English Verse Part 55

the syllable _trust_-occupies the time of two syllables; the typical metre would require something like

"And a pitiless joy."

Now, the fact that _trust_-is a noticeably long syllable, especially when closed by the following _l_, makes it well fitted to fill the place of two syllables; and we should find the line distinctly less pleasing if a short syllable were there instead. _Boundless_ would do as well, because equally long; _trusty_ would not be quite so good; _silly_ would be very bad. Conversely, when a noticeably long syllable occupies the place of a light syllable, in rapid tri-syllabic verse, we feel that the verse is injured. Mr. William Larminie criticises a line of Mr.

Swinburne's on this ground,--

"Time sheds them like snow on strange regions;"[53]

the combination _-ange_, with its final _-nj_ sound, made still longer by the following _r_, and preceded, too, by the combination _n-st_, has too much quant.i.ty for the place where it stands in the verse. In the verse of inferior writers many worse cases could easily be found. These ill.u.s.trations, then, may serve to show that while we do not coordinate our consonantal syllable-lengths as absolute "shorts" and "longs," we perceive certain degrees of length, and find these playing a part in our verse.

So much for intrinsic quant.i.ty as found in English syllables. But there is much more to be said for syllables made long or short at the will of the speaker, under certain conditions. If we address a friend in surprise, saying, "_Why, John!_" we not only throw a heavy stress on both the words, but also perceptibly prolong them. In like manner, we realize that unimportant words, especially proc.l.i.tics (like the italicized words in the phrase "_The_ land _of the_ free") are not only unstressed, but are hurried over in shorter moments than the accented words. Examples like this suggest what may in fact be expressed in a general statement, that accented syllables are very commonly prolonged.

This is not, as we have seen, from any essential connection between the nature of accent and the nature of quant.i.ty. In certain cases, unaccented syllables even show a tendency to length beyond that of those bearing the stress, as in words like _follow_, _dying_, and others where the final sound is easily prolonged. The coincidence of stress and length, then, is due simply to the operation of the same cause--the grammatical or rhetorical importance of the syllable in question. This fact, that the important (stressed) syllables are likely to be held a little longer than the others, will not warrant us in representing them as _twice_ as long, in the exact mathematical relations of musical notes; but it may explain why a musician like Lanier tried to represent them in such notation. It must also be the cause of Mr. Robertson's attempt to identify quant.i.ty and stress. His statement that "quant.i.ty in fact, in spoken verse, consists of stress _and_ of the consonantal total of syllables," may be regarded as much more satisfactory than those already quoted from his essay. It is, however, not quite accurate.

Still another kind of relative syllable-length remains to be considered, and for metrical purposes it is probably the most important. The _accents_ of English words not only vary in degree according to the different stresses which they receive in different prose sentences, but in verse they are made artificially to vary also so as to conform as closely as possible to the scheme of the metre. Thus the first syllable of the word _over_ is accented far more strongly when it occurs at the opening of a dactylic verse,

"Over the ocean wave,"

than when it occurs at the opening of an anapestic verse,

"Over land, over sea."

This being the case with accent, which tends to be strongly fixed in English words, we might naturally expect that it would be still more clearly the case with the element of time; and so it is. Syllables will be lengthened and shortened by the reader in order to preserve as nearly as possible the fundamental equal time-intervals between the princ.i.p.al accents. This is most easily recognized, and most commonly practised, in the case where syllables are shortened because there are more of them than the normal scheme of the verse would imply. The old "tumbling verse" of our ancestors depended on this principle, and so did the revival of it in Coleridge's _Christabel_. For example:

"A little door she opened straight, All in the middle of the gate, The gate that was ironed within and without, Where an army in battle array had marched out."

Here the rhythm of the last verse is brought into the four-beat measure of the first verse, by pa.s.sing lightly and rapidly over all syllables save the four that mark the metre. In prose, the word _marched_ would be stressed quite as much as the word _out_, but there is no difficulty in reducing the stress in reading the verse.[54] It cannot be said, however, that there is no difficulty in reducing its _length_, for the final consonant combination _-cht_ takes up considerable time, and the whole word follows a syllable (_had_) which has been closed and so lengthened by the _d + m_. Sensitive readers would probably agree, therefore, that the quant.i.ty in this verse is too much for the smoothness of the rhythm. On the other hand, the long syllable _ironed_ helps us to fill the place of the light syllable which is missing after it, and we find the rhythm easier than it would be in this form:

"The gate that was ironed both within and without."

