A Study of Poetry by Bliss Perry (ereader with android TXT) đ
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than that other which wholly ignores the effect of musical sound and
looks only to the thought that is conveyed. Aristotle comes
perilously near this doctrine.â
But it is not Aristotle only who permits himself at times to undervalue the formal element in verse. It is also Sir Philip Sidney, with his famous âverse being but an ornament and no cause to poetryâ and âit is not riming and versing that maketh a poet.â It is Shelley with his âThe distinction between poets and prose writers in a vulgar errorâŠ. Plato was essentially a poetâthe truth and splendor of his imagery, and the melody of his language, are the most intense that it is possible to conceiveâŠ. Lord Bacon was a poet.â It is Coleridge with his âThe writings of Plato, and Bishop Taylor, and the Theoria Sacra of Burnet, furnish undeniable proofs that poetry of the highest kind may be written without metre.â
In such passages as these, how generous are Sidney, Shelley, and Coleridge to the prose-men! And yet these same poet-critics, in dozens of other passages, have explained the fundamental justification of metre, rhyme and stanza as elements in the harmony of verse. Harmony may be attained, it is true, by rhythms too complicated to be easily scanned in metrical feet, and by measures which disregard rhyme and stanza; and poets, as well as critics, by giving exclusive attention to a single element in harmony, are able to persuade themselves for the moment that all other elements are relatively negligible. Milton, in his zeal for blank verse, attacked rhyme, in which he had already proved himself a master, quite as fiercely as any of our contemporary champions of free verse. Campion, a trained musician, argued for a quantitative system of English prosody during the very period when he was composing, in the accentual system, some of the most exquisite songs in the language. Daniel, whose Defense of Rhyme (1603) was a triumphant reply to Campionâs theory, gave courteous praise to his opponentâs practice. Dryden, most flexible-minded of critics, argues now for, and now against the use of rhymed heroic couplets in the drama, fitting his theories to the changing currents of contemporary taste as well as to the varying, self-determined technique of his own plays. âNever wholly out of the way, nor in it,â was Drydenâs happy phrase to describe the artistâs freedom, a freedom always conscious of underlying law.
2. Rhyme as a Form of Rhythm
However theory and practice may happen to coincide or to drift apart, the fundamental law which justifies rhyme and stanza seems to be this: if rhythm is a primary fact in poetry, and metre is, as Aristotle called it, sections of rhythm, any device of repeating identical or nearly identical sounds at measured intervals is an aid to rhythmical effect. Rhyme is thus a form, an âexternalizingâ of rhythm. It is structural as well as decorative, or rather, it is one way of securing structure, of building verse. There are other devices, of course, for attaining symmetrical patterns, for conveying an impression of unity in variety. The âparallelâ structure of Hebrew poetry, where one idea and phrase is balanced against another,
âI have slain a man to my woundingâ
And a young man to my hurtââ
or the âenvelopeâ structure of many of the Psalms, where the initial phrase or idea is repeated at the close, after the insertion of illustrative matter, thus securing a pattern by the âreturnâ of the main ideaâthe closing of the âcurveââmay serve to illustrate the universality of the principle of balance and contrast and repetition in the architecture of verse. For Hebrew poetry, like the poetry of many primitive peoples, utilized the natural pleasure which the ear takes in listening for and perceiving again an already uttered sound. Rhyme is a gratification of expectation, like the repetition of a chord in music [Footnote: âMost musical compositions are written in quite obvious rhymes; and the array of familiar and classical works that have not only rhymes but distinct stanzaic arrangements exactly like those of poetry is worth remembering. Mendelssohnâs âSpring Songâ and Rubinsteinâs âRomance in E Flatâ will occur at once as examples in which the stanzas are unmistakable.â C. E. Russell, âSwinburne and Music,â North American Review, November, 1907.] or of colors in a rug. It assists the mind in grasping the sense-rhythm,â the design of the piece as a whole. It assists the emotions through the stimulus to the attention, through the reinforcement which it gives to the pulsations of the psycho-physical organism.
âAnd sweep through the deep
While the stormy tempests blow,
While the battle rages long and loud
And the stormy tempests blow.â
The pulses cannot help quickening as the rhymes quicken.
But in order to perform this structural, rhythmical purpose it is not necessary that rhyme be of any single recognized type. As long as the ear receives the pleasure afforded by accordant sound, any of the various historical forms of rhyme may serve. It may be Alliteration, the letter-rhyme or âbeginning-rhymeâ of Old English poetry:
âHim be healfe stod hyse unweaxen,
Cniht on gecampe, se full caflice.â
Tennyson imitates it in his âBattle of Brunanburhâ:
âMighty the Mercian,
Hard was his hand-play,
Sparing not any of
Those that with Anlaf,
Warriors over the
Weltering waters
Borne in the barkâs-bosom,
Drew to this islandâ
Doomed to the death.â
This repetition of initial letters survives in phrases of prose like âdead and done with,â âto have and to hold,â and it is utilized in modern verse to give further emphasis to accentual syllables. But masters of alliterative effects, like Keats, Tennyson and Verlaine, constantly employ alliteration in unaccented syllables so as to color the tone-quality of a line without a too obvious assault upon the ear. The unrhymed songs of The Princess are full of these delicate modulations of sound.
