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

purpose of accentuating and marking off each shade of emotion as it

arises, regardless of any demands of stanza…. If a metrical passage

does not gain immensely by being written independently of stanzaic

law, it loses immensely; and for this reason, perhaps, that the great

charm of the music of all verse, as distinguished from the music of

prose, is inevitableness of cadence. In regular metres we enjoy the

pleasure of feeling that the rhymes will inevitably fall under a

recognized law of couplet or stanza. But if the passage flows

independently of these, it must still flow inevitably—it must, in

short, show that it is governed by another and a yet deeper force,

the inevitableness of emotional expression.”

This distinction between “stanzaic law” and “emotional law” is highly suggestive and not merely in its application to the metres of the famous regular and irregular odes of English verse. It applies also to the infinite variety of stanza-patterns which English poetry has taken over from Latin and French sources and developed through centuries ofexperimentation, and it affords a key, as we shall see in a moment, to some of the vexed questions involved in free verse.

Take first the more familiar of the stanza forms of English verse. They are conveniently indicated by using letters of the alphabet to correspond with each rhyme-sound, whenever repeated.

Thus the rhymed couplet

“Around their prows the ocean roars,

And chafes beneath their thousand oars”

may be marked as “four-stress iambic,” rhyming aa; the heroic couplet

“The zeal of fools offends at any time,

But most of all the zeal of fools in rhyme”

as five-stress iambic, rhyming aa. The familiar measure of English ballad poetry,

“The King has written a braid letter,

And signed it wi’ his hand,

And sent it to Sir Patrick Spence,

Was walking on the sand”

is alternating four-stress and three-stress iambic, rhyming ab cb. The In Memoriam stanza,

“Now rings the woodland loud and long,

The distance takes a lovelier hue,

And drown’d in yonder living blue

The lark becomes a sightless song”

is four-stress iambic, rhyming ab ba.

The Chaucerian stanza rhymes a b a b b c c:

“‘Loke up, I seye, and telle me what she is

Anon, that I may gone aboute thi nede:

Know iche hire ought? for my love telle me this;

Thanne wolde I hopen the rather for to spede.’

Tho gan the veyne of Troilus to blede,

For he was hit, and wex alle rede for schame;

‘Aha!’ quod Pandare, ‘here bygynneth game.’”

Byron’s “ottava rima” rhymes a b a b a b c c:

“A mighty mass of brick, and smoke, and shipping,

Dirty and dusky, but as wide as eye

Could reach, with here and there a sail just skipping

In sight, then lost amidst the forestry

Of masts; a wilderness of steeples peeping

On tiptoe through their sea-coal canopy;

A huge, dun cupola, like a foolscap crown

On a fool’s head—and there is London Town!”

The Spenserian stanza rhymes a b a b b c b c c, with an extra foot in the final line:

“Hee had a faire companion of his way,

A goodly lady clad in scarlot red,

Purfled with gold and pearle of rich assay;

And like a Persian mitre on her hed

Shee wore, with crowns and owches garnished,

The which her lavish lovers to her gave:

Her wanton palfrey all was overspred

With tinsell trappings, woven like a wave,

Whose bridle rung with golden bels and bosses brave.”

In considering these various groups of lines which we call stanzas it is clear that we have to do with thought-units as well as feeling-units, and that both thought-units and feeling-units should be harmonized, if possible, with the demands of beauty and variety of sound as represented by the rhymes. It is not absurd to speak of the natural “size” of poetic thoughts. Pope, for instance, often works with ideas of couplet size, just as Martial sometimes amused himself with ideas of a still smaller epigram size, or Omar Khayyam with thoughts and fancies that came in quatrain sizes. Many sonnets fail of effectiveness because the contained thought is too scanty or too full to receive adequate expression in the fourteen lines demanded by the traditional sonnet form. They are sometimes only quatrain ideas, blown up big with words to fill out the fourteen lines, or, on the contrary, as often with the Elizabethans, they are whole odes or elegies, remorselessly packed into the fashionable fourteen-line limit. No one who has given attention to the normal length of phrases and sentences doubts that there are natural “breathfuls” of words corresponding to the units of ideas; and when ideas are organized by emotion, there are waves, gusts, or ripples of words, matching the waves of feeling. In the ideal poetic “pattern,” these waves of idea, feeling and rhythmic speech would coincide more or less completely; we should have a union of “emotional law” with “stanzaic law,” the soul of poetry would find its perfect embodiment.

