A Study of Poetry by Bliss Perry

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CHAPTER IV

I regret that Professor Lowes's brilliant discussion of "Poetic Diction"
in his _Convention and Revolt_ did not appear until after this chapter was
written. There are stimulating remarks on Diction in Fairchild and
Eastman, in Raleigh's _Wordsworth_, in L. A. Sherman's _Analytics of
Literature_, chapter 6, in Raymond's _Poetry as a Representative Art_, and
in Hudson Maxim's _Science of Poetry_. Coleridge's description of
Wordsworth's theory of poetic diction in the _Biographia Literaria_ is
famous. Walt Whitman's _An American Primer_, first published in the
_Atlantic_ for April, 1904, is a highly interesting contribution to the
subject.

No theoretical discussion, however, can supply the place of a close study,
word by word, of poems in the classroom. It is advisable, I think, to
follow such analyses of the diction of Milton, Keats and Tennyson by a
scrutiny of the diction employed by contemporary poets like Edgar Lee
Masters and Carl Sandburg.

The following passages in prose and verse, printed without the authors'
names, are suggested as an exercise in the study of diction:

1. "The falls were in plain view about a mile off, but very distinct,
and no roar--hardly a murmur. The river tumbling green and white, far
below me; the dark, high banks, the plentiful umbrage, many bronze
cedars, in shadow; and tempering and arching all the immense
materiality, a clear sky overhead, with a few white clouds, limpid,
spiritual, silent. Brief, and as quiet as brief, that picture--a
remembrance always afterward."

2. "If there be fluids, as we know there are, which, conscious of a
coming wind, or rain, or frost, will shrink and strive to hide
themselves in their glass arteries; may not that subtle liquor of the
blood perceive, by properties within itself, that hands are raised to
waste and spill it; and in the veins of men run cold and dull as his
did, in that hour!"

3. "On a flat road runs the well-train'd runner,
He is lean and sinewy with muscular legs,
He is thinly clothed, he leans forward as he runs,
With lightly closed fists and arms partially rais'd."

4. "The feverish heaven with a stitch in the side,
Of lightning."

5. "Out of blue into black is the scheme of the skies, and their dews are
the wine of the bloodshed of things."

6. "Dry clash'd his harness in the icy caves
And barren chasms, and all to left and right
The bare black cliff clang'd round him, as he based
His feet on juts of slippery crag that rang
Sharp-smitten with the dint of armed heels."

7. "As for the grass, it grew as scant as hair
In leprosy; their dry blades pricked the mud
Which underneath looked kneaded up with blood.
One stiff blind horse, his every bone a-stare,
Stood stupefied, however he came there:
Thrust out past service from the devil's stud."

8. "For the main criminal I have no hope
Except in such a suddenness of fate.
I stood at Naples once, a night so dark
I could have scarce conjectured there was earth
Anywhere, sky or sea or world at all:
But the night's black was burst through by a
blaze--
Thunder struck blow on blow, earth groaned and
bore,
Through her whole length of mountain visible:
There lay the city thick and plain with spires,
And, like a ghost disshrouded, white the sea.
So may the truth be flashed out by one blow,
And Guido see, one instant, and be saved."

CHAPTER V

A fresh and clear discussion of the principles governing Rhythm and
Metre may be found in C. E. Andrews's _Writing and Reading of Verse_.
The well-known books by Alden, Corson, Gummere, Lewis, Mayor, Omond,
Raymond and Saintsbury are indicated in the Bibliography. Note also
the bibliographies given by Alden and Patterson.

I have emphasized in this chapter the desirability of compromise in some
hotly contested disputes over terminology and methods of metrical
notation. Perhaps I have gone farther in this direction than some teachers
will wish to go. But all classroom discussion should be accompanied by
oral reading of verse, by the teacher and if possible by pupils, and the
moment oral interpretations begin, it will be evident that "a satisfied
ear" is more important than an exact agreement upon methods of notation.

I venture to add here, for their suggestiveness, a few passages about
Rhythm and Metre, and finally, as an exercise in the study of the
prevalence of the "iambic roll" in sentimental oratory, an address by
Robert G. Ingersoll.

1. "Suppose that we figure the nervous current which corresponds to
consciousness as proceeding, like so many other currents of nature, in
_waves_--then we do receive a new apprehension, if not an explanation, of
the strange power over us of successive strokes.... Whatever things occupy
our attention--events, objects, tones, combinations of tones, emotions,
pictures, images, ideas--our consciousness of them will be heightened by
the rhythm as though it consisted of waves."
EASTMAN, _The Enjoyment of Poetry_, p. 93.

