The Principles of English Versification Part 17

II, 134-142.

On its formal side, what makes Milton's versification as unique as it is admirable, is the instinctive and yet prescient skill with which the pause is continuously varied so as to keep the whole metrical structure in movement. There are no dead lines. There are no jerks or stoppages. His movement may best be described by quoting a pa.s.sage which, like many others, is at once a description and an instance. It is a

Mystical dance, which yonder starry sphere Of planets and of fixt in all her wheels Resembles nearest, mazes intricate, Eccentric, intervolv'd, yet regular Then most, when most irregular they seem, And in their motions harmony divine.

I ask the reader most particularly to notice that these six lines, like almost any short quotation that can be made from the poem, are broken from their context. They begin in the middle of a sentence, and end in the middle of a clause. The continuous periodic movement cannot be really shown by examples, just because it is continuous and periodic. If we except the speeches, each of which by the necessity of the case is more or less a definite and detachable unit, the periods flow into one another. Like the orbit of a planet, the movement of the verse never closes its ellipse and begins again. Each of the twelve books is a single organic rhythmical structure. But one cannot very well quote a whole book.

Within that structure, the variation of pause and stress is similarly in continuous movement. As a general fact, this is instinctively felt in reading the poem; how rigorously the law of freedom is observed comes out even more surprisingly when brought to the test of figures. For movement of stress one instance may serve as a typical example. In Michael's description of the plagues of Egypt in the twelfth book, beginning--

But first the lawless tyrant, who denies To know their G.o.d, or message to regard, Must be compelled by signs and judgments dire--

the detailed roll of the plagues is all threaded on the word _must_. It recurs nine times, with studied and intricate variation of its place in the line: this is, taken by order, in the first, eighth, fifth, fourth, fifth, fifth, first, third, and fourth syllable. Again, as regards variation, in the whole ten thousand lines of the Paradise Lost there are less than five-and-twenty instances of the pause coming at the same point in the line for more than two lines consecutively. Facts like these are the formal index of what is the great organic principle of Milton's verse.

That is, that like all organic structures, it is incalculable; it cannot be reduced to a formula.... His rhythm is perpetually integrating as it advances; and not only so, but at no point can its next movement be predicted, although tracing it backwards we can see how each phrase rises out of and carries on the rhythm of what was before it, how each comes in not only rightly, but as it seems inevitably. This secret he inherited from no English predecessor and transmitted to no follower.[69]

+--------------------------------------------------------------+ [69] J. W. Mackail, The Springs of Helicon, pp. 181 ff. +--------------------------------------------------------------+

One may surely say that Milton extracted from blank verse all its possibilities of variety and movement so far as his subject matter permitted. He is lyrical, dramatic, didactic, and of course epic, in turn. He even showed that it is possible to imitate hollowly his own "planetary wheelings"--as though the instruments kept on playing and the music ceased.[70]

+--------------------------------------------------------------+ [70] Cf., for example. Paradise Regained, III, 68 ff. +--------------------------------------------------------------+

Since Paradise Regained and Samson Agonistes, though various poets have adapted it to their own uses, blank verse has shown only one significant development, the conversational, or so-called 'talking,' style. In the eighteenth century Milton's mannerisms dominated nearly all blank verse, both for good and for evil. What freedom Thomson allowed himself he got from Milton; most of Cowper's thin grandiosity he took from Milton; and much also of Wordsworth's false and empty elaboration which make the Prelude and Excursion so dull in places--the whole tribe of verses of which

And at the Hoop alighted, famous inn

is the pilloried example--came from the Miltonic tradition. Keats fell partially into the error, but was wise enough to recognize it. Sh.e.l.ley, with much of Milton's intensity and somewhat too of his sublimity, could successfully follow the great stride and at the same time preserve his own idiom. Tennyson, keeping both the freedom and as much of the "continuous planetary movement" as was consistent with his themes, softened the metre--weakened it, some will say--by his decorative tendency and indulgence in only half-concealed virtuosity.[71] And the famous Oxus ending of Arnold's Sohrab and Rustum is a studied reproduction of the Miltonic music in a lower key. But it was Landor who, taking a hint perhaps from Milton's unadorned didacticism of Paradise Regained and also from the straightforward verse used on occasion by the Elizabethan dramatists, showed the way to what has often been called a strictly contemporary development of blank verse, the talking style. Since this is less familiar than most of the phenomena of blank verse, it will require fuller ill.u.s.tration.