Once more, for the sake of convenience, let us attempt to put our conclusions into the form of a summary. An English syllable may be said to be _long_, not absolutely but _relatively_, from:

[1. The naturally long character of its vowel-sound, due either to open quality or diphthongization.]

2. The presence of two or more consonants which require a perceptible time for utterance.

3. Prolongation by the speaker (_a_) because of the importance of the syllable, or (_b_) because of the time which it ought to occupy in the scheme of the verse.

The artificial lengthening and shortening of syllables, then, is constantly and naturally practised in the reading of verse which has a strong lyrical swing such as guides the reader into a sense of its structure. In verse more subtle and less lyrical in character the time-intervals are not so strongly marked, and by the ear not trained to listen for rhythm they are not so easily observed. The five-stress iambic line, especially when unrimed, has developed far more freedom and subtlety in English poetry than any other measure, and it is to this that one finds these writers invariably turning who wish to prove that our verse is not based on regular time-intervals. A verse like this:

"The lone couch of his everlasting sleep,"

if read as an ordinary prose phrase, has no obvious metrical character.

The second foot ("couch of") inverts the normal order of accent and no-accent, and in common speech the second and third syllables would be long and followed by a phrase-pause, while the fourth and fifth syllables would be made very short and jointed closely to what follows.

There is no rhythm in such a group of words. But when we know that they are part of a poem in five-stress verse, we can readjust them so as to approach more closely to the rhythmical scheme in our minds. We cannot accent either _of_ or _his_, without destroying the sense; nor can we deprive either _lone_ or _couch_ of its accent; but we can _lengthen_ the words _of his_ beyond their natural time in speech, p.r.o.nouncing them more deliberately, and we can also, perhaps, diminish the phrase-pause after _couch_. This would tend to equalize the five time-intervals to which the verse, as a verse, should fit itself. It would be too much to say that this is what the ordinary reader would do, because the ordinary reader is likely to have his mind fixed on expressing the sense, neglecting the rhythm which is equally an element of the poetry; but it is what the careful reader could do without difficulty.

The first line of _Paradise Lost_,

"Of man's first disobedience, and the fruit,"

always a favorite specimen for metrists to dissect, is of like character. Mr. Robertson, in the essay already cited, makes considerable use of this verse as showing the vanity of the usual method of dividing verses into equal feet. He quotes approvingly Professor Shairp's account of the way in which Clough a.n.a.lyzed the line: "The two feet 'first disobe-' took up the time of four syllables, two iambic feet: the voice rested awhile on the word 'first'; then pa.s.sed swiftly over 'diso-,'

then rested again on 'be-' so as to recover the previous hurry." Now this seems to be merely a description of the way in which the words would be uttered in prose, and to neglect the rhythm of the poem in which they stand. In the second foot one can and should give the syllable _dis-_ full syllabic time, instead of hurrying over it as in prose speech,--a rendering made easy by the fact that it frequently has a marked secondary accent. Conversely, one can give _first_ somewhat less time than it would occupy in prose, without thereby diminis.h.i.+ng its accent. The word _and_, in the fourth foot, would in prose utterance be allowed almost no time-value; and it may be treated in the same way in the verse, by permitting the pause at the comma to fill up the normal time of the foot. It would seem to be better, however, to give _and_ a fairly distinct utterance for metrical purposes (without, of course, adding any stress), and thus to approach more closely to the scheme of time-intervals. It is highly improbable that any one would read this verse--or almost any other verse of _Paradise Lost_--with such exact observance of the equal time-intervals as would appear in regular lyrical poetry. We have already seen that blank verse departs more constantly from the typical scheme of the measure than any other of our verse-forms. Nevertheless, the reader with a well-trained ear listens always for the flow of the typical metre underneath the surface irregularities, and, by a delicate adjustment of syllable-lengths, can bring the poet's words into far more rhythmical utterance than they would find in prose.

There is one other method of varying the time-elements in verse which has already been suggested by what was said of the pause at the comma in the line of _Paradise Lost_. It will be seen very generally that light syllables, such as one wishes to utter in brief periods of time, are found on either side of the phrase-pauses in our verse.