2. "Rhythm of pulse is the regular alternation of units made up of beat
and pause; rhythm in verse is a measured or standardized arrangement of
sound relations. The difference between rhythm of pulse and rhythm in
verse is that the one is known through touch, the other through hearing;
as rhythm, they are essentially the same kind of thing. Viewed generally
and externally, then, verse is language that is beaten into measured
rhythm, or that has some type of uniform or standard rhythmical
arrangement."
FAIRCHILD, _The Making of Poetry_, p. 117.

3. "A Syllable is a body of sound brought out with an independent, single,
and unbroken breath (Sievers). This syllable may be _long_ or _short_,
according to the time it fills; compare the syllables in _merrily_ with
the syllables in _corkscrew_. Further, a syllable may be _heavy_ or
_light_ (also called _accented_ or _unaccented_) according as it receives
more or less force or _stress_ of tone: compare the two syllables of
_treamer_. Lastly, a syllable may have increased or diminished _height-_of
tone,--_pitch: cf._ the so-called 'rising inflection' at the end of a
question. Now, in spoken language, there are infinite degrees of length,
of stress, of pitch....

"It is a well-known property of human speech that it keeps up a ceaseless
change between accented and unaccented syllables. A long succession of
accented syllables becomes unbearably monotonous; a long succession of
unaccented syllables is, in effect, impossible. Now when the ear detects
at regular intervals a recurrence of accented syllables, varying with
unaccented, it perceives _Rhythm_. Measured intervals of time are the
basis of all verse, and their _regularity_ marks off poetry from prose; so
that Time is thus the chief element in Poetry, as it is in Music and in
Dancing. From the idea of measuring these time-intervals, we derive the
name Metre; Rhythm means pretty much the same thing,--'a flowing,' an
even, measured motion. This rhythm is found everywhere in nature: the beat
of the heart, the ebb and flow of the sea, the alternation of day and
night. Rhythm is not artificial, not an invention; it lies at the heart of
things, and in rhythm the noblest emotions find their noblest expression."
GUMMERE, _Handbook of Poetics_, p. 133.

4. "It was said of Chopin that in playing his waltzes his left hand kept
absolutely perfect time, while his right hand constantly varied the rhythm
of the melody, according to what musicians call _tempo rubato_,'stolen' or
distorted time. Whether this is true in fact, or even physically possible,
has been doubted; but it represents a perfectly familiar possibility of
the mind. Two streams of sound pass constantly through the inner ear of
one who understands or appreciates the rhythm of our verse: one, never
actually found in the real sounds which are uttered, is the absolute
rhythm, its equal time-intervals moving on in infinitely perfect
progression; the other, represented by the actual movement of the verse,
is constantly shifting by quickening, retarding, strengthening or
weakening its sounds, yet always hovers along the line of the perfect
rhythm, and bids the ear refer to that perfect rhythm the succession of
its pulsations."
ALDEN, _An Introduction to Poetry_, p. 188.

5. "Many lines in Swinburne cannot be scanned at all except by the Lanier
method, which reduces so-called feet to their purely musical equivalents
of time bars. What, for instance, can be made by the formerly accepted
systems of prosody of such hexameters as

'Full-sailed, wide-winged, poised softly forever asway?'

The usual explanation of this line is that Mr. Swinburne, carelessly,
inadvertently, or for some occult purpose, interjected one line of five
feet among his hexameters and the scansion usually followed is by
arrangement into a pentameter, thus:

'Full-sailed | wide-winged | poised softly | forever | asway,'

the first two feet being held to be spondees, and the third and fourth
amphibrachs. It has also been proposed to make the third foot a spondee or
an iambus, and the remaining feet anapaests, thus:

'Full-sailed | wide-winged | poised soft- | ly forev- | er asway.'

"The confusion of these ideas is enough to mark them as unscientific and
worthless, to say nothing of the severe reflection they cast on the poet's
workmanship. We have not so known Mr. Swinburne, for, if there be anything
he has taught us about himself it is his strenuous and sometimes absurd
particularity about immaculate form. He would never overlook a line of
five feet in a poem of hexameters. But--as will, I think, appear later and
conclusively--the line is really of six feet, and is not iambic, trochaic,
anapaestic, the spurious spondaic that some writers have tried to
manufacture for English verse, or anything else recognized in Coleridge's
immortal stanza, or in text-books. It simply cannot be scanned by
classical rules; it cannot be weighed justly, and its full meaning
extracted, by any of the 'trip-time' or 'march-time' expedients of other
investigators. It is purely music; and when read by the method of music
appears perfectly designed and luminous with significance. Only a poet
that was at heart a composer could have made such a phrase, based
upon such intimate knowledge of music's rhythmical laws."
C. E. RUSSELL, "Swinburne and Music" _North American Review_,
November, 1907.

