A Study of Poetry Part 12

The Chaucerian stanza rhymes _a b a b b c c_:

"'Loke up, I seye, and telle me what she is Anon, that I may gone aboute thi nede: Know iche hire ought? for my love telle me this; Thanne wolde I hopen the rather for to spede.'

Tho gan the veyne of Troilus to blede, For he was. .h.i.t, and wex alle rede for schame; 'Aha!' quod Pandare, 'here bygynneth game.'"

Byron's "ottava rima" rhymes _a b a b a b c c_:

"A mighty ma.s.s of brick, and smoke, and shipping, Dirty and dusky, but as wide as eye Could reach, with here and there a sail just skipping In sight, then lost amidst the forestry Of masts; a wilderness of steeples peeping On tiptoe through their sea-coal canopy; A huge, dun cupola, like a foolscap crown On a fool's head--and there is London Town!"

The Spenserian stanza rhymes _a b a b b c b c c_, with an extra foot in the final line:

"Hee had a faire companion of his way, A goodly lady clad in scarlot red, Purfled with gold and pearle of rich a.s.say; And like a Persian mitre on her hed Shee wore, with crowns and owches garnished, The which her lavish lovers to her gave: Her wanton palfrey all was overspred With tinsell trappings, woven like a wave, Whose bridle rung with golden bels and bosses brave."

In considering these various groups of lines which we call stanzas it is clear that we have to do with thought-units as well as feeling-units, and that both thought-units and feeling-units should be harmonized, if possible, with the demands of beauty and variety of sound as represented by the rhymes. It is not absurd to speak of the natural "size" of poetic thoughts. Pope, for instance, often works with ideas of couplet size, just as Martial sometimes amused himself with ideas of a still smaller epigram size, or Omar Khayyam with thoughts and fancies that came in quatrain sizes. Many sonnets fail of effectiveness because the contained thought is too scanty or too full to receive adequate expression in the fourteen lines demanded by the traditional sonnet form. They are sometimes only quatrain ideas, blown up big with words to fill out the fourteen lines, or, on the contrary, as often with the Elizabethans, they are whole odes or elegies, remorselessly packed into the fashionable fourteen-line limit. No one who has given attention to the normal length of phrases and sentences doubts that there are natural "breathfuls" of words corresponding to the units of ideas; and when ideas are organized by emotion, there are waves, gusts, or ripples of words, matching the waves of feeling. In the ideal poetic "pattern," these waves of idea, feeling and rhythmic speech would coincide more or less completely; we should have a union of "emotional law" with "stanzaic law," the soul of poetry would find its perfect embodiment.

But if we turn the pages of any collection of English poetry, say the _Golden Treasury_ or the _Oxford Book of English Verse_, we find something very different from this ideal embodiment of each poetic emotion in a form delicately moulded to the particular species of emotion revealed. We discover that precisely similar stanzaic patterns--like similar metrical patterns--are often used to express diametrically opposite feelings,--let us say, joy and sorrow, doubt and exultation, victory and defeat. The "common metre" of English hymnology is thus seen to be a rough mould into which almost any kind of religious emotion may be poured. If "trochaic"

measures do not always trip it on a light fantastic toe, neither do "iambic" measures always pace sedately. Doubtless there is a certain general fitness, in various stanza forms, for this or that poetic purpose: the stanzas employed by English or Scotch balladry are admittedly excellent for story-telling; Spenser's favorite stanza is unrivalled for painting dream-pictures and rendering dream-music, but less available for pure narration; Chaucer's seven-line stanza, so delicately balanced upon that fourth, pivotal line, can paint a picture and tell a story too; Byron's _ottava rima_ has a devil-may-care jauntiness, borrowed, it is true, from his Italian models, but perfectly fitted to Byron's own mood; the rhymed couplets of Pope sting and glitter like his ant.i.theses, and the couplets of Dryden have their "resonance like a great bronze coin thrown down on marble"; each great artist in English verse, in short, chooses by instinct the general stanza form best suited to his particular purpose, and then moulds its details with whatever cunning he may possess. But the significant point is this: "stanzaic law" makes for uniformity, for the endless repet.i.tion of the chosen pattern, which must still be recognized as a pattern, however subtly the artist modulates his details; and in adjusting the infinitely varied material of thought and feeling, phrase and image, picture and story to the fixed stanzaic design, there are bound to be gaps and patches, stretchings and foldings of the thought-stuff,-- for even as in humble tailor-craft, this many-colored coat of poetry must be cut according to the cloth as well as according to the pattern. How many pages of even the _Oxford Book of English Verse_ are free from some touch of feebleness, of redundancy, of constraint due to the remorseless requirements of the stanza? The line must be filled out, whether or not the thought is quite full enough for it; rhyme must match rhyme, even if the thought becomes as far-fetched as the rhyming word; the stanza, in short, demands one kind of perfection as a constantly repeated musical design, as beauty of form; and another kind of perfection as the expression of human emotion. Sometimes these two perfections of "form" and "significance" are miraculously wedded, stanza after stanza, and we have our "Ode to a Nightingale," or "Ode to Autumn" as the result. (And perhaps the best, even in this kind, are but shadows, when compared with the absolute union of truth and beauty as the poetic idea first took rhythmic form in the brain of the poet.)

