A Study of Poetry by Bliss Perry (ereader with android TXT) 📖

Greeks and Romans, and Saintsbury’s History of English Prose Rhythm is a monumental collection of wonderful prose passages in English, with the scansion of “long” and “short” syllables and of “feet” marked after a fashion that seems to please no one but the author. But in truth the task of inventing an adequate system for notating the rhythm of prose, and securing a working agreement among prosodists as to a proper terminology, is almost insuperable. Those of us who sat in our youth at the feet of German masters were taught that the distinction between verse and prose was simple: verse was, as the Greeks had called it, “bound speech” and prose was “loosened speech.” But a large proportion of the poetry published in the last ten years is “free verse,” which is assuredly of a “loosened” rather than a “bound” pattern.

Apparently the old fence between prose and verse has been broken down. Or, if one conceives of indubitable prose and indubitable verse as forming two intersecting circles, there is a neutral zone,

[Illustration: Prose Neutral Zone Verse]

which some would call “prose poetry” and some “free verse,” and which, according to the experiments of Dr. Patterson [Footnote: The Rhythm of Prose, already cited.] may be appropriated as “prose experience” or “verse experience” according to the rhythmic instinct of each individual. Indeed Mr. T. S. Omond has admitted that “the very same words, with the very same natural stresses, may be prose or verse according as we treat them. The difference is in ourselves, in the mental rhythm to which we unconsciously adjust the words.” [Footnote: Quoted in B. M. Alden, “The Mental Side of Metrical Form,” Modern Language Review, July, 1914.] Many familiar sentences from the English Bible or Prayer-Book, such as the words from the Te Deum, “We, therefore, pray thee, help thy servants, whom thou hast redeemed with thy precious blood,” have a rhythm which may be felt as prose or verse, according to the mental habit or mood or rhythmizing impulse of the hearer.

Nevertheless it remains true in general that the rhythms of prose are more constantly varied, broken and intricate than the rhythms of verse. They are characterized, according to the interesting experiments of Dr. Patterson, by syncopated time, [Footnote: “For a ‘timer’ the definition of prose as distinguished from verse experience depends upon a predominance of syncopation over coincidence in the coordination of the accented syllables of the text with the measuring pulses.” Rhythm of Prose, p. 22.] whereas in normal verse there is a fairly clean-cut coincidence between the pulses of the hearer and the strokes of the rhythm. Every one seems to agree that there is a certain danger in mixing these infinitely subtle and “syncopated” tunes of prose with the easily recognized tunes of verse. There is, unquestionably, a natural “iambic” roll in English prose, due to the predominant alternation of stressed and unstressed syllables in our native tongue, but when Dickens—to cite what John Wesley would call “an eminent sinner” in this respect—inserts in his emotional prose line after line of five-stress “iambic” verse, we feel instinctively that the presence of the blank verse impairs the true harmony of the prose. [Footnote: Observe, in the “Notes and Illustrations” for this chapter, the frequency of the blank-verse lines in Robert G. Ingersoll’s “Address over a Little Boy’s Grave.”] Delicate writers of English prose usually avoid this coincidence of pattern with the more familiar patterns of verse, but it is impossible to avoid it wholly, and some of the most beautiful cadences of English prose might, if detached from their context, be scanned for a few syllables as perfect verse. The free verse of Whitman, Henley and Matthew Arnold is full of these embedded fragments of recognized “tunes of verse,” mingled with the unidentifiable tunes of prose. There has seldom been a more curious example of accidental coincidence than in this sentence from a prosaic textbook on “The Parallelogram of Forces”: “And hence no force, however great, can draw a cord, however fine, into a horizontal line which shall be absolutely straight.” This is precisely the “four-stressed iambic” metre of In Memoriam, and it even preserves the peculiar rhyme order of the In Memoriam stanza:

 

“And hence no force, however great,

Can draw a cord, however fine,

Into a horizontal line

Which shall be absolutely straight.”

We shall consider more closely, in the section on Free Verse in the following chapter, this question of the coincidence and variation of pattern as certain types of loosened verse pass in and out of the zone which is commonly recognized as pure prose. But it is highly important here to remember another fact, which professional psychologists in their laboratory experiments with the notation of verse and prose have frequently forgotten, namely, the existence of a type of ornamented prose, which has had a marked historical influence upon the development of English style. This ornamented prose, elaborated by Greek and Roman rhetoricians, and constantly apparent in the pages of Cicero, heightened its rhythm by various devices of alliteration, assonance, tone-color, cadence, phrase and period. Greek oratory even employed rhyme in highly colored passages, precisely as Miss Amy Lowell uses rhyme in her polyphonic or “many-voiced” prose. Medieval Latin took over all of these devices from Classical Latin, and in its varied oratorical, liturgical and epistolary forms it strove to imitate the various modes of cursus (“running”) and clausula (“cadence”) which had characterized the rhythms of Isocrates and Cicero. [Footnote: A. C. Clark, Prose Rhythm in English. Oxford, 1913. Morris W. Croll, “The Cadence of English Oratorical Prose,” Studies in Philology. January, 1919. Oliver W. Elton, “English Prose Numbers,” in Essays and Studies by members of the English Association, 4th Series. Oxford, 1913.] From the Medieval Latin Missal and Breviary these devices of prose rhythm, particularly those affecting the end of sentences, were taken over into the Collects and other parts of the liturgy of the English Prayer-Book. They had a constant influence upon the rhythms employed by the translators of the English Bible, and through the Bible the cadences of this ancient ornamented prose have passed over into the familiar but intricate harmonies of our “heightened” modern prose.