6. Dr. Henry Osborn Taylor has kindly allowed me to quote this passage
from his _Classical Heritage of the Middle Ages_, pp. 246, 247:

"Classic metres expressed measured feelings. Hexameters had given voice to
many emotions beautifully, with unfailing modulation of calm or storm.
They had never revealed the infinite heart of God, or told the yearning of
the soul responding; nor were they ever to be the instrument of these
supreme disclosures in Christian times. Such unmeasured feelings could not
be held within the controlled harmonies of the hexameter nor within
sapphic or alcaic or Pindaric strophes. These antique forms of poetry
definitely expressed their contents, although sometimes suggesting further
unspoken feeling, which is so noticeable with Virgil. But characteristic
Christian poetry, like the Latin mediaeval hymn, was not to express its
meaning as definitely or contain its significance. Mediaeval hymns are
childlike, having often a narrow clearness in their literal sense; and
they may be childlike, too, in their expressed symbolism. Their
significance reaches far beyond their utterance; they suggest, they echo,
and they listen; around them rolls the voice of God, the infinitude of
His love and wrath, heaven's chorus and hell's agonies; _dies irae, dies
illa_--that line says little, but mountains of wrath press on it, from
which the soul shall not escape.

"Christian emotion quivers differently from any movement of the spirit in
classic measures. The new quiver, the new shudder, the utter terror, and
the utter love appear in mediaeval rhymed accentual poetry:

Desidero te millies,
Me Jesu; quando venies?
Me laetum quando facies,
Ut vultu tuo saties?

Quo dolore
Quo moerore
Deprimuntur miseri,
Qui abyssis
Pro commissis
Submergentur inferi.

Recordare, Jesu pie,
Quod sum causa tuae viae;
Ne me perdas ilia die.
* * * * *
Lacrymosa dies illa
Qua resurget ex fa villa,
Judicandus homo reus;
Huic ergo parce, Deus!
Pie Jesu, Domine,
Dona eis requiem.

"Let any one feel the emotion of these verses and then turn to some piece
of classic poetry, a passage from Homer or Virgil, an elegiac couplet or a
strophe from Sappho or Pindar or Catullus, and he will realize the
difference, and the impossibility of setting the emotion of a mediaeval
hymn in a classic metre."

7. "_Friends_: I know how vain it is to gild a grief with words, and yet I
wish to take from every grave its fear. Here in this world, where life and
death are equal things, all should be brave enough to meet what all the
dead have met. The future has been filled with fear, stained and polluted
by the heartless past. From the wondrous tree of life the buds and
blossoms fall with ripened fruit, and in the common bed of earth, the
patriarchs and babes sleep side by side.

"Why should we fear that which will come to all that is?

"We cannot tell, we do not know, which is the greater blessing--life or
death. We do not know whether the grave is the end of this life, or the
door of another, or whether the night here is not somewhere else at dawn.
Neither can we tell which is the more fortunate--the child dying in its
mother's arms, before its lips have learned to form a word, or he who
journeys all the length of life's uneven road, painfully taking the last
slow steps with staff and crutch.

"Every cradle asks us, 'Whence?' and every coffin, 'Whither?' The poor
barbarian, weeping above his dead, can answer these questions as
intelligently as the robed priest of the most authentic creed. The tearful
ignorance of the one is just as consoling as the learned and unmeaning
words of the other. No man, standing where the horizon of a life has
touched a grave, has any right to prophesy a future filled with pain and
tears. It may be that death gives all there is of worth to life. If those
we press and strain against our hearts could never die, perhaps that love
would wither from the earth. Maybe this common fate treads from out the
paths between our hearts the weeds of selfishness and hate, and I had
rather live and love where death is king, than have eternal life where
love is not. Another life is naught, unless we know and love again the
ones who love us here.

"They who stand with aching hearts around this little grave need have no
fear. The larger and the nobler faith in all that is and is to be tells us
that death, even at its worst, is only perfect rest. We know that through
the common wants of life--the needs and duties of each hour--their griefs
will lessen day by day, until at last this grave will be to them a place
of rest and peace--almost of joy. There is for them this consolation. The
dead do not suffer. And if they live again, their lives will surely be as
good as ours. We have no fear. We are all children of the same mother, and
the same fate awaits us all.

"We, too, have our religion, and it is this: Help for the living, hope for
the dead."
ROBERT G. INGERSOLL, "Address over a Little Boy's Grave."

