|
SECTION THREE POETIC RHYTHM AND TECHNIQUE IF your purpose is to acquire not only metrical skill but the sense and the power of rhythm, to study the poets may do something, but not all. There are two factors in poetic rhythm,—there is the technique (the variation of movement without spoiling the fundamental structure of the metre, right management of vowel and consonantal assonances and dissonances, the masterful combination of the musical element of stress with the less obvious element of quantity, etc.), and there is the secret soul of rhythm which uses but exceeds these things. The first you can learn, if you read with your ear always in a tapasya. of vigilant attention to these constituents, but without the second what you achieve may be technically faultless and even skilful, but poetically a dead letter. This soul of rhythm can only be found by listening in to what is behind the music of words and sounds and things. You will get something of it by listening for that subtler element in great poetry, but mostly it must either grow or suddenly open in yourself. This sudden opening can come if the Power Page - 161 within wishes to express itself in that way. I have more than once seen a sudden flowering of capacities in every kind of activity come by a rapid opening of the consciousness, so that one who laboured long without the least success to express himself in rhythm becomes a master of poetic language and cadences almost in a day. Poetry is a question of the right concentrated silence or seeking somewhere in the mind with the right openness to the Word that is trying to express itself—for the Word is there ready to descend in those inner planes where all artistic forms take birth, but it is the transmitting mind that must change and become a perfect channel and not an obstacle. Importance of Metre and Technique I DON'T know that Swinburne failed for this reason-before assenting to such a dictum I should like to know which were these poems he spoiled by too much artistry of technique. So far as I remember, his best poems are those in which he is most perfect in artistry, most curious or skilful, most subtle. I think his decline began when he felt himself too much at ease and poured himself out in an endless waste of melody without caring for substance and the finer Page - 162 finenesses of form. Attention to technique harms only when a writer is so busy with it that he becomes indifferent to substance. But if the substance is adequate, the attention to technique can only give it greater beauty. Even devices like a refrain, internal rhymes, etc. can indeed be great aids to the inspiration and the expression—just as can ordinary rhyme. It is in my view a serious error to regard metre or rhyme as artificial elements, mere external and superfluous equipment restraining the movement and sincerity of poetic form. Metre, on the contrary,. is the most natural mould of expression for certain states of creative emotion and vision, it is much more natural and spontaneous than a non-metrical form; the emotion expresses itself best and most powerfully in a balanced rather than in a loose and shapeless rhythm. The search for technique is simply the search for the best and most appropriate form for expressing what has to be said and once it is found, the inspiration can flow quite naturally and fluently into it. There can be no harm therefore in close attention to technique so long as there is no inattention to substance. There are only two conditions about artistry: (1) that the artistry does not become so exterior as to be no longer art and (2)that substance (in which of course I include bhava) is not left behind Page - 163 in the desert or else art and bhava not woven into each other.
August, 1935 Inspiration and Study of Technique You do not need at all to afflict your inspiration by Studying metrical technique—you have all the technique you need, within you. I have never studied prosody myself—in English, at least; what I know E know by reading and writing and following my ear and using my intelligence. If one is interested in the technical study of prosody for its own sake, that is another matter—but it is not at all indispensable.