"The first in valor, as the first in place"

is a typical line in this respect. The natural pause, indicated by the comma, takes up part of the time of the third foot, which there are no syllables fitted wholly to fill. It might almost be said that, in ordinary five-stress verse, such verses are quite as numerous as those with five complete feet. The pause satisfies the ear, so far as the time-intervals are concerned, quite as well as a long syllable.

Pauses not only fill up the incomplete time of a foot containing only short syllables, but they also fill the time of wholly missing syllables. In the verse

"Come from the dying moon, and blow"

we start out with trisyllabic rhythm, but have only two syllables in the second and in the third foot. It does not seem certain whether the missing syllable after _dying_ is to have its place filled by a pause or by a prolongation of either or both of the syllables _dy-ing_--perhaps by all three means combined. In the same way the missing syllable after _moon_ may have its place filled either by the prolongation of the _oo_, or by the pause indicated by the comma, or by both. But in other cases the pause occupies the entire syllable-moment; for examples, see under Pauses in pages 20-22 above. The whole matter was well summed up in Lanier's saying that "rhythm may be dependent on silences" as well as on sounds.

Let us now try to gather what we have been considering into the form of definite statements regarding the place of the time-element in our verse.

1. _In the normal verse, accents appear at equal time-intervals._ This, of course, does not preclude all manner of variations; the unit of measure is not the distance between the accents as they are found in each verse, but between the points where they belong in the typical metre.

2. _There is a tendency toward the coincidence of long and accented, and of short and unaccented, syllables._ This we have seen to be true in two different senses. In the first place, an accented syllable is likely to be lengthened for the same reason that it is accented--because of its relative importance in the place where it stands. In the second place, syllables noticeably long are avoided in those places in the verse where the accent does not fall, and are preferred where the stress is heavy.

3. _In the reading of verse, the length of the syllables is varied artificially, so as to tend to preserve the equal time-intervals._

4. _In like manner, pauses are introduced where syllables are short or wanting, to preserve these intervals._

It is quite possible that these laws might be stated more fully and definitely. In Anglo-Saxon verse the conditions were perhaps not so different from those of modern English as we are likely to think; there we know that the princ.i.p.al stresses of the verse always fell on long syllables, and scholars like Sievers, by a.n.a.lyzing the remains of our early poetry, have formulated certain other laws as to the position and relations of the short syllables. If similar laws were to be formulated for our modern verse, we should probably find them no more perplexing than our ancestors would find those we have formulated for their verse.

In every case the "law" is only an attempt to express what the ear has long known and obeyed. Mr. Goodell, in an article on "Quant.i.ty in English Verse," in the _Proceedings of the American Philological Society_ for 1885, attempted to do for our verse what has just been suggested. He stated such laws as these:

"The thesis becomes a triseme if the next syllable bears the ictus. No syllable can be placed in this position which is incapable of prolongation."

"If the arsis is monosyllabic, a short vowel in the thesis followed by a single consonant is not lengthened by the ictus; the arsis is instead prolonged."

"With arsis monosyllabic, the strong tendency is to make the thesis short."

Perhaps these rules are on the right track; the terminology is somewhat difficult, and makes one hesitate to criticise carefully. But since, as we have seen, the terms "long" and "short," as applied to English syllables, have come to be so purely relative, since our syllabic quant.i.ties vary so much at the will of the reader, and since the whole matter of the reading of our verse is in good measure one of subjective interpretation, it seems very doubtful whether any statements more explicit than those already laid down would be found of practical service.

Finally, we come back to the question whether we shall use for English verse the cla.s.sical terminology which has for so long been applied to it. Those who object to such terminology do so either on the ground that it implies that English accented and unaccented syllables are equivalent respectively to Latin long and short syllables, or on the still more fundamental ground that there is nothing in our verse which can properly be called a "foot." It is undoubtedly true that the use of terms based on quant.i.ty has given rise to some confusion when applied to phenomena based on accent, yet the terms are now understood with as fair a degree of clearness as any terms relating to so disputed a subject as English verse; and it seems very doubtful whether it is not easier to explain them than to introduce new ones. Experiments in the latter direction have not been very successful. The latest writer on the subject objects, with considerable severity, to the cla.s.sical nomenclature "hardly pressed and barbarously misapplied." Our current prosody, he says later, "ignores" the frequent occurrence of an accented syllable at the beginning of a line of Shakspere's verse, "turning it off with the statement that 'a trochaic foot may begin an iambic verse.'" Yet when we reach the summary of the author's discussion of the subject, we find the same phenomenon "turned off" with this statement: "In rising rhythm a thought-moment may begin with a falling wave-group." One cannot avoid querying whether this interesting combination of words conveys any simpler and better idea to the normal English reader than the familiar statement that "a trochaic foot may begin an iambic verse." The case is instructive as to the danger of attempting a new terminology where one is already established, and of imagining that one has thereby made the discussion of the subject more scientific.