+--------------------------------------------------------------+ [71] Browning's blank verse, like all his metres, is typically Browningesque; instead of moulding his verse to fit the idea perfectly, he too often effected the compromise between content and form by slighting the latter. +--------------------------------------------------------------+

The uneven line which separates blank verse and prose is easily apparent in such a pa.s.sage as the following from Much Ado about Nothing (V, i)--

_Leon._ Some haste, my lord!--well, fare you well, my lord:-- Are you so hasty now--Well, all is one.

_D. Pedro._ Nay, do not quarrel with us, good old man.

_Ant._ If he could right himself with quarrelling, Some of us would lie low.

_Claud._ Who wrongs him?

_Leon._ Marry, thou dost wrong me; thou dissembler, thou.-- Nay, never lay thy hand upon thy sword; I fear thee not.

_Claud._ Marry, beshrew my hand, If it should give your age such cause of fear.

In faith, my hand meant nothing to my sword.

_Leon._ Tush, tush, man! never fleer and jest at me; I speak not like a dotard nor a fool; As under privilege of age, to brag What I have done being young, or what would do, Were I not old. Know, Claudio, to thy heed, Thou hast so wrong'd mine innocent child and me, That I am forc'd to lay my reverence by, And with gray hairs and bruise of many days, Do challenge thee to trial of a man....

In the first part of this pa.s.sage the language is the simple natural expression of prose, yet so devised that it also fits the metrical pattern. It is either prose or verse according to the way one reads it.

But in Leonardo's long speech (after the first line, which is 'irregular') the verse pattern becomes more and more prominent, until in the last three lines it predominates over the natural utterance of the words and produces a certain stiffness. Here the two different manners stand side by side: a natural simplicity so great that the metrical quality is almost obscured, beside a formality so obvious that the feeling of natural expression is partly lost. Now Milton, and after him Dryden and the eighteenth century, regarding poetry generally as a thing apart, followed the latter sort; but when the Romantic Revival brought poetry back to ordinary human life there reappeared, tentatively, of course, a simpler blank verse in Thomson, Crabbe, Cowper, and Wordsworth. A clear example is the opening of Landor's Iphigeneia and Agamemnon--

Iphigeneia, when she heard her doom At Aulis, and when all beside the King Had gone away, took his right hand, and said, "O father! I am young and very happy.

I do not think the pious Calchas heard Distinctly what the G.o.ddess spake. Old-age Obscures the senses. If my nurse, who knew My voice so well, sometimes misunderstood While I was resting on her knee both arms And hitting it to make her mind my words, And looking in her face, and she in mine, Might he not also hear one word amiss, Spoken from so far off, even from Olympus?"

Again, compare Mrs. Browning's Aurora Leigh--

As it was, indeed, I felt a mother-want about the world, And still went seeking, like a bleating lamb Left out at night, in shutting up the fold,-- As restless as a nest-deserted bird Grown chill through something being away, though what It knows not. I, Aurora Leigh, was born To make my father sadder, and myself Not overjoyous, truly. Women know The way to rear up children (to be just), They know a simple, merry, tender knack Of tying sashes, fitting baby-shoes, And stringing pretty words that make no sense, And kissing full sense into empty words.

These are from the metrical point of view nearly identical with Mr.

Robert Frost's talking verse, so often called a 'contribution' to verse technique--

Something there is that doesn't love a wall, That sends the frozen ground-swell under it, And spills the upper boulders in the sun; And makes gaps even two can pa.s.s abreast.

The work of hunters is another thing: I have come after them and made repair Where they have left not one stone on stone, But they would have the rabbit out of hiding, To please the yelping dogs.

