— 34 —
Rossetti put to the ancient stanza "How should I your true-love know?" (Hamlet IV. 5,25) under the title of "An old Song ended,"[1]) here comes a quatrain which reads almost exactly like one of Blake's Songs of Innocence in its child-like turn of phrase:
"For a token is there nought,
Say, that he should bring?"
"He will bear a ring I gave
And another ring."
In these poems we find a preference for monosyllabic words of Teutonic origin, with which often great dignity of expression has been achieved e.g. in the "White Ship"[2]) the lines:
"The ship was gone and the crowd was gone,
And the deep shuddered and the moon shone"
or in the following lines from "The Staff and Scrip":[3])
"Uncover ye his face", she said.
"O changed in little space!"
She cried, "O pale that was so red!
God, God of Grace!
Cover his face!"
Exactly as in Blake's lyrics, a profuse use of alliteration has been made; we also find the repetition of the same words, the same phrases or occasionally the same stanzas. Of Rossetti's use of alliteration I will not give examples, as there are hardly any poems in which no alliterative lines occur. I will merely mention the poem called "Chimes"[4]) in which alliteration has been carried to an excess, and where we find lines like:
