THE EVOLUTION OF TECHNIQUE
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:
And I will show
This mask the devil wears, this old shipman,
A thing to make his proud heart of evil
Writhe like a trodden snake;
or when Mr. Bottomley writes:
Have I broken the bird’s wings to catch the bird?
Have I shattered the door of her mind to enter there?
they are following the same principle that allowed Shakespeare to say:
Dearly my delicate Ariel. Let us approach ...
or again:
Is goads, thorns, nettles, tails of wasps.
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:
Blasted with sighs, and surrounded with tears,
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.
And mony was the feather bed
That flatter’d on the faem;
And mony was the gude lord’s son
That never mair came hame.
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_.
The daughters of the Seraphim led round their sunny flocks--
All but the youngest: she in paleness sought the secret air,
To fade away like morning beauty from her mortal day.
Down by the river of Adona her soft voice is heard,
And thus her gentle lamentation falls like morning dew:--
“O life of this our spring! why fades the lotus of the water?
Why fade these children of the spring, born but to smile and fall?
Ah! Thel is like a watery bow, and like a parting cloud;
Like a reflection in a glass; like shadows in the water;
Like dreams of infants, like a smile upon an infant’s face;
Like the dove’s voice; like transient day; like music in the air.”
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.
Awáy! The móor is dárk beneath the moón.
Rápid clouds have drúnk the lást pale beams of éven:
Awáy! the gathering wínds will cáll the darkness sóon,
And profóundest midnight shróud the seréne lights of héaven.
He concludes with the completely filled-out structure:
Thy remémbrance, and repéntance, and deep músings are not frée
From the músic of two vóices and the light of one sweet smíle.
The lines in his _Prometheus_ beginning:
Ah Síster, Desolátion is a délicate thing,
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:
Merrily, merrily shall I live now
Under the blossom that hangs on the bough.
The eighteenth century found it an effective comedic rhythm, as in
Goldsmith’s:
When they talked of their Raphaels, Correggios and stuff,
He shifted his trumpet and only took snuff.
But it was Shelley who first successfully slowed down triple time, and
gave it dignity and variety, as in his _Sensitive Plant_:
And the jessamine faint, and the sweet tuberose,
The sweetest flower for scent that blows;
And all rare blossoms from every clime
Grew in that garden in perfect prime.
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_:
Could I take me to some cavern for mine hiding,
In the hill-tops where the Sun scarce hath trod.
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.