Yet more often lovers of poetry must content themselves, not with such "dictates of nature" as these poems, but with approximations. Each stanzaic form has its conveniences, its "fatal facility," its natural fitness for singing a song or telling a story or turning a thought over and over into music. Intellectual readers will always like the epigrammatic "snap" of the couplet, and Spenser will remain, largely because of his choice of stanza, the "poet's poet." Perhaps the very necessity of fitting rhymes together stimulates as much poetic activity as it discourages; for many poets have testified that the delight of rhyming adds energy to the imagination. If, as Sh.e.l.ley said, "the mind in creation is as a fading coal, which some invisible influence, like an inconstant wind, awakens to transitory brightness," why may it not be the breath of rhyme, as well as any other form of rhythmic energy, which quickens its drooping flame? And few poets, furthermore, will admit that they are really in bondage to their stanzas. They love to dance in these fetters, and even when wearing the same fetters as another poet, they nevertheless invent movements of their own, so that Mr. Masefield's "Chaucerian" stanzas are really not so much Chaucer's as Masefield's.

Each Ulysses makes and bends his own bow, after all; it is only the unsuccessful suitors for the honors of poetic craftsmanship who complain of its difficulties. Something of our contemporary impatience with fixed stanzaic forms is due perhaps to the failure to recognize that the greater poets succeed in making over every kind of poetic pattern in the act of employing it, just as a Chopin minuet differs from a Liszt minuet, although both composers are using the same fundamental form of dance music. We must allow for the infinite variety of creative intention, technique and result. The true defence of rhyme and stanza against the arguments of extreme advocates of free verse is to point out that rhyme and stanza are natural structural devices for securing certain effects. There are various types of bridges for crossing different kinds of streams; no one type of bridge is always and everywhere the best. To do away with rhyme and stanza is to renounce some modes of poetic beauty; it is to resolve that there shall be one less way of crossing the stream. An advocate of freedom in the arts may well admit that the artist may bridge his particular stream in any way he can,--or he may ford it or swim it or go over in an airplane if he chooses. But some method must be found of getting his ideas and emotions "across" into the mind and feelings of the readers of his poetry. If this can adequately be accomplished without recourse to rhyme and stanza, very well; there is _Paradise Lost_, for instance, and _Hamlet_. But here we are driven back again upon the countless varieties of artistic intention and craftsmanship and effect.

Each method--and there are as many methods as there are poets and far more, for craftsmen like Milton and Tennyson try hundreds of methods in their time--is only a medium through which the artist is endeavoring to attain a special result. It is one way--only one, and perhaps not the best way--of trying to cross the stream.

_4. Free Verse_

Recalling now the discussion of the rhythms of prose in the previous chapter, and remembering that rhyme and stanza are special forms of reinforcing the impulse of rhythm, what shall be said of free verse? It belongs, unquestionably, in that "neutral zone" which some readers, in Dr.

Patterson's phrase, instinctively appropriate as "prose experience," and others as "verse experience." It renounces metre--or rather endeavors to renounce it, for it does not always succeed. It professes to do away with rhyme and stanza, although it may play cunningly upon the sounds of like and unlike words, and it may arrange phrases into poetic paragraphs, which, aided by the art of typography, secure a kind of stanzaic effect.

It cannot, however, do away with the element of rhythm, with ordered time.

