The Principles of English Versification Part 4

(John Stuart Mill). Then, as Coleridge says, "the wheels take fire from the mere rapidity of their motion," and finally we have

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

Intensified, regularized rhythm is reciprocally both a result of impa.s.sioned feeling and a cause of it: hence its double function in poetry. It springs, on the one hand, from "the high spiritual instinct of the human being impelling us to seek unity by harmonious adjustment and thus establishing the principle that _all_ the parts of an organized whole must be a.s.similated to the more _important_ and _essential_ parts." On the other hand, it "resembles (if the aptness of the simile may excuse its meanness) yeast, worthless or disagreeable by itself, but giving vivacity and spirit to the liquor with which it is proportionally combined."[19]

+--------------------------------------------------------------+ [19] Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, ch. xviii. Compare the more poetical expression of the same truth in Carlyle's Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History: "Observe too how all pa.s.sionate language does of itself become musical--with a finer music than the mere accent; the speech of a man even in zealous anger becomes a chant, a song. All deep things are Song. It seems somehow the very central essence of us, Song; as if all the rest were but wrappings and hulls! The primal element of us; of us, and of all things. The Greeks fabled of Sphere-Harmonies: it was the feeling they had of the inner structure of Nature; that the soul of all her voices and utterances was perfect music.... See deep enough, and you see musically; the heart of Nature _being_ everywhere music, if you can only reach it." (The Hero as Poet.) +--------------------------------------------------------------+

The question is as old as Aristotle, whether metre, that is, regularized rhythm, is an inalienable and necessary concomitant of poetry. The answer rests on a precise understanding of terms; for the right ant.i.thesis, so far as there is one, is not between prose and poetry, but between prose and verse. High and pa.s.sionate thoughts, true poetical feeling and expression may and do exist in prose, but their most natural and characteristic expression is in verse. The old question has been lately reopened, however, by the anomalous form called 'free-verse.'

Only the name is new; the thing itself is, at its best, but a carefully rhythmed prose printed in a new shape: an effort to combine in an effective union some of the characteristics of spatial rhythm with the established temporal rhythms of language. Free-verse will be discussed more fully on a later page; it is mentioned here because it is a natural transition between prose and verse, claiming as it does the freedom of the one and the powers of the other.

Another means of recognizing the close relations of verse and prose is to try to determine which of several pa.s.sages of similarly heightened emotion, printed in the same form, was originally verse and which prose.

Yet, as I would not catch your love with a lie, but force you to love me as I am, faulty, imperfect, human, so I would not cheat your inward being with untrue hopes nor confuse pure truth with a legend. This only I have: I am true to my truth, I have not faltered; and my own end, the sudden departure from the virile earth I love so eagerly, once such a sombre matter, now appears nothing beside this weightier, more torturing bereavement.

But follow; let the torrent dance thee down to find him in the valley; let the wild lean-headed eagles yelp alone, and leave the monstrous ledges there to slope, and spill their thousand wreaths of dangling water-smoke, that like a broken purpose waste in air.

So waste not thou; but come; for all the vales await thee; azure pillars of the hearth arise to thee; the children call, I thy shepherd pipe.

A late lark twitters from the quiet skies; and from the west, where the sun, his day's work ended, lingers as in content, there falls on the old, gray city an influence luminous and serene, a shining peace. The smoke ascends in a rosy-and-golden haze. The spires shine, and are changed. In the valley shadows rise. The lark sings on. The sun, closing his benediction, sinks, and the darkening air thrills with a sense of the triumphing night--night with her train of stars and her great gift of sleep.

There, suddenly, within that crimson radiance, rose the apparition of a woman's head, and then of a woman's figure. The child it was--grown up to woman's height. Clinging to the horns of the altar, voiceless she stood--sinking, rising, raving, despairing; and behind the volume of incense, that, night and day, streamed upwards from the altar, dimly was seen the fiery font, and the shadow of that dreadful being who should have baptized her with the baptism of death. But by her side was kneeling her better angel, that hid his face with wings; that wept and pleaded for _her_; that prayed when _she_ could _not_; that fought with Heaven by tears for _her_ deliverance; which also, as he raised his immortal countenance from his wings, I saw, by the glory of his eye, that from Heaven he had won at last.

