A Study of Poetry by Bliss Perry

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"He clasps the crag with crooked hands;
Close to the sun in lonely lands,
Ring'd with the azure world, he stands.

"The wrinkled sea beneath him crawls;
He watches from his mountain walls,
And like a thunderbolt he falls."
[Footnote: Tennyson, "The Eagle." ]

Or suppose the poet is a woman, meditating upon the coming of old age, and
reflecting that age brings riches of its own. Observe how this thought is
"troped"; i.e. turned into figures which re-present the fundamental idea:

"Come, Captain Age,
With your great sea-chest full of treasure!
Under the yellow and wrinkled tarpaulin
Disclose the carved ivory
And the sandalwood inlaid with pearl,
Riches of wisdom and years.
Unfold the India shawl,
With the border of emerald and orange and crimson and blue,
Weave of a lifetime.
I shall be warm and splendid
With the spoils of the Indies of age."
[Footnote: Sarah N. Cleghorn, "Come, Captain Age."]

It is true, of course, that a poet may sometimes prefer to use
unornamented language, "not elevated," as Wordsworth said, "above the
level of prose." Such passages may nevertheless be marked by poetic
beauty, due to the circumstances or atmosphere in which the plain words
are spoken. The drama is full of such instances. "I loved you not," says
Hamlet; to which Ophelia replies only: "I was the more deceived." No
figure of speech could be more moving than that.

I once found in an old graveyard on Cape Cod, among the sunny, desolate
sandhills, these lines graven on a headstone:

"She died, and left to me
This heath, this calm and quiet scene;
This memory of what hath been,
And nevermore will be."

I had read the lines often enough in books, but here I realized for the
first time the perfection of their beauty.

But though a poet, for special reasons, may now and then renounce the use
of figurative language, it remains true that this is the characteristic
and habitual mode of utterance, not only of poetry but of all emotional
prose. Here are a few sentences from an English sailor's account of the
fight off Heligoland on August 28, 1915. He was on a destroyer:

"Scarcely had we started when from out the mist and across our front,
in furious pursuit, came the first cruiser squadron--the town class,
Birmingham, etc.--each unit a match for three Mainzes; and as we
looked and reduced speed they opened fire, _and the clear
'bang-bang!' of their guns was just a cooling drink_....

"The Mainz was immensely gallant. The last I saw of her, absolutely
wrecked alow and aloft, her whole midships a fuming inferno, she had
one gun forward and one aft still spitting forth fury and defiance
_like a wildcat mad with wounds_.

"Our own four-funnel friend recommenced at this juncture with a
couple of salvos, but rather half-heartedly, and we really did not
care a d----, for there, straight ahead of us, in lordly procession,
_like elephants walking through a pack of dogs_, came the Lion, Queen
Mary, Invincible, and New Zealand, our battle cruisers, great and
grim and _uncouth as some antediluvian monsters_. How solid they
looked! How utterly _earthquaking_!"

The use and the effectiveness of figures depend primarily, then, upon the
mood and intentions of the writer. Figures are figures, whether employed
in prose or verse. Mr. Kipling does not lose his capacity for employing
metaphors as he turns from writing verse to writing stories, and the
rhetorician's analysis of similes, personifications, allegories, and all
the other devices of "tropical" language is precisely the same, whether he
is studying poetry or prose. Any good textbook in rhetoric gives adequate
examples of these various classes of figures, and they need not be
repeated here.

8. _Words as Permanent Embodiment of Poetic Feeling_

We have seen that the characteristic vocabulary of poetry originates in
emotion and that it is capable of transmitting emotion to the hearer or
reader. But how far are words capable of embodying emotion in permanent
form? Poets themselves, in proud consciousness of the enduring character
of their creations, have often boasted that they were building monuments
more enduring than bronze or marble. When Shakspere asserts this in his
sonnets, he is following not only an Elizabethan convention, but a
universal instinct of the men of his craft. Is it a delusion? Here are
words--mere vibrating sounds, light and winged and evanescent things,
assuming a meaning value only through the common consent of those who
interchange them, altering that meaning more or less from year to year,
often passing wholly from the living speech of men, decaying when races
decay and civilizations change. What transiency, what waste and oblivion
like that which waits upon millions on millions of autumn leaves!

