From: "Martin J. Walker" <[log in to unmask]>
> that was more or less superseded by the ghazal; there are imitations by
> Tennyson ("Locksley Hall") and Platen, according to _The Princeton
> Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics_ ~ I can only find ghazals among
Platen's
> work.
The PEPP (1993 -- the Tennyson reference is taken over from the 1974
edition) article on "Qasida" does indeed say this, but ...
It defines the rhyme scheme of qasida as aa ba ca etc., whereas "Locksley
Hall" is aa bb cc etc.
"Locksley Hall" is written in septameter trochaic couplets, and it would
seem to me that a more likely source is the old Poulter's Measure, with
trochiacs substituted for iambics. Tennyson has his own version of The
Poulter's Problem -- the lines tend to break down into abcb quatrains (as
below, with my relineation):
Locksley Hall
Comrades, leave me here a little,
while as yet 't is early morn:
Leave me here, and when you want me,
sound upon the bugle-horn.
'T is the place, and all around it,
as of old, the curlews call,
Dreary gleams about the moorland
flying over Locksley Hall;
(I refuse to quote any more of this interminable and boring poem!!)
Browning does it +so+ much better in "A Toccata of Galuppi's", with three
line stanzas -- aaa bbb ccc etc.
Even Auden in his homage/parody of "Locksley Hall" ('Get there if you can,
and see the land you once were proud to own') does it better.
The article on qasida is written/revised by W.L.H., a professor of Persian,
not Brogan -- Brogan I'd have more trust in if he'd made the Tennyson
comment.
Robin
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