The moment free verse ceases to be felt as rhythmical, it ceases to be felt as poetry. This is admitted by its advocates and its opponents alike. The real question at issue then, is the manner in which free verse may secure the effects of rhythmic unity and variety, without, on the one hand, resorting to the obvious rhythms of prose, or on the other hand, without repeating the recognized patterns of verse. There are many competent critics who maintain with Edith Wyatt that "on an earth where there is nothing to wear but clothes, nothing to eat but food, there is also nothing to read but prose and poetry." "According to the results of our experiments," testifies Dr. Patterson, "there is no psychological meaning to claims for a third _genre_ between regular verse and prose, except in the sense of a jumping back and forth from one side of the fence to the other."

[Footnote: _The Rhythm of Prose_, p. 77.]

And in the preface to his second edition, after having listened to Miss Amy Lowell's readings of free verse, Dr. Patterson remarks: "What is achieved, as a rule, in Miss Lowell's case, is emotional prose, emphatically phrased, excellent and moving. _s.p.a.ced prose_, we may call it."

Now "s.p.a.ced prose" is a useful expression, inasmuch as it calls attention to the careful emphasis and balance of phrases which up so much of the rhetorical structure of free verse, and it also serves to remind us of the part which typography plays in "s.p.a.cing" these phrases, and stressing for the eye their curves and "returns." But we are all agreed that typographical appeals to the eye are infinitely deceptive in blurring the distinction between verse and prose, and that the trained ear must be the only arbiter as to poetical and pseudo-poetical effects. Ask a lover of Walt Whitman whether "s.p.a.ced prose" is the right label for "Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking," and he will scoff at you. He will maintain that following the example of the rich broken rhythms of the English Bible, the example of Ossian, Blake, and many another European experimenter during the Romantic epoch, Whitman really succeeded in elaborating a mode of poetical expression, nearer for the most part to recitative than to aria, yet neither pure declamation nor pure song: a unique embodiment of pa.s.sionate feeling, a veritable "neutral zone," which refuses to let itself be annexed to either "prose" or "verse" as those terms are ordinarily understood, but for which "free verse" is precisely the right expression. _Leaves of Gra.s.s_ (1855) remains the most interesting of all experiments with free verse, written as it was by an artist whose natural rhythmical endowment was extraordinary, and whose technical curiosity and patience in modulating his tonal effects was unwearied by failures and undiscouraged by popular neglect. But the case for free verse does not, after all, stand or fall with Walt Whitman. His was merely the most powerful poetic personality among the countless artificers who have endeavored to produce rhythmic and tonal beauty through new structural devices.

Readers who are familiar with the experiments of contemporary poets will easily recognize four prevalent types of "free verse":

(a) Sometimes what is printed as "free verse" is nothing but prose disguised by the art of typography, i.e. judged by the ear, it is made up wholly of the rhythms of prose.

(b) Sometimes the prose rhythms predominate, without excluding a mixture of the recognized rhythms of verse.

(c) Sometimes verse rhythms predominate, and even fixed metrical feet are allowed to appear here and there.

(d) Sometimes verse rhythms and metres are used exclusively, although in new combinations which disguise or break up the metrical pattern.

A parody by F. P. A. in _The Conning Tower_ affords a convenient ill.u.s.tration of the "a" type:

ADD SPOON RIVER ANTHOLOGY

Peoria, Ill., Jan. 24.--The Spoon River levee, which protected thousands of acres of farm land below Havana, Ill., fifty-five miles south of here, broke this morning.

A score or more of families fled to higher ground. The towns of Havana, Lewiston and Duncan Mills are isolated. Two dozen head of cattle are reported drowned on the farm of John Himpsh.e.l.l, near Havana.--a.s.sociated Press dispatch.

Edgar Lee Masters wrote a lot of things About me and the people who Inhabited my banks.

All of them, all are sleeping on the hill.

Herbert Marshall, Amelia Garrick, Enoch Dunlap, Ida Frickey, Alfred Moir, Archibald Highbie and the rest.

Me he gave no thought to-- Unless, perhaps, to think that I, too, was asleep.

Those people on the hill, I thought, Have grown famous; But n.o.body writes about me.

I was only a river, you know, But I had my pride, So one January day I overflowed my banks; It wasn't much of a flood, Mr. Masters, But it put me on the front page And in the late dispatches Of the a.s.sociated Press.

