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On Quantitative Metre The Reason of Past Failures
The measures of this prose rhythm find their units of order in word-groups and not as in poetry in metrical lines; the syllabic combinations which we call feet do not follow here any fixed sequence. In colloquial speech the sequence is arranged by
impulse of Nature or by the automatic play of the subconscious mind, in prose either by the instinctive or by the conscious action
of an inner ear, by a secret and subtle hearing in our subliminal parts. There is not an arrangement of feet previously set by the
mind and fixedly recurrent as in metre. But still the measures of speech are the same and in all these prose passages there
is a dominant rhythm, — even sometimes a free recurrence or dominance of certain measures, not laid down or fixed, but easy
and natural, — which gives an underlying unity to the whole passage. In the instance taken from Shakespeare a remarkable
persistence of four-foot measures, with occasional shorter ones intervening, builds up a grave and massive rhythmic feeling and
imparts even a poetic motion to the unified whole.
In free verse the difference of prose movement and poetic
rhythm tends to disappear; poetry steps down to or towards the level of rhythmic, sometimes a very poorly rhythmic prose;
but it is too often a rhythm which misses its aim at the ear and is not evident, still less convincing, though it may exist
incommunicably somewhere in the mind of the writer. That indeed is the general modernistic tendency
— to step back to
the level of prose, sometimes to the colloquial level, both in language and in sound movement; the tendency, the aim even, is to
throw away the intensities of poetic rhythm and poetic language and approximate to a prose intonation and to a prose diction;
one intensity only is kept in view and that too not always, the intensity of the thought substance. It is the thought substance
that is expected to determine its own sound harmonies — as in prose: the thought must not subject itself to a preconceived or
set rhythm, it must be free from the metrical strait-waistcoat; or else the metrical mould must be sufficiently irregular, capricious,
easily modifiable to give a new freedom and ease of movement to the thought substance.
Our immediate concern, however, is with quantitative metre
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constructed on this principle of quantity, — though free verse also on that basis has to be taken into consideration as a subordinate possibility. After all, the swing against metre has not justified itself; it goes contrary to a very profound law of speech,
contradicts a very strong need of the ear, and the metreless verse it prefers disappoints, by the frequent flatness and inequality
which seems natural to it at its ordinary level, the listening consciousness. All creation proceeds on a basis of oneness and
sameness with a superstructure of diversity, and there is the highest creation where is the intensest power of basic unity
and sameness and on that supporting basis the intensest power of appropriate and governed diversity. In poetic speech metre
gives us this intensest power of basic unity and sameness — rhythmic variation gives us this intensest power of expressive
diversity. Metre was in the thought of the Vedic poets the reproduction in speech of great creative world-rhythms; it is not a
mere formal construction, though it may be made by the mind into even such a lifeless form: but even that lifeless form or
convention, when genius and inspiration breathe the force of life into it, becomes again what it was meant to be, it becomes
itself and serves its own true and great purpose. There is an intonation of poetry which is different from the flatter and
looser intonation of prose, and with it a heightened or gathered intensity of language, a deepened vibrating intensity of rhythm,
an intense inspiration in the thought substance. One leaps up with this rhythmic spring or flies upon these wings of rhythmic
exaltation to a higher scale of consciousness which expresses things common with an uncommon power both of vision and
of utterance and things uncommon with their own native and revealing accent; it expresses them, as no mere prose speech
can do, with a certain kind of deep appealing intimacy of truth which poetic rhythm alone gives to expressive form and power
of language: the greater this element, the greater is the poetry. The essence of this power can be there without metre, but metre
is its spontaneous form, raises it to its acme. The tradition of metre is not a vain and foolish convention followed by the great
poets of the past in a primitive ignorance unconscious of their
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own bondage; it is in spite of its appearance of human convention a law of Nature, an innermost mind-nature, a highest
speech-nature.
