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Chapter III
Rhythm and Movement
THE MANTRA, poetic expression of the deepest spiritual reality, is only possible when three highest intensities of poetic speech meet and become indissolubly one, a highest intensity of rhythmic movement, a highest intensity of interwoven verbal form and thought-substance, of style, and a highest intensity of the soul’s vision of truth. All great poetry comes about by a unison of these three elements; it is the insufficiency of one or another which makes the inequalities in the work of even the greatest poets, and it is the failure of some one element which is the cause of their lapses, of the scoriae in their work, the spots in the sun. But it is only at a certain highest level of the fused intensities that the Mantra becomes possible. It is from a certain point of view the rhythm, the poetic movement that is of primary importance; for that is the first fundamental and indispensable element without which all the rest, whatever its other value, remains inacceptable to the Muse of poetry. A perfect rhythm will often even give immortality to work which is slight in vision and very far from the higher intensities of style. But it is not merely metrical rhythm, even in a perfect technical excellence, which we mean when we speak of poetic movement; that perfection is only a first step, a physical basis. There must be a deeper and more subtle music, a rhythmical soul-movement entering into the metrical form and often overflooding it before the real poetic achievement begins. A mere metrical excellence, however subtle, rich or varied, however perfectly it satisfies the outer ear, does not meet the deeper aims of the creative spirit; for there is an inner hearing which makes its greater claim, and to reach and satisfy it is the true aim of the creator of melody and harmony.
Nevertheless metre, by which we mean
a fixed and balanced system of the measures of sound, maātraā, is not only the
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traditional, but also surely the right physical basis for the poetic movement. A recent modern tendency
— that which has given us
the poetry of Whitman and Carpenter and the experimentalists in vers libre
in France and Italy, — denies this tradition and sets
aside metre as a limiting bondage, perhaps even a frivolous artificiality or a falsification of true, free and natural poetic rhythm.
That is, it seems to me, a point of view which cannot eventually prevail, because it does not deserve to prevail. It certainly
cannot triumph, unless it justifies itself by supreme rhythmical achievements beside which the highest work of the great masters
of poetic harmony in the past shall sink into a clear inferiority. That has not yet been done. On the contrary,
vers libre has done
its best when it has either limited its aim in rhythm to a kind of chanting poetical prose or else based itself on a sort of irregular
and complex metrical movement which in its inner law, though not in its form, recalls the idea of Greek choric poetry.
Milton disparaging rhyme, which he had himself used with so much skill in his earlier, less sublime, but more beautiful
poetry, forgot or ignored the spiritual value of rhyme, its power to enforce and clinch the appeal of melodic or harmonic recurrence which is a principal element in the measured movement of poetry, its habit of opening sealed doors to the inspiration, its
capacity to suggest and reveal beauty to that supra-intellectual something in us which music is missioned to awake. The
Whit manic technique falls into a similar, but wider error. When mankind found out the power of thought and feeling thrown
into fixed and recurring measures of sound to move and take possession of the mind and soul, they were not discovering a
mere artistic device, but a subtle truth of psychology, of which the conscious theory is preserved in the Vedic tradition. And
when the ancient Indians chose more often than not to throw whatever they wished to endure, even philosophy, science and
law, into metrical form, it was not merely to aid the memory, — they were able to memorise huge prose Brahmanas quite as
accurately as the Vedic hymnal or the metrical Upanishads, — but because they perceived that metrical speech has in itself
not only an easier durability, but a greater natural power than
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unmetrical, not only an intenser value of sound, but a force to compel language and sense to heighten themselves in order to
fall fitly into this stricter mould. There is perhaps a truth in the Vedic idea that the Spirit of creation framed all the movements
of the world by chandas, in certain fixed rhythms of the formative Word, and it is because they are faithful to the cosmic
metres that the basic world-movements unchangingly endure. A balanced harmony maintained by a system of subtle recurrences
is the foundation of immortality in created things, and metrical movement is nothing else than creative sound grown conscious
of this secret of its own powers.
Still there are all sorts of heights and gradations in the use
of this power. General consent seems indeed to have sanctioned the name of poetry for any kind of effective language set in a
vigorous or catching metrical form, and although the wideness of this definition is such that it has enabled even the Macaulays
and Kiplings to mount their queer poetic thrones, I will not object: catholicity is always a virtue. Nevertheless, mere force
of language tacked on to the trick of the metrical beat does not answer the higher description of poetry; it may have the
form or its shadow, it has not the essence. There is a whole mass of poetry, — the French metrical romances and most of the
mediaeval ballad poetry may be taken as examples, — which relies simply on the metrical beat for its rhythm and on an even
level of just tolerable expression for its style; there is hardly a line whose rhythm floats home or where the expression strikes
deep. Even in later European poetry, though the art of verse and language has been better learned, essentially the same method
persists, and poets who use it have earned not only the popular suffrage, but the praise of the critical mind. Still the definitive
verdict on their verse is that it is nothing more than an effective jog-trot of Pegasus, a pleasing canter or a showy gallop. It has
great staying-power, — indeed there seems no reason why, once begun, it should not go on for ever,
— it carries the poet easily
over his ground, but it does nothing more. Certainly, no real soul-movement can get easily into this mould. It has its merits
and its powers; it is good for metrical romances of a sort, for
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war poetry and popular patriotic poetry, or perhaps any poetry which wants to be an “echo of life”; it may stir, not the soul,
but the vital being in us like a trumpet or excite it like a drum. But after all the drum and the trumpet do not carry us far in the
way of music.