CHAPTER VI

I have not attempted in this chapter to give elaborate illustrations of
the varieties of rhyme and stanza in English poetry. Full illustrations
will be found in Alden's _English Verse_. A clear statement of the
fundamental principles involved is given in W. H. Carruth's _Verse
Writing_.

Free verse is suggestively discussed by Lowes, _Convention and Revolt_,
chapters 6 and 7, and by Andrews, _Writing and Reading of Verse_, chapters
5 and 19. Miss Amy Lowell has written fully about it in the Prefaces to
_Sword Blades and Poppy Seed_ and _Can Grande's Castle_, in the final
chapter of _Tendencies in Modern American Poetry_, in the Prefaces to
_Some Imagist Poets_, and in the _North American Review_ for January,
1917. Mr. Braithwaite's annual _Anthologies of American Verse_ give a full
bibliography of special articles upon this topic.

An interesting classroom test of the difference between prose rhythm and
verse rhythm with strongly marked metre and rhyme may be found in
comparing Emerson's original prose draft of his "Two Rivers," as found in
volume 9 of his Journal, with three of the stanzas of the finished poem:

"Thy voice is sweet, Musketaquid, and repeats the music of the ram, but
sweeter is the silent stream which flows even through thee, as thou
through the land.

"Thou art shut in thy banks, but the stream I love flows in thy water, and
flows through rocks and through the air and through rays of light as well,
and through darkness, and through men and women.

"I hear and see the inundation and the eternal spending of the stream in
winter and in summer, in men and animals, in passion and thought. Happy
are they who can hear it."

"Thy summer voice, Musketaquit,
Repeats the music of the rain;
But sweeter rivers pulsing flit
Through thee, as thou through Concord plain.

"Thou in thy narrow banks are pent;
The stream I love unbounded goes
Through flood and sea and firmament;
Through light, through life, it forward flows.

"I see the inundation sweet,
I hear the spending of the stream
Through years, through men, through nature fleet,
Through love and thought, through power and dream."

I also suggest for classroom discussion the following brief passages from
recent verse, printed without the authors' names:

1. "The milkman never argues; he works alone and no one speaks to him;
the city is asleep when he is on his job; he puts a bottle on six hundred
porches and calls it a day's work; he climbs two hundred wooden stairways;
two horses are company for him; he never argues."

2. "Sometimes I have nervous moments--
there is a girl who looks at me strangely
as much as to say,
You are a young man,
and I am a young woman,
and what are you going to do about it?
And I look at her as much as to say,
I am going to keep the teacher's desk
between us, my dear,
as long as I can."

3. "I hold her hands and press her to my breast.

"I try to fill my arms with her loveliness, to plunder her sweet smile
with kisses, to drink her dark glances with my eyes.

"Ah, but where is it? Who can strain the blue from the sky?

"I try to grasp the beauty; it eludes me, leaving only the body in my
hands.

"Baffled and weary, I came back. How can the body touch the flower which
only the spirit may touch?"

4. "Child, I smelt the flowers,
The golden flowers ... hiding in crowds like fairies at my feet,
And as I smelt them the endless smile of the infinite broke over me,
and I knew that they and you and I were one.
They and you and I, the cowherds and the cows, the jewels and the
potter's wheel, the mothers and the light in baby's eyes.
For the sempstress when she takes one stitch may make nine unnecessary;
And the smooth and shining stone that rolls and rolls like the great
river may gain no moss,
And it is extraordinary what a lot you can do with a platitude when you
dress it up in Blank Prose.
Child, I smelt the flowers."

CHAPTER VII

Recent criticism has been rich in its discussions of the lyric. John
Drinkwater's little volume on _The Lyric_ is suggestive. See also C. E.
Whitmore's article in the _Pub. Mod. Lang. Ass._, December, 1918. Rhys's
_Lyric Poetry_, Schelling's _English Lyric_, Reed's _English Lyrical
Poetry_ cover the whole field of the historical English lyric. A few books
on special periods are indicated in the "Notes" to chapter ix.

An appreciation of the lyric mood can be helped greatly by adequate oral
reading in the classroom. For teachers who need suggestions as to oral
interpretation, Professor Walter Barnes's edition of Palgrave's _Golden
Treasury_ (Row, Petersen & Co., Chicago) is to be commended.

The student's ability to analyse a lyric poem should be tested by frequent
written exercises. The method of criticism may be worked out by the
individual teacher, but I have found it useful to ask students to test a
poem by some or all of the following questions:

(a) What kind of experience, thought or emotion furnishes the basis for
this lyric? What kind or degree of sensitiveness to the facts of nature?
What sort of inner mood or passion? Is the "motive" of this lyric purely
personal? If not, what other relationships or associations are involved?