But it does not immediately follow that the metrical application to poetry of the normal rhythm of the language, discoverable even in its colloquial speech and prose, is imperatively
called for or that the construction of quantitative metres in that mould will be a needed or a right procedure. It might be reasoned, on the contrary, that precisely because this is a normal movement for colloquial speech and prose, it must be ill-fitted
for poetry; poetic speech is supernormal, above the ordinary level, and its principle of rhythm should be other than that of
common language. Moreover, it may be said, the admission of intrinsic rhythmic quantities to a share in determining the metrical basis would in practice only give us an accentual or stress metre with a slight difference, and the difference would be for the
worse. For the function which quantity now serves in accentual verse as a powerful free element in the variation of the rhythm,
would be sacrificed; quantitative verse would be bound to a rigid beat which would impose on it the character of a monotonous
drone or would fix it in a shackled stiffness like the drumming of the early “decasyllabon” or that treadmill movement which
has been charged, as an incurable defect, against the English hexameter.
But let us note, first, that there can be no idea of replacing altogether the normal accentual mould of English verse by
a quantitative structure; the object can only be to introduce new rhythms which would extend and vary the established
achievement of English poetry, to create new moulds, to add a rich and possibly a very spacious modern wing to an old
edifice. Even if the new forms are only an improvement on stress metre, a rhythm starting from the same swing of the
language, that is no objection; it may still be worth doing if it brings in new tunes, other cadences, fresh subtleties of wordmusic. As for the objection of a tied-up monotony caused by the disappearance of the free placing and variation of the pure
quantitative elements in metrical rhythm, that need not be the
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consequence: there are other means of variation which are sufficient to dispel that peril. A free use of modulation, an avoidance of metrical rigidity by other devices natural to the flexibility of
the English tongue, a skilful employment of overlapping (enjambement), of caesura, of word-grouping are presupposed in
any reasonable quantitative system. Even where a very regular movement is necessitated or desirable, the resources of the play
of sound, a subtle play of vowellation and of consonant harmonies, rhythmic undertones and overtones ought to cure the
alleged deficiency. It is not the nature of the material but the unskilful hand that creates the flaw; for each kind of material
has its own limitations and its own possibilities, and the hand of the craftsman is needed to restrict or overcome the limitations,
even to take advantage of the natural bounds and bring out the full force of the latent creativeness concealed in the obstructing
matter.
The application of the quantitative principle and the discovery of the forms that are possible are the task of the creator, not of the theoretical critic. It is, first and foremost, English
quantitative forms that we have to create; the reproduction or new-creation of classical metres in English speech is only a side
issue. Here the possibilities are endless, but they fall into two or three categories. First, there can be fixed quantitative metres
repeated from line to line without variation except for such modulations as are, in the form chosen, possible or desirable.
Secondly, stanza forms can be found, either analogous to those used in accentual verse or else analogous to the Greek arrangement in strophe and antistrophe. Thirdly, one can use a freer quantitative verse in which each line has its own appropriate
movement, the feet being variable, but with a predominant single rhythm unifying the whole. Lastly, there can be entirely
free quantitative verse, true verse with a poetic rhythm, but not bound by any law of metre. The stanza form is the most
suitable to quantitative verse, for here there can be much variety and the danger of rigidity or monotony is non-existent. The
use of set stanza metres simple or composite is less obligatory than it was in classical verse; even, each poem can discover
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its own metrical stanza form most in consonance with its own thought and feeling. The fixed metre unchanging from line to
line needs greater skill; modulation is here of great importance. A semi-free quantitative verse also gives considerable scope; it
can be planned in a form resembling that of the Greek chorus but without the fixed balance of strophe and antistrophe, or a
still looser use can be made of it escaping towards the freedom of modernistic verse. There are in this collection of poems examples
of the first two methods, the fixed metre and the set stanza or the strophe and antistrophe arrangement;9 a few more, illustrative
of these and other forms, are added at the end of this appendix. There is one illustration of semi-free and one of free quantitative
verse.
