English Verse Part 57

With regard to the principle of Variety in Uniformity by which verses ought to be modulated, and oneness of impression diversely produced, it has been contended by some that poetry need not be written in verse at all; that prose is as good a medium, provided poetry be conveyed through it, and that to think otherwise is to confound letter with spirit, or form with essence. But the opinion is a prosaical mistake. Fitness and unfitness for _song_, or metrical excitement, just make all the difference between a poetical and prosaical subject; and the reason why verse is necessary to the form of poetry is that the perfection of poetical spirit demands it--that the circle of its enthusiasm, beauty, and power is incomplete without it. I do not mean that a poet can never show himself a poet in prose; but that being one, his desire and necessity will be to write in verse; and that, if he were unable to do so, he would not and could not deserve his t.i.tle. Verse to the true poet is no clog. It is idly called a trammel and a difficulty. It is a help.

It springs from the same enthusiasm as the rest of his impulses, and is necessary to their satisfaction and effect.... Verse is the final proof to the poet that his mastery over his art is complete. It is the shutting up of his powers in "_measureful_ content"; the answer of form to his spirit; of strength and ease to his guidance.... Verse, in short, is that finishing, and rounding, and "tuneful planeting" of the poet's creations which is produced of necessity by the smooth tendencies of their energy or inward working, and the harmonious dance into which they are attracted round the orb of the beautiful. Poetry, in its complete sympathy with beauty, must of necessity leave no sense of the beautiful, and no power over its forms, unmanifested; and verse flows as inevitably from this condition of its integrity as other laws of proportion do from any other kind of embodiment of beauty....

Every poet, then, is a versifier; every fine poet an excellent one; and he is the best whose verse exhibits the greatest amount of strength, sweetness, straightforwardness, unsuperfluousness, variety, and oneness;--oneness, that is to say, consistency in the general impression, metrical and moral; and variety, or every pertinent diversity of tone and rhythm, in the process.... It is thus that versification itself becomes part of the sentiment of a poem, and vindicates the pains that have been taken to show its importance. I know of no very fine versification unaccompanied with fine poetry; no poetry of a mean order accompanied with verse of the highest.

(LEIGH HUNT: _What is Poetry?_ Cook ed., pp. 37-40, 61.)

No literary expression can, properly speaking, be called poetry that is not in a certain deep sense emotional, whatever may be its subject-matter, concrete in its method and its diction, rhythmical in movement, and artistic in form.... That poetry must be metrical or even rhythmical in movement, however, is what some have denied. Here we touch at once the very root of the subject.... While prose requires intellectual life and emotional life, poetry seems to require not only intellectual life and emotional life but rhythmic life.... Unless the rhythm of any metrical pa.s.sage is so vigorous, so natural, and so free that it seems as though it could live, if need were, by its rhythm alone, has that pa.s.sage any right to exist? and should it not, if the substance is good, be forthwith demetricized and turned into prose? ...

Aristotle ignored, and Plato slighted, the importance of versification (though Plato on one occasion admitted that he who did not know rhythm could be called neither musician nor poet).... On the whole, however, the theory that versification is not an indispensable requisite of a poem seems to have become nearly obsolete in our time. Perhaps, indeed, many critics would now go so far in the contrary direction as to say with Hegel (_aesthetik_, iii. p. 289) that "metre is the first and only condition absolutely demanded by poetry, yea even more necessary than a figurative picturesque diction."

(THEODORE WATTS: Article on "Poetry" in _Encyclopaedia Britannica_.)

Verse-rhythm in words is the imposition of a _sensible_ order on what naturally and normally has only a _logical_ order; and there is piquancy in the feeling that so little is this ideal control a fettering instrument, that each order seems to gain verve and spontaneity from the other, or rather from the latent sense that the other, though present and operative, is powerless to hamper it. Much more important, however, is it to notice how the sense that one single thing--the word-series--is lending itself to this joint dominance may take the form of a sort of transfigured surprise. (The root-principle here involved is the old one of "unity in variety," the _single_ line of words, "dominated at once by the idea which they express in their grammatical connection and by their metrical adjustment," clearly possessing _two_ independent functions or aspects. See the fuller discussion of "The Sound-element in Verse," in chapter xix. of _The Power of Sound_.) ... When, as in verse, the sounds are pointedly addressed _both_ to the ear and to the understanding, the rarity of the combination of aspects contributes a strain of feeling partly akin to that with which we follow an exhibition of skill, and partly to that with which we receive an unexpected gratuity....