(b) What sort of imaginative transformation of the material furnished by
the senses? What kind of imagery? Is it true poetry or only verse?

(c) What degree of technical mastery of lyric structure? Subordination of
material to unity of "tone"? What devices of rhythm or sound to heighten
the intended effect? Noticeable words or phrases? Does the author's power
of artistic expression keep pace with his feeling and imagination?

CHAPTER VIII

For a discussion of narrative verse in general, see Gummere's _Poetics_
and _Oldest English Epic_, Hart's _Epic and Ballad_, Council's _Study of
Poetry_, and Matthew Arnold's essay "On Translating Homer."

For the further study of ballads, note G. L. Kittredge's one volume
edition of Child's _English and Scottish Popular Ballads_, Gummere's
_Popular Ballad_, G. H. Stempel's _Book of Ballads_, J. A. Lomax's _Cowboy
Songs and other Frontier Ballads_, and Hart's summary of Child's views in
_Pub. Mod. Lang. Ass._, vol. 21, 1906. The _Oxford Book of English Verse_,
Nos. 367-389, gives excellent specimens.

All handbooks on _Poetics_ discuss the Ode. Gosse's _English Odes_ and
William Sharp's _Great Odes_ are good collections.

For the sonnet, note Corson's chapter in his _Primer of English Verse_,
and the Introduction to Miss Lockwood's collection. There are other
well-known collections by Leigh Hunt, Hall Caine and William Sharp.
Special articles on the sonnet are noted in Poole's _Index_.

The dramatic monologue is well discussed by Claude Howard, _The Dramatic
Monologue_, and by S. S. Curry, _The Dramatic Monologue in Tennyson and
Browning_.

CHAPTER IX

The various periods of English lyric poetry are covered, as has been
already noted, by the general treatises of Rhys, Reed and Schelling. Old
English lyrics are well translated by Cook and Tinker, and by Pancoast and
Spaeth. W. P. Ker's _English Literature; Mediaeval_ is excellent, as is C.
S. Baldwin's _English Mediaeval Literature_. John Erskine's _Elizabethan
Lyric_ is a valuable study. Schelling's introduction to his Selections
from the Elizabethan Lyric should also be noted, as well as his similar
book on the Seventeenth-Century Lyric. Bernbaum's _English Poets of the
Eighteenth Century_ is a careful selection, with a scholarly introduction.
Studies of the English poetry of the Romantic period are very numerous:
Oliver Elton's _Survey of English Literature, 1780-1830_, is one of the
best. Courthope's _History of English Poetry_ and Saintsbury's _History of
Criticism_ are full of material bearing upon the questions discussed in
this chapter.

Professor Legouis's account of the change in atmosphere as one passes from
Old English to Old French poetry is so delightful that I refrain from
spoiling it by a translation:

"En quittant _Beowulf_ ou la _Bataille de Maldon_ pour le _Roland_, on a
l'impression de sortir d'un lieu sombre pour entrer dans la lumiere. Cette
impression vous vient de tous les cotes a la fois, des lieux decrits, des
sujets, de la maniere de raconter, de l'esprit qui anime, de
l'intelligence qui ordonne, mais, d'une facon encore plus immediate et
plus diffuse, de la difference des deux langues. On reconnait sans doute
generalement a nos vieux ecrivains ce merite d'etre clairs, mais on est
trop habitue a ne voir dans ce don que ce qui decoule des tendances
analytiques et des aptitudes logiques de leurs esprit. Aussi plusieurs
critiques, quelques-uns francais, ont-ils fait de cet attribut une maniere
de pretexte pour leur assigner en partage la prose et pour leur retirer
la faculte poetique. Il n'en est pas ainsi. Cette clarte n'est pas
purement abstraite. Elle est une veritable lumiere qui rayonne meme des
voyelles et dans laquelle les meilleurs vers des trouveres--les seuls qui
comptent--sont baignes. Comment dire l'eblouissement des yeux longtemps
retenus dans la penombre du _Codex Exoniensis_ et devant qui passent
soudain avec leurs brillantes syllables 'Halte-Clerc,' l'epee d'Olivier,
'Joyeuse' celle de Charlemagne, 'Monjoie' l'etendard des Francs? Avant
toute description on est saisi comme par un brusque lever de soleil. Il
est tels vers de nos vieilles romances d'ou la lumiere ruisselle sans
meme qu'on ait besoin de prendre garde a leur sens:

"'Bele Erembors a la fenestre au jor
Sor ses genolz tient paile de color,'
[Footnote: "Fair Erembor at her window in daylight
Holds a coloured silk stuff on her knees."]

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