The Principles of English Versification Part 3

"I wear the chain I forged in life," replied the Ghost, "I made it link by link, and yard by yard."

d.i.c.kENS, Christmas Carol.

I cannot rest, I cannot stay, I cannot linger anywhere.

Ibid.

Much they saw and far they went, and many homes they visited, but always with a happy end.

d.i.c.kENS, Christmas Carol.

But above the curved soft elbow, where no room was for one cross word (according to our proverb) three sad gashes edged with crimson spoiled the flow of the pearly flesh.

BLACKMORE, Lorna Doone, ch. 38.

A peculiar instance of metrical prose, avowedly an experiment and fortunately (as most will think) not repeated, is the pa.s.sage near the end of Kingsley's Westward Ho! Kingsley called it 'prose shaped into song.' The objection is simply that in such a situation song is out of place. Let prose do the legitimate work of prose; and when the intensity of feeling justifies song, let there be song. No hybrids, no cross-breeding--unless, as here, for purposes of experiment. Here is a part of the pa.s.sage:

Then he took a locket from his bosom; and I heard him speak, Will, and he said: "Here's the picture of my fair and true lady; drink to her, Senors, all." Then he spoke to me, Will, and called me, right up through the oar-weed and the sea: "We have had a fair quarrel, Senor; it is time to be friends once more. My wife and your brother have forgiven me; so your honour takes no stain."

_Elements of Prose Rhythm._ Thus far the discussion of language rhythm has been confined to a general perception of rhythmic movement. When an attempt is made to carry the investigation into greater detail, more difficult and from a prosodic point of view really crucial problems present themselves. The essential thing in any perception of rhythm is the experience of groups; but what are the nature and determining qualities of these groups? In music there are bars--the primary rhythmic group, comprising a single rhythmic wave, that is, covering the time-distance from one point of division to another--phrases, cadences, etc. The dual nature of language, however, its union of sound elements and thought elements, gives the question another aspect. Corresponding to the musical bar there is the metrical foot; to the musical phrase, the logical phrase; to the musical cadence, a similar melodious flow of word-sounds. But there are also in prose what are called breath-groups and attention-groups, series of words bound together by the physiological requirements of utterance and the mental requirements of perception and understanding.[13] The first step towards clearness will be a closer distinction between prose and metrical rhythms.

+--------------------------------------------------------------+ [13] Compare the sentence from Disraeli on page 24, above. +--------------------------------------------------------------+

_Syllable._ The simplest and smallest unit of speech-sound is the syllable; then follow, in increasing magnitude, the word, the phrase (that is, words held together by their meaning or by their sound), the clause, the sentence, the paragraph. These units exist in verse as well as in prose, but while verse has other units (which are arbitrary and artificial), prose rhythm has only these. The rhythm of a paragraph is determined by the length, structure, content, and arrangement of the sentences; that of a sentence by the length, structure, content, and arrangement of the phrases; that of the phrase by the length, structure, content, and arrangement of the words; that of a word by the character of the syllables. Now syllables, as has been explained above, have the sound attributes of duration, intensity (or lack of intensity), and pitch--called, however, in the terminology of phonetics, length or quant.i.ty, accent (or no accent), and pitch. These must be studied individually before their combined effects can be understood.

_Length._ Length is of course comparative. Some vowels require a longer time to enunciate than others: the _e_ in _penal_ than the _i_ in _pin_, the _o_ in _coat_ than the _o_ in _cot_, etc. Again, some consonants are shorter by nature than others: the explosives, _p_, _t_, _k_, etc., than the continuants _s_, _z_, _th_, _f_, _m_, _n_, _l_, etc. When vowels and consonants are combined into syllables the comparative length is still more apparent: thus _form_ is longer than _G.o.d_, _stole_ than _poke_, _curl_ than _cut_, etc. Moreover, it is not alone the natural quant.i.ty of vowels and consonants that affects or determines their length, but also their position in a word and in a sentence. Thus, for example, the same sounds are uttered more rapidly when closely followed by one or more syllables than when alone: as _bit_, _bitter_, _bitterly_; _hard_, _hardy_, _hardily_. This elasticity of syllabic quant.i.ty is clearly shown in Verrier's examples:[14]

[Ill.u.s.tration: They come fast--faster yet--faster and faster Barren mountain tracts--barren affections.]

These indications, moreover, cover normal utterance only; in emotional language or elocutionary delivery there are deliberate and arbitrary lengthenings and shortenings.[15]

+--------------------------------------------------------------+ [14] Vol. i, pp. 79, 80. The musical notation must be taken as merely approximate. [15] Experiments have been made to obtain absolute measurements of syllabic quant.i.ty, and elaborate rules formulated for determining longs and shorts. Thus far, however, the results have been very variable and unsatisfactory, and should be accepted with great caution. +--------------------------------------------------------------+

_Accent and Stress._ The term _accent_ may best be reserved for grammatical or dictionary accent--the greater emphasis placed according to standard usage upon one syllable of a word as compared with the others. Thus _portion_ has an accent on the first syllable, _material_ on the second, _apprehension_ on the third, _deliberation_ on the fourth. The other syllables are either unaccented, as the first of _material_ and the second of _portion_, or have a secondary accent, as the second of _deliberation_.

