The now book-length poem is written in four-line stanzas, all in rhyming heptameter couplets, with the first stanza repeated at the end: a form used most famously in Canada by Robert Service in "The Cremation of Sam McGee.'Tt is meant for recitation, and the rhythmic narrative causes readers like me to rush through it headlong, though a well-practised recitation by the writer's son Kelly Russell runs over five minutes.
If we compare the relative tempos of meters, we can observe that a heptameter will tend to be slightly quicker than a hexameter, a hexameter quicker than a pentameter, and all the way down.
Series of irregular heptameter verse are found in [section][section] 7, 33, 45 (two series), 48, and 134; and of both irregular heptameter and tetrameter verse in [section][section] 68 and 94.
The Vice 'drags' rhyme royal 'in the mud', (106) while the revenging hero Horestes speaks chiefly in the clumsy rhymed heptameter line known as the fourteener.
This latter edition is in some ways a harsher critique of Landon's elegy; it bears her name and collapses the eight-line stanzas into the other ballad form, heptameter quatrains.
Through the rhymed iambic heptameter, the epithets ("the bounding step," "dark foaming stream"), and the synecdoches (the heart, the hand), Hemans transplants American Indian experience from its own cultural ground to English soil.
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