R. FROST, Mending Wall.[72]

The obvious difficulty is to maintain dignity along with relaxation--a feat which Mr. Frost and Mr. E. A. Robinson have occasionally accomplished. And from this it is but a step to the extreme simplicity of Miss Lowell's To Two Unknown Ladies--

If either of you much attracted me We could fall back upon phenomena And make a pretty story out of psychic Balances, but not to be too broad In my discourtesy, nor prudish neither (Since, really, I can hardly quite suppose With all your ghostliness you follow me), I feel no such attraction. Or if one Bows to my sympathy for the briefest s.p.a.ce, Snap--it is gone! And, worst of all to tell, What broke it is not in the least dislike But utter boredom.

Now....

+--------------------------------------------------------------+ [72] Mr. Frost in some of his later work permits himself such laxness as-- Had beauties he had to point out to me at length To insure their not being wasted on me. The Axe-Helve. +--------------------------------------------------------------+

Thus the wheel has come nearly full circle, but with a longer radius.

For just as blank verse developed from the early Elizabethan--and pre-Elizabethan--strict formality to the laxity of the Jacobean dramatists and found a true balance of freedom and restraint in Milton, so from the monotonous eighteenth-century couplet (and it should be recalled that in the beginning blank verse sprang from the couplet) it has gradually enlarged its freedom into the extreme license from a metrical point of view of its adopted cousin free-verse. Already, moreover, there have been signs of a reaction against the extreme, and the wheel is coming to an artistic balance again.

4. FREE-VERSE

Free-verse (or, as Miss Lowell prefers, 'unrhymed cadence') is a hydra-headed phenomenon. It can never be adequately discussed; for when one head is disposed of, two others appear in its place. Its origins are involved in obscurity and--what is worse--ignorance; and its pract.i.tioners and staunchest defenders are as variable in their points of view as it itself is in its rhythmic impulses.[73]

+--------------------------------------------------------------+ [73] Strongly to be deprecated is the frequent confusion not only of the different varieties of English free-verse, but of the fundamentally distinct phenomena of free-verse as commonly understood and French _vers libre_. _Vers libre_ itself has many aspects, from the literally freer use of rime and the mute-_e_ than the traditional French prosody allowed and an escape from the old principle of syllabification to what superficially corresponds with English free-verse, that is, a subst.i.tution of prose for verse; but only superficially, since the French language is phonetically different from English, and its ordinary prose has a naturally greater song potentiality. Since the phenomena differ they should not be called by the same name. The English term 'free-verse' is wholly adequate. +--------------------------------------------------------------+

Behind all the utterances of friend and foe seems to lie the ultimate belief that the 'voluntary thraldom' of formal metrical patterns is a monstrous error which can only be removed by unrestricted appreciation and application of the natural rhythms of idea and of language. There is in every thought, however simple or subtle, in every feeling, however evanescent or profound, an inherent rhythm which is as a material body to the thought's or emotion's soul. This native, inevitable rhythm--one might call it the _rhythme juste_, the exact rhythm--is the only fit expression for an intellectual or emotional idea; all others are foreign to it, tyrannous usurpations, in a word, impossible subst.i.tutions for it. To attempt, therefore, to twist these natural and exact rhythms to the formal predetermined patterns of traditional versification is a suicidal impertinence, foredoomed to failure.

Such a position has in theory much justice. It means briefly that the basis of poetical form should not be the metrical pattern freely varied yet always perceptible, but the natural organic rhythm of the ideas expressed; that is, there should be no harmonized difference between what have been explained above as thought rhythms, sound rhythms, and metrical rhythms, but all three should be one original and indivisible unit. This would make a combined thought-and-sound unit (breath group and logical-emotional group) the foundation of verse, whereas this is really the characteristic of prose as distinguished from verse. These exact organic rhythms "differ from ordinary prose rhythms," says Miss Lowell, "in being more curved, and containing more stress"; which, though not very perspicuous, seems to mean that free-verse is more carefully cadenced, or, in other words, more nearly metrical, than ordinary prose. Perhaps it would be no injustice to the upholders of free-verse in its best manifestations to say that, while metre requires that beneath all variations the regular beat should never be missed, free-verse requires as much rhythm (i. e., regularity) as is possible without its becoming perceptible.