But if we turn the pages of any collection of English poetry, say the Golden Treasury or the Oxford Book of English Verse, we find something very different from this ideal embodiment of each poetic emotion in a form delicately moulded to the particular species of emotion revealed. We discover that precisely similar stanzaic patterns—like similar metrical patterns—are often used to express diametrically opposite feelings,—let us say, joy and sorrow, doubt and exultation, victory and defeat. The “common metre” of English hymnology is thus seen to be a rough mould into which almost any kind of religious emotion may be poured. If “trochaic” measures do not always trip it on a light fantastic toe, neither do “iambic” measures always pace sedately. Doubtless there is a certain general fitness, in various stanza forms, for this or that poetic purpose: the stanzas employed by English or Scotch balladry are admittedly excellent for story-telling; Spenser’s favorite stanza is unrivalled for painting dream-pictures and rendering dream-music, but less available for pure narration; Chaucer’s seven-line stanza, so delicately balanced upon that fourth, pivotal line, can paint a picture and tell a story too; Byron’s ottava rima has a devil-may-care jauntiness, borrowed, it is true, from his Italian models, but perfectly fitted to Byron’s own mood; the rhymed couplets of Pope sting and glitter like his antitheses, and the couplets of Dryden have their “resonance like a great bronze coin thrown down on marble”; each great artist in English verse, in short, chooses by instinct the general stanza form best suited to his particular purpose, and then moulds its details with whatever cunning he may possess. But the significant point is this: “stanzaic law” makes for uniformity, for the endless repetition of the chosen pattern, which must still be recognized as a pattern, however subtly the artist modulates his details; and in adjusting the infinitely varied material of thought and feeling, phrase and image, picture and story to the fixed stanzaic design, there are bound to be gaps and patches, stretchings and foldings of the thought-stuff,— for even as in humble tailor-craft, this many-colored coat of poetry must be cut according to the cloth as well as according to the pattern. How many pages of even the Oxford Book of English Verse are free from some touch of feebleness, of redundancy, of constraint due to the remorseless requirements of the stanza? The line must be filled out, whether or not the thought is quite full enough for it; rhyme must match rhyme, even if the thought becomes as far-fetched as the rhyming word; the stanza, in short, demands one kind of perfection as a constantly repeated musical design, as beauty of form; and another kind of perfection as the expression of human emotion. Sometimes these two perfections of “form” and “significance” are miraculously wedded, stanza after stanza, and we have our “Ode to a Nightingale,” or “Ode to Autumn” as the result. (And perhaps the best, even in this kind, are but shadows, when compared with the absolute union of truth and beauty as the poetic idea first took rhythmic form in the brain of the poet.)

Yet more often lovers of poetry must content themselves, not with such “dictates of nature” as these poems, but with approximations. Each stanzaic form has its conveniences, its “fatal facility,” its natural fitness for singing a song or telling a story or turning a thought over and over into music. Intellectual readers will always like the epigrammatic “snap” of the couplet, and Spenser will remain, largely because of his choice of stanza, the “poet’s poet.” Perhaps the very necessity of fitting rhymes together stimulates as much poetic activity as it discourages; for many poets have testified that the delight of rhyming adds energy to the imagination. If, as Shelley said, “the mind in creation is as a fading coal, which some invisible influence, like an inconstant wind, awakens to transitory brightness,” why may it not be the breath of rhyme, as well as any other form of rhythmic energy, which quickens its drooping flame? And few poets, furthermore, will admit that they are really in bondage to their stanzas. They love to dance in these fetters, and even when wearing the same fetters as another poet, they nevertheless invent movements of their own, so that Mr. Masefield’s “Chaucerian” stanzas are really not so much Chaucer’s as Masefield’s.

Each Ulysses makes and bends his own bow, after all; it is only the unsuccessful suitors for the honors of poetic craftsmanship who complain of its difficulties. Something of our contemporary impatience with fixed stanzaic forms is due perhaps to the failure to recognize that the greater poets succeed in making over every kind of poetic pattern in the act of employing it, just as a Chopin minuet differs from a Liszt minuet, although both composers are using the same fundamental form of dance music. We must allow for the infinite variety of creative intention, technique and result. The true defence of rhyme and stanza against the arguments of extreme advocates of free verse is to point out that rhyme and stanza are natural structural devices for securing certain effects. There are various types of bridges for crossing different kinds of streams; no one type of bridge is always and everywhere the best. To do away with rhyme and stanza is to renounce some modes of poetic beauty; it is to resolve that there shall be one less way of crossing the stream. An advocate of freedom in the arts may well admit that the artist may bridge his particular stream in any way he can,—or he may ford it or swim it or go over in an airplane if he chooses. But some method must be found of getting his ideas and emotions “across” into the mind and feelings of the readers of his poetry. If this can adequately be accomplished without recourse to rhyme and stanza, very well; there is Paradise Lost, for instance, and Hamlet. But here we are driven back again upon the countless varieties of artistic intention and craftsmanship and effect. Each method—and there are as many methods as there are poets and far more, for craftsmen like Milton and Tennyson try hundreds of methods in their time—is only a medium through which the artist is endeavoring to attain a special result. It is one way—only one, and perhaps not the best way—of trying to cross the stream.

4. Free Verse

Recalling now the discussion of the rhythms of prose in the previous chapter, and remembering that rhyme and stanza are special forms of reinforcing the impulse of rhythm, what shall be said of free verse? It belongs, unquestionably, in that “neutral zone” which some readers, in Dr. Patterson’s phrase, instinctively appropriate as “prose experience,” and others as “verse experience.”