Thamyris

I have now made it as clear as I am able what I believe the medium of modern spoken verse to be; and I have tried to indicate some of the dangers that lie in wait both for poets and their readers. The best safeguard is that we should fully realise both what the medium is and what it is not. All art consists in exploiting the possibilities and limitations of a medium; and any art of which the medium is misunderstood, and so misused, is likely to degenerate into gracelessness or triviality, and perish as it deserves.

Now that poetry is generally no longer performed, but read, it is obvious that its nature has to a certain extent grown more like that of prose, and that there has been a corresponding increase both in subtlety of expression, and in the possible range of material. Let us take full advantage of this change: but let us also remember that “everything is what it is, and not another thing”; that poetry still is, and always must be, a different art from prose; and that so long as it retains its integrity, it will have its own proper subject-matter, which though it may sometimes resemble, will never be the same as that of any other art.

Let us also honestly admit the truth that poetry has ceased to be a great popular and social art. It is no longer possible for it to be publicly recited or performed in any way. When it ventures upon the stage, it becomes a cause either of boredom or of laughter, unless it be travestied until it is unrecognisable. When associated with music, it is absorbed in the more dominating medium. It is of course possible, though unlikely, that music will evolve in the direction of greater simplicity or that some few musicians may grow sufficiently interested in poetry to devise a special kind of music, so tenuous and transparent that poetry will be able to live and breathe through it. It is also conceivable that, although the public of the commercial theatre will not tolerate poetry on the stage, satisfactory amateur productions of verse plays may become more common. I have never heard verse spoken on the stage more beautifully than by Ulysses and Agamemnon in the Cambridge Marlowe Society’s Troilus. If such successes were to become more frequent, we might hope in time to establish a tradition for performing verse plays, and to create a fit audience for them, which would encourage poets to take poetical drama seriously. But if that is to happen, then modern experiments will have to be risked, and produced as carefully and as frequently as classical revivals are now.

But though in this direction we may see a kind of dawning hope for poetical drama, yet I fear it is no more than a dubious glimmering. Poetry will still have to be written in the main for readers. And if poets are to continue to find readers, in spite of the growing competition of the more popular arts of music, the prose drama, the cinema, and the novel, they will have, I fancy, to take thought how they may put away childish things, and become, not perhaps more serious, but more rational, more daring, in fact more interesting. The material for poetry is the whole realm of the sensuous and intellectual imagination, and that is infinite. At present poets seem to be somewhat timid and unenterprising explorers. And I would suggest that experiments and innovations in technique are likely to be the most hopeful means of extending the range of expression and of discovering new material. In every art changes and developments of the medium require and call forth the invention of appropriate subject-matter; and the greatest art has always been produced where inspiration has been refreshed and quickened by technical changes, which have made possible the exploitation of unfamiliar themes. It would be rash to foretell with any confidence the directions in which poetical technique will develop in the future. The poets themselves will go their own ways, for better or for worse. But I may perhaps venture to indicate what seem to me the most natural and profitable lines of development.

Whatever may be our theory as to the true æsthetic and emotional function of metre, the conscious governing principle, according to which English verse has been written from the time of Chaucer until recent years, has been that of syllable-counting. Wherever a decasyllabic line contained more than ten syllables, elision, or the fiction of elision, was assumed as the explanation. Milton indeed formulated for himself certain definite rules, which he observed with great strictness, at least in Paradise Lost. But already in Shakespeare we may perceive a tendency to determine rhythm by stress rather than by the number of syllables; and during the last hundred years we find stress becoming more and more the dominant principle of English prosody. When Mr. Abercrombie writes:

or when Mr. Bottomley writes:

they are following the same principle that allowed Shakespeare to say:

or again:

They have in fact adopted an entirely different metrical system not only from Milton’s, but from such poets as Donne, who when he wrote:

did so in the confidence that his readers would be instinctively conscious of the number of the syllables, and so would not be disconcerted by the irregular disposition of the stresses.

These two systems of syllabic and stress prosody, though descended from the same parent, the rhymed couplet of Chaucer, have now grown to be very different from each other. I would suggest that, just as stress prosody had its origin in Shakespeare’s need for increased energy and emphasis in verse that was intended to be declaimed on the stage, so it may still be found to be the more expressive instrument for dramatic poetry, or for lyrics that require a free rhythmical structure; whereas syllabic prosody, of which Milton was the supreme master, is more suitable for undramatic verse of a deliberate and even movement, or for meditative lyrical poetry, like that of Donne and Keats. In a recently published poem, written in alexandrines, Mr. Bridges has carried the syllabic principle to its logical conclusion, and relying upon the rigid observance of his rule of twelve syllables to each line, has ventured upon a far more extensive use of difficult displacements of accent than even Milton thought possible. It may be that, as often happens with experimental artists, Mr. Bridges has demanded more effort from some of his readers than they will be able to give. But if so, it is to be hoped that he will write more poetry on the same method, so that the counting of syllables may become as natural and instinctive a process with us as it evidently is with him. He has already had the courage to explore the possibilities of English quantitative verse; yet though some of the poetry he wrote according to that system was of remarkable beauty, the experiment was perhaps too alien to the rhythmical genius of our language to be altogether satisfactory. But his new syllabic experiment, being no mere leap in the dark, but a natural development of the medium we have inherited from Chaucer and Milton, deserves our welcome, and is all the more likely to achieve lasting success.