If this is true, or as near the manifold truth as one can get, then the free-verse movement in English is mainly a return to the cadenced prose of the seventeenth century with the additional trait of the appearance of verse. This is an important addition, however. It involves a careful recognition of what psychology calls the 'prose att.i.tude' and the 'verse att.i.tude,' and also (as has been suggested above) the peculiar union of prose with the spatial rhythm of verse. We read with ear and eye together, though with varying proportions of emphasis on the one or the other; for some 'vocalize' whatever they read, others read almost entirely with the eye. Since it is the eye that takes the earlier and quicker perception of printed language, we tend to judge by the appearance of a page whether it contains prose or verse. Columns of irregular but approximately equal line lengths, regular blocks of printing regularly s.p.a.ced and separated as stanzas, indentation of every second or every third line--these at once announce that the page contains verse. And they at the same time const.i.tute an obvious spatial rhythm to the eye, and prepare the attention of eye and ear and mind for the approximate regularity of verse. Then, when so prepared, we unconsciously organize as fully as possible any irregularities that appear in the language and transform into actual verse the verse potentialities which pervade our speech.

Some kinds of free-verse, however, do not, so far as one can see, aim to be more than ordinary prose printed in segments more or less closely corresponding with the phrase rhythm or normal sound rhythms of language. It is then prose in actuality and verse in appearance--no more.

On the justification of this peculiar amalgam there is little agreement.

No doubt for certain swift effects free-verse is the natural and most serviceable medium. Many short poems in this irregular form are like snapshots or like rapid sketches as compared with finished paintings.

But the ultimate aesthetic judgment must be precisely that of the snapshot as compared with finished painting. Nature is always wrong, says the paradox; art depends upon a deliberate selection of details and structure. It balances freedom and restraint, variety and uniformity, one against the other; and even when it appears spontaneous it is but the result of an unconscious choice which is itself born of long training or of the mysterious faculty divine. In very little of what at present is called free-verse does art have a real place. It is all freedom and variety, with almost no restraint and uniformity: all stimulation and no repose. There is sometimes a rapid alternation of verse rhythm and prose rhythm, which, in Bacon's phrase, may cleave but not incorporate; they succeed each other but do not melt into each other. Now and again, to be sure, this uncertainty, this very irregularity, powerfully represents the thought and emotion of the poem; but nevertheless there can be little doubt that except in the limited field of instantaneous flashes the most adequate and pleasing medium is the skilfully varied regularity of formal verse.[74]

+--------------------------------------------------------------+ [74] "In the effort to get rhyme, 'the rack of finest wits,'" says a pseudonymous newspaper writer, "and in the struggle, writhing, and agony of trying to get the wrong words to say the right thing, one sometimes achieves the impossible, or, rather, from the flame of frantic friction (of 'Rhyming Dictionary' leaves) rises, phoenix-like, another idea, somewhat like the first, its illegitimate child, so to say, and thus more beautiful. "With vers libre one experiences the mortification one sometimes feels in having roared out one's agony in perfectly fit terms. With rhymed poetry one feels the satisfaction of a wit who gives the nuance of his meaning by the raise of an eyebrow, the turn of a word." +--------------------------------------------------------------+

The many kinds of free-verse are recognizable chiefly by the greater or less feeling of metrical form lying behind them. For convenience they may be distinguished, according as verse or prose predominates, as (1) irregular unrimed metre, (2) very free blank verse, (3) unusual mingling of metre and prose, a kind of recitative, and (4) mere prose printed as verse, or what may be called free-verse _par excellence_. A few ill.u.s.trations will help to make clear the distinctions.

Of the first sort are the unrimed choruses in Milton's Samson Agonistes, the metre of Southey's once-admired Thalaba and the Curse of Kehama, and parts of Sh.e.l.ley's Queen Mab. Here the lines are irregular in length (as in the 'irregular' Pindaric odes), but they are usually felt as truly metrical, though they do not repeat a single pattern.

This, this is he; softly a while; Let us not break in upon him.

O change beyond report, thought, or belief!