A Study of Poetry by Bliss Perry

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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 we must be
careful that by "iambus," in English poetry, we _meant_ an unstressed
syllable, rather than a short syllable followed by a long one. And so with
"trochee," "dactyl," "anapest" and the rest; if we knew that accent and
not quantity was what we really had in mind, it was proper enough to speak
of _Paradise Lost_ as written in "iambic pentameter," and _Evangeline_ in
"dactylic hexameter," etc. The trick was to count stresses and not
syllables, for was not Coleridge's _Christabel_ written in a metre which
varied its syllables anywhere from four to twelve for the line, yet
maintained its music by regularity of stress?

Nothing could be plainer than all this. Yet some of us discovered when we
went to college and listened to instructors who grew strangely excited
over prosody, that it was not all as easy as this distinction between
_Quantity_ and _Stress_ would seem to indicate. For we were now told that
the Greek and Roman habits of daily speech in prose had something to do
with their instinctive choice of verse-rhythms: that at the very time when
the Greek heroic hexameters were being composed, there was a natural
dactylic roll in spoken prose; that Roman daily speech had a stronger
stress than Greek, so that Horace, in imitating Greek lyric measures, had
stubborn natural word-accents to reconcile with his quantitative measures;
that the Roman poets, who had originally allowed normal word-accent and
verse-pulse to coincide for the most part, came gradually to enjoy a
certain clash between them, keeping all the while the quantitative
principle dominant; so that when Virgil and Horace read their verses
aloud, and word-accent and verse-pulse fell upon different syllables, the
verse-pulse yielded slightly to the word-accent, thus adding something of
the charm of conversational prose to the normal time-values of the rhythm.
In a word, we were now taught--if I may quote from a personal letter of a
distinguished American Latinist--that "the almost universal belief that
Latin verse is a matter of quantity only is a mistake. Word-accent was not
lost in Latin verse."

And then, as if this undermining of our schoolboy faith in pure Quantity
were not enough, came the surprising information that the Romans had kept,
perhaps from the beginning of their poetizing, a popular type of accented
verse, as seen in the rude chant of the Roman legionaries,

_Mille Francos mille semel Sarmatas occidimus_.
[Footnote: See C. M. Lewis, _Foreign Sources of Modern English
Versification_. Halle, 1898.]

Certainly those sun-burnt "doughboys" were not bothering themselves
about trochees and iambi and such toys of cultivated "literary" persons;
they were amusing themselves on the march by inventing words to fit the
"goose-step." Their

_Unus homo mille mille mille decollavimus_

which Professor Courthope scans as trochaic verse,
[Footnote: _History of English Poetry_, vol. 1, p. 73.]
seems to me nothing but "stress" verse, like

_"Hay-foot, straw-foot, belly full of bean-soup--Hep--Hep!"_

Popular accentual verse persisted, then, while the more cultivated Roman
public acquired and then gradually lost, in the course of centuries, its
ear for the quantitative rhythms which originally had been copied from the
Greeks.

Furthermore, according to our ingenious college teachers, there was still
a third principle of versification to be reckoned with, not depending on
Quantity or Stress, but merely _Syllabic_, or syllable-counting. This was
immemorially old, it seemed, and it had reappeared mysteriously in Europe
in the Dark Ages.

Dr. Lewis cites from a Latin manuscript poem of the ninth century:
[Footnote: _Foreign Sources_, etc., p. 3.]

_"Beatissimus namque Dionysius | Athenis quondam episcopus,
Quem Sanctus Clemens direxit in Galliam | propter praedicandi
gratiam_," etc.

"Each verse contains 21 syllables, with a caesura after the 12th. No
further regularity, either metrical or rhythmical, can be perceived.
Such a verse could probably not have been written except for music."
Church-music, apparently, was also a factor in the development of
versification,--particularly that "Gregorian" style which demanded neither
quantitative nor accentual rhythm, but simply a fair count of syllables in
the libretto, note matching syllable exactly. But when the great medieval
Latin hymns, like _Dies ire_, were written, the Syllabic principle of
versification, like the Quantitative principle, dropped out of sight,
and we witness once more the emergence of the Stress or accentual system,
heavily ornamented with rhymes.
[Footnote: See the quotation from Taylor's _Classical Heritage of the
Middle Ages_ printed in the "Notes and Illustrations" for this chapter.]
Yet the Syllabic method reappears once more, we were told, in French
prosody, and thus affects the verse of Chaucer and of subsequent English
poetry, and it still may be studied, isolated as far as may be from
considerations of quantity and stress, in certain English songs written
for music, where syllable carefully matches note. The "long metre"
(8 syllables), "short metre" (6 syllables) and "common metre"
(7 syllables, 6 syllables) of the hymn books is a convenient
illustration of thinking of metre in terms of syllables alone.

