1919.] 
New Zealand Institute Science Congress. 
329 
To translate this stave with its alliterations and half-alliterations is a 
task of some difficulty, which is attempted in the following :— 
Broww her eyes were brimmmg 
Brightly on me lighting 
Glances gledewise shining 
Gimoed unhard and open 
(From) brow as snow on broad hill 
Blent in morning splearfid 
Lac&aday that love blinfc 
Looms with sorrow gloomy. 
In the first place, apart altogether from alliteration or other ornament, 
the verses of the stanza have kinship to the classic hexameter, especially 
to the English form of it:— 
Brown her eyes were brimming, brightly on me lighting 
and 
Brown were her eyes as the berry that grows on the thorn by the wayside, 
where it is merely a question of making two-syllabled units into three- 
syllabled. Again— 
One by one the pale stars die before the day now, 
One by one the great ships are stirring from their sleep. 
There is the verse in modern guise, the abrupt rhythm changed to the 
ordinary in the second verse. But there is more. A rhythm is thoroughly 
naturalized once it forms the vehicle for children’s nursery-rimes :—- 
and 
One by one the great ships are stirring from their sleep 
Sing a song of six pence a pocket full of rye. 
Here we have two verses, each with seven units, the eighth unit being- 
represented by the pause at the end of the verse, as may be shown by filling 
the pause with sound — 
Sing a song of six pence a pocket full of peas and rye 
Four and twenty black birds, &c. 
In the ordinary reading the common Ballad verse of seven units emerges. 
But it may be said that the nursery-rime is not ordinarily recited in that 
slow deliberate way. It is not recited 
but 
Sing a song of six pence, &c. 
Sing a song of sixpence a pocket full of rye. 
Good ; it is true ; and the result is that the verse of seven two-syllabled 
units becomes a line of four four-syllabled units ; two verses of seven units 
becoming one full verse of eight units. So that out of one ancient stave or 
stanza we have, by various readings, all the forms assumed by the modern 
lyric verse unit. The full verse of eight units may be taken as the norm": 
it is the usual verse of the old metrical romances, and it has been made 
familiar to modern readers by Scott in his tales in verse, and more recently 
by Morris in “ The Earthly Paradise.” A classic in early modern English is 
Gower’s “ Confessio Amantis.” All these are written in couplet form— 
that is, the verse is divided into two riming lines. 
Ill fared it then with Roderick Dhu 
That on the field his targe he threw, 
Whose brazen studs and tough bull-hide 
Had death so often turned aside ; 
For, trained abroad his arms to wield, 
Fitz James’s blade was sword and shield. 