In Common rhyme, or âend-rhymeâ (foundâabound), the accented vowel and all succeeding sounds are repeated, while the consonants preceding the accented vowel vary. Assonance, in its stricter sense, means the repetition of an accented vowel (blacknessâdances), while the succeeding sounds vary, but the terms âassonanceâ and âconsonanceâ are often employed loosely to signify harmonious effects of tone-color within a line or group of lines. Complete or âidenticalâ rhymes (fairâaffair), which were legitimate in Chaucerâs time, are not now considered admissible in English. âMasculineâ rhymes are end-rhymes of one syllable; âfeminineâ rhymes are end-rhymes of two syllables (uncertainâcurtain); internal or âmiddle-rhymesâ are produced by the repetition at the end of a line of a rhyme-sound already employed within the line.
âWe were the first that ever burst
Into that silent sea.â
In general, the more frequent the repetitions of rhyme, the quicker is the rhythmic movement of the poem, and conversely. Thus, the In Memoriam stanza attains its peculiar effect of retardation by rhyming the first line with the fourth, so that the ear is compelled to wait for the expected recurrence of the first rhyme sound.
âBeside the riverâs wooded reach,
The fortress and the mountain ridge,
The cataract flashing from the bridge,
The breaker breaking on the beach.â
This gives a movement markedly different from that secured by rearranging the same lines in alternate rhymes:
âBeside the riverâs wooded reach,
The fortress and the mountain ridge,
The breaker breaking on the beach,
The cataract flashing from the bridge.â
If all the various forms of rhyme are only different ways of emphasizing rhythm through the repetition of accordant sounds, it follows that the varying rhythmical impulses of poets and of readers will demand now a greater and now a less dependence upon this particular mode of rhythmical satisfaction. Chaucer complained of the scarcity of rhymes in English as compared with their affluence in Old French, and it is true that rhyming is harder in our tongue than in the Romance languages. We have had magicians of rhyme, like Swinburne, whose very profusion of rhyme-sounds ends by cloying the taste of many a reader, and sending him back to blank verse or on to free verse. The Spenserian stanza, which calls for one fourfold set of rhymes, one threefold, and one double, all cunningly interlaced, is as complicated a piece of rhyme-harmony as the ear of the average lover of poetry can carry. It is needless to say that there are born rhymers, who think in rhyme and whose fecundity of imagery is multiplied by the excitement of matching sound with sound. They are often careless in their prodigality, inexact in their swift catching at any rhyme-word that will serve. At the other extreme are the self-conscious artists in verse who abhor imperfect concordances, and polish their rhymes until the life and freshness disappear. For sheer improvising cleverness of rhyme Byron is still unmatched, but he often contents himself with approximate rhymes that are nearly as bad as some of Mrs. Browningâs and Whittierâs. Very different is the deliberate artifice of the following lines, where the monotony of the rhyme-sound fits the âsolemn ennuiâ of the trailing peacocks;
I
âFrom out the templeâs pillared portico,
Thence to the gardens where blue poppies blow
The gold and emerald peacocks saunter slow,
Trailing their solemn ennui as they go,
Trailing their melancholy and their woe.
II
âTrailing their melancholy and their woe,
Trailing their solemn ennui as they go
The gold and emerald peacocks saunter slow
From out the gardens where blue poppies blow
Thence to the templeâs pillared portico.â [Footnote: Frederic Adrian Lopere, âWorld Wisdom,â The International, September, 1915.]
Rhyme, then, is not merely a âjingle,â it is rather, as Samuel Johnson said of all versification, a âjoining music with reason.â Its blending of decorative with structural purpose is in truth âa dictate of nature,â or, to quote E. C. Stedman, âIn real, that is, spontaneous minstrelsy, the fittest assonance, consonance, time, even rime,⊠come of themselves with imaginative thought.â
3. Stanza
There are some lovers of poetry, however, who will grant this theoretical justification of rhyme as an element in the harmony of verse, without admitting that the actual rhyming stanzas of English verse show âspontaneous minstrelsy.â The word âstanzaâ or âstropheâ means literally âa resting-place,â a halt or turn, that is to say, after a uniform group of rhymed lines. Alden defines it in his English Verse as âthe largest unit of verse-measure ordinarily recognized. It is based not so much on rhythmical divisions as on periods either rhetorical or melodic; that is, a short stanza will roughly correspond to the period of a sentence, and a long one to that of a paragraph, while in lyrical verse the original idea was to conform the stanza to the melody for which it was written.â âNormally, then,â Alden adds in his Introduction to Poetry, âall the stanzas of a poem are identical in the number, the length, the metre, and the rime-scheme of the corresponding verses.â The question arises, therefore, whether those units which we call âstanzasâ are arbitrary or vital. Have the lines been fused into their rhymed grouping by passionate feeling, or is their unity a mere mechanical conformation to a pattern? In Theodore Watts-Duntonâs well-known article on âPoetryâ in the Encyclopaedia Brittanica [Footnote: Now reprinted, with many expansions, in his Poetry and the Renascence of Wonder. E. P. Dutton, New York.] the phrases âstanzaic lawâ and âemotional lawâ are used to represent the two principles at issue:
âIn modern prosody the arrangement of the rhymes and the length of
the lines in any rhymed metrical passage may be determined either by
a fixed stanzaic law, or by a law infinitely deeperâby the law which
impels the soul, in a state of poetic exultation, to seize hold of
every kind of metrical aid, such as rhyme, caesura,
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