It is clear that the quoted words of the a.s.sociated Press dispatch from Peoria are pure prose, devoid of rhythmical pattern, devoted to a plain statement of fact. So it is with the imaginary speech of the River. Not until the borrowed fourth line:

"All of them, all are sleeping on the hill,"

do we catch the rhythm (and even the metre) of verse, and F. P. A. is here imitating Mr. Masters's way of introducing a strongly rhythmical and even metrical line into a pa.s.sage otherwise flatly "prosaic" in its time-intervals. But "free verse" adopts many other cadences of English prose besides this "formless" structure which goes with matter-of-fact statement. It also reproduces the neat, polished, perhaps epigrammatic sentence which crystallizes a fact or a generalization; the more emotional and "moving" period resulting from heightened feeling, and finally the frankly imitative and ornamented cadences of descriptive and highly impa.s.sioned prose. Let us take some ill.u.s.trations from Sidney Lanier's _Poem Outlines_, a posthumously published collection of some of his sketches for poems, "jotted in pencil on the backs of envelopes, on the margins of musical programmes, or little torn sc.r.a.ps of paper."

"The United States in two hundred years has made Emerson out of a witch-burner."

This is polished, graphic prose. Here is an equally graphic, but more impa.s.sioned sentence, with the staccato rhythm and the alliterative emphasis of good angry speech:

_To the Politicians_

"You are servants. Your thoughts are the thoughts of cooks curious to skim perquisites from every pan, your quarrels are the quarrels of scullions who fight for the privilege of cleaning the pot with most leavings in it, your committees sit upon the landings of back-stairs, and your quarrels are the quarrels of kitchens."

But in the following pa.s.sage, apparently a first draft for some lines in _Hymns of the Marshes_, Lanier takes a strongly rhythmical, heavily punctuated type of prose, as if he were writing a Collect:

"The courses of the wind, and the shifts thereof, as also what way the clouds go; and that which is happening a long way off; and the full face of the sun; and the bow of the Milky Way from end to end; as also the small, the life of the fiddler-crab, and the household of the marsh-hen; and more, the translation of black ooze into green blade of marsh-gra.s.s, which is as if filth bred heaven: This a man seeth upon the marsh."

In that rhapsody of the marsh there is no recognizable metrical scheme, in spite of the plainly marked rhythm, but in the following symbolic sketch the imitation of the horse's ambling introduces an element of regular metre:

"Ambling, ambling round the ring, Round the ring of daily duty, Leap, Circus-rider, man, through the paper hoop of death, --Ah, lightest thou, beyond death, on this same slow-ambling, padded horse of life."

And finally, in such fragments as the following, Lanier uses a regular metre of "English verse"--it is true with a highly irregular third line--

"And then A gentle violin mated with the flute, And both flew off into a wood of harmony, Two doves of tone."

It is clear that an artist in words, in jotting down thoughts and images as they first emerge, may instinctively use language which is subtly blended of verse and prose, like many rhapsodical pa.s.sages in the private journals of Th.o.r.eau and Emerson. When duly elaborated, these pa.s.sages usually become, in the hands of the greater artists, either one thing or the other, i.e. unmistakable prose or unmistakable verse. But it remains true, I think, that there is another artistic instinct which impels certain poets to blend the types in the endeavor to reach a new and hybrid beauty.

[Footnote: Some examples of recent verse are printed in the "Notes and Ill.u.s.trations" for this chapter.]

Take these ill.u.s.trations of the "b" type--i.e. prose rhythms predominant, with some admixture of the rhythms of verse:

"I hear footsteps over my head all night.

They come and go. Again they come and again they go all night.

They come one eternity in four paces and they go one eternity in four paces, and between the coming and the going there is Silence and Night and the Infinite.

For infinite are the nine feet of a prison cell, and endless is the march of him who walks between the yellow brick wall and the red iron gate, thinking things that cannot be chained and cannot be locked, but that wander far away in the sunlit world, in their wild pilgrimage after destined goals.

Throughout the restless night I hear the footsteps over my head.

Who walks? I do not know. It is the phantom of the jail, the sleepless brain, a man, the man, the Walker.

One--two--three--four; four paces and the wall."

[Footnote: From Giovanitti's "The Walker."]