Whatever you need for memorable narrative verse, whatever you want for reading aloud, whatever you hope for thrilling romantic tales, you won’t find much better than the poem by Sir Walter Scott (1771–1832) that begins “young Lochinvar is come out of the west.” It gallops, it swoons, it mocks, and it triumphs. “So daring in love, and so dauntless in war, / Have ye e’er heard of gallant like young Lochinvar?”

Sir Walter Scott — whose birthday is today, August 15 — was the best-known British poet in the early years of the 19th century, writing such long narrative poems as “The Lay of the Last Minstrel” (1805) and “The Lady of the Lake” (1810). The British bought the books in droves, while on the continent the Europeans took Scott (1771–1832) as the model of romanticism (which is why so many Italian operas were made from his work). But then came Lord Byron’s “Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage” (1812–1818), and Scott was clever enough to recognize that the ground of romantic poetry had shifted. He mostly gave up verse, turned instead to prose fiction — with his historical tales and Scottish stories racing through such novels as “Ivanhoe,” “Rob Roy,” “The Bride of Lammermoor,” and nearly two dozen more. His poetry never slipped into obscurity, however, and the popular Victorian anthologies made set pieces for recitation out of extracts from his books — notably “Lochinvar,” from Canto 5 of “Marmion” (1808). In eight six-line stanzas of rhymed couplets of anapestic tetrameter (ba BAM ba ba BAM ba ba BAM ba ba BAM), Scott tells of the young knight who swept into his love’s wedding feast, persuaded the bride to elope with him, and galloped away — while her weak would-be bridegroom, “a laggard in love, and a dastard in war,” stood by, “dangling his bonnet and plume.”