While this whole matter is too technical to be dealt with adequately here, it may serve at least to remind the reader that an appreciation of English prose rhythms, as they have been actually employed for many centuries, requires a sensitiveness to the rhetorical position of phrases and clauses, and to “the use of sonorous words in the places of rhetorical emphasis, which cannot be indicated by the bare symbols of prosody.” [Footnote: New York Nation, February 27, 1913.] For that sonority and cadence and balance which constitute a harmonious prose sentence cannot be adequately felt by a possibly illiterate scientist in his laboratory for acoustics; the “literary” value of words, in all strongly emotional prose, is inextricably mingled with the bare sound values: it is thought-units that must be delicately “balanced” as well as stresses and slides and final clauses; it is the elevation of ideas, the nobility and beauty of feeling, as discerned by the trained literary sense, which makes the final difference between enduring prose harmonies and the mere tinkling of the “musical glasses.” [Footnote: This point is suggestively discussed by C. E. Andrews, The Writing and Reading of Verse, chap. 5. New York, 1918.] The student of verse may very profitably continue to exercise himself with the rhythms of prose. He should learn to share the unwearied enthusiasm of Professor Saintsbury for the splendid cadences of our sixteenth-century English, for the florid decorative period of Thomas Browne and Jeremy Taylor, for the eloquent “prose poetry” of De Quincey and Ruskin and Charles Kingsley, and for the strangely subtle effects wrought by Pater and Stevenson. But he must not imagine that any laboratory system of tapping syncopated time, or any painstaking marking of macrons (-) breves (u) and caesuras (||) will give him full initiation into the mysteries of prose cadences which have been built, not merely out of stressed and unstressed syllables, but out of the passionate intellectual life of many generations of men. He may learn to feel that life as it pulsates in words, but no one has thus far devised an adequate scheme for its notation.

 

5. Quantity, Stress and Syllable

The notation of verse, however, while certainly not a wholly simple matter, is far easier. It is practicable to indicate by conventional printer’s devices the general rhythmical and metrical scheme of a poem, and to indicate the more obvious, at least, of its incidental variations from the expected pattern. It remains as true of verse as it is of prose that the “literary” values of words—their connotations or emotional overtones—are too subtle to be indicated by any marks invented by a printer; but the alternation or succession of long or short syllables, of stressed or unstressed syllables, the nature of particular feet and lines and stanzas, the order and interlacing of rhymes, and even the devices of tone-color, are sufficiently external elements of verse to allow easy methods of indication.

When you and I first began to study Virgil and Horace, for instance, we were taught that the Roman poets, imitating the Greeks, built heir verses upon the principle of Quantity. The metrical unit was the foot, made up of long and short syllables in various combinations, two short syllables being equivalent to one long one. The feet most commonly used were the Iambus [short-long], the Anapest [short-short-long], the Trochee [long-short], the Dactyl [long-short-short], and the Spondee [long-long]. Then we were instructed that a “verse” or line consisting of one foot was called a monometer, of two feet, a dimeter, of three, a trimeter, of four, a tetrameter, of five, a pentameter, of six, a hexameter. This looked like a fairly easy game, and before long we were marking the quantities in the first line of the Aeneid, as other school-children had done ever since the time of St. Augustine:

 

Arma vi�rumque ca�no Tro�jae qui � primus ab�oris.

Or perhaps it was Horace’s

 

Maece�nas, atavis �� edite reg�ibus.

We were told, of course, that it was not all quite as simple as this: that there were frequent metrical variations, such as trochees changing places with dactyls, and anapests with iambi; that feet could be inverted, so that a trochaic line might begin with an iambus, an anapestic line with a dactyl, or vice versa; that syllables might be omitted at the beginning or the end or even in the middle of a line, and that this “cutting-off” was called catalexis; that syllables might even be added at the beginning or end of certain lines and that these syllables were called hypermetric; and that we must be very watchful about pauses, particularly about a somewhat mysterious chief pause, liable to occur about the middle of a line, called a caesura. But the magic password to admit us to this unknown world of Greek and Roman prosody was after all the word Quantity.

If a few of us were bold enough to ask the main difference between this Roman system of versification and the system which governed modern English poetry—even such rude playground verse as

 

“Eeny, meeny, miny, mo,

Catch a nigger by the toe”—

we were promptly told by the teacher that the difference was a very plain one, namely, that English, like all the Germanic languages, obeyed in its verse the principles of Stress. Instead of looking for “long” and “short” syllables, we had merely to look for “stressed” and “unstressed” syllables. It was a matter, not of quantity, but of accent; and if we remembered this fact, there was no harm but rather a great convenience, in retaining the technical names of classical versification. Only