandrines as the last verse - and a modified rhyme scheme in John Donne and John Milton ([ababccc]), James Thomson ([ababccb]) and Robert Browning ([ababcca]). A variant of the royal stanza is the stanza with the ababbaa rhyme scheme:

This is a spray the Bird clung to,
Making it blossom with pleasure,
Ere the high tree-top she jump to,
Fit for her nest and her treasure.
O, what a hope beyond measure
What the poor spray's, which the flying feet hung to,
So to be singled out, built in, and sung to!
(Robert Browning, Misconceptions)

literature

  • Hans-Jürgen Diller: Metrics and Verslehre. Bagel, Düsseldorf 1978, ISBN 3-513-02268-9 , pp. 121-123.
  • Martin Stevens: The Royal Stanza in Early English Literature. In: PMLA , Vol. 94, No. 1 (1979), pp. 62-76.
  • Gero von Wilpert : Subject dictionary of literature. 8th edition Kröner, Stuttgart 2013, ISBN 978-3-520-84601-3 , p. 690.

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Alexander Barclay: This present boke named the shyp of folys of the worlde was translated in the college of Saynt Mary Otery in the counte of Deuonshyre out of Laten, Frenche, and Doche into Englysshe tonge . London 1509.
  2. ↑ Stephen Hawes: The Passetyme of Pleasure. London 1509.
  3. ↑ In: The Mirror for Magistrates (1563 edition), a collection of poems from the Tudor period.
  4. ↑ Friedhelm Kemp, Werner von Koppenfels (ed.): English and American poetry: English poetry: from Chaucer to Milton. Vol. 1. Beck, Munich 2000, ISBN 3406464645 , p. 82.
  5. ↑ Emma Lazarus, Epochs (in :) The Poems of Emma Lazarus, in Two Volumes Vol. I. Narrative, Lyric, and Dramatic
  6. ↑ http://www.bartleby.com/101/728.html