Nor is this all. Rhythm perpetually not only transfigures the poetical expression of an idea, but makes the existence of that expression possible. This is tolerably obvious in the case of what is often called _par excellence_ poetical language--language which keeps clear of prosaic homeliness and prosaic precision and of technical and abstract terms, and confines itself to a more picturesque and loftier vocabulary.... Clearly it is the rarity of rhythmic, as compared with non-rhythmic, speech that supports such rarity of poetic as compared with non-poetic diction; that is to say, verse, being in one respect--namely, its effect on the ear--a marked exception from ordinary language, thereby establishes for itself the means of being exceptional, without seeming unnatural, in other ways....

... In dwelling on the non-reasonable part in poetical beauty, I am in no way committed to the a.s.sertion that all its const.i.tuents are excluded from prose, but only to the a.s.sertion that the metrical form makes a difference of kind. It cannot be for nothing that the very idea of "poetical prose" inspires dread; and the instances of prose-writing where we find delight of the intangible and non-reasonable kind are exceptions that only prove the rule. One has but to test by self-examination the living force of words in a specimen of verse and of poetical prose which may respectively seem to oneself first-rate of their kind. For such typical pa.s.sages may often be regarded as fairly on a par in respect of the ideas and emotions which they reasonably express; and the prose may unquestionably further resemble the poetry in a certain subtle individuality of life in its more prominent words, so far as this life can be quickened in them by the idea itself, aided by such qualities of sound-arrangement as are possible apart from metre. So far the poetical merits of the respective pa.s.sages may be equal; yet only one of them is Poetry.... Language, which in prose does little more than transmit thought, like clear gla.s.s, becomes--even as that becomes--by art's adjustments and the moulding of measured form, a lens, where the thought takes fire as it pa.s.ses. The poet speaks through a medium which seems to intensify the point and to extend the range of what he would tell us by some power outside his own volition. Such a power, in fact, a rhythmic order, in its fundamental appeal to human nerves, literally is.... The _ictus_ of the verse comes upon us as the operative force which shocks the words into their unwonted life.

... In considering the total contribution of metre to imaginative language, it is impossible to overlook the quality of _permanence_. I do not mean permanence merely in the sense that metrical words live in the memory.... This is, of course, a most important fact; but I am here dealing only with elements of effect that enter into the actual moment of enjoyment.... It is a sense of combined parts, and their indispensableness one to another, which gives us a sense of permanence in an arch as compared with a casual heap of stones; it is a similar indispensableness which gives to metrical language an air of permanence impossible even to the most harmonious sentence whose sounds conform to no genuine scheme. And again, in the case of this const.i.tuent as of the others, we have no difficulty in seeing that its influence is really a joint one of sound and sense--that, though founded in the nature of metrical sound as such, it is not merely a sound-quality superposed _ab extra_ on the intelligible beauty of the words, but depends for its existence on their intelligible character.... We cannot glory in the enshrining for memory of things that we do not care to remember. But for that which is of true spiritual significance the fairly-fitted body of sound is greeted as the inevitable invest.i.ture; and thus justified and quickened, the strength of the mutually indispensable parts seems no longer that of mere structure but of organic life.

(EDMUND GURNEY: Essay on "Poets, Critics, and Cla.s.s-Lists," in _Tertium Quid_, vol. ii. pp. 162-179, _pa.s.sim_.)

Why have poets always written in metre? The answer is, Because the laws of artistic expression oblige them to do so. When the poet has been inspired from without in the way in which we saw Scott was inspired to conceive the _Lay of the Last Minstrel_--that is to say, when he has found his subject-matter in an idea, universally striking to the imagination, when he has received this into his own imagination, and has given it a new and beautiful form of life there, then he will seek to express his conception through a vehicle of language harmonizing with his own feelings and the nature of the subject, and this kind of language is called verse. For example, when Marlowe wishes to represent the emotions of Faustus, after he has called up the phantom of Helen of Troy, it is plain that some very rapturous form of expression is needed to convey an adequate idea of such famous beauty. Marlowe rises to the occasion in those "mighty lines" of his:

"Was this the face that launched a thousand ships, And burned the topless towers of Ilium?"

But it is certain that he could only have ventured on the sublime audacity of saying that a face launched ships and burned towers by escaping from the limits of ordinary language, and conveying his metaphor through the harmonious and ecstatic movements of rhythm and metre....