Yet nothing in human history is more indisputable than the fact that
certain passages of poetry do survive, age after age, while empires pass,
and philosophies change and science alters the mental attitude of men as
well as the outward circumstances of life upon this planet.

Some thoughts and feelings, then, eternalize themselves in human speech;
most thoughts and feelings do not. Wherein lies the difference?
If most words are perishable stuff, what is it that keeps other words from
perishing? Is it superior organization and arrangement of this fragile
material, "fame's great antiseptic, style"? Or is it by virtue of some
secret passionate quality imparted to words by the poet, so that the
apparently familiar syllables take on a life and significance which is
really not their own, but his? And is this intimate personalized quality
of words "style," also, as well as that more external "style" revealed in
clear and orderly and idiomatic arrangement? Or does the mystery of
permanence reside in the poet's generalizing power, by which he is able to
express universal, and hence permanently interesting human experience? And
therefore, was not the late Professor Courthope right when he declared, "I
take all great poetry to be not so much what Plato thought it, the
utterance of individual genius, half inspired, half insane, as the
enduring voice of the soul and conscience of man living in society"?

Answers to such questions as these depend somewhat upon the "romantic" or
"classic" bias of the critics. Romantic criticism tends to stress the
significance of the personality of the individual poet. The classic school
of criticism tends to emphasize the more general and universal qualities
revealed by the poet's work. But while the schools and fashions of
criticism shift their ground and alter their verdicts as succeeding
generations change in taste, the great poets continue as before to
particularize and also to generalize, to be "romantic" and "classic" by
turns, or even in the same poem. They defy critical augury, in their
unending quest of beauty and truth. That they succeed, now and then, in
giving a permanently lovely embodiment to their vision is surely a more
important fact than the rightness or wrongness of whatever artistic theory
they may have invoked or followed.

For many a time, surely, their triumphs are a contradiction of their
theories. To take a very familiar example, Wordsworth's theory of poetic
diction shifted like a weathercock. In the Advertisement to the _Lyrical
Ballads_ (1798) he asserted: "The following poems are to be considered as
experiments. They were written chiefly with a view to ascertain how far
the language of conversation in the middle and lower classes of society is
adapted to the purposes of poetic pleasure." In the Preface of the second
edition (1800) he announced that his purpose had been "to ascertain how
far, by fitting to metrical arrangement a selection of the real language
of men in a state of vivid sensation, that sort of pleasure and that
quantity of pleasure may be imparted, which a poet may rationally
endeavour to impart." But in the famous remarks on poetic diction which
accompanied the third edition (1802) he inserted after the words "A
selection of language really used by men" this additional statement of his
intention: "And at the same time to throw over them a certain colouring of
the imagination whereby ordinary things should be presented to the mind in
an unusual aspect." In place of the original statement about the
conversation of the middle and lower classes of society, we are now
assured that the language of poetry "if selected truly and judiciously,
must necessarily be dignified and variegated and alive with metaphors and
figures.... This selection will form a distinction ... and will entirely
separate the composition from the vulgarity and meanness of ordinary
life."

What an amazing change in theory in four years! Yet it is no more
remarkable than Wordsworth's successive emendations in the text of his
poems. In 1807 his blind Highland boy had gone voyaging in

"A Household Tub, like one of those
Which women use to wash their clothes;
This carried the blind Boy."

In 1815 the wash-tub becomes

"The shell of a green turtle, thin
And hollow--you might sit therein,
It was so wide and deep."

And in 1820 the worried and dissatisfied artist changes that unlucky
vessel once more into the final banality of

"A shell of ample size, and light
As the pearly car of Amphitrite
That sportive dolphins drew."

