stewamax wrote:Poe's narrator (in The Raven) was clearly haunted by adjectives ending in -er:
"Caught from some unhappy master whom unmerciful Disaster
Followed fast and followed faster till his songs one burden bore—
Till the dirges of his Hope that melancholy burden bore,
Of ‘Never—nevermore’.”
You may be reading too mucher into that (though I have to admit you've caught out my defective parody - touché. And I could so easily have reworded it). That rhyme scheme (two syllables, not just the weak syllable you highlight) is used throughout: it's a part of what gives the poem its drive. Lines 3 and 4 of each verse.
verse 1 wrote:While I nodded, nearly napping, suddenly there came a tapping,
As of some one gently rapping, rapping at my chamber door.
verse 2 wrote:Eagerly I wished the morrow;—vainly I had sought to borrow
From my books surcease of sorrow—sorrow for the lost Lenore
verse 3 wrote:So that now, to still the beating of my heart, I stood repeating
“’Tis some visitor entreating entrance at my chamber door
etc.
Note: the "-or" syllable at the end of line 4 runs through lines 2,4,5 and 6 of every verse (including my mimic above). Only lines 1 and 3 use different syllables from verse to verse in their internal rhymes. A very tight scheme!
And since this is Pedants' Place, I can add that text like this in The Raven that reaches a crescendo thus:
And since this is Pedant's Place, I must deplore your horrible misuse of the word "crescendo". Not to mention both our misuse of "And since" to begin a sentence!
Caught from some unhappy master | whom unmerciful Disaster | Followed fast and followed faster
is using a mix of the welsh 'cynghanedd sain' rhyming and the Old English 'A A | A' alliteration used by Langland in Piers Plowman
Hmmm. I don't think the alliteration is really a feature: it's not at all part of that strong pattern repeated across every verse. Though of course it's widely used in many Germanic and Nordic, as well as Old English traditions.
As UncleEbenezer - at least I think it was him! - has commented, the overall 'trochaic octameter plus a short line' metre used is difficult to set a song to or even to parody. Tennyson's Locksley Hall used trochaic octameters, and Locksley Hall was in turn parodied by William Bromley Davenport's foxhunting morality tale Lowesby Hall
I may very well have commented something to that effect. Even Beethoven sounds very four-square when he set Schiller's trochaic tetrameter, and in the hands of a lesser composer (like me) it would just become boring. Which makes Coleridge-Taylor's setting of Longfellow all the more impressive!