novation; only the common elementary forms are employed in a new way:—
With blackest moss the flower-plots
Were thickly crusted, one and all:
The rusted nails fell from the knots
That held the peach to the garden-wall
The broken sheds looked sad and strange;
Unlifted was the clinking latch;
Weeded and worn the ancient thatch;
Upon the lonely moated grange.
For one thing, the short line is here made weighty and solemn, nearly the equal of the heroic line. This in itself is no new effect, but it is used here in a new pattern; and the change from the alternate rhymes of the first quatrain to the In Memoriam stanza in the second is poetical invention.
There are two great families of verse (not two only) in modern poetry, which can be traced back to the beginnings of modern poetry in Provence about the year 1100. One is used for long-sustained passages, and the heroic line is its chief instrument, as in the Faerie Queene or in Paradise Lost: the other has a shorter length of wave and rings more