Dost thou already single me? I thought gyves and the mill had tamed thee. Oh that fortune had brought me to the field where thou art famed to have wrought such wonders with an a.s.s's jaw! I should have forced thee soon wish other arms, or left thy carca.s.s where the a.s.s lay thrown; so had the glory of prowess been recovered to Palestine.

And when, in times made better through your brave decision now,--might but Utopia be!--Rome rife with honest women and strong men, manners reformed, old habits back once more, customs that recognize the standard worth,--the wholesome household rule in force again, husbands once more G.o.d's representative, wives like the typical Spouse once more, and Priests no longer men of Belial, with no aim at leading silly women captive, but of rising to such duties as yours now,--then will I set my son at my right hand and tell his father's story to this point.[20]

+--------------------------------------------------------------+ [20] The first is from a poem in free-verse, Meditation, by Richard Aldington; the second is blank verse, from the Small Sweet Idyl in Tennyson's Princess; the third is from Henley's Margaritae Sorori (also in free-verse); the fourth is from DeQuincey's English Mail-Coach, Dream Fugue IV (prose); the fifth is from Milton's Samson Agonistes, ll. 1092 ff. (blank verse); the sixth is from Browning's The Ring and the Book, Bk. V (blank verse). +--------------------------------------------------------------+

On the other hand, it is worth observing what effect metrical arrangement has upon the emotional quality and power of words and phrases. Hardly anyone would, perhaps, find the following pa.s.sages strikingly melodious:

Prince Lucifer uprose on a starr'd night. The fiend, tired of his dark dominion, swung above the rolling ball, part screen'd in cloud, where sinners hugg'd their spectre of repose.

Here there is sweet music that falls softer on the gra.s.s than petals from blown roses, or night-dews on still waters in a gleaming pa.s.s between walls of shadowy granite; music that lies gentlier on the spirit than tired eyelids upon tired eyes.

But turn these words back to their original metrical order, and it is almost a miracle performed. One recalls Coleridge's definition of poetry as the best words in the best places.

On a starr'd night Prince Lucifer uprose.

Tired of his dark dominion swung the fiend Above the rolling ball in cloud part screen'd, Where sinners hugg'd their spectre of repose.

MEREDITH, Lucifer in Starlight.

There is sweet music here that softer falls Than petals from blown roses on the gra.s.s, Or night-dews on still waters between falls Of shadowy granite in a gleaming pa.s.s, Music that gentlier on the spirit lies Than tired eyelids upon tired eyes.

TENNYSON, Lotos Eaters.

It should now be clear that prose and verse are not so ant.i.thetical as is often supposed; that they are only different forms of the same substance, language; two branches from the same root. At certain points they overlap and are practically one; at other points the divergence is obvious but not great; and even in their extreme differences the common basis of the rhythms is the same. In both prose and verse are the same relations of time, stress, and pitch, except that in verse the arrangement and order of them are according to a perceptible pattern.

_Verse is but prose fitted over a framework of metre._ Herein lies the whole art of versification, the whole psychology of poetic rhythm, the whole problem of metrical study and investigation.

We must always remember that "a line of verse is a portion of speech-material with all its phonetic features (corresponding to its ethos as well as its logos) _adjusted_, without violence, to a fixed and definite metrical scheme. The two ent.i.ties, metrical scheme and portion of speech-material adjusted thereto, are distinct and the chief study of the metricist is the manner of adjustment of the latter to the former, the way in which a suitable portion of phonetic liquid is chosen and poured into metrical bottles."[21] Only after having grasped what can be grasped of the subtleties of prose rhythm, and having learned the common forms and patterns of metre, can we put the two together, recognize their new unity, perceive the new rhythmic beauties, harmonies, modulations that spring from their mutual adjustment.

