A Study of Poetry Part 10

"Each verse contains 21 syllables, with a caesura after the 12th. No further regularity, either metrical or rhythmical, can be perceived.

Such a verse could probably not have been written except for music."

Church-music, apparently, was also a factor in the development of versification,--particularly that "Gregorian" style which demanded neither quant.i.tative nor accentual rhythm, but simply a fair count of syllables in the libretto, note matching syllable exactly. But when the great medieval Latin hymns, like _Dies ire_, were written, the Syllabic principle of versification, like the Quant.i.tative principle, dropped out of sight, and we witness once more the emergence of the Stress or accentual system, heavily ornamented with rhymes.

[Footnote: See the quotation from Taylor's _Cla.s.sical Heritage of the Middle Ages_ printed in the "Notes and Ill.u.s.trations" for this chapter.]

Yet the Syllabic method reappears once more, we were told, in French prosody, and thus affects the verse of Chaucer and of subsequent English poetry, and it still may be studied, isolated as far as may be from considerations of quant.i.ty and stress, in certain English songs written for music, where syllable carefully matches note. The "long metre"

(8 syllables), "short metre" (6 syllables) and "common metre"

(7 syllables, 6 syllables) of the hymn books is a convenient ill.u.s.tration of thinking of metre in terms of syllables alone.

_6. The Appeal to the Ear_

At this point, perhaps, having set forth the three theories of _Quant.i.ty, Stress_ and _Syllable_, our instructors were sensible enough to make an appeal to the ear. Reminding us that stress was the controlling principle in Germanic poetry,--although not denying that considerations of quant.i.ty and number of syllables might have something to do with the effect,--they read aloud to us some Old English verse. Perhaps it was that _Song of the Battle of Brunanburh_ which Tennyson has so skilfully rendered into modern English words while preserving the Old English metre. And here, though the Anglo-Saxon words were certainly uncouth, we caught the chief stresses without difficulty, usually four beats to the line. If the instructor, while these rude strokes of rhythm were still pounding in our ears, followed the Old English with a dozen lines of Chaucer, we could all perceive the presence of a newer, smoother, more highly elaborated verse-music, where the number of syllables had been cunningly reckoned, and the verse-accent seemed always to fall upon a syllable long and strong enough to bear the weight easily, and the rhymes rippled like a brook. Whether we called the metre of the _Prologue_ rhymed couplets of iambic pentameter, or rhymed couplets of ten-syllabled, five-stressed verse, the music, at least, was clear enough. And so was the music of the "blank" or unrhymed five-stress lines of Marlowe and Shakspere and Milton, and as we listened it was easy to believe that "stress" and "quant.i.ty" and "syllable," all playing together like a chime of bells, are concordant and not quarrelsome elements in the harmony of modern English verse. Only, to be richly concordant, each must be prepared to yield a little if need be, to the other!

I have taken too many pages, perhaps, in thus sketching the rudimentary education of a college student in the elements of rhythm and metre, and in showing how the theoretical difficulties of the subject--which are admittedly great--often disappear as soon as one resolves to let the ear decide. A satisfied ear may soothe a dissatisfied mind. I have quoted from a letter of an American scholar about quant.i.ty being the "controlling"

element of cultivated Roman verse, and I now quote from a personal letter of an American poet, emphasizing the necessity of "reading poetry as it was meant to be read": "My point is _not_ that English verse has no quant.i.ty, but that the controlling element is not quant.i.ty but accent. The lack of fixed _syllabic _quant.i.ty is just what I emphasize. This lack makes definite _beat _impossible: or at least it makes it absurd to attempt to scan English verse by feet. The proportion of 'irregularities'

and 'exceptions' becomes painful to the student and embarra.s.sing to the professor. He is put to fearful straits to explain his prosody and make it fit the verse. And when he has done all this, the student, if he has a good ear, forthwith forgets it all, and reads the verse as it was meant to be read, as a succession of musical bars (without pitch, of course), in which the accent marks the rhythm, and pauses and _rests _often take the place of missing syllables. To this ingenuous student I hold out my hand and cast in my lot with him. He is the man for whom English poetry is written."