Sometimes, it is true, this adventurer in poetic diction had rather better
fortune in his alterations. The much-ridiculed lines of 1798 about the
child's grave--

"I've measured it from side to side,
'T is three feet long and two feet wide"--

became in 1820:

"Though but of compass small and bare
To thirsty suns and parching air."

Like his friend Coleridge, Wordsworth forsook gradually his early
experiments with matter-of-fact phrases, with quaintly grotesque figures.
Revolt against conventional eighteenth-century diction had given him a
blessed sense of freedom, but he found his real strength later in subduing
that freedom to a sense of law. Archaisms, queernesses, flatly
naturalistic turns of speech gave place to a vocabulary of simple dignity
and austere beauty. Wordsworth attained his highest originality as an
artist by disregarding singularity, by making familiar words reveal new
potencies of expression.

For after all, we must come back to what William James called the long
"loop-line," to that reservoir of ideas and feelings which stores up the
experience of individuals and of the race, and to the words which most
effectively evoke that experience. Two classes at Columbia University, a
few years ago, were asked to select fifty English words of basic
importance in the expression of human life. In choosing these words, they
were to aim at reality and strength rather than at beauty. When the two
lists were combined, they presented these seventy-eight different words,
which are here arranged alphabetically: age, ambition, beauty, bloom,
country, courage, dawn, day, death, despair, destiny, devotion, dirge,
disaster, divine, dream, earth, enchantment, eternity, fair, faith,
fantasy, flower, fortune, freedom, friendship, glory, glow, god, grief,
happiness, harmony, hate, heart, heaven, honor, hope, immortality, joy,
justice, knell, life, longing, love, man, melancholy, melody, mercy, moon,
mortal, nature, noble, night, paradise, parting, peace, pleasure, pride,
regret, sea, sigh, sleep, solitude, song, sorrow, soul, spirit, spring,
star, suffer, tears, tender, time, virtue, weep, whisper, wind and youth.
[Footnote: See Nation, February 23, 1911.]

Surely these words, selected as they were for their significance, are not
lacking in beauty of sound. On the contrary, any list of the most
beautiful words in English would include many of them. But it is the
meaning of these "long-loop" words, rather than their formal beauty alone,
which fits them for the service of poetry. And they acquire in that
service a "literary" value, which is subtly blended with their "sound"
value and logical "meaning" value. They connote so much! They suggest more
than they actually say. They unite the individual mood of the moment with
the soul of mankind.

And there is still another mode of union between the individual and the
race, which we must attempt in the next chapter to regard more closely,
but which should be mentioned here in connection with the permanent
embodiment of feeling in words,--namely, the mysterious fact of rhythm.
Single words are born and die, we learn them and forget them, they alter
their meanings, they always say less than we really intend, they are
imperfect instruments for signaling from one brain to another. Yet these
crumbling particles of speech may be miraculously held together and built
into a tune, and with the tune comes another element of law, order,
permanence. The instinct for the drumbeat lies deep down in our bodies; it
affects our mental life, the organization of our emotions, and our
response to the rhythmical arrangement of words. For mere ideas and words
are not poetry, but only part of the material for poetry. A poem does not
come into full being until the words begin to dance.

CHAPTER V

RHYTHM AND METRE

"Rhythm is the recurrence of stress at intervals; metre is the
regular, or measured, recurrence of stress."
M. H. SHACKFORD, _A First Book of Poetics_

"Metres being manifestly sections of rhythm."
ARISTOTLE, _Poetics_, 4. (Butcher's translation)

