Virginia Lucas Poetry Scrapbook

A Formal Description of "Florence Vane"

            “Florence Vane” is Philip Pendleton Cooke’s most famous poem. The poem follows an interesting meter scheme throughout the five eight-line stanzas. Each stanza follows the same pattern of starting with a longer iambic trimeter line followed by a shorter trochaic dimeter line with this repeating until the eighth line which ends on the iambic dimeter. This makes it so that each stanza has four iambic trimeter lines and four trochaic dimeter lines. The poem has a pure meter which means that there are no exceptions to the pattern—it is consistent throughout. With how Virginia Lucas transcribed the poem, there are about fifteen enjambments (sentences that continue onto the next line without punctuation) within the piece that appear inconsistently. 
            The poem follows a consistent rhyme scheme of ABABCDCD in each eight-line stanza. The iambic trimeter lines have feminine rhymes while the trochaic dimeter lines having masculine rhymes. The rhyme scheme is almost all true rhymes except for three rhyme sets which are slant rhymes. Within the first four lines of the poem, Cooke rhymes “dearly” with “early,” and “Vane” with “again.” While these sounds are close enough, they’re not perfect making them slant rhymes. This happens again in the fifth and seventh lines of the third stanza where “river” is rhymed with “never.” These are the only points of inconsistency within the poem’s rhyme scheme. 
            Alliteration is used subtly within the poem with the letter “L” sound appearing in many lines. It can be seen in the first line of the poem “I loved thee long and dearly.” Here, the “L” sound appears in every other word making the use of the consonant obvious. The sound is fairly constant throughout the rest of the poem with it being more obvious again in the first line of the last stanza, “The lilies of the valley,” where it’s heard in the first and last words.