A Study of Poetry by Bliss Perry

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Nor should it be forgotten that the "sense" of words, their
meaning-weight, their rhetorical value in certain phrases, constantly
affects the theoretical number of stresses belonging to a given line. In
blank verse, for instance, the theoretical five chief stresses are often
but three or four in actual practice, lighter stresses taking their place
in order to avoid a pounding monotony, and conversely, as in Milton's
famous line,

"Rocks, caves, lakes, dens, bogs, fens, and shades of death,"

the rhetorical significance of the monosyllables compels an overloading of
stresses which heightens the desired poetic effect. Corson's _Primer of
English Verse_ and Mayor's _English Metres_ give numerous examples from
the blank verse of Milton and Tennyson to illustrate the constant
substitution and shifting of stresses in order to secure variety of music
and suggestive adaptations of sound to sense. It is well known that
Shakspere's blank verse, as he developed in command of his artistic
resources, shows fewer "end-stopped" lines and more "run-on" lines, with
an increasing proportion of light and weak endings. But the same principle
applies to every type of English rhythm. As soon as the dominant
beat--which is commonly, but not always, apparent in the opening measures
of the poem--once asserts itself, the poet's mastery of technique is
revealed through his skill in satisfying the ear with a verbal music which
is never absolutely identical in its time-intervals, its stresses or its
pitch, with the fixed, wooden pattern of the rhythm he is using.

For the human voice utters syllables which vary their duration, stress and
pitch with each reader. Photographs of voice-waves, as printed by Verrier,
Scripture, and many other laboratory workers, show how great is the
difference between individuals in the intervals covered by the upward and
downward slides or "inflections" which indicate doubt or affirmation. And
these "rising" and "falling" and "circumflex" and "suspended" inflections,
which make up what is called "pitch-accent," are constantly varied, like
the duration and stress of syllables, by the emotions evoked in reading.
Words, phrases, lines and stanzas become colored with emotional overtones
due to the feeling of the instant. Poetry read aloud as something sensuous
and passionate cannot possibly conform exactly to a set mechanical pattern
of rhythm and metre. Yet the hand-woven Oriental rug, though lacking the
geometrical accuracy of a rug made by machinery, reveals a more vital and
intimate beauty of design and execution. Many well-known poets--Tennyson
being perhaps the most familiar example--have read aloud their own verses
with a peculiar chanting sing-song which seemed to over-emphasize the
fundamental rhythm. But who shall correct them? And who is entitled to say
that a line like Swinburne's

"Full-sailed, wide-winged, poised softly forever asway"

is irregular according to the foot-rule of traditional prosody, when it is
probable, as Mr. C. E. Russell maintains, that Swinburne was here
composing in purely musical and not prosodical rhythm?
[Footnote: "Swinburne and Music," by Charles E. Russell, _North American
Review_, November, 1907. See the quotation in the "Notes and
Illustrations" for this chapter.]

Is it not true, furthermore, as some metrical sceptics like to remind us,
that if we once admit the principle of substitution and equivalence, of
hypermetrical and truncated syllables, of pauses taking the place of
syllables, we can very often make one metre seem very much like another?
The question of calling a given group of lines "iambic" or "trochaic," for
instance, can be made quite arbitrary, depending upon where you begin to
count syllables. "Iambic" with initial truncation or "trochaic" with final
truncation? Tweedle-dum or tweedle-dee? Do you count waves from crest to
crest or from hollow to hollow? When you count the links in a bicycle
chain, do you begin with the slender middle of each link or with one of
the swelling ends? So is it with this "iambic" and "trochaic" matter.
Professor Alden, in a suggestive pamphlet,
[Footnote: "The Mental Side of Metrical Form," already cited.]
confesses that these contrasting concepts of rising and falling metre are
nothing more than concepts, alterable at will.

