Thamyris

When we read Homer or Aeschylus to ourselves, we do not as a rule attempt to imagine what their poems must have sounded like, when they were recited or sung. We transpose them, as it were, into a medium more or less resembling that of modern poetry. Let us try to measure what our loss must be, and what, if any, the compensations. To begin with, the elements of music and intonation, and also, in drama, of acting and dancing, have disappeared altogether. The intensity and mass of our emotions cannot possibly be the same as they would have been, could we have heard and beheld the living reality of which the text is but a pale, colourless shadow. It is true that rhythm is still there, and the general proportions of the whole: but rhythm and movement, unembodied and uninterpreted by performers, are far more difficult for us to realise by the less sensuous, more purely mental process of reading; while in the absence of musical and histrionic contrasts and emphasis, even the general proportions are likely to be somewhat obscured. It is as though we were studying a photograph or a monochrome copy of a painted picture; or rather we might be said to experience the same kind of difficulties as when we are contemplating colourless fragments of Greek sculpture against the background of a museum wall, at a distance and in a light that were never intended for them by their creators. How different would be our emotions, could we see the figures of the Olympian or Parthenon pediments placed in their right relation to the architecture and to the landscape, unmutilated, and glowing with colour which harmonised with that of the temples of which they were an organic part! It is a poor compensation that by long loving study we may perhaps become more intimate with the indestructible beauty of certain details, than we could ever have been, had we seen them less closely as elements of a complex work of art.

In some ways our plight with regard to ancient poetry is less unhappy. Many of our texts are unmutilated, and when we read the Oedipus to ourselves, it should seem to us as much an organic unity as Othello. There may also be a real gain in our sensitiveness to the more purely literary qualities, such as verbal, as distinguished from musical colour, the suggestive values of words and combinations of words, their overtones, and the complicated reverberations they evoke in our minds. As none of the work is being done for us by performers, our imagination, thrown back on its own unaided resources, should be all the more wide awake and active. A line drawing is often a more effective stimulus to the mind than a painting, an unaccompanied violin sonata than an orchestral symphony; and in the same way poetry, when merely read to ourselves, though it cannot so imperiously dominate our physical senses, may well make a subtler and profounder appeal to the intellectual imagination.

All that has been said with regard to the reading of poetry that was intended to be sung or chanted, should be even more true of modern verse that has been written solely in order to be spoken or read. Such poetry is in fact composed in quite a different medium to the poetry of Homer and Aeschylus; and I must now try to make it clear what this medium seems to me to consist of. In order to do so, I must venture upon a brief excursion over the perilous quicksands of metrical theory. To save time I shall speak dogmatically, while well aware that none of my assertions can at best do more than express a part of the truth.

When we read aloud a leading article, or any other piece of utilitarian and unemotional prose, we are not as a rule in the least aware of the rhythm of the sentences. But suppose we were to read the same leading article with a simulated mock-heroic emotion, we should then find, if we cared to observe, that we were now emphasising the before latent rhythm in two ways: we should be stressing certain syllables with greater force; and at the same time we should be making the intervals between these stressed syllables, not indeed rigidly equal, but far more nearly equal than they were, when we read the passage with the lack of emotion which it merited. And we shall find that the same thing happens whenever we read prose that genuinely moves us. Emotion in fact always tends to regularise and emphasise rhythm, even in prose. Now the main function of verse is deliberately, by its structure, to regularise rhythm, and so to create emotion artificially. Let us take a normal English verse: “The curfew tolls the knell of parting day.” The five stressed syllables, cur-, tolls, knell, par-, day, are felt to be equi-distant in time. No doubt they are in fact only approximately equi-distant. The human voice is not an instrument like a piano or a violin, by means of which we can divide time into mathematically equal spaces. However, the normal bars, or feet, are felt to be equal in time; and that is sufficient. The rhythmically indeterminate words and phrases of everyday speech are forced into this mould, or rather stretched upon this framework; and that process is a continuous series of Procrustean operations, of slight lengthenings or contractions, and imperceptible changes of stress and emphasis. Almost the most important difference between good and bad verse is that in good verse this process of moulding and stretching words increases their emotional expressiveness, whereas in bad verse it does not. Of course the versification of a good poem is never continuously regular. Accents are dropped or displaced; unstressed syllables are left out, or extra syllables inserted. But we are, or should be, always conscious of the underlying pattern, the ideal rhythmical base.