An unconsciously quantitative free verse may be said to exist
already in the writings of Whitman and contemporary modernist poets. In modern free verse the underlying impulse is to get away
from the fixed limitations of accentual metre, its set forms and its traditional “poetic” language, and to create forms and a
diction more kin to the natural rhythm and turns of language which we find in common speech and in prose. To throw away
the bonds of metre altogether, to approximate not only in the language but in the rhythmic movement to normal speech and to
prose tone and prose expression was the method first preferred; a great deal of free verse is nothing but prose cut up into lines
to make it look like verse. But in the more skilful treatment by the greater writers there is a labour to arrive at a certain power
of rhythm and a sufficient unity of movement. Free verse cannot justify itself unless it makes a thing of beauty of every line and
achieves at the same time an underlying rhythmic oneness; this is imperative when the power for form and the uplifting intensity
of metrical verse is absent, if this kind of writing is not to be, as it too often is, a failure. In the best poetry of the kind the
attempt to achieve this end arrives precisely at a form of free
9 “On Quantitative Metre” first appeared as an appendix to Sri Aurobindo’s
Collected
Poems and Plays (1942). The examples mentioned as occurring “in this collection of
poems” are now published in Collected Poems. They include “Ahana” and some of the
poems in “Six Poems” and “Poems [1941]“. — Ed.
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quantitative verse based on the natural rhythm of the language liberated from all metrical convention of regularity, and there
is sometimes an approximation to its highest possibilities. But the approximation is not so near as it might have been in the
work of one who had the theory before him; for it was not the conscious mind, but the creative ear that was active and
compelled this result, helped no doubt by the will to outdo the beauty of accentual metrical rhythm in a freer poetry.
In Whitman the attempt at perfection of rhythm is often present and,
when he does his best as a rhythmist, it rises to a high-strung
acuteness which gives a great beauty of movement to his finest
lines; but what he arrives at is a true quantitative free verse.
That is comparatively rare in its high beauty; but everywhere
the rhythmic trend is the same wherever we look at it, — as in the
rhymed freedom of this opening,
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Even when he loosens into a laxity nearer to prose, the compact
quantitative movement, though much less high-strung, is still there,
It is only when he lies back or lolls indolently content with
spreading himself out in a democratic averageness of rhythm that the intensity of poetic movement fades out; but the free
quantitative movement is there even then, though near now to the manner and quality of prose.
The later practicians of free verse have not often the heightened rhythmic movement of Whitman at his best, but still they
are striving towards the same kind of thing, and their work apparently and deliberately amorphous receives something like
a shape, a balance, a reasoned meaning when scanned as quantitative free verse. We find this in passages of
The Waste Land
and The Hollow Men, e.g.,
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Or let us take a passage from Stephen Spender, —
There is a rhythm there, but it is not sufficiently gathered up or vivid and it is much more subdued than Eliot’s towards
the atony and flatness of ordinary prose rhythm. The last lines of the quotation from
The Hollow Men could be used to describe with a painful accuracy most of this ametric poetry. Some kind of poetic shape is there but no realised and convincing
form; shade there is plenty, but colour — except perhaps blacks,
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browns, greys and silver-greys — is mostly absent; force is there but paralysed or only half-carrying out its intention, gestures
with much effort and straining, but no successful motion. In less excellent passages of the free verse writers this atony comes
out very evidently; all intensity of poetic rhythm disappears and we plod through arid waste-lands. There is an insistence on
formlessness as the basis and each writer tries to shape his own rhythm out of this arhythmic amorphousness, sometimes with
a half success, but not always or very often. This is clearly the reason of the failure of free verse and the reason too of several
besetting general deficiencies of modernist verse; for even where there is form or metre, it seems ashamed of itself and tries to look
as if there were none. It is the reason also of the discouraging inequality of modernist poetry, its failure to achieve any supreme
beauty or greatness, any outstanding work which could compare with the masterpieces of other epochs. Inspiration is the source
of poetic intensity and, while inspiration comes when it will and not at command, yet it is more tempted to come and can be
more sustained when there is a conscious and constant form to receive it, — not necessarily metre in the received sense,
— and
although the highest breath of inspiration cannot, even so, be continuous, for the human mind is too frail to sustain the supernormal luminous inrush, yet the form sustains quality, keeps it at a higher level than can any licence of caprice or freedom of
shapelessness. When the form is not there the inspiration, the intensity that gives perfect poetic expression to idea, feeling or
vision, keeps more at a distance and has to be dragged in with an effort; even if it comes in lines, phrases, passages, afterwards its
impulse ceases or flags and toils and through long weary pages one feels its persistent absence or unwilling half-presence and
the mass of the work remains unsatisfying. What is done may be strong or interesting in substance, but it lacks the immortal
shape. Mind is there, a fertile and forceful, sometimes too acute and forceful intelligence, but not life, not a firm lasting body.
