THE MEDIUM OF SPOKEN VERSE
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,
Transfix us to the bottom of this gulf,
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:
O’er many a frozen, many a fiery alp,
Rocks, caves, lakes, fens, bogs, dens, and shades of death.
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,
And made him bow to the gods of his wives,
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?
Come, my songs, let us express our baser passions.
Let us express our envy for the man with a steady job and no worry
about the future.
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.