Accent should be distinguished from _stress_, which is the rhythmical emphasis in a series of sounds. In prose the rhythmical stress is determined almost wholly by accent; in verse the two sometimes coincide and sometimes differ markedly.

In certain words whose accent is somewhat evenly divided between two syllables, and in certain combinations of monosyllables, there is a tendency to subject even grammatical accent to rhythmical stress. Hence the common p.r.o.nunciations _Newfound_land, _Hawthorn_den; the alternation of stress in _poor old man_, _sad hurt heart_; and the shift of accent in "In a _Chi_nese restaurant the waiters are Chi_nese_."

_Pitch._ Pitch is a very uncertain and variable phenomenon. For the most part it is an ornament or aid to simple language rhythms, but under some conditions it plays an important role which cannot be neglected. Because of the physical structure of the vocal organs pitch is constantly changing in spoken discourse, though often the changes are not readily perceptible. Usually it coincides with accent.[16] It is also a frequent but by no means regular means of intensifying accent: compare "That was done simply" (normal utterance) with "That was simply wonderful"

(intensive utterance). On the other hand pitch and accent sometimes clash: compare "The idea is good" (normal utterance) with "The _i_dea!"

(exclamatory). Other examples of pitch as a significant factor in prose are: "One should not say 'good' but 'good_ly_,' not 'brave' but 'brave_ly_'"; "Not praise but prais_ing_ gives him delight."[17]

+--------------------------------------------------------------+ [16] To adduce Greek in explanation of English pitch would be a clear case of _ignotum per ignotius_. But interesting parallels have been noted by Mr. Stone (in R. Bridges, Milton's Prosody, 2d ed.). "The ordinary unemphatic English accent," he says, "is exactly a raising of pitch, and nothing more" (p. 143); and there are similar habits in English and Greek of turning the grave accent into acute, as in _to get money_ and _to get it_. The Greeks recognized three degrees of pitch: the acute (high), and the grave (low), (which, according to Dionysius, differed by about the musical interval of a fifth), and midway, the circ.u.mflex. Compare _that?_ (acute, expressing surprise); _that?_ (circ.u.mflex, expressing doubt); and _that book_ (grave--'book' and not 'table'). The main difference between the two languages is that so far as we can tell cla.s.sical Greek had (very much like modern French) a pitch-accent and very little or no stress-accent, whereas English has both (though stress-accent preponderates). [17] Cf. J. W. Bright, "Proper Names in Old English Verse," Publications of the Modern Language a.s.sociation, vol. 14 (1899), pp. 347 ff.; especially pp. 363-365. +--------------------------------------------------------------+

Another aspect of pitch is that which in the rhetorics is usually called inflection. A question is uttered with rising inflection, that is, with a higher pitch at the end. Declarative sentences usually have a falling inflection just before the final period, that is, a lower pitch.

Exclamations often have a circ.u.mflex inflection, as "Really!" spoken in a sarcastic tone; that is, the pitch rises and falls.

Experimental attempts to indicate variations of pitch by our common musical notation are given by Verrier. A single example will suffice here.[18]

[Ill.u.s.tration: "I come from haunts of coot and hern"]

+--------------------------------------------------------------+ [18] Verrier, vol. iii, p. 229. A more ambitious attempt, from Pierson, Metrique naturelle du langage (Paris, 1884), pp. 226, 227, is given by Verrier, vol. ii, p. 14--a musical transcription of the opening verses of Racine's Athalie. +--------------------------------------------------------------+

Perhaps the most important aspect of pitch from the point of view of rhythm is its actual influence upon accent. We say naturally: "He was _fif_teen years old"; but place the numeral for emphasis at the end of the sentence and it receives a kind of pitch accent: "His age was fif_teen_." Compare also _Chi_nese and Chi_nese_ in the example above.

Observe carefully the elements of duration, stress, accent, and pitch in the following sentences:

Now he's a great big man.

He was a _re_markable young fellow, but he had an _un_governable temper.

Off went Joy; on came Despair.

_Word and Phrase Rhythm._ The next larger unit after the syllable is the word; after the word, the phrase. Something has already been said in the previous paragraphs on word and phrase rhythm: it remains to examine them more closely.

