208 The Poetry of Mary Robinsoncoincide with the popularity of Gottfried August Bürger’s ballads,
“Lenora” and “The Lass of Fair Wone,” as translated by William Taylor
of Norwich in 1796, a year that saw four other translations, includ-
ing one by Poet Laureate Henry James Pye and one by Walter Scott.
When Percy writes that the “old Minstrel- ballads” are “extremely
incorrect, and run into the utmost license of metre,” he is addressing
the fact that their rhythms do not correspond to accentual- syllabic
metrical feet and are thus metrically uncouth (xxii). Percy recognized
that later ballads gradually became more “lyrical” in that they were
more metrically correct. But Taylor’s translations of Bürger’s ballads
into English, for example, deliberately reject foot verse in favor of
syncopated effects that resist conventional scansion. Taylor employs
the standard English ballad form, the four- line stanza (x 4 a 3 x 4 a 3 ) that
also had been revived in popularity by Thomas Chatterton, writing in
the guise of a fifteenth- century minstrel “Thomas Rowelie,” specifi-
cally in his ballad the “Bristowe Tragedie: or the Dethe of Syr Charles
Bawdin” (1777). As Taylor’s translations show, the German phonic
inf luence reinforced the accentual nature of the ballad stanza found
in Percy’s more (although not wholly) authentic Reliques.
The “Alonzo meter,” too, embedded as it is in the gothic, empha-
sizes the heavy accents of the older English ballads. So, what Paul
Fussell identifies as the new “technique of trisyllabic substitution”
in the 1790s, appearing “almost as if by some strange conspiracy,”
is actually an emphasis on the rhythms of English poetry taking
precedence over the syllabic count (148). Fussell is not incorrect to
refer to “trisyllabic substitution” because we do recognize in the
scansion of “the Alonzo meter” a strong tendency toward anapes-
tic sounds, giving the impression that the syllabic count is hyper-
metrical. But, unlike hypermetrical iambic pentameter lines, which
usually have an augmented or feminine ending, these lines always
end on a beat, or stressed syllable. For instance, the first, third, and
fourth lines of the five- line “Alonzo” stanza are the longest lines
per stanza, consisting of eleven or twelve syllables each; but these
lines, in order for them to have the characteristic rhythmic bounce,
contain no more than four stresses. To measure these lines as foot
verse would involve elaborate anapestic and dactylic substitutions in
i r reg u la r placement f rom l i ne to l i ne ; it i s more l i kely t hat L ew i s a nd
his imitators are listening for the stresses in these lines. Similarly,
the shorter second and fifth lines, as part of the overall sonic effect,
employ the same principle but on a smaller scale: they run to eight
or nine syllables while only expressing three stresses or beats. The
“Alonzo” stanza may be represented as a 4 b 3 a 4 a 4 b 3 , the operative9780230100251_07_ch05.indd 2089780230100251_07_ch05.indd 208 12/28/2010 11:09:03 AM12/28/2010 11:09:03 AM
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omso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-04-13