I think Wordsworth's a.n.a.lysis of emotion is clearly wrong. The reason why the harrowing descriptions of Richardson are simply painful, while Shakspere's tragic situations are pleasurable, is that the imagination shrinks from dwelling on ideas so closely imitated from real objects as the scenes in _Clarissa Harlowe_, but contemplates without excess of pain the situation in _Oth.e.l.lo_, for example, because the imitation is poetical and ideal. Prose is used by Richardson because his novel professedly resembles a situation of real life; metre is needed by Shakspere to make the ideal life of his drama real to the imagination.

Wordsworth, if I may say so, has put the poetical cart before the horse....

The propriety of poetical expression is the test and the touch-stone of the justice of poetical conception.... Poetry lies in the invention of the right metrical form--be it epic, dramatic, lyric, or satiric--for the expression of some idea universally interesting to the imagination.

When the form of metrical expression seems _natural_--natural, that is, to the genius of the poet and the inherent character of the subject--then the subject-matter will have been rightly conceived....

Apply this test of what is natural in metrical expression to any composition claiming to be poetically inspired, and you will be able to decide whether it fulfils the universal conditions of poetical life, or whether it is one of those phantoms, or, as Bacon calls them, idols of the imagination, which vanish as soon as the novelty of their appearance has exhausted its effect. For instance, the American poet, Walt Whitman, announces his theme, and asks for the sympathy of the reader in these words:

"Oneself I sing, a simple, separate person, Yet utter the word Democratic, the word En Ma.s.se.

Poets to come, orators, singers, musicians to come, Not to-day is to justify me and answer what I am for, But you, a new brood, native, athletic, continental, greater than before known, Arouse! for you must justify me!..."

To this appeal I think the reader may reply: The subject you have chosen is certainly an idol of the imagination. For if you had anything of universal interest to say about yourself, you could say it in a way natural to one of the metres, or metrical movements, established in the English language. What you call metre bears precisely the same relation to these universal laws of expression, as the Mormon church and the religion of Joseph Smith and Brigham Young bear to the doctrines of Catholic Christendom.[58] ...

Why do we so often find men in these days, either using metre ... where they ought to have expressed themselves in prose, or expressing themselves in verse in a style so far remote from the standard of diction established in society that they fail to touch the heart? I think the explanation of this curious phenomenon is that, though metre can only properly be used for the expression of universal ideas, there is in modern society an eccentric or monastic principle at work, which leads men to pervert metre into a luxurious instrument for the expression of merely private ideas.

(WILLIAM JOHN COURTHOPE: _Life in Poetry, Law in Taste_, pp. 71-83.)

Language is colloquial and declarative in our ordinary speech, and on its legs for common use and movement. Only when it takes wings does it become poetry. As the poet, touched by emotion, rises to enthusiasm and imaginative power or skill, his speech grows _rhythmic_, and thus puts on the attribute that distinguishes it from every other mode of artistic expression--the guild-mark which, rightly considered, establishes the nature of the thing itself.... Our new empiricism, following where intuition leads the way, comprehends the function of _vibrations_: it perceives that every movement of matter, seized upon by universal force, is _vibratory_; that vibrations, and nothing else, convey through the body the look and voice of nature to the soul; that thus alone can one incarnate individuality address its fellow; that, to use old Bunyan's imagery, these vibrations knock at the ear-gate, and are visible to the eye-gate, and are sentient at the gates of touch of the living temple.

The word describing their action is in evidence; they "thrill" the body, they thrill the soul, both of which respond with subjective, interblending vibrations, according to the keys, the wave-lengths, of their excitants. Thus it is absolutely true that what Buxton Forman calls "idealized language,"--that is, speech which is imaginative and rhythmical,--goes with emotional thought; and that words exert a mysterious and potent influence, thus chosen and a.s.sorted, beyond their normal meanings....

Aside from the vibratory mission of rhythm, its little staff of adjuvants, by the very discipline and limitations which they impose, take poetry out of the plane of common speech, and make it an art which lifts the hearer to its own unusual key. Schiller writes to Goethe that "rhythm, in a dramatic work, treats all characters and all situations according to one law.... In this manner it forms the atmosphere for the poetic creation. The more material part is left out, for only what is spiritual can be borne by this thin element." In real, that is, spontaneous minstrelsy, the fittest a.s.sonance, consonance, time, even rime, ... come of themselves with the imaginative thought.... Such is the test of genuineness, the underlying principle being that the masterful words of all poetic tongues are for the most part in both their open and consonantal sounds related to their meanings, so that with the inarticulate rhythm of impa.s.sioned thought we have a correspondent verbal rhythm for its vehicle. The whole range of poetry which is vital, from the Hebrew psalms and prophecies, in their original text and in our great English version, to the Georgian lyrics and romances and the Victorian idyls, confirms the statement of Mill that "the deeper the feeling, the more characteristic and decided the rhythm." The rapture of the poet governs the tone and accent of his

"high and pa.s.sionate thoughts To their own music chanted."