It may be objected, of course, that the phrase "reading poetry as it was meant to be read" really begs the question. For English poets have often amused themselves by composing purely quant.i.tative verse, which they wish us to read as quant.i.tative. The result may be as artificial as the painfully composed Latin quant.i.tative verse of English schoolboys, but the thing can be done. Tennyson's experiments in quant.i.ty are well known, and should be carefully studied. He was proud of his hexameter:

"High winds roaring above me, dark leaves falling about me,"

and of his pentameter:

"All men alike hate slops, particularly gruel."

Here the English long and short syllables--as far as "long" and "short"

can be definitely distinguished in English--correspond precisely to the rules of Roman prosody. The present Laureate, Robert Bridges, whose investigations in English and Roman prosody have been incessant, has recently published a book of experiments in writing English quant.i.tative hexameters.

[Footnote: _Ibant Obscuri_. New York, Oxford University Press, 1917.]

Here are half a dozen lines:

"Midway of all this tract, with secular arms an immense elm Reareth a crowd of branches, aneath whose lofty protection Vain dreams thickly nestle, clinging unto the foliage on high: And many strange creatures of monstrous form and features Stable about th' entrance, Centaur and Scylla's abortion, And hundred-handed Briareus, and Lerna's wild beast...."

These are lines interesting to the scholar, but they are somehow "non-English" in their rhythm--not in accordance with "the genius of the language," as we vaguely but very sensibly say. Neither did the stressed "dactylic" hexameters of Longfellow, written though they were by a skilful versifier, quite conform to "the nature of the language."

_7. The a.n.a.logy with Music_

One other attempt to explain the difficulties of English rhythm and metre must at least be mentioned here, namely the "musical" theory of the American poet and musician, Sidney Lanier. In his _Science of English Verse_, an acute and very suggestive book, he threw over the whole theory of stress--or at least, retained it as a mere element of a.s.sistance, as in music, to the marking of time, maintaining that the only necessary element in rhythm is equal time-intervals, corresponding to bars of music.

According to Lanier, the structure of English blank verse, for instance, is not an alternation of unstressed with stressed syllables, but a series of bars of 3/8 time, thus:

[Ill.u.s.tration: Five bars of 3/8 time, each with a short and a long note.]

Thomson, Dabney and other prosodists have followed Lanier's general theory, without always agreeing with him as to whether blank verse is written in 3/8 or 2/4 time. Alden, in a competent summary of these various musical theories as to the basis of English verse, [Footnote: _Introduction to Poetry_, pp. 190-93. See also Alden's _English Verse_, Part 3. "The Time-Element in English Verse."]

quotes with approval Mr. T. S. Omond's words: "Musical notes are almost pure symbols. In theory at least, and no doubt substantially in practice, they can be divided with mathematical accuracy--into fractions of 1/2, 1/4, 1/8, 1/16, etc.--and the ideal of music is absolute accordance with time. Verse has other methods and another ideal. Its words are concrete things, not readily carved to such exact pattern.... The perfection of music lies in absolute accordance with time, that of verse is continual slight departures from time. This is why no musical representations of verse ever seem satisfactory. They a.s.sume regularity where none exists."

