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

“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 t�ck-tock, t�ck-tock, or else tick-t�ck, tick-t�ck, although psychologists assure 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 spaced 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 crashing 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 shifts 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 quantity, 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 illustration 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.

3. Conflict and Compromise

And everywhere in the arrangement of syllables into the patterns of rhythm and metre we find conflict and compromise, the surrender of some values of sound or sense for the sake of a greater unity. To revert to considerations dealt with in an earlier chapter, we touch here upon the old antinomy—or it may be, harmony—between “form” and “significance,” between the “outside” and the “inside” of the work of art. For words, surely, have one kind of value as pure sound, as “cadences” made up of stresses, slides, pauses, and even of silences when the expected syllable is artfully withheld. It is this sound-value, for instance, which you perceive as you listen to a beautifully recited poem in Russian, a language of which you know not a single word; and you may experience a modification of the same pleasure in closing your mind wholly to the “sense” of a richly musical passage in Swinburne, and delighting your ear by its mere beauty of tone. But words have also that other value as meaning, and we are aware how these meaning values shift with the stress and turns of thought, so that a given word has a greater or less weight in different sentences or even in different clauses of the same sentence. “Meaning” values, like sound values, are never precisely fixed in a mechanical and universally agreed-upon scale, they are relative, not absolute. Sometimes meaning and sound conflict with one another, and one must be sacrificed in part, as when the normal accent of a word refuses to coincide with the verse-accent demanded by a certain measure, so that we “wrench” the accent a trifle, or make it “hover” over two syllables without really alighting upon either. And it is significant that lovers of poetry have always found pleasure in such compromises. [Footnote: Compare the passage about Chopin’s piano-playing, quoted from Alden in the Notes and Illustrations for this chapter.] They enjoy minor departures from and returns to the normal, the expected measure of both sound and sense, just as a man likes to sail a boat as closely into the wind as he conveniently can, making his actual course a compromise between the line as laid by the compass, and the actual facts of wind and tide and the behavior of his particular boat. It is thus that the sailor “makes it,” triumphantly! And the poet “makes it” likewise, out of deep, strong-running tides of rhythmic impulse, out of arbitrary words and rebellious moods, out of

“Thoughts hardly to be packed

Into a narrow act,

Fancies that broke through language and escaped,”

until he compels rhythm and syllables to move concordantly, and blend into that larger living whole—the dancing, singing crowd of sounds and meanings which make up a poem.

4. The Rhythms of Prose

Just here it may be of help to us to turn away for a moment from verse rhythm, and to consider what Dryden called “the other harmony” of prose. For no one doubts that prose has rhythm, as well as verse. Vast and learned treatises have been written on the prose rhythms of the