It is possible that one day the impulse which created free verse may be justified; but, if so, it can only be done when a free
form is achieved, a free rhythmic unity. For that end the best
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work of Whitman would seem to point to a free but finely built quantitative rhythm as the most promising base. But, even at its
highest, free verse is not likely to replace metre.
The Problem of the Hexameter
It is now possible to transfer our attention to the minor problem of the naturalisation of classical quantitative metres in English
poetry; for in the light of this more natural theory of quantity we can hope to find an easier solution. Among these metres the
hexameter stands as the central knot of the problem; if that is loosened, the rest follows. But first let us return on past attempts
and their failure and find by that study a basis of comparison between the true and the false hexameter. There are here two
elements to be considered, the metrical form and the characteristic rhythm; both Clough and Longfellow have failed for the
most part to get into their form the true metrical movement and missed too by that failure to get the true inner rhythm,
the something more that is the soul of the hexameter. Of the two, Longfellow achieved the smoother half-success
— or rather
the more plausible failure. He realised that the metre must be predominantly dactylic and maintained a smooth dactylic flow,
broken only by the false, because mechanical, use of trochees to vary the continuous dactylic beat. Other modulations could not
be used with effect because the accentual system only admits in the hexameter the dactyl, the spondee and the trochee. For all
three-syllabled feet are in the accentual hexameter reduced to dactyls. The
tribrach gets right of entry by imposing an accentual low pitch on
its inherently unaccented and unstressed first syllable, e.g.,
The anapaest is cooked up into a pseudo-dactyl by a similar device of false accentuation and by the belittling of its long vowel,
the antibacchius and cretic by a depression or half-suppression of the value of the unstressed long syllable, the second long
bar that gives them their musical value; the molossus is shorn
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of its strength by a similar treatment of all its syllables except the opening long sound. All are disabled from coming out in
relief on the dactylic background and so cannot do their work as modulating variants; for that they should enter in their own
right as themselves and not as false dactyls and with their full metrical value. Even among the three available feet the trochee
gives poor service; for it rarely fits in, — its effect, when it is used mechanically as a device and with no meaningful appropriateness or rhythmic beauty, disturbs the dactylic flow without giving any relief to the dactylic monotone. Dactyl and spondee
by themselves, pure and unmodulated, or the dactyl by itself cannot, unhelped and unrelieved, bear successfully the burden
of a long poem in accentual metre.
Longfellow treats us to a non-stop flow of even
hexameters with few overlappings and insufficient use of pauses;
such overlappings as there are hardly noticeable, so mechanical
is their intervention, so entirely uncalled by rhythmic necessity
and unburdened with meaning; the pauses are sometimes well-done but
the whole tone of the rhythm is so mechanical that even then they
lose their effect and seem almost artificial. The result on the
rhythmic whole is disastrous; a smooth even sing-song is the
constant note, a movement without nobility or beauty or power or
swiftness. Sometimes we come across passages that are adequate and
achieve a quiet and subdued beauty —
Filled was the air with a dreamy and magical light, and the landscape
Lay as if new-created in all the freshness of childhood.
Peace seemed to reign upon earth and the restless heart of the ocean
Was for a moment consoled. All sounds were in harmony blended.
In such passages, the metre, though accentual, satisfies the quantitative demand and so escapes from its deficiencies, but the
rhythm is too flatly smooth and still indistinctive; it fails to support and achieve fully by the something more behind the
metrical movement the beauty that the words intended. Some charm of delicacy is achieved, but it lacks power, height and
depth; here certainly is not the tread of the great Olympian measure. Ordinarily, the note sinks lower and even descends to
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a very low pitch; we hear, not the roll of the hexameter, but some
six-foot dactylic rhythm resembling a sort of measured prose
recitative —
Then he arose from his bed and heard what the people were saying,
Joined in the talk at the door with Stephen and Richard and Gilbert,
Joined in the morning prayer and in the reading of Scripture.10
And yet even the accentual (or perhaps one should
say the stress) hexameter is capable of better things. Clough,
aiming at this stronger efficiency, tries to escape from the
treadmill motion, the sing-song, the monotone; but he does not
altogether get away from it and arrives only at a familiar vigour or
a capable but undistinguished movement, or falls into a trotting and
stumbling rhythm which is sometimes hardly even a rhythm. In
attempting to shun the monotony of the unuplifted dactylic beat, he
often totally overlays or half overlays the metrical basis of the
hexameter rhythm which must be always a sustained dactylic movement.