_8. Prosody and Enjoyment_

It must be expected then, that there will be different preferences in choosing a nomenclature for modern English metres, based upon the differences in the individual physical organism of various metrists, and upon the strictness of their adherence to the significance of stress, quant.i.ty and number of syllables in the actual forms of verse. Adherents of musical theories in the interpretation of verse may prefer to speak of "duple time" instead of iambic-trochaic metres, and of "triple" time for anapests and dactyls. Natural "stressers" may prefer to call iambic and anapestic units "rising" feet, to indicate the ascent of stress as one pa.s.ses from the weaker to the stronger syllables; and similarly, to call trochaic and dactylic units "falling" feet, to indicate the descent or decline of stress as the weaker syllable or syllables succeed the stronger. Or, combining these two modes of nomenclature, one may legitimately speak of iambic feet as "duple rising,"

"And never lifted up a single stone";

trochaic as "duple falling,"

"Here they are, my fifty perfect poems";

anapestic as "triple rising,"

"But he lived with a lot of wild mates, and they never would let him be good";

and dactylic as "triple falling";

"Cannon to right of them, cannon to left of them."

If a line is felt as "metrical," i.e. divided into approximately equal time-intervals, the particular label employed to indicate the nature of the metre is unimportant. It may be left to the choice of each student of metre, provided he uses his terms consistently. The use of the traditional terminology "iambic," "trochaic," etc., is convenient, and is open to no objection if one is careful to make clear the sense in which he employs such ambiguous terms.

It should also be added, as a means of reconciling the apparently warring claims of stress and quant.i.ty in English poetry, that recent investigations in recording through delicate instruments the actual time-intervals used by different persons in reading aloud the same lines of poetry, prove what has long been suspected, namely, the close affiliation of quant.i.ty with stress.

[Footnote: "Syllabic Quant.i.ty in English Verse," by Ada F. Snell, _Pub. Of Mod, Lang. a.s.s_., September, 1918.]

Miss Snell's experiments show that the foot in English verse is made up of syllables 90 per cent of which are, in the stressed position, longer than those in the unstressed. The average relation of short to long syllables, is, in spite of a good deal of variation among the individual readers, almost precisely as 2 to 4--which has always been the accepted ratio for the relation of short to long syllables in Greek and Roman verse. If one examines English words in a dictionary, the quant.i.ties of the syllables are certainly not "fixed" as they are in Greek and Latin, but the moment one begins to read a pa.s.sage of English poetry aloud, and becomes conscious of its underlying type of rhythm, he fits elastic units of "feet" into the steadily flowing or pulsing intervals of time.

The "foot" becomes, as it were, a rubber link in a moving bicycle chain.

The revolutions of the chain mark the rhythm; and the stressed or unstressed or lightly stressed syllables in each "link" or foot, accommodate themselves, by almost unperceived expansion and contraction, to the rhythmic beat of the pa.s.sage as a whole.

Nor should it be forgotten that the "sense" of words, their meaning-weight, their rhetorical value in certain phrases, constantly affects the theoretical number of stresses belonging to a given line. In blank verse, for instance, the theoretical five chief stresses are often but three or four in actual practice, lighter stresses taking their place in order to avoid a pounding monotony, and conversely, as in Milton's famous line,

"Rocks, caves, lakes, dens, bogs, fens, and shades of death,"

the rhetorical significance of the monosyllables compels an overloading of stresses which heightens the desired poetic effect. Corson's _Primer of English Verse_ and Mayor's _English Metres_ give numerous examples from the blank verse of Milton and Tennyson to ill.u.s.trate the constant subst.i.tution and shifting of stresses in order to secure variety of music and suggestive adaptations of sound to sense. It is well known that Shakspere's blank verse, as he developed in command of his artistic resources, shows fewer "end-stopped" lines and more "run-on" lines, with an increasing proportion of light and weak endings. But the same principle applies to every type of English rhythm. As soon as the dominant beat--which is commonly, but not always, apparent in the opening measures of the poem--once a.s.serts itself, the poet's mastery of technique is revealed through his skill in satisfying the ear with a verbal music which is never absolutely identical in its time-intervals, its stresses or its pitch, with the fixed, wooden pattern of the rhythm he is using.