+--------------------------------------------------------------+ [21] Thomas Rudmose-Brown, "English and French Metric," in Modern Language Review, vol. 8 (1913), p. 104. +--------------------------------------------------------------+

A word may be added here, though the subject is one rather of aesthetics than of prosody, on the function of metre in emphasizing and reinforcing the beauties of thought, emotion, and expression that poetry offers. Two practical ill.u.s.trations have just been given above. Every writer on poetics, from Aristotle down, has had something to contribute, but the substance of it all may be found in the eighteenth chapter of Coleridge's Biographia Literaria, from which a few sentences have already been quoted.[22] It is not merely that verse by its external appearance notifies the reader, or by its perceptible regularity notifies the listener, that the writer is putting forth his highest efforts, that language is being driven to its highest possibilities; it is not that the use of verse signalizes greater aims and intentions than the use of prose; but rather that the higher efforts, the greater aims, turn by a natural, spontaneous, but partly mysterious instinct to metrical forms for adequate or fit expression. The poets themselves have proved this. No one, barring a few notable exceptions, who felt the creative powers of poetry within him has dared neglect or refuse the added difficulties and the potential beauties of metre. Not the sense of obstacles overcome, but of possibilities realized prompts to formal rhythms. Music, in Dryden's phrase, is inarticulate poetry; but poetry, while it remains articulate and endeavors to accomplish its own destinies, will always approach as close as its own conditions permit to the powers of music. Some poets are inclined more powerfully to music than others. Burns composed with definite melodies in mind; Sh.e.l.ley often began with a little tune which he gradually crystallized into words; Schiller tells us that inspiration often came to him first in the form of music. Tennyson, Swinburne, and others, have chanted rather than read their poetry aloud. And even Browning, who sometimes appears to prefer discord to music, is found to have studied not only the science of music, but also the musical effectiveness of words.

+--------------------------------------------------------------+ [22] A convenient collection of extracts from various writers is made by Professor R. M. Alden in Part IV of his English Verse, New York, 1903. +--------------------------------------------------------------+

While it is unquestionably going too far to insist as Hegel does that "metre is the first and only condition absolutely demanded by poetry, yea even more necessary than a figurative picturesque diction"; or even to say that the finest poetry is always metrical; still it remains a simple fundamental truth that metre is the natural form of poetic language. The great exceptions to this--the poetic prose of a Sir Thomas Browne, a Pater, a Carlyle, or the free-verse of Whitman--do but prove its soundness; for we always feel them to be something exceptional, something not quite natural though not quite amiss, something wonderful, like _tours de force_. We would not wish them otherwise, perhaps; but we should doubt them if we did not actually have them before us.

CHAPTER III

METRE

_Elements of verse rhythm._ The simplest metrical unit is the syllable; the next higher unit is the foot, a group of syllables; the next higher unit the line, a group of feet; then the stanza or strophe.

In some prosodies--as the French and Italian, for example--the standard unit of verse is the syllable. The first essential of a line is that it have a certain number of syllables; the accents or stresses may, theoretically at least, fall anywhere in the line. In English verse also the syllable has sometimes been regarded as the unit, but for the most part only by a few poets and prosodists of the late sixteenth, the seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries.

The foot corresponds in English verse to what has been described in Chapter I as the rhythmic unit of all rhythms, namely that which recurs in regular sequence. It comprises, therefore, a point of emphasis and all that occupies the time-distance between that point of emphasis and the following one. In other words, a foot is a section of speech-rhythm containing a stressed element and an unstressed element, usually one or two unaccented syllables. So much is clear and undisputed in theory. But there are few single topics on which writers on English prosody are so much at variance as on the further, more accurate definition of the foot. One of the main sources of difficulty, however, is easily removed.

The metrical foot is not a natural division of language, like the word or the phrase, but an arbitrary division, like the bar in music, an abstraction having no existence independent of the larger rhythm of which it is a part. The a.n.a.logy between the metrical foot and the musical bar is very close: they are both artificial sections of rhythm which either in whole or in part may be grouped into such phrases as the ideas or melodies may require.[23] They may be isolated and treated by themselves only for the purposes of a.n.a.lysis, for they are merely theoretical ent.i.ties, like the chemical elements. There is no reason, therefore, that the foot should correspond with word divisions, no objection to the falling of different syllables of one word into different feet. Thus in Gray's line

The cur few tolls the knell of part ing day

both _curfew_ and _parting_ are divided.[24] Further, the division between clauses may fall in the middle of a foot, as in Wordsworth's lines

The world is too much with us; late and soon Getting and spending we lay waste our powers.