He perpetrates frequently lines that are wholly trochaic and have
only this in common with the hexameter that they walk on six feet; a
host of other lines are, if not wholly, yet predominantly trochaic.
This, which can sometimes be done in a true hexameter rhythm with a
special intonation and a special purpose, is fatal if constantly
used as an ordinary action of a machine. Very often the trochees
break a line that would otherwise have been adequate; sometimes
there is what seems to be a cross between hexameter and pentameter;
often he indulges in an anapaestic line, sometimes three at a time,
disguised as hexameters by turning an initial pyrrhic into a false
trochee. The result tends to be tedious, trivial and disappointing;
let us take a sample —
So they bathed, they read, they roamed in glen and forest
Far amid blackest pines to the waterfalls they shadow,
Far up the long long glens to the loch and the loch behind it
Deep under huge red cliffs, a secret, and oft by the starlight
10 Note the detestable combination of two flat trochees with a falsified tribrach in the middle of this line. These false movements abound in the accentual hexameter.
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So they bathed and read and roamed in heathery Highland.
This indistinctive paddling has even less of the sound and rhythm of the true hexameter than Longfellow’s verses which are at least
hexametric in form and surface appearance.
But still there are passages, not numerous enough, in which
he loses his fear of the pure dactylic movement and does not replace it or break it with the disturbing intrusion of unmanaged
or unassimilated trochees; he arrives then at “accentual” lines, — if they must be so called, but they are really stress lines,
—
with a firm beat that makes the metrical structure adequate; or he achieves a movement in which the trochees come in with
a distinct rhythmic meaning and significant effect or, at the least, make themselves at home in the dactylic rhythm, or he
brings in other modulations in a way proper to the quantitative hexameter.
Found amid granite dust on the frosty scalp of the Cairngorm. . . .
Eying one moment the beauty, the life, ere he flung himself in it,
Drinking in, deep in his soul, the beautiful hue and the clearness. . . .
Often I find myself saying and know not myself as I say it,
Perish the poor and the weary! what can they better than perish,
Perish in labour for her who is worth the destruction of empires? . . .
Dig in thy deep dark prison, Ominer! and finding be thankful,
Far away glitters the gem on the peerless neck of a princess. . . .
Into a granite bason the amber torrent descended.
These lines are metrically and rhythmically adequate; the
treatment of the metre is unexceptionable: there is a true form, a good basis and beginning of a genuine hexameter movement;
and yet something is lacking, something which ought to be there
11 Note that this, the sole truly dactylic line, with quantitative modulations, is in spite
of its deliberate prosaism less unsatisfactory in sound than the rest of the passage.
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and is not, and its absence prevents them from being quite effective. It is the rhythm that in spite of its soundness is not altogether alive, does not keep sufficiently alert, has not found
the true movement that would give it the full power and speed of the true hexameter. A second fault is that while individual lines
are good and may sound even excellent when read by themselves or even two or three at a time, there is no rhythmic harmony
of the long passage or paragraph; one has, in the mass, the sense of listening to the same indifferent and undistinguished
movement repeated without sufficient meaningful variation and without any harmonious total significance. Above all the large
hexameter rhythm, such as we have it in Greek or Latin, has not been found, nor anything that would equal it as a native English
harmony fitted for great poetic speech, for great thoughts and feelings, for great action and movement. There is a tameness of
sound, a flatness of level, or, even when beauty or energy is there, it is a tenuous beauty, a strength that is content to be low-toned
and moderate.
