A Study of Poetry by Bliss Perry (top 10 books of all time txt) 📕

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,

 

M�lle Fr�ncos m�lle s�mel S�rmat�s occ�dim�s. [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