A Study of Poetry Part 8

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 pa.s.sages may nevertheless be marked by poetic beauty, due to the circ.u.mstances 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 cla.s.s, 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 mids.h.i.+ps 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 a.n.a.lysis 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 cla.s.ses 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 a.s.serts 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, a.s.suming a meaning value only through the common consent of those who interchange them, altering that meaning more or less from year to year, often pa.s.sing 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 pa.s.sages of poetry do survive, age after age, while empires pa.s.s, and philosophies change and science alters the mental att.i.tude of men as well as the outward circ.u.mstances 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 peris.h.i.+ng? Is it superior organization and arrangement of this fragile material, "fame's great antiseptic, style"? Or is it by virtue of some secret pa.s.sionate 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 "cla.s.sic" bias of the critics. Romantic criticism tends to stress the significance of the personality of the individual poet. The cla.s.sic school of criticism tends to emphasize the more general and universal qualities revealed by the poet's work. But while the schools and fas.h.i.+ons of criticism s.h.i.+ft 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 "cla.s.sic" 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 s.h.i.+fted like a weatherc.o.c.k. In the Advertis.e.m.e.nt to the _Lyrical Ballads_ (1798) he a.s.serted: "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 cla.s.ses 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 quant.i.ty 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 cla.s.ses of society, we are now a.s.sured 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 sh.e.l.l 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 ba.n.a.lity of

"A sh.e.l.l 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 compa.s.s 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 cla.s.ses 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, friends.h.i.+p, glory, glow, G.o.d, grief, happiness, harmony, hate, heart, heaven, honor, hope, immortality, joy, justice, knell, life, longing, love, man, melancholy, melody, mercy, moon, mortal, nature, n.o.ble, 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 a.s.sure 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 s.p.a.ced 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 cras.h.i.+ng 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 s.h.i.+fts 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 quant.i.ty, 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 ill.u.s.tration 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.