One reason of this deficiency must be that in all this work
the hexameter is compelled to express subjects whose triviality brings it down far below its natural pitch of greatness, force
or beauty. A pathetically sentimental love story, a rather dullhued tale of courtship among New England Puritans, the trifling
doings and amours and chaff and chat of holiday-making undergraduates, these are not subjects in which either language or
rhythm can rise to any great heights or reach out into revealing largenesses; they are obliged to key themselves to commonness
and flatness; the language is as often as not confidentially familiar or prosaic, a manner good enough for some other kinds of
verse but not entitled to call in the power of the great classical metre. There can be in such an atmosphere no room and no
courage to dare to rise into any uplifting grandeur or break out into any extreme of beauty. Both Clough and Longfellow tell their stories well and it is more for the interest of the contents than for the beauty of the poetry that we read
them. But the hexameter was made for nobler purposes; it has been the medium of epic or pastoral or it tuned itself to a
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powerful or forcefully pointed expression of thought and observation; power and beauty are its native character and, even
when it turns to satire or to familiar speech, it keeps always one or other or both of these characteristics. There is no sound
reason why it should be otherwise in English, why this great metre should be condemned to an inferior level and inferior
purpose; if that is done, it fails its user and dissatisfies the reader.
In fact, Clough does once or twice rise above
these limitations. Here, following immediately three lines that have
been already quoted as good in their limits, come three others that
suddenly realise the true hexameter rhythm; there is the life and
energy natural to that rhythm, there is the characteristic
swiftness, rush, force, which is one of its notes, there is an exact
clothing of the thought, feeling or action in its own native
movement —
What! for a mite, or a mote, an impalpable odour of honour
Armies shall bleed, cities burn, and the soldier red from the storming
Carry hot rancour and lust into chambers of mothers and daughters!
At another place he rises still higher and suddenly discovers,
though only once in a way and apparently without being conscious of
his find, the rhythm of the true quantitative hexameter —
where the opening antibacchius and
spondee followed by bounding and undulating dactyls give a
sound-value recognisable as akin to the ancient movement. It would
be an epic line if it were not in the mock-heroic style; but, even
so, if we met it apart from its context, it would remind us at once
of the Homeric rhythms —
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If all the poem had been written in that manner or in accordant rhythms, the problem of the English hexameter would have been
solved; there would have been no failure or half failure.12
We begin to glimpse the conditions of success and may now
summarily state them. The hexameter is a dactylic metre and it must remain unequivocally and patently dactylic; there can be
no escape from its difficulties by diminishing the dactylic beat: rather its full quantitative force has to be brought out,
— the
more that is done, the more the true rhythm will appear. But this need not bring in any sing-song, treadmill walk or monotone. In
Longfellow, in Clough at their ordinary level, it is the low even tone without relief, the repetition of a semi-trochaic jog-trot or
a smooth unvarying canter, the beat of tame dactyls, that gives this impression. In Harvey or similar writers it is the constrained
artificial treatment of the metre that enforces a treadmill labour. But this is not the true hexameter movement; the true movement
is a swift stream or a large flow, an undulating run, the impetuous bounding of a torrent, an ocean surge or a divine gallop of the
horses of the sungod. There must be one underlying sameness as in all metre, but there can and should be at the same time
a considerable diversity on the surface. That can be secured by several means, each of which gives plenty of room for rhythmic
subtlety and for many turns of sound significance. There is the pause in various places of the line, near the beginning, at the
middle or just after it or close to the end; all admit of a considerable variety in the exact placing, modulation, combination of
the pause or pauses. There is also the line caesura and the foot caesura. The hexameter line in English may be cut into two or
else three equal dactylic parts, or it may be cut anywhere in the middle of a foot and this admits of a number of very effective
12 Kingsley’s “Andromeda” deserves a mention, for it is the most readable of English hexameter poems; the verse is well-constructed, much better than Clough’s; it has not
the sing-song tameness of Longfellow, there is rhythm, there is resonance. But though the frame is correct and very presentable, there is nothing or little inside it. Kingsley
has the trick of romantic language, romantic imagination and thinking, but he is not an original poet; the poetic value of his work is far inferior to Clough’s or Longfellow’s, it
is not sound and good stuff but romantic tinsel.
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variations which obviate monotony altogether. For example —
In the dawn-ray lofty and voiceless
Ida climbed with her god-haunted peaks | into diamond lustres,
Ida first of the hills | with the ranges silent beyond her
Watching the dawn in their giant companies, | as since the ages
First began | they had watched her, | upbearing Time on their
summits
“Hero Aeneas, swift be thy stride to the Ilian hill-top.