(EDMUND CLARENCE STEDMAN: _The Nature and Elements of Poetry_, pp.

51-55.)

We agree, then, to call by the name of poetry that form of art which uses rhythm to attain its ends, just as we call by the name of flying that motion which certain animals attain by the use of wings; that the feelings roused by poetry can be roused by unrhythmic order of words, and that rhythmic order of words is often deplorably bad art, or "unpoetic," have as little to do with the case as the fact that a greyhound speeding over the gra.s.s gives the spectator quite the exhilaration and sense of lightness and grace which is roused by the flight of a bird, and the fact that an awkward fowl makes itself ridiculous in trying to fly, have to do with the general proposition that flying is a matter of wings.... As a matter of fact, all writers on poetry take rhythm for granted until some one asks why it is necessary; whereupon considerable discussion, and the protest signed by a respectable minority, but a minority after all, that rhythm is not an essential condition of the poetic art. This discussion, as every one knows, has been lively and at times bitter. A patient and comprehensive review of it in a fairly impartial spirit has led to the conclusion, first, that no test save rhythm has been proposed which can be put to real use, even in theory, not to mention the long reaches of a historical and comparative study; secondly, that all defenders of the poem in prose are more or less contradictory and inconsistent, making confusion between theory and practice; and thirdly, that advocates of a rhythmic test, even in abstract definition, seem to have the better of the argument....

All reports of primitive singing, that is, of singing among races on a low plane of culture, make rhythm a wholly insistent element of the verse.... Rhythm is obscured or hidden by declamation only in times when the eye has usurped the functions of the ear, and when a highly developed prose makes the accented rhythm of poetry seem either old-fashioned or a sign of childhood. Not that one wishes to restore a sing-song reading, but rather a recognition of metrical structure, of those subtle effects in rhythm which mean so much in the poet's art; verse, in a word, particularly lyric verse, must not be read as if it were prose. Dramatic verse is a difficult problem.... For in drama one wishes nowadays to hear not rhythm, but the thought, the story, the point.... As thought recedes, as one comes nearer to those primitive emotions which were untroubled by thought, they get expression more and more in cadenced tones. And again, this cadenced emotional expression, as it grows stronger, grows wider; the barriers of irony and reserve, which keep a modern theatre tearless in the face of Lear's most pathetic utterance, break down; first, as one recedes from modern conditions, comes the sympathetic emotion of the spectators expressed in sighs and tears; ... then comes the partial activity of the spectators by their deputed chorus; and at last the throng of primitive times, common emotion in common expression, with no spectators, no audience, no reserve or comment of thought,--for thought is absorbed in the perception and action of communal consent; and here, by all evidence, rhythm rules supreme....

If, now, the curve of evolution in Aryan verse begins with an absolutely strict rhythm and alternate emphasis of syllables, often, as in Iranian, to the neglect of logical considerations; if the course of poetry is to admit logical considerations more and more, forcing in at least one case the abandoning of movable accent and the agreement of verse-emphasis with syllabic-emphasis, an undisputed fact; if poetry, too, first shakes off the steps of dancing, then the notes of song, finally the strict scanning of the verse, until now recited poetry is triumphantly logical, with rhythm as a subconscious element; if, finally, this process exactly agrees with the gradual increase of thought over emotion, with the a.n.a.logous increase of solitary poetry over gregarious poetry,--then, surely, one has but to trace back this curve of evolution, and to project it into prehistoric conditions, in order to infer with something very close to cert.i.tude that rhythm is the primal fact in the beginnings of the poetic art....

The hold of rhythm upon modern poetry, even under conditions of a.n.a.lytic and intellectual development which have unquestionably worked for the increased importance of prose, is a hold not to be relaxed, and for good reason. The reason is this. In rhythm, in sounds of the human voice, timed to movements of the human body, mankind first discovered that social consent which brought the great joys and the great pains of life into a common utterance.... The mere fact of utterance is social; however solitary his thought, a poet's utterance must voice this consent of man with man, and his emotion must fall into rhythm, the one and eternal expression of consent. This, then, is why rhythm will not be banished from poetry so long as poetry shall remain emotional utterance; for rhythm is not only sign and warrant of a social contract stronger, deeper, vaster, than any fancied by Rousseau, but it is the expression of a human sense more keen even than the fear of devils and the love of G.o.ds--the sense and sympathy of kind.[59]

(Francis B. Gummere: _The Beginnings of Poetry_, chap. ii, "Rhythm as the Essential Fact of Poetry." Pp. 30, 31, 82-85, 114, 115.)

