The persistent alliteration seems to come without
effort, and often the rhymes within lines are seductive; while the refrain
or burden dominates the whole work. Here also he had profited by Miss
Barrett's study of ballads and romaunts in her own and other tongues. A
"refrain" is the lure wherewith a poet or a musician holds the wandering
ear,--the recurrent longing of Nature for the initial strain. I have always
admired the beautiful refrains of the English songstress,--"The
Nightingales, the Nightingales," "Margret, Margret," "My Heart and I,"
"Toll slowly," "The River floweth on," "Pan, Pan is dead," etc. She also
employed what I term the Repetend, in the use of which Poe has excelled all
poets since Coleridge thus revived it:
"O happy living things! no tongue
Their beauty might declare:
A spring of love gushed from my heart,
And I blessed them unaware:
Sure my kind saint took pity on me,
And I blessed them unaware."
Poe created the fifth line of his stanza for the magic of the repetend. He
relied upon it to the uttermost in a few later poems,--"Lenore," "Annabel
Lee," "Ulalume," and "For Annie." It gained a wild and melancholy music, I
have thought, from the "sweet influences," of the Afric burdens and
repetends that were sung to him in childhood, attuning with their native
melody the voice of our Southern poet.
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