For the human voice utters syllables which vary their duration, stress and pitch with each reader. Photographs of voice-waves, as printed by Verrier, Scripture, and many other laboratory workers, show how great is the difference between individuals in the intervals covered by the upward and downward slides or "inflections" which indicate doubt or affirmation. And these "rising" and "falling" and "circ.u.mflex" and "suspended" inflections, which make up what is called "pitch-accent," are constantly varied, like the duration and stress of syllables, by the emotions evoked in reading.

Words, phrases, lines and stanzas become colored with emotional overtones due to the feeling of the instant. Poetry read aloud as something sensuous and pa.s.sionate cannot possibly conform exactly to a set mechanical pattern of rhythm and metre. Yet the hand-woven Oriental rug, though lacking the geometrical accuracy of a rug made by machinery, reveals a more vital and intimate beauty of design and execution. Many well-known poets--Tennyson being perhaps the most familiar example--have read aloud their own verses with a peculiar chanting sing-song which seemed to over-emphasize the fundamental rhythm. But who shall correct them? And who is ent.i.tled to say that a line like Swinburne's

"Full-sailed, wide-winged, poised softly forever asway"

is irregular according to the foot-rule of traditional prosody, when it is probable, as Mr. C. E. Russell maintains, that Swinburne was here composing in purely musical and not prosodical rhythm?

[Footnote: "Swinburne and Music," by Charles E. Russell, _North American Review_, November, 1907. See the quotation in the "Notes and Ill.u.s.trations" for this chapter.]

Is it not true, furthermore, as some metrical sceptics like to remind us, that if we once admit the principle of subst.i.tution and equivalence, of hypermetrical and truncated syllables, of pauses taking the place of syllables, we can very often make one metre seem very much like another?

The question of calling a given group of lines "iambic" or "trochaic," for instance, can be made quite arbitrary, depending upon where you begin to count syllables. "Iambic" with initial truncation or "trochaic" with final truncation? Tweedle-dum or tweedle-dee? Do you count waves from crest to crest or from hollow to hollow? When you count the links in a bicycle chain, do you begin with the slender middle of each link or with one of the swelling ends? So is it with this "iambic" and "trochaic" matter.

Professor Alden, in a suggestive pamphlet, [Footnote: "The Mental Side of Metrical Form," already cited.]

confesses that these contrasting concepts of rising and falling metre are nothing more than concepts, alterable at will.

But while the experts in prosody continue to differ and to dogmatize, the lover of poetry should remember that versification is far older than the science of prosody, and that the enjoyment of verse is, for millions of human beings, as unaffected by theories of metrics as the stars are unaffected by the theories of astronomers. It is a satisfaction to the mind to know that the stars in their courses are amenable to law, even though one be so poor a mathematician as to be incapable of grasping and stating the law. The mathematics of music and of poetry, while heightening the intellectual pleasure of those capable of comprehending it, is admittedly too difficult for the ma.s.s of men. But no lover of poetry should refuse to go as far in theorizing as his ear will carry him. He will find that his susceptibility to the pulsations of various types of rhythm, and his delight in the intricacies of metrical device, will be heightened by the mental effort of attention and a.n.a.lysis. The danger is that the lover of poetry, wearied by the quarrels of prosodists, and forgetting the necessity of patience, compromise and freedom from dogmatism, will lose his curiosity about the infinite variety of metrical effects. But it is this very curiosity which makes his ear finer, even if his theories may be wrong. Hundreds of metricists admire and envy Professor Saintsbury's ear for prose and verse rhythms while disagreeing wholly with his dogmatic theories of the "foot," and his system of notation. There are sure to be some days and hours when the reader of poetry will find himself bored and tired with the effort of attention to the technique of verse. Then he can stop a.n.a.lysing, close his eyes, and drift out to sea upon the uncomprehended music.

"The stars of midnight shall be dear To her; and she shall lean her ear In many a secret place Where rivulets dance their wayward round, And beauty born of murmuring sound Shall pa.s.s into her face."

CHAPTER VI