Words vary in length from one to eight or even ten syllables; and the accents (main and secondary) may fall on any of these syllables according to the origin and historical development of the word--thus words of two syllables: _apple_, _alone_; of three syllables: _beautiful_, _accession_, _apperceive_; of four syllables: _apoplexy_, _material_, _evolution_, _interrelate_. But generally in polysyllables the tendency to rhythmic alternation of stress produces one or more secondary accents more or less distinctly felt; thus on the first syllable of _apperceive_ and on the third of _apoplexy_ there is an obvious secondary accent; on the third syllable of _beautiful_ and the fourth of _material_ there are potential accents, not regularly felt as such but capable, under certain circ.u.mstances, of rhythmic stress. For example, in the phrase 'beautiful clothes' there is no accent and no stress on -_ful_; but in 'beautiful attire' the syllable -_ful_ receives a very slight accent (properly not recognized by the dictionaries) which can well serve as a weak rhythmic stress. Long words ill.u.s.trate the same principle: _ant.i.transsubstantionalistic_, _pseudomonocotyledonous_, _perfectibiliarianism_. This potential stress is of the utmost importance in verse--as when Milton out of three words, two of which have no recognized secondary accent, makes a 5-stress line:

Immutable, immortal, infinite.

Paradise Lost, III, 373.

The result of this tendency to alternation, or in other words of the difficulty of p.r.o.nouncing more than three consecutive syllables without introducing a secondary accent or stress, is that English phrases fall naturally into four rhythmic patterns or movements (and their combinations): 1. accent + no-accent (_a._ one syllable, _b._ two syllables); 2. no-accent (_a._ one syllable, _b._ two syllables) + accent. Examples: 1a _beauty_, 1b _beautiful_, 2a _relate_, 2b _intercede_. These four movements are variously named: the first two are called _falling_, the second two _rising_; 1a and 2a are called _duple_ or _dissyllabic_, 1b and 2b _triple_ or _trisyllabic_; 1a is called _trochaic_, 1b _dactylic_, 2a _iambic_, 2b _anapestic_ (after the names of the metrical feet in cla.s.sical prosody). _Beauty_, by this usage, is a trochee, _beautiful_ a dactyl, _relate_ an iamb, _intercede_ an anapest. But these patterns alone are by no means sufficient to explain or register all the phrasal movements of English prose--as a single sentence will show.

He that hath wife and children hath given hostages to fortune, for they are impediments to great enterprises either of virtue or of mischief.

BACON, Essay VIII.

Here the first phrase is in falling rhythm, the second (probably) in rising rhythm, the third is--rising or falling? To some readers it will appear of one sort, to others of another. The fourth phrase is probably rising, the fifth doubtful, the sixth falling, the seventh probably rising. To say that the first phrase is made up of a dactyl and two trochees means very little. The primary fact to be recognized and understood is that these four patterns exist in English speech not as absolute ent.i.ties but as tendencies. In prose they are discontinuous, irregularly alternating, often hardly perceptible; but they are there as potential forces whose latent effects are brought out by regular metre.

Another problem at once obvious is to determine the limits of a phrase.

Some readers will feel "to fortune" in the above sentence as a separate phrase, others will join it to the three words that precede. No rules can be laid down. Two tentative but useful criteria are possible, however. A phrase may be regarded as purely musical, a group of sounds that either by their own nature or by their possibility of utterance in a single expulsion of breath seem to belong together. But this is an uncertain criterion, since we separate the sounds of words with great difficulty from their meaning, and the periods of breathing are subject to arbitrary control. And some phrases are uttered in much less than the time required in normal breathing. The other criterion, sometimes supporting sometimes contradicting the former, is the logical content of words. But this also is uncertain, since logical content ought to hold subject and verb together, whereas in the example above it clearly does not. And neither breath grouping nor logical grouping will enable us to determine whether "either of virtue or of mischief" is two phrases or one.

The limits of the sentence, with its clauses, are, largely through the modern conventions of printing, more distinctly felt and observed. But its rhythm is none the less complex. For it is not only the sum of the smaller rhythmic movements of word and phrase and clause, but forms a new ent.i.ty of itself, created by the union of the lesser elements--just as a building is more than its component bricks, stones, and timbers.

_Composite Speech Rhythm._ Such, briefly described, are the rhythmic elements of spoken English prose. When only small sections are a.n.a.lyzed singly, it is possible to understand something, at least, of the intricate pattern of forces which are interwoven in the rhythms of ordinary language. When one undertakes to a.n.a.lyze and express the combined rhythms--musical, logical, emotional--of connected sentences and paragraphs, one finds no system of notation adequate; the melodies and harmonies disappear in the process of being explained. Those who wish to enjoy to the fullest the rhythmic beauties of English prose must patiently scrutinize the smallest details, then study the details in larger and still larger combinations--the balance and contrast of phrases, the alternation of dependent and independent clauses, the varieties of long and short sentences, of simple, compound, periodic sentences--and finally endeavor to rejoin the parts into a complete whole. To pursue the subject further would be to encroach upon the domain of formal rhetoric and would be out of place here. The best counsel is the old counsel: try to _understand_ and _feel_ the great pa.s.sages of the great prose masters. A few examples have been given on pages 25 ff., above; they should be studied diligently.

_Prose and Verse Rhythm._ It is but a short step from the occasional regularity of rhythm in the pa.s.sages on pages 27-29 to the deliberately continuous regularity of verse. A tendency to rhythmic flow, it has already been shown, is inherent in ordinary language. When the words are made to convey heightened emotion this tendency is increased, and "the deeper the feeling, the more characteristic and decided the rhythm"