FOOTNOTES:

[56] Compare with this a pa.s.sage in a letter of Goethe's to Schiller about _Faust_: "Some tragic scenes were done in prose; by reason of their naturalness and strength they are quite intolerable in relation to the other scenes. I am, therefore, now trying to put them into rime, for there the idea is seen as if under a veil, and the immediate effect of this tremendous material is softened." (Translation of Professor F. B.

Gummere, in _The Beginnings of Poetry_, p. 73.)

[57] In these chapters of the _Biographia Literaria_, Coleridge was replying to the theories of Wordsworth as set forth in his Preface.

[58] Compare the amusingly vigorous remarks of Mr. Swinburne on the want of metre in Whitman's poems:

"'Did you ask dulcet rhymes from me?' inquires Mr. Whitman. ... No, my dear good sir: ... not in the wildest visions of a distempered slumber could I have dreamed of doing anything of the kind. ... But metre, rhythm, cadence, not merely appreciable but definable and reducible to rule and measurement, though we do not expect from you, we demand from all who claim, we discern in the works of all who have achieved, any place among poets of any cla.s.s whatsoever.... The question is whether you have any more right to call yourself a poet, or to be called a poet, ... than to call yourself or to be called, on the strength of your published writings, a mathematician, a logician, a painter, a political economist, a sculptor, a dynamiter, an old parliamentary hand, a civil engineer, a dealer in marine stores, an amphimacer, a triptych, a rhomboid, or a rectangular parallelogram."

(_Studies in Prose and Poetry_, pp. 133, 134.)

[59] Professor Gummere also gives this a.n.a.lysis of Karl Bucher's essay on "Labor and Rhythm" (_Arbeit und Rhythmus_, Leipzig, 1896): "Fatigue, which besets all work felt as work by reason of its continued application of purpose, vanished for primitive man, as it vanishes now for children, if the work was once freed from this stress of application and so turned to a kind of play. The dance itself is really hard work, exacting and violent; what makes it the favorite it is with savages as with children? Simply its automatic, regular, rhythmic character, the due repet.i.tion of a familiar movement which allows the mind to relax its att.i.tude of constant purpose. The purpose and plan of work involve external sources and external ends; rhythm is instinctive, and springs from the organic nature of man; it is no invention. The song that one sings while at work is not something fitted to the work, but comes from movements of the body in the specific acts of labor; and this applies not only to the rhythm, but even to the words. So it was in the festal dance.... That poetry and music were always combined by early man, and, along with labor, made up the primitive three-in-one, an organic whole, labor being the basal fact, with rhythm as an element common to the three; and that not harmony or pitch, but this overmastering and pervasive rhythm, exact, definite, was the main factor of early song,--these are conclusions for which Bucher offers ample and convincing evidence." (_Ib._ pp. 108, 109.)

APPENDIX

TABLE ILl.u.s.tRATING THE HISTORY OF THE HEROIC COUPLET

The following table is designed, in the first place, to ill.u.s.trate the history of the decasyllabic couplet in English verse, by making possible a comparison of the characteristic details of its form in different periods; and, in the second place, to suggest a method by which, through the careful tabulation of facts, one may substantiate or correct general statements as to the qualities of verse.

Any such statistics as are here presented must be accepted, if at all, with no little caution. The table is based on pa.s.sages of one hundred lines each, believed to be fairly representative of the verse of the several authors. No pa.s.sage of this length, however, can be known to be perfectly typical. A still greater difficulty is found in the necessarily subjective character of any such tabulation. Most lines of English decasyllabic verse can be read--with reference to the distribution of accents and pauses--in more than one way. It is unlikely, therefore, that any two readers would reach the same results in trying to form a table of this kind. The _absolute_ validity of the figures is therefore doubtful; but on condition that they all have been computed by the same person, consistently with a single standard of judgment, their relative validity, for purposes of _comparison_, may be fairly a.s.sumed.

The facts here set down for each specimen of verse group themselves in four divisions. In the first place, each line of verse is either "run-on" or "end-stopped"; and, in riming couplets, it is also of interest to know whether the second line of the couplet is run-on into the following couplet. In the second place, the cesural pause occurs either near the middle of the line or elsewhere, or--it may be--is omitted altogether. In the third place, the line may have a feminine ending. In the fourth place, it may contain some other foot than the regular iambus.