_6. The Appeal to the Ear_

At this point, perhaps, having set forth the three theories of _Quantity,
Stress_ and _Syllable_, our instructors were sensible enough to make an
appeal to the ear. Reminding us that stress was the controlling principle
in Germanic poetry,--although not denying that considerations of quantity
and number of syllables might have something to do with the effect,--they
read aloud to us some Old English verse. Perhaps it was that _Song of the
Battle of Brunanburh_ which Tennyson has so skilfully rendered into modern
English words while preserving the Old English metre. And here, though the
Anglo-Saxon words were certainly uncouth, we caught the chief stresses
without difficulty, usually four beats to the line. If the instructor,
while these rude strokes of rhythm were still pounding in our ears,
followed the Old English with a dozen lines of Chaucer, we could all
perceive the presence of a newer, smoother, more highly elaborated
verse-music, where the number of syllables had been cunningly
reckoned, and the verse-accent seemed always to fall upon a syllable long
and strong enough to bear the weight easily, and the rhymes rippled like a
brook. Whether we called the metre of the _Prologue_ rhymed couplets of
iambic pentameter, or rhymed couplets of ten-syllabled, five-stressed
verse, the music, at least, was clear enough. And so was the music of the
"blank" or unrhymed five-stress lines of Marlowe and Shakspere and Milton,
and as we listened it was easy to believe that "stress" and "quantity" and
"syllable," all playing together like a chime of bells, are concordant and
not quarrelsome elements in the harmony of modern English verse. Only, to
be richly concordant, each must be prepared to yield a little if need be,
to the other!

I have taken too many pages, perhaps, in thus sketching the rudimentary
education of a college student in the elements of rhythm and metre, and in
showing how the theoretical difficulties of the subject--which are
admittedly great--often disappear as soon as one resolves to let the ear
decide. A satisfied ear may soothe a dissatisfied mind. I have quoted from
a letter of an American scholar about quantity being the "controlling"
element of cultivated Roman verse, and I now quote from a personal letter
of an American poet, emphasizing the necessity of "reading poetry as it
was meant to be read": "My point is _not_ that English verse has no
quantity, but that the controlling element is not quantity but accent. The
lack of fixed _syllabic _quantity is just what I emphasize. This lack
makes definite _beat _impossible: or at least it makes it absurd to
attempt to scan English verse by feet. The proportion of 'irregularities'
and 'exceptions' becomes painful to the student and embarrassing to the
professor. He is put to fearful straits to explain his prosody and make it
fit the verse. And when he has done all this, the student, if he has a
good ear, forthwith forgets it all, and reads the verse as it was meant to
be read, as a succession of musical bars (without pitch, of course), in
which the accent marks the rhythm, and pauses and _rests _often take the
place of missing syllables. To this ingenuous student I hold out my hand
and cast in my lot with him. He is the man for whom English poetry is
written."

It may be objected, of course, that the phrase "reading poetry as it was
meant to be read" really begs the question. For English poets have often
amused themselves by composing purely quantitative verse, which they wish
us to read as quantitative. The result may be as artificial as the
painfully composed Latin quantitative verse of English schoolboys, but the
thing can be done. Tennyson's experiments in quantity are well known, and
should be carefully studied. He was proud of his hexameter:

"High winds roaring above me, dark leaves falling about me,"

and of his pentameter:

"All men alike hate slops, particularly gruel."

Here the English long and short syllables--as far as "long" and "short"
can be definitely distinguished in English--correspond precisely to the
rules of Roman prosody. The present Laureate, Robert Bridges, whose
investigations in English and Roman prosody have been incessant, has
recently published a book of experiments in writing English quantitative
hexameters.
[Footnote: _Ibant Obscuri_. New York, Oxford University Press, 1917.]
Here are half a dozen lines:

"Midway of all this tract, with secular arms an immense elm
Reareth a crowd of branches, aneath whose lofty protection
Vain dreams thickly nestle, clinging unto the foliage on high:
And many strange creatures of monstrous form and features
Stable about th' entrance, Centaur and Scylla's abortion,
And hundred-handed Briareus, and Lerna's wild beast...."

These are lines interesting to the scholar, but they are somehow
"non-English" in their rhythm--not in accordance with "the genius of the
language," as we vaguely but very sensibly say. Neither did the stressed
"dactylic" hexameters of Longfellow, written though they were by a skilful
versifier, quite conform to "the nature of the language."