The second of the objections to the usual terminology, that there is no real _foot_ in English verse, has already been considered. If there are no regular units of measure in our verse, then to attempt constantly to find such units, and to use terms that imply their existence, is certainly a mistake. But those are on the wrong track who would find the divisions of the verse in the natural phrase-divisions of English speech.[55] In "_arma virumque cano_" the syllable _vi-_ is far more closely connected with the syllable _-rum_, for all prose purposes, than with the preceding syllables; but in the verse the Romans thought of it as being in the same foot with _arma_; and later in the verse the last syllable of _cano_ is rhythmically connected (over the barrier of a comma) with the first of _Trojae_. Indeed, the Latin poets instinctively avoided the regular coincidence of metrical units with word or sentence units. Precisely the same thing is true of English verse. It has been suggested more than once that the great preponderance, among English dissyllables, of those accented on the first syllable, goes to explain our preference for iambic over trochaic measures; and that one reason why the rhythm of _Hiawatha_, for example, so soon wearies the ear, is because its metrical divisions and word divisions so frequently coincide. The fundamental principle of verse is that it sets up a new order of progress which constantly conflicts with, yet without destroying, the order of progress of common prose speech.

So the _foot_ means, not a unit of measure for the words, but for the syllables viewed as rhythmical sound; and the attempt has already been made to show that it represents the time-interval between the regularly recurring accents of the normal metre. When there are two syllables in the interval, it is convenient to call the foot an iambus, a trochee, a pyrrhic, or a spondee; when there are three, it is convenient to call the foot an anapest or a dactyl. According to this system, the number of feet in the metre will always depend on the number of regularly recurring accents, which of course is not the case in cla.s.sical prosody.

For the same reason, all exceptional feet can be named by one of the six terms indicated, except where (as in Swinburne's "Choriambics") some cla.s.sical metre is deliberately imitated. There is no sufficient reason for speaking of the choriambus as occurring in Shakspere's verse, because where four syllables occur in such succession as to form a sort of choriambus, they will be found to fill the place of _two_ ordinary feet, not of one; hence it would be irrational to combine them into one exceptional foot. But on this matter of convenience in the terminology of verse, one cannot do better than to refer the reader to Mr. Mayor's _Chapters on English Metre_, where a refres.h.i.+ngly simple system is set forth, such as will not break down under any reasonable test.

There is one defect, it may be freely admitted, in these cla.s.sical names of feet. They provide no place for the secondary accent. A foot made up of a fully accented plus a slightly accented syllable must be called either a spondee (the second syllable being thought of as approaching the stress of the first) or a trochee (the syllable being thought of as approaching no stress). The abundant use of secondary or compromised accents--and one might say, too, of secondary or compromised quant.i.ties--is a Germanic characteristic, for which no cla.s.sical terminology can provide. There is, theoretically, room for some new names of feet recognizing these ambiguous syllables. Yet since degrees of accent are purely relative, and no two readers would be sure of agreeing as to which syllables are fully stressed, and which are half-stressed, it is not likely that such additional terms would make our terminology any more exact for practical purposes. The present system does, in fact, represent a characteristic feature of modern English as distinguished from early English verse; namely, that our metres strive after a regular alternation of stress and no-stress, and that the ear imagines this alternation even where (if it were a matter of prose utterance) it can scarcely be said to exist.

It would be absurd to strive with any warmth for the cla.s.sical system of terminology in English prosody. It is undoubtedly not an ideal system, nor such a one as we should adopt if we were naming everything anew; few existing terminologies are. The only object of the present defence of its carefully limited use is to show that it does stand for some fundamental facts in our verse, and to suggest that it is usually wiser to make the best of the vocabulary we have than to fly to one we know not of. The important thing, in any case, is not the question of terms, but the end that we should not lose hold of the musical rhythms of our verse, made up of delicately adjusted elements of accent and time.

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