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ke. -- Secular music, any music or songs not adapted to sacred uses. -- Secular hymn or poem, a hymn or poem composed for the secular games, or sung or rehearsed at those games.

of my nativity, . . . and have nothing at his hands for my service but blows. Shak. This poem was the last piece of service I did for my master, King Charles. Dryden. To go on the forlorn hope is a service of peril; who will understake it if it be not also a service of honor Macaulay.

Unsubstantial; unreal; as, shadowy honor. Milton has brought into his poems two actors of a shadowy and fictitious nature, in the persons of Sin and Death. Addison.

a. [Written also schah.] Shah Nameh. Etym: [Per., Book of Kings.] A celebrated historical poem written by Firdousi, being the most ancient in the modern Persian language. Brande & C.

icating want of modesty, or sensibility to disgrace; indecent; as, a shameless picture or poem.

th blessed thee, since my coming. Gen. xxx. 30. I have a model by which he build a nobler poem than any extant since the ancients. Dryden.

wrought by solid toil what the myth-making imagination of the Germans had projected in a poem. J. A. Symonds.

A written composition, reciting what it is supposed a person says to himself. The whole poem is a soliloquy. Prior.

A lyrical poem adapted to vocal music; a ballad.

A short poem, -- usually amatory. [Obs.] Shak. He had a wonderful desire to chant a sonnet or hymn unto Apollo Pythius. Holland.

A composer of sonnets, or small poems; a small poet; -- usually in contempt. What woful stuff this madrigal would be In some starved hackney sonneteer or me! Pope.

lities; a class or order; as, a sort of men; a sort of horses; a sort of trees; a sort of poems.

A Sotadic verse or poem.

pertaining to the English poet Spenser; -- specifically applied to the stanza used in his poem "The Faërie Queene."

again; a stanza; a stave. Cowley found out that no kind of staff is proper for an heroic poem, as being all too lyrical. Dryden.

A number of lines or verses forming a division of a song or poem, and agreeing in meter, rhyme, number of lines, etc., with other divisions; a part of a poem, ordinarily containing every variation of measure in that poem; a combination or arrangement of lines usually recurring; whether like or unlike, in measure. Horac…

Fig.: Abortive; as, a stillborn poem. Swift.

Any sustained note or movement; a song; a distinct portion of an ode or other poem; also, the pervading note, or burden, of a song, poem, oration, book, etc.; theme; motive; manner; style; also, a course of action or conduct; as, he spoke in a noble strain; there was a strain of woe in his story; a strain of trickery a…

23. Now and then a glittering beam of wit or passion strikes through the obscurity of the poem. Dryden.

freer form, with arguments or programmes to explain their meaning, such as the "symphonic poems" of Liszt. The term was formerly applied to any composition for an orchestra, as overtures, etc., and still earlier, to certain compositions partly vocal, partly instrumental.