But even high above this level we still do not get at once
the greater sound-movement of which we are speaking. Poets of considerable power, sometimes even the greatest in their less
exalted moments, are satisfied ordinarily with a set harmony or a set melody, which is very satisfying to the outward ear and carries the aesthetic sense along with it in a sort of even, indistinctive pleasure, and into this mould of easy melody or harmony they
throw their teeming or flowing imaginations without difficulty or check, without any need of an intenser heightening, a deeper
appeal. It is beautiful poetry; it satisfies the aesthetic sense, the imagination and the ear; but there the charm ends. Once we have
heard its rhythm, we have nothing new to expect, no surprise for the inner ear, no danger of the soul being suddenly seized and
carried away into unknown depths. It is sure of being floated along evenly as if upon a flowing stream. Or sometimes it is
not so much a flowing stream as a steady march or other even movement: this comes oftenest in poets who appeal more to
the thought than to the ear; they are concerned chiefly with the thing they have to say and satisfied to have found an adequate
rhythmic mould into which they can throw it without any farther preoccupation
But even a great attention and skill in the use of metrical possibilities, in the invention of rhythmical turns, devices, modulations, variations, strong to satisfy the intelligence, to seize the ear, to maintain its vigilant interest, will not bring us yet to the
higher point we have in view. There are periods of literature in which this kind of skill is carried very far. The rhythms of Victorian poetry seem to me to be of this kind; they show sometimes the skill of the artist, sometimes of the classical or romantic
technician, of the prestigious melodist or harmonist, sometimes the power of the vigorous craftsman or even the performer of
robust metrical feats. All kinds of instrumental faculties have
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been active; but the one thing that is lacking, except in moments or brief periods of inspiration, is the soul behind creating and
listening to its own greater movements.
Poetic rhythm begins to reach its highest levels, the greater
poetic movements become possible when, using any of these powers but rising beyond them, the soul begins to make its
direct demand and yearn for a profounder satisfaction: they awake when the inner ear begins to listen. Technically, we
may say that this comes in when the poet becomes, in Keats’ phrase, a miser of sound and syllable, economical of his means,
not in the sense of a niggardly sparing, but of making the most of all its possibilities of sound. It is then that poetry
gets farthest away from the method of prose-rhythm. Proserhythm aims characteristically at a general harmony in which
the parts are subdued to get the tone of a total effect; even the sounds which give the support or the relief, yet to a
great extent seem to be trying to efface themselves in order not to disturb by a too striking particular effect the general
harmony which is the whole aim. Poetry on the contrary makes much of its beats and measures; it seeks for a very definite
and insistent rhythm. But still, where the greater rhythmical intensities are not pursued, it is only some total effect that
predominates and the rest is subdued to it. But in these highest, intensest rhythms every sound is made the most of, whether
in its suppression or in its swelling expansion, its narrowness or its open wideness, in order to get in the combined effect
something which the ordinary harmonic flow of poetry cannot give us
But this is only the technical side, the physical means by which the effect is produced. It is not the artistic intelligence or
the listening physical ear that is most at work, but something within that is trying to bring out the echo of a hidden harmony,
to discover a secret of rhythmic infinities within us. It is not a labour of the devising intellect or the aesthetic sense which
the poet has achieved, but a labour of the spirit within itself to cast something out of the surge of the eternal depths. The
other faculties are there in their place, but the conductor of the
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orchestral movement is the soul suddenly and potently coming forward to get its own work done by its own higher and unanalysable methods. The result is something as near to wordless music as word-music can get, and with the same power of soul-life, of soul-emotion, of profound supra-intellectual significance. In these higher harmonies and melodies the metrical rhythm is
taken up by the spiritual; it is filled with or sometimes it seems rolled away and lost in a music that has really another unseizable
and spiritual secret of movement
This is the intensity of poetic movement out of which the
greatest possibility of poetic expression arises. It is where the metrical movement remains as a base, but either enshrines and
contains or is itself contained and floats in an element of greater music which exceeds it and yet brings out all its possibilities,
that the music fit for the Mantra makes itself audible. It is the triumph of the embodied spirit over the difficulties and limitations of the physical instrument. And the listener seems to be that other vaster and yet identical eternal spirit whom the Upanishad
speaks of as the ear of the ear, he who listens to all hearings; “behind the instabilities of word and speech” it is the profound
inevitable harmonies of his own thought and vision for which he is listening.
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