28-4-1934 English Quantitative Verse and Classical Metres- Melody of English and Bengali Languages THERE have been attempts to write in English. quantitative verse on the Greek and Latin Page - 164 principle with the classical metres, attempts which began in the Elizabethan times, but they have not been successful because the method was either too slipshod or tried to adhere too rigidly to the rules of quantity natural to Greek and Latin but not to the English tongue instead of making an adaptation of it for the English ear or, still better, discovering directly in English itself the true principle of an English quantitative metre. I believe it is perfectly possible to acclimatise the quantitative principle in English and with great advantage. I have not seen Bridges' attempts, but I do not see why his failure—if it was one—should damn the possibility. I think one day it will be done. It is true that English rhythm falls most naturally into the iambic movement. But I do not admit the adverse strictures passed on the other (trochaic, anapaestic, dactylic) bases of metre. All depends on how you handle them,—if as much pains are bestowed on them, as on the iambic, the fault attributed to them will disappear. Even as it is, the trochaic metre in the hands of great poets like Milton, Shelley, Keats does not pall—I do not get tired of the melody of the Skylark. Swinburne's anapaestic metres, as in Dolores are kept up for pages without difficulty with the most royal ease, without fatigue either to the writer or the reader. Page - 165 Both trochee and anapaest are surely quite natural to the language. The dactyl is more difficult ) continue, but I believe it can be done, even in long dactylic metre like the hexameter, if intersperse with spondees (as the metre allows) and supported by subtle modulations of rhythm, variations of pause and caesura. The iambic metre itself was at first taxed with monotony in a drumming beat until it was used in a more plastic way by Shakespeare and Milton. All depends on the skill which one brings to the work and the tool is quarrelled with only when the workman does not know how to use it. The English language is not naturally melodious I like the Italian or Bengali—no language with a Teutonic base can be—but it is capable of remarkable harmonic effects and also it can by a skilful handling be made to give out the most beautiful melodies. Bengali and Italian are soft, easy and mellifluous languages—English is difficult and has to be struggled with in order to produce its best effects, but out of that very difficulty has arisen an astonishing plasticity, depth and manifold subtlety of rhythm. These qualities do not repose on metrical handling alone but much more on the less analysable elements of the entire rhythmic structure. The metrical basis itself is a peculiar and subtle combination Page - 166 on which English rhythm depends without explicitly avowing it,—a skilful and most extraordinarily variable combination of three elements —the numeric foot dependent on the number of syllables, the use of the stress foot and a play of stresses, and a recognisable but free and plastic use of quantitative play (not quantitative feet), all three running into each other. I am afraid your estimate here is marred by the personal or national habit. One is always inclined to make this claim for one's own language because one can catch every shade and element of it while in another language, however well-learned, the ear is not so clair-audient. I cannot agree that the examples you give of Bengali melody beat hollow the melody of the greatest English lyrists. Shakespeare, Swinburne's best work in Atalanta and elsewhere, Shelley at his finest and some others attain a melody that cannot be surpassed. It is a different kind of melody but not inferior. Bengali has a more melodious basis, it can accomplish melody more easily than English, it has a freer variety of melodies now, for formerly as English poetry is mostly iambic, Bengali poetry used to be mostly aksharvritta. (I remember how my brother Manmohan would annoy me by denouncing the absence of melody, the featureless monotony of Page - 167 Bengali rhythm and tell me how Tagore ought to be read to be truly melodious—like English in Stress, with ludicrous effects. That however is by 'the way.) What I mean is that variety of melodic ".bases was not conspicuous at that time in Bengali poetry. Nowadays this variety is there and un-doubtedly opens possibilities such as perhaps do not exist in other languages. I do not see, however, how the metrical aspect by itself can really be taken apart from other more subtle elements; I do not mean the spirit and feeling or the sense of the language only, though without depth or adequacy there metrical melody is only a melodious corpse, but the spirit and feeling or subtle (not intellectual) elements of rhythm and it is on these that English depends for the greater power and plasticity of its harmonic and even to a less extent of its melodic effects. In a word, there is truth in what you say but it cannot be pushed so far as you push it.