In discussing the structure of English metre, I have taken my examples from blank verse, because that is the oldest and most highly elaborated of our verse-forms. But besides blank verse there are three other fundamental rhythms, each with a history and future possibilities of its own. If a musical analogy be permissible, rhythms of the blank verse kind (with or without rime, and whatever may be the number of feet to the line) may be said to be in duple time. But there is another rhythmical variety, which is sometimes not easy to distinguish from duple time, yet is essentially different.

This seven-stressed couplet, in which so many of our ballads are written, may be said to be in common time. The first, third, fifth and seventh stresses are generally stronger than the three intervening stresses, thus producing a kind of rhythmical undulation, which gives the line swiftness and lightness. The Elizabethans used this metre frequently in the form of rimed couplets. Chapman’s translation of the Iliad, for example, is written in it. Blake in his prophetic books was the first, so far as I know, to dispense with rime, and to give the line variety by frequently changing the position of the cæsura, which normally follows the fourth stress. The following lines are from the Book of Thel.

Shelley uses this metre lyrically in two of his most beautiful poems, taking the liberty of omitting the minor even stresses, and the light syllables that precede them, whenever it suits his purpose.

He concludes with the completely filled-out structure:

The lines in his Prometheus beginning:

are also written in this metre, which moreover is sufficiently Protean to form the basis of several of Gilbert’s most attractive songs, such as, “If you’re anxious for to shine in the high æsthetic line as a man of culture rare.” There is no reason why this metre should not be developed into a very expressive and subtle instrument, especially if Blake’s experiment be taken as a starting point. Though it may not have the grandeur of Milton’s blank verse, it has more rapidity and lightness, and is not without a beauty and dignity of its own.

Triple time was seldom employed by the Elizabethans, except in lyrics such as Shakespeare’s:

The eighteenth century found it an effective comedic rhythm, as in Goldsmith’s:

But it was Shelley who first successfully slowed down triple time, and gave it dignity and variety, as in his Sensitive Plant:

This rhythm has now become, in various forms and disguises, one of our commonest lyrical metres, easily modulating into duple time, and adaptable to lines of various lengths.

There is also another slower triple time, quite different to the usual form. Byron used it, probably without knowing what he was doing, in several of his lyrics, such as the Song of the Third Spirit in Manfred, and “There be none of Beauty’s daughters”: but the only instance I know where it has been consciously and deliberately used, is Professor Murray’s translation of an Ionic a minore ode in the Hippolytus:

It is unlikely that this difficult rhythm will ever become common; but in lyric poetry, by way of occasional contrast, very beautiful effects might well be obtained by it.

So far as I can see, these four are the only fundamental rhythms in English poetry. Their true nature, their various disguises, and their difference and relationship with one another, are not always sufficiently understood, and the result has frequently been confused and clumsy workmanship, and a failure to exploit their latent possibilities to the full.

There is one further aspect of the poetic craft which I must now mention. The Greek lyrical poets, whose metre was quantitative, and was emphasised by music and dancing movements, were able to build up far more elaborately organised rhythmical structures than we are accustomed to, with our simpler lyrical forms. Structure, with us, is generally delineated and emphasised by rime, rather than by internal variations and contrasts of rhythm. Even in the unrimed choruses of Samson Agonistes the rhythm is far more uniform than in the simplest Greek lyrical poems. I do not suggest that it would be possible or desirable artificially to change the nature of English poetical rhythm from an accentual to a quantitative basis, as Ennius did with Latin prosody. But although no doubt purely quantitative English verse will always remain somewhat of an exotic curiosity, I feel sure that if more conscious attention were paid to the quantity of English syllables, not only would our normal verse-forms, such as blank verse, gain in subtlety and expressive force, but all sorts of new possibilities of lyrical structure could be discovered and explored. Rime need not necessarily be dispensed with; but it would no longer be the only effective instrument for binding together a complicated lyrical stanza. Stress would still indicate and govern internal rhythm; but careful attention to the length and shortness of syllables would make it possible to build up far more elaborate and varied metrical structures than have hitherto been attempted. The result might be a verse that was genuinely free, yet did not degenerate into prose, based upon irregular but easily comprehensible metrical patterns, that could mould and dominate language as effectively as the older, more rigid verse-forms.