My love is like unto th' eternal fire, And I as those which therein do remain; Whose grievous pains is but their great desire To see the sight which they may not attain: So in hell's heat myself I feel to be, That am restrained by great extremity, The sight of her which is so dear to me. O! puissant love! and power of great avail! By whom hell may be felt e'er death assail! (SIR THOMAS WYATT: _Of the extreme torment endured by the unhappy lover._ ab. 1550.) _ababbcbcc_ ("_Spenserian stanza_") By this the Northerne wagoner had set His sevenfold teme behind the stedfast starre That was in Ocean waves yet never wet, But firme is fixt, and sendeth light from farre To all that in the wide deepe wandring arre; And chearefull Chaunticlere with his note shrill Had warned once, that Phœbus fiery carre In hast was climbing up the Easterne hill, Full envious that night so long his roome did fill. (SPENSER: _The Faerie Queene_, bk. i. canto 2, st. 1. 1590.) And more to lulle him in his slumber soft, A trickling streame from high rock tumbling downe, And ever-drizling raine upon the loft, Mixt with a murmuring winde, much like the sowne Of swarming Bees, did cast him in a swowne. No other noyse, nor peoples troublous cryes, As still are wont t'annoy the walled towne, Might there be heard; but carelesse Quiet lyes Wrapt in eternall silence farre from enimyes. (SPENSER: _ib._ bk. i. canto 1, st. 41.) This stanza, which Spenser invented for his own use and to which his name is always given, was apparently formed by adding an alexandrine to the _ababbcbc_ stanza of Chaucer. In it Spenser wrote the greater part of his poetry, and its use marks the Spenserian influence wherever found, especially among the poets of the eighteenth century,--Thomson, Shenstone, Beattie, and the like. James Russell Lowell, in his Essay on Spenser, comments as follows: "He found the _ottava rima_ ... not roomy enough, so first ran it over into another line, and then ran that added line over into an alexandrine, in which the melody of one stanza seems forever longing and feeling forward after that which is to follow.... Wave follows wave with equable gainings and recessions, the one sliding back in fluent music to be mingled with and carried forward by the next. In all this there is soothingness, indeed, but no slumberous monotony; for Spenser was no mere metrist, but a great composer. By the variety of his pauses--now at the close of the first or second foot, now of the third, and again of the fourth--he gives spirit and energy to a measure whose tendency it certainly is to become languorous." (_Works_, vol. iv. pp. 328, 329.) See also the chapters on the Spenserian stanza in Corson's _Primer of English Verse_, where its use for pictorial effects is interestingly discussed.