_7. The Analogy with Music_

One other attempt to explain the difficulties of English rhythm and metre
must at least be mentioned here, namely the "musical" theory of the
American poet and musician, Sidney Lanier. In his _Science of English
Verse_, an acute and very suggestive book, he threw over the whole theory
of stress--or at least, retained it as a mere element of assistance, as in
music, to the marking of time, maintaining that the only necessary element
in rhythm is equal time-intervals, corresponding to bars of music.
According to Lanier, the structure of English blank verse, for instance,
is not an alternation of unstressed with stressed syllables, but a series
of bars of 3/8 time, thus:

[Illustration: Five bars of 3/8 time, each with a short and a long note.]

Thomson, Dabney and other prosodists have followed Lanier's general
theory, without always agreeing with him as to whether blank verse is
written in 3/8 or 2/4 time. Alden, in a competent summary of these various
musical theories as to the basis of English verse,
[Footnote: _Introduction to Poetry_, pp. 190-93. See also Alden's _English
Verse_, Part 3. "The Time-Element in English Verse."]
quotes with approval Mr. T. S. Omond's words: "Musical notes are almost
pure symbols. In theory at least, and no doubt substantially in practice,
they can be divided with mathematical accuracy--into fractions of 1/2,
1/4, 1/8, 1/16, etc.--and the ideal of music is absolute accordance with
time. Verse has other methods and another ideal. Its words are concrete
things, not readily carved to such exact pattern.... The perfection of
music lies in absolute accordance with time, that of verse is continual
slight departures from time. This is why no musical representations of
verse ever seem satisfactory. They assume regularity where none exists."

_8. Prosody and Enjoyment_

It must be expected then, that there will be different preferences in
choosing a nomenclature for modern English metres, based upon the
differences in the individual physical organism of various metrists, and
upon the strictness of their adherence to the significance of stress,
quantity and number of syllables in the actual forms of verse. Adherents
of musical theories in the interpretation of verse may prefer to speak of
"duple time" instead of iambic-trochaic metres, and of "triple" time for
anapests and dactyls. Natural "stressers" may prefer to call iambic and
anapestic units "rising" feet, to indicate the ascent of stress as one
passes from the weaker to the stronger syllables; and similarly, to call
trochaic and dactylic units "falling" feet, to indicate the descent or
decline of stress as the weaker syllable or syllables succeed the
stronger. Or, combining these two modes of nomenclature, one may
legitimately speak of iambic feet as "duple rising,"

"And never lifted up a single stone";

trochaic as "duple falling,"

"Here they are, my fifty perfect poems";

anapestic as "triple rising,"

"But he lived with a lot of wild mates, and they never would let him be
good";

and dactylic as "triple falling";

"Cannon to right of them, cannon to left of them."

If a line is felt as "metrical," i.e. divided into approximately equal
time-intervals, the particular label employed to indicate the nature of
the metre is unimportant. It may be left to the choice of each student of
metre, provided he uses his terms consistently. The use of the traditional
terminology "iambic," "trochaic," etc., is convenient, and is open to no
objection if one is careful to make clear the sense in which he employs
such ambiguous terms.

It should also be added, as a means of reconciling the apparently warring
claims of stress and quantity in English poetry, that recent
investigations in recording through delicate instruments the actual
time-intervals used by different persons in reading aloud the same lines
of poetry, prove what has long been suspected, namely, the close
affiliation of quantity with stress.
[Footnote: "Syllabic Quantity in English Verse," by Ada F. Snell, _Pub. Of
Mod, Lang. Ass_., September, 1918.]
Miss Snell's experiments show that the foot in English verse is made up of
syllables 90 per cent of which are, in the stressed position, longer than
those in the unstressed. The average relation of short to long syllables,
is, in spite of a good deal of variation among the individual readers,
almost precisely as 2 to 4--which has always been the accepted ratio for
the relation of short to long syllables in Greek and Roman verse. If one
examines English words in a dictionary, the quantities of the syllables
are certainly not "fixed" as they are in Greek and Latin, but the moment
one begins to read a passage of English poetry aloud, and becomes
conscious of its underlying type of rhythm, he fits elastic units of
"feet" into the steadily flowing or pulsing intervals of time.
The "foot" becomes, as it were, a rubber link in a moving bicycle chain.
The revolutions of the chain mark the rhythm; and the stressed or
unstressed or lightly stressed syllables in each "link" or foot,
accommodate themselves, by almost unperceived expansion and contraction,
to the rhythmic beat of the passage as a whole.

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