But while the experts in prosody continue to differ and to dogmatize, the
lover of poetry should remember that versification is far older than the
science of prosody, and that the enjoyment of verse is, for millions of
human beings, as unaffected by theories of metrics as the stars are
unaffected by the theories of astronomers. It is a satisfaction to the
mind to know that the stars in their courses are amenable to law, even
though one be so poor a mathematician as to be incapable of grasping and
stating the law. The mathematics of music and of poetry, while heightening
the intellectual pleasure of those capable of comprehending it, is
admittedly too difficult for the mass of men. But no lover of poetry
should refuse to go as far in theorizing as his ear will carry him. He
will find that his susceptibility to the pulsations of various types of
rhythm, and his delight in the intricacies of metrical device, will be
heightened by the mental effort of attention and analysis. The danger is
that the lover of poetry, wearied by the quarrels of prosodists, and
forgetting the necessity of patience, compromise and freedom from
dogmatism, will lose his curiosity about the infinite variety of metrical
effects. But it is this very curiosity which makes his ear finer, even if
his theories may be wrong. Hundreds of metricists admire and envy
Professor Saintsbury's ear for prose and verse rhythms while
disagreeing wholly with his dogmatic theories of the "foot," and his
system of notation. There are sure to be some days and hours when the
reader of poetry will find himself bored and tired with the effort of
attention to the technique of verse. Then he can stop analysing, close his
eyes, and drift out to sea upon the uncomprehended music.

"The stars of midnight shall be dear
To her; and she shall lean her ear
In many a secret place
Where rivulets dance their wayward round,
And beauty born of murmuring sound
Shall pass into her face."

CHAPTER VI

RHYME, STANZA AND FREE VERSE

"Subtle rhymes, with ruin rife,
Murmur in the house of life."
EMERSON

"When this verse was first dictated to me I consider'd a Monotonous
Cadence like that used by Milton & Shakspeare, & all writers of
English Blank Verse, derived from the modern bondage of Rhyming, to
be a necessary and indispensible part of the verse. But I soon found
that in the mouth of a true Orator, such monotony was not only
awkward, but as much a bondage as rhyme itself. I therefore have
produced a variety in every line, both of cadences & number of
syllables. Every word and every letter is studied and put into its
fit place: the terrific numbers are reserved for the terrific parts,
the mild & gentle for the mild & gentle parts, and the prosaic for
inferior parts: all are necessary to each other. Poetry Fetter'd
Fetters the Human Race!"
WILLIAM BLAKE

_1. Battles Long Ago_

As we pass from the general consideration of Rhythm and Metre to some of
the special questions involved in Rhyme, Stanza and Free Verse, it may be
well to revert to the old distinction between what we called for
convenience the "outside" and the "inside" of a work of art. In the field
of music we saw that this distinction is almost, if not quite,
meaningless, and in poetry it ought not to be pushed too far. Yet it is
useful in explaining the differences among men as they regard, now the
external form of verse, and now its inner spirit, and as they ask
themselves how these two elements are related. Professor Butcher, in his
_Aristotle's Theory of Poetry and Fine Art_,
[Footnote: Page 147.]
describes the natural tendencies of two sorts of men, who are quite as
persistent to-day as ever they were in Greece in looking at one side only
of the question:

"We need not agree with a certain modern school who would empty all
poetry of poetical thought and etherealize it till it melts into a
strain of music; who sing to us we hardly know of what, but in such a
way that the echoes of the real world, its men and women, its actual
stir and conflict, are faint and hardly to be discerned. The poetry,
we are told, resides not in the ideas conveyed, not in the blending
of soul and sense, but in the sound itself, in the cadence of the
verse. Yet, false as this view may be, it is not perhaps more false
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."

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
"verse being but an ornament and no cause to poetry" and "it is not riming
and versing that maketh a poet." It is Shelley with his "The distinction
between poets and prose writers in a vulgar error.... Plato was
essentially a poet--the truth and splendor of his imagery, and the melody
of his language, are the most intense that it is possible to conceive....
Lord Bacon was a poet." It is Coleridge with his "The 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."