"Thoughts that voluntary move
Harmonious numbers."
MILTON

_1. The Nature of Rhythm_

And why must the words begin to dance? The answer is to be perceived in
the very nature of Rhythm, that old name for the ceaseless pulsing or
"flowing" of all living things. So deep indeed lies the instinct for
rhythm in our consciousness that we impute it even to inanimate objects.
We hear the ticking of the clock as tick-tock, tick-tock, or else
tick-tock, tick-tock, although psychologists assure us that the clock's
wheels are moving with indifferent, mechanical precision, and that it is
simply our own focusing of attention upon alternate beats which creates
the impression of rhythm. We hear a rhythm in the wheels of the train, and
in the purring of the motor-engine, knowing all the while that it
is we who impose or make-up the rhythm, in our human instinct for
organizing the units of attention. We cannot help it, as long as our own
pulses beat. No two persons catch quite the same rhythm in the sounds of
the animate and inanimate world, because no two persons have absolutely
identical pulse-beats, identical powers of attention, an identical
psycho-physical organism. We all perceive that there is a rhythm in a
racing crew, in a perfectly timed stroke of golf, in a fisherman's fly-
casting, in a violinist's bow, in a close-hauled sailboat fighting with
the wind. But we appropriate and organize these objective impressions in
subtly different ways.

When, for instance, we listen to poetry read aloud, or when we read it
aloud ourselves, some of us are instinctive "timers,"
[Footnote: See W. M. Patterson, _The Rhythm of Prose_. Columbia University
Press, 1916.]
paying primary attention to the spaced or measured intervals of time,
although in so doing we are not wholly regardless of those points of
"stress" which help to make the time-intervals plainer. Others of us are
natural "stressers," in that we pay primary attention to the "weight" of
words,--the relative loudness or pitch, by which their meaning or
importance is indicated,--and it is only secondarily that we think of
these weighted or "stressed" words as separated from one another by
approximately equal intervals of time. Standing on the rocks at Gloucester
after an easterly storm, a typical "timer" might be chiefly conscious of
the steady sequence of the waves, the measured intervals between
their summits; while the typical stresser, although subconsciously aware
of the steady iteration of the giant rollers, might watch primarily their
foaming crests, and listen chiefly to their crashing thunder. The point to
be remembered is this: that neither the "timing" instinct nor the
"stressing" instinct excludes the other, although in most individuals one
or the other predominates. Musicians, for instance, are apt to be
noticeable "timers," while many scholars who deal habitually with words in
their varied shifts of meaning, are professionally inclined to be
"stressers."

_2. The Measurement of Rhythm_

Let us apply these facts to some of the more simple of the vexed questions
of prosody, No one disputes the universality of the rhythmizing impulse;
the quarrel begins as soon as any prosodist attempts to dogmatize about
the nature and measurement of those flowing time-intervals whose
arrangement we call rhythm. No one disputes, again, that the only arbiter
in matters of prosody is the trained ear, and not the eye. Infinitely
deceptive is the printed page of verse when regarded by the eye. Verse may
be made to look like prose and prose to look like verse. Capital letters,
lines, rhymes, phrases and paragraphs may be so cunningly or
conventionally arranged by the printer as to disguise the real nature of
the rhythmical and metrical pattern. When in doubt, close your eyes!

We agree, then, that in all spoken language--and this is as true of prose
as it is of verse--there are time-intervals more or less clearly marked,
and that the ear is the final judge as to the nature of these intervals.
But can the ear really measure the intervals with any approximation to
certainty, so that prosodists, for instance, can agree that a given poem
is written in a definite metre? In one sense "yes." No one doubts that the
_Odyssey_ is written in "dactylic hexameters," i.e., in lines made up of
six "feet," each one of which is normally composed of a long syllable plus
two short syllables, or of an acceptable equivalent for that particular
combination. But when we are taught in school that Longfellow's
_Evangeline_ is also written in "dactylic hexameters," trouble begins for
the few inquisitive, since it is certain that if you close your eyes and
listen carefully to a dozen lines of Homer's Greek, and then to a
dozen lines of Longfellow's English, each written in so-called
"hexameters," you are listening to two very different arrangements of
time-intervals, so different, in fact, that the two poems are really not
in the same "measure" or "metre" at all. For the Greek poet was, as a
metrist, thinking primarily of quantity, of the relative "timing" of his
syllables, and the American of the relative "stress" of his syllables.
[Footnote: "Musically speaking--because the musical terms are exact and
not ambiguous--true dactyls are in 2-4 time and the verse of _Evangeline_
is in 3-8 time." T. D. Goodell, _Nation_, October 12, 1911.]