+--------------------------------------------------------------+ [23] The chief difference perhaps between the foot and the bar is that the latter always begins with a rhythmic stress, whereas the foot may begin with an unstressed element. [24] Some metrists, holding that every foot should begin with a stress, divide thus: The curfew tolls the knell of parting day. Such a division can be justified on several grounds, but it remains awkward and obscures the plain fact of rising rhythm. It does not affect the division of word and foot; for compare Sh.e.l.ley's line: Ne cessi ty! thou mother of the world. +--------------------------------------------------------------+

But another difficulty remains, which is apparent in the second line just quoted from Wordsworth. The general rhythm of the whole sonnet of which these two lines are the beginning is plainly duple rising, or iambic. The first line and the latter part of the second are easily divisible into iambs; but how shall _Getting and spend_- be divided?

Clearly _and spend_- is an iamb, but _Getting_ is not. Can trochees and iambs occur together in the same line without either obscuring or actually destroying the rhythm? The simpler solution would be to keep the whole line in rising rhythm by regarding -_ing and spend_- as the second foot and ? _Gett_- as the first. (The sign ? indicates a missing syllable or musical rest. See below, page 63.)

The most common feet are the iamb, the trochee, the anapest, and the dactyl (see above, page 38), to which may be added the spondee. The names are borrowed, not quite felicitously, from cla.s.sical prosody.

Various symbols are in use:

FOOT SYMBOLS EXAMPLES

iamb ?_? X ? _xa_ alone, despair, to walk.

trochee _?? ? X _ax_ study, backward, talk to.

anapest ??_? X X ? _xxa_ interdict, to permit, dactyl _??? ? X X _axx_ tenderly, after the.

spondee _?_? ? ? _aa_ stone deaf, broad-browed.

Cla.s.sical prosody distinguished several other feet, some of which are occasionally mentioned in treatises on English verse: amphibrach ?_?, tribrach ???, pyrrhic ??, paeon _???, choriamb _??_.

The objection to the use of these cla.s.sical terms is not so serious as is frequently supposed. Since Greek and Latin prosody was primarily quant.i.tative, that is, based upon syllabic length, and every long syllable was theoretically equal to two short syllables, an iamb or ?-had the musical value of ??, a trochee of ??, a dactyl of ???, etc.

And since no such definite musical valuation can be given to English feet, a Greek iamb and an English iamb are obviously different. But after all there was inevitably an element of stress in the cla.s.sical feet, and there is a very positive element of time in the English, so that the difference is not so great, and no confusion need result once the facts are recognized. Another set of terms, however, borrowed from the Greek and Latin is open to more grave objection, for no real equivalence exists between the cla.s.sical and the modern phenomena. The _iambic trimeter_ in Greek consists of three dipodies or six iambs; as used by English prosodists it consists of three iambs. The Greek _trochaic tetrameter_, similarly, contains eight trochees, the English 'trochaic tetrameter' but four. The common term _iambic pentameter_ is not so objectionable, but is to be rejected because of its similarity to the others, which are actually confusing.

The next larger metrical unit after the foot is the _line_ or _verse_.

It is distinguished (1) mechanically by the custom of printing, (2) phonetically by the pause usual at the end, and (3) structurally by its use as a unit in forming the stanza. Lines are of one, two, three, or more feet, according to the metrical form used by the poet (see Chapter IV). In rimed verse the end of the line is so emphasized that the line itself stands out as a very perceptible rhythmic unit; in unrimed verse, however, the line is frequently not felt as a unit at all, but is so interwoven with the natural prose rhythm of the words as to be almost indistinguishable to the ear, though of course visible to the eye on the printed page. This fact is easily apparent in reading the second, fifth, and sixth ill.u.s.trative selections on pages 43, 44.