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 Campion's theory, gave courteous
praise to his opponent's 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. "Never wholly out of the way, nor in it," was Dryden's
happy phrase to describe the artist's 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 "externalizing" 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 "parallel"
structure of Hebrew poetry, where one idea and phrase is balanced against
another,

"I have slain a man to my wounding--
And a young man to my hurt--"

or the "envelope" 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 "return" of the main
idea--the closing of the "curve"--may 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: "Most 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. Mendelssohn's 'Spring Song' and Rubinstein's 'Romance in E
Flat' will occur at once as examples in which the stanzas are
unmistakable." C. E. Russell, "Swinburne and Music," _North American
Review_, November, 1907.]
or of colors in a rug. It assists the mind in grasping the sense-rhythm,--
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.

"And _sweep_ through the _deep_
While the stormy tempests blow,
While the battle rages long and loud
And the stormy tempests blow."

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 "beginning-rhyme" of Old English poetry:

"_H_im be _h_ealfe stod _h_yse unweaxen,
_C_niht on ge_c_ampe, se full _c_aflice."

Tennyson imitates it in his "Battle of Brunanburh":

"Mighty the Mercian,
Hard was his hand-play,
Sparing not any of
Those that with Anlaf,
Warriors over the
Weltering waters
Borne in the bark's-bosom,
Drew to this island--
Doomed to the death."

This repetition of initial letters survives in phrases of prose like
"dead and done with," "to have and to hold," 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 "end-rhyme" (found--abound), 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 (blackness--dances), while the succeeding
sounds vary, but the terms "assonance" and "consonance" are often employed
loosely to signify harmonious effects of tone-color within a line or group
of lines. Complete or "identical" rhymes (fair--affair), which were
legitimate in Chaucer's time, are not now considered admissible in
English. "Masculine" rhymes are end-rhymes of one syllable; "feminine"
rhymes are end-rhymes of two syllables (uncertain--curtain); internal or
"middle-rhymes" are produced by the repetition at the end of a line of a
rhyme-sound already employed within the line.

"We were the _first_ that ever _burst_
Into that silent sea."

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.

"Beside the river's wooded reach,
The fortress and the mountain ridge,
The cataract flashing from the bridge,
The breaker breaking on the beach."

This gives a movement markedly different from that secured by rearranging
the same lines in alternate rhymes:

"Beside the river's wooded reach,
The fortress and the mountain ridge,
The breaker breaking on the beach,
The cataract flashing from the bridge."

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. Browning's and
Whittier's. Very different is the deliberate artifice of the following
lines, where the monotony of the rhyme-sound fits the "solemn ennui"
of the trailing peacocks;

I
"From out the temple's 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
"Trailing 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 temple's pillared portico."
[Footnote: Frederic Adrian Lopere, "World Wisdom," The International,
September, 1915.]

Rhyme, then, is not merely a "jingle," it is rather, as Samuel Johnson
said of all versification, a "joining music with reason." Its blending of
decorative with structural purpose is in truth "a dictate of nature," or,
to quote E. C. Stedman, "In real, that is, spontaneous minstrelsy, the
fittest assonance, consonance, time, even rime,... _come of themselves
with imaginative thought_."

_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
"spontaneous minstrelsy." The word "stanza" or "strophe" means literally
"a resting-place," a halt or turn, that is to say, after a uniform group
of rhymed lines. Alden defines it in his _English Verse_ as "the 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."
"Normally, then," Alden adds in his _Introduction to Poetry_, "all the
stanzas of a poem are identical in the number, the length, the metre, and
the rime-scheme of the corresponding verses." The question arises,
therefore, whether those units which we call "stanzas" 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-Dunton's well-known article on "Poetry" 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 "stanzaic law" and "emotional law" are used to represent the
two principles at issue:

"In 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 deeper--by 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, etc., for the
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.

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