That illustration is drearily hackneyed, no doubt, but it has a double
value. It is perfectly clear; and furthermore, it serves to remind us of
the instinctive differences between different persons and different races
as regards the ways of arranging time-intervals so as to create the
rhythms of verse. The individual's standard of measurement--his poetic
foot-rule, so to speak--is very elastic,--"made of rubber" indeed, as the
experiments of many psychological laboratories have demonstrated beyond a
question. Furthermore, the composers of poetry build it out of very
elastic units. They are simply putting syllables of words together into a
rhythmical design, and these "airy syllables," in themselves mere symbols
of ideas and feelings, cannot be weighed by any absolutely correct
sound-scales. They cannot be measured in time by any absolutely accurate
watch-dial, or exactly estimated in their meaning, whether that be literal
or figurative, by any dictionary of words and phrases. But this is only
saying that the syllables which make up the units of verse, whether the
units be called "foot" or "line" or "phrase," are not dead, mechanical
things, but live things, moving rhythmically, entering thereby into the
pulsing, chiming life of the real world, and taking on more fullness of
life and beauty in elastic movement, in ordered but infinitely flexible
design, than they ever could possess as independent particles.

_3. Conflict and Compromise_

And everywhere in the arrangement of syllables into the patterns of rhythm
and metre we find conflict and compromise, the surrender of some values of
sound or sense for the sake of a greater unity. To revert to
considerations dealt with in an earlier chapter, we touch here upon the
old antinomy--or it may be, harmony--between "form" and "significance,"
between the "outside" and the "inside" of the work of art. For words,
surely, have one kind of value as _pure sound_, as "cadences" made up of
stresses, slides, pauses, and even of silences when the expected syllable
is artfully withheld. It is this sound-value, for instance, which you
perceive as you listen to a beautifully recited poem in Russian, a
language of which you know not a single word; and you may experience a
modification of the same pleasure in closing your mind wholly to the
"sense" of a richly musical passage in Swinburne, and delighting your ear
by its mere beauty of tone. But words have also that other value as
_meaning_, and we are aware how these meaning values shift with the stress
and turns of thought, so that a given word has a greater or less weight in
different sentences or even in different clauses of the same sentence.
"Meaning" values, like sound values, are never precisely fixed in a
mechanical and universally agreed-upon scale, they are relative, not
absolute. Sometimes meaning and sound conflict with one another, and one
must be sacrificed in part, as when the normal accent of a word
refuses to coincide with the verse-accent demanded by a certain measure,
so that we "wrench" the accent a trifle, or make it "hover" over two
syllables without really alighting upon either. And it is significant that
lovers of poetry have always found pleasure in such compromises.
[Footnote: Compare the passage about Chopin's piano-playing, quoted from
Alden in the Notes and Illustrations for this chapter.]
They enjoy minor departures from and returns to the normal, the expected
measure of both sound and sense, just as a man likes to sail a boat as
closely into the wind as he conveniently can, making his actual course a
compromise between the line as laid by the compass, and the actual facts
of wind and tide and the behavior of his particular boat. It is thus that
the sailor "makes it," triumphantly! And the poet "makes it" likewise, out
of deep, strong-running tides of rhythmic impulse, out of arbitrary words
and rebellious moods, out of

"Thoughts hardly to be packed
Into a narrow act,
Fancies that broke through language and escaped,"

until he compels rhythm and syllables to move concordantly, and blend into
that larger living whole--the dancing, singing crowd of sounds and
meanings which make up a poem.

_4. The Rhythms of Prose_

Just here it may be of help to us to turn away for a moment from verse
rhythm, and to consider what Dryden called "the other harmony" of prose.
For no one doubts that prose has rhythm, as well as verse. Vast and
learned treatises have been written on the prose rhythms of the 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.

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