Such metrical irregularities are necessary not merely in order to prevent monotony: for any writer who knows his business they are a powerful instrument for controlling and modifying the emotional values of language. In Milton’s line,

there are only three stressed syllables. If these words were to occur in a newspaper article we should probably read them so rapidly that they would not sound like a blank verse at all. In order that they may become a verse, we must either put artificial stresses upon to and of, and read, “Trans- | fíx us | tó the | bóttom | óf this | gúlf,” which, though formally a blank verse, is not English; or else we must linger upon certain syllables, and stretch them out sufficiently to compensate for the absent stresses: “Trans | fíx us | to the | bóttom | of this | gúlf.” What happens here is something of the same nature as syncopation in music. The two pairs of syllables, -fix us and bottom, are each dwelt upon and prolonged, so that they expand and bulge over from their own bars into the bars that follow them, and so push away the unemphatic syllables to and of from the positions at the beginning of the bar, where a stress would normally occur. We are in fact compelled, if the line is to make metrical sense, to read the words slowly and spaciously, which produces the rhetorical and emotional effect that Milton intended. The following lines from Milton are instances of the opposite process of forcing into the rhythmical mould words which in ordinary prose speech would claim more elbow-room than the metre allows them:

The natural way of spacing these words, if they were prose, would be: “Rócks, | cáves, | lákes, | féns, | bógs, | déns, and | shádes of | déath.” But the metrical framework compels us to crowd these monosyllables together, and read them twice as rapidly as we should in prose. This hurry and constipation produces an effect of effort and strain, which is just what is required. An extreme case of this power of metre to mould and so give life to a phrase, is the line,

If this be read as a line with four stresses, thus: “And | máde him | bów to the | góds of his | wíves,” it is then not a Miltonic blank verse at all. Yet, since we cannot read it, “And | máde him | bów tó | thé góds | óf his | wíves,” the only thing to be done is to put a kind of level staccato accent on the last six syllables, thus: “And máde him bów tó thé góds óf hís wíves,” which spaces the words out, so that they sound like a blank verse, or at least do the best they can to sound like one. Thus not only is our ear sufficiently reminded of the underlying metrical base, but we are obliged to give to the phrase a kind of fierce indignant or ironic emphasis, which again is, I think, exactly what Milton intended. I could multiply instances; but these should be sufficient to illustrate the way in which verse, if it be well written, adds imaginative expressiveness to words, by forcing us to space them out and emphasise them, till they acquire new values that they would not have had in prose.

Another obvious function of a constant metrical framework is that of heightening the values of words and phrases by mere position, much as the structure of a cathedral may do with sculpture. Any passage of Milton, or of Keats’ mature work, might be used to illustrate this principle.

If then the main function of spoken verse be this of building a framework upon which we may place words in significant and beautiful relations both with each other and with the rhythmical structure itself, and upon which we may also stretch out and contract them, in order to increase their emotional values, it would seem to be necessary that this framework should be definite and constant. And it is this necessity that is, I think, the chief objection to some modern experiments in free verse. Whatever advantages there may be in emancipation from regularity, we should not forget the price that has to be paid for it in the loss or diminution of this power of moulding and vivifying language. It is true that there have been many successful experiments in more or less free verse, from the choruses in Samson Agonistes to, let us say, Mr. Waley’s translations of early Chinese poetry; but I suggest that as a general rule the success is in proportion to the degree in which we are made aware of a fixed metrical base underlying the irregularities. But what are we to think of this kind of thing?

Have these words, by being divided into two lines, acquired any kind of value they would not have had if they had been printed as prose, in which case they might be enjoyed as an amusing satirical outburst? But it would almost seem that at times free verse is no more than an excuse for uttering futilities and ineptitudes that we should not have dared to express in honest prose.

There is yet another important aspect of this medium of modern verse which we must not forget. Ancient poetry was in an obvious and literal sense an incantation, at once charming and exciting the mind through the ear. Now modern poetry, though no longer chanted but spoken, still retains, or should retain, something of its primitive nature as an incantation. It is notorious that poets, when reading verse, generally fall into a kind of chanting delivery, which sometimes, owing to their lack of skill, may seem affected, and even absurd. But their instinct is none the less right. Poetry read to sound like prose is intolerable. Thought is not poetic unless it be kindled into emotion; and the natural language of emotion is different from that of prose, the vehicle of reason. Not only is it more rhythmical, but it is more musical; that is to say, though the pitch is not deliberately regulated, as in song, there is a tendency to a level monotonous intonation, and changes of pitch, when they occur, are more conscious and more noticeable. The commonest fault of bad speakers of verse on the stage is to emphasise individual words by raising the pitch, so destroying the music that is proper to verse, and incidentally the rhythm too.

And here I may mention a danger to which both writers and readers of modern verse are very liable. In order to get the full value out of poetry (or indeed out of prose too), we ought, as Flaubert insisted, to read it aloud. But as we cannot always be doing that, we must, when reading silently to ourselves, listen with our unsensual ear to the same sounds and the same rhythms, moving at the same pace, as though we were reading aloud. Otherwise we shall not be reading poetry. It is indeed quite possible that twenty lines of Milton, read silently thus, may actually take up somewhat less time than they would if they were read aloud; but the pace ought not to seem hurried: in so far as it does, the magic of the medium will be impaired or destroyed. Moreover poets themselves, when, as they often do, they write more for the eye and for the mind than for the ear, are not writing literature at all, let alone poetry.