Poetry and the Thought of Song in Nineteenth-Century Britain by Helsinger Elizabeth K.;

Author:Helsinger, Elizabeth K.;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Lightning Source Inc. (Tier 3)

This song within a song concludes by returning to repeat the warning against “a false false love.” After a brief narrative interval, Rachel sings “a second strain” in yet another verse pattern, where the rhythm seems to shift definitively, with the second two lines, toward the trochaic:

“There goes the swallow—

Could we but follow!

Hasty swallow stay,

Point us out the way;

Look back swallow, turn back swallow, stop swallow.” (71–75)

The song can’t stop the temporal migration of the swallow (or its own migrations from iambic to trochaic), of course, nor can the maidens follow, though its long-lined stanza-ends imitatively try to stay the swallow’s flight. Or they can’t succeed, at any rate, in the way Rachel or Lettice or May imagines. But now Marian, the abandoned lover, sings her song in a voice “sweeter than that voice” and “sweeter than its wont,” “like one who grieves,” the narrative voice suggests, only to correct itself, “Like one who hopes and grieves” (88, 90, 89, 93):

“Deeper than the hail can smite,

Deeper than the frost can bite,

Deep asleep thro’ day and night,

Our delight.” (94–97)

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