foreign forms of verse took it into new ways, and sent it, say as “tumbling verse,” down to our own time, justified by such a line as Browning’s
“Seethed in fat and suppled in flame”. . .
yet in its own person it passed the stage of the conquest, kept its vigor, suffered few notable changes, and appears as a popular and effective verse, some six centuries from the date of the original Beowulf, in the Piers Plowman poems. Englishmen of that day had ears to hear “rum-ram-ruf” in no mocking spirit, as well as to greet the harmonious flow of Chaucer’s pentameter. That very pentameter, too, reveals from time to time in the actual four-stress tendency, and,—though not so often,—in its initial rimes, a hint of the old rhythmic structure:
“Ther shyveren shaftës upon sheeldës thikkë” . . .
In short, if the two systems—old four-stressed initial-rimed and new pentameter—could appeal to the same hearers, and if Chaucer is now the delight for lovers of verse that he was in his own day, there should be no difficulty for modern ears to allow the dual presence. William Morris employed something akin to the old rhythm in parts of his charming Love is Enough:
"For as lone as thou liest in a land that we see not,
When the world loseth thee, what is left for its losing?"
Yet, apart from its haphazard and unregulated initial rimes, this rhythm is far too swift in its pace for the old verse. Professor J. L. Hall used it for his translation of Beowulf very effectively; but though he curbed it here and there, it is still too rapid, and the initial rimes are not fully carried out. The translation of Beowulf by Morris and Wyatt cannot be called an improvement on