Dardanid, haste! for the gods are at work; they have risen with the
morning,
Each from his starry couch, and they labour. Doom, we can see it,
Glows on their anvils of destiny, clang we can hear of their hammers.
Something they forge there sitting unknown in the silence eternal,
Whether of evil or good it is they who shall choose who are masters
Calm, unopposed; they are gods and they work out their iron caprices.
Troy is their stage and Argos their background; we are their puppets.
Always our voices are prompted to speech for an end that we know not,
Always we think that we drive, but are driven. Action and impulse,
Yearning and thought are their engines, our will is their shadow and
helper.”
There are many other devices for variation: there is overlapping, — but it must be skilfully managed so as to coincide with
perceptible movements of the thought, not used merely as a customary technical device; there is the constant attention to the
right vowellation and consonant harmonies which can give an individual character to each line and are also intimately connected with the rhythmic rendering of significance. Even though the free rhythmic placing of intrinsic long syllables is taken away,
since they are now bound down to a metrical use, still much can be done with the distribution of stressed long vowels and stressed
short vowels among the six beats; for the predominance of either in a line or passage or their more or less equal distribution in
various ways creates different psychologies of sound and dictates large or wide or narrow or subtle motions of both rhythm and
feeling. In this opening of a poem —
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Dawn in her journey eternal compelling the labour of mortals,
Dawn the beginner of things with the night for their rest or their ending,
Pallid and bright-lipped arrived from the mists and the chill of the
Euxine
—
in the first line the stressed long vowels predominate, in the second the stressed short vowels, in the third there is an equal
distribution; in each case there is a suiting of the choices of sound to a different shade of movement-sense. In another passage
—
Doffing his mantle
Started to run at the bidding a swift-footed youth of the Trojans
First in the race and the battle, Thrasymachus son of Aretes,
we can see that the predominance of short stresses amounting
to an almost unbroken succession of natural short-vowel syllables creates a long running swiftness of the rhythm which fits
in exactly with the action. All these minutiae are part of the technique and the possibilities of the hexameter and, if they are
neglected or ineffectively used, the fault does not lie with the metre. The natural resources of the true quantitative hexameter
are so great that even a long series of end-stopped lines would not necessarily create a monotone.
Finally, there is the resource of modulation, and
in the quantitative hexameter this can be used with great effect,
either sparingly or in abundance, best sparing perhaps in epic or
high narrative, abundant in poems of complex thinking and emotion.
There is only one possible modulation in place of the spondee and
that is the trochee. In the quantitative hexameter the trochee,
unless unskilfully used, does not break or hurt the flow; it
modifies the total rhythm so as to give it an expressive turn and it
can easily make itself a part of the general dactylic streaming. For
example—
High over all that a nation had built and its love and its laughter,
Lighting the last time highway and homestead, market and temple, a
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Here the two trochees together — a combination almost always awkward or crippling in the accentual hexameter
— and the
trochee followed by a cretic fit easily into the movement and create by their unusual and appropriate turn of sound a modulation
of the rhythmic feeling. If the third line were written
Looking on men who must die and on women predestined to sorrow,
the common indistinguishable metrical run would not at all serve the intended meaning,
— it would be a statement and would
inform the mind but, robbed of the special turn of sound, it would not move. For the dactyl there is a great number of
possible modulations; the antibacchius can be used freely, the lighter cretic less freely but still frequently, the first paeon often
but not too often; even the lighter molossus can come in to our aid; the tribrach or the anapaest can introduce the first foot of
a line or step in after a pause in the middle, but elsewhere they can seldom intervene or only if it is done very carefully. Even the
choriamb or the double trochee can be employed in place of the paeon, if the second long syllable of the foot is unstressed and
therefore not burdensome. Heavy trisyllables can be allowed only now and then, if the movement demands them. But in
fact all modulations must be employed only when there is the rhythmic necessity or for rhythmic significance; if they are used
mechanically without reason or at random, it does not help the harmony and often destroys it. Rhythmic necessity intervenes
when the special movement needed by the thought, feeling or action must so be brought about, by modulation of the fixed
rhythm or a departure from it;13 rhythmic significance occurs when the deeper unexpressed soul sense behind the words is
brought out, not by word but by sound, to the surface.
The efficacy of this technique depends on the power of the
13 Thus even an almost wholly trochaic or a wholly spondaic line can be admitted when it is demanded by the action, e.g.,
He from the carven couch upreared his giant stature
or,
Fate-weighed up Troy’s slope strode musing strong Aeneas.
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writer to discover and sustain the true movement of the hexameter, its spirit and character, such as we find it in the ancient
epics, pastorals, epistles, satires in which it was used with a supreme greatness or a consummate mastery. That movement
can be of many kinds; it admits a considerable variation of pace, sometimes swift, sometimes slow, short in its rapidity or
long-drawn-out with many rhythmic turns, and there are several possibilities in each kind. Only a considerable poetic genius
could bring out the full power and subtleties of its rhythms; but it is essential for even a tolerable success to find and keep up a
true length and pitch in the delivery of the lines; the dactylic flow is especially exacting in this respect on the care of the rhythmist.
An undulant run is the easiest to maintain, the most simple and natural pace, but it has to be varied by other movements, a long
or a brief bounding swiftness, the light rapid run or a slower deliberate running; a large even stream is a second possibility as
a basic rhythm, but this needs a Virgilian genius or talent; the surge is the greatest of all, but only the born epic poet could
sustain it for a long time, — it suits indeed only the epic or highpitched narrative, but it can come in from time to time as an
occasional high rise from a lower level of rhythmic plenitude. Finally, rhyme can be used for poems of reflective thought or
lyrical feeling; but it must not be made the excuse for a melodic monotone. That kind of melodic fixity is permissible in very
short dactylic pieces, but the hexameter does not move at ease in a short range: it has fluted in the pastoral grove and walked
on the Appian way, but it loves better the free sky and the winds of the ocean; it finds its natural self in the wide plain, on high
mountains or in the surge and roll of a long venturous voyage.
If the difficulty of the hexameter can be successfully overcome, no insuperable impossibility need be met in the naturalisation of other classical metres, for the harmonic principle will be
the same. All that is necessary is that artificial quantity and the atmosphere of a pastime or an experiment must be abandoned;
there must not be the sense of an importation or a construction, the metre must read as if it were a born English rhythm, not a
naturalised alien. It would be a mistake to cling to rigid scholarly
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correctness in the process; these metres must submit to the natural law of English poetry, to movements and liberties which
the classical rhythms do not admit, to modulation, to slight facilitating changes of form, to the creation of different models
of itself, as there are different models of the sonnet. The Alcaic is the most attractive and manageable of the ancient lyrical metres,
but in English even the Alcaic cannot easily be the same in all respects as the original verse form of its creator. The original
model can indeed be reproduced; but modulations have to be brought in to help the difficulties experienced by English speech
in taking a foreign metre into itself; trochees have very usually to be substituted for the not easily found spondee, an occasional
anapaest, a paeon lengthening out the orthodox dactyl should not be excluded; the omission of the first syllable in the opening
line of the stanza can be admitted as an occasional licence. Otherwise the full harmonic possibilities of this rhythmic measure in
its new tongue cannot be richly exploited. The Horatian form in which the two opening lines very commonly end in a cretic doing
duty for the theoretic dactyl, is more manageable in English, in which a constant dactylic close to the line is not easily handled:
this change gives a less melodious, a graver and more sculptural turn to the outlines of the stanza. Finally, to this Horatian form
it is possible to give a greater amplitude by admitting a feminine ending in these two lines, the cretic turning into a double trochee.
That does not break or destroy the spirit and character of the Alcaic verse; it gives it more largeness and resonance.
Other lyrical forms may be less amenable to change; there is sometimes too close an identity between the body and the spirit.
It is so with the Sapphic, an alluring metre but, as experimenters have found, difficult to change and anglicise: here only slight
modulations are admissible, the trochee for the spondee, the antibacchius or light cretic for the dactyl. Still others would
need the minute and scrupulous art of a goldsmith or the force of a giant to make anything of them; yet they are worth trying,
for one never knows whether the difficulty may not be the way to a triumph or a
trouvaille. In any case, the hexameter, half
a dozen of the greater or more beautiful lyrical forms and the
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freedom of the use of quantitative verse for the creation of new original rhythms would be enough to add a wide field to the
large and opulent estate of English poetry.
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