May, 1934 Page - 168 Comments on Milford’s Views on Quantity in English Verse MILFORD accepts the rule that two consonants after a short vowel make the short vowel long, even if they are outside the word and come in another word following it. To my mind that is an absurdity. I shall go on pronouncing the y of frosty as short whether it has two consonants after it or only one or none; it remains frosty whether it is a frosty scalp or frosty top or a frosty anything. In no case have I pronounced it or could I consent to pronounce it as frostee. My hexameters are intended to be read naturally as one would read any English sentence. But if you admit a short syllable to be long whenever there are two consonants after it, then Bridges' scansions are perfectly justified. Milford does not accept that conclusion; he says Bridges' scansions are an absurdity. But he bases this on his idea that quantitative length does not count in English verse. It is intonation that makes the metre, he says, high tones or low tones—not longs and shorts, and stress is there of the greatest importance. On that ground he refuses to discuss my idea of weight or dwelling of the voice or admit quantity or anything else but tone as determinative of the metre and declares that there is no such thing as metrical length. Perhaps also that is the reason why he counts Page - 169 frosty as a spondee before scalp, he thinks that it causes! it to be intoned in a different way. I don't see how it does that; for my part, I intone it just the same before top as before scalp. The ordinary theory is, I believe, that the sc of scalp acts as a sort of stile (because of the two consonants) which you take time to cross, so that ty must be considered as long because of this delay of the voice, while the t of top is merely a line across the path which gives no trouble. I don't see it like that; at most, scalp is a slightly longer word than top and that affects perhaps the rhythm of the line but not the metre; it cannot lengthen the preceding syllable so as to turn a trochee into a spondee. Sanskrit quantitation is irrelevant here (it is the same as Latin or Greek in this respect) for both Milford and I agree that the classical quantitative conventions are not reproducible in English; we both spew out Bridges' eccentric rhythms. This answers also your question as to what Milford means by "fundamental confusion" regarding aridity. He refuses to accept the idea of metrical length. But I am concerned with metrical as well as natural vowel quantities. My theory is that natural length in English depends, or can depend, on the dwelling of the voice giving metrical value or weight to the syllable; in quantitative verse one has to take account of all such dwelling or weight of the voice, both Page - 170 weight by ictus (stress) and weight by prolongation of the voice (ordinary syllabic length); the two are different, but for metrical purposes in a quantitative verse can rank as of equal value. I do not say that stress turns a short vowel into a long one. Milford does not take the trouble to understand my theory—he ignores the importance I give to. modulations and treats cretics and antibacchii and molossi as if they were dactyls, whereas they are only substitutes for dactyls; he ignores my objection to stressing short insignificant words like and, with, but, the—and thinks that I do that everywhere, which would be to ignore my theory. In fact I have scrupulously applied my theory in every detail of my practice. Take, for instance, (Ahana, p. 141) Art thou not heaven-bound even as I with the earth? Hast thou ended.
Here art is long by natural quantity though unstressed, which disproves Milford's criticism that in practice I never put an unstressed long as the first syllable of a dactylic foot or spondee, as I should do by my theory. I don't do it often because normally in English rhythm stress bears the foot—a fact to which I have given full emphasis in my theory, That is the reason why I condemn the Bridgean. Page - 171 disregard of stress in the rhythm,—still I do it occasionally whenever it can come in quite naturally*. My quantitative system, as I have shown at great length, is based on the natural movement of the English tongue, the same in prose and poetry, not on any artificial theory.
24.12-1942
* e.g. Opening tribrachs are very frequent in my hexameter. Œ Ahana p. 142: Is he the first? was there none then before him? shall none come after? But Milford thinks I have stressed the first short syllable to make them into dactyls—a thing I abhor. Œ also Ahana, p.153 (initial anapaest);
Page - 172 Quantitative Metre in Bengali Poetry THIS question of quantity is one in which I find it difficult to arrive at a conclusion. You can prove that it can be done and has been successfully done in Bengali, and you can prove and -have proved it yourself over again by writing these poems and bringing in the rhythm, the Kallole, which is absent in S. It is quite true also that stylisation is permissible and a recognised form of art—1 mean professed and overt stylisation and not that which hides itself under a contrary profession of naturalness or faithful following of external nature. The only question is how much of it Bengali poetry can bear. I do not think the distinction between song and poem goes at all to the root of the matter. The question is whether it is possible to have ease of movement in this kind of quantitative metre. For a few lines it can be very beautiful or for a short poem or a song—that much cannot be doubted. But can it be made a spontaneous movement of Bengali poetry like the ordinary Matrabrittas or the others, in which one can walk or run at will without looking at one's steps to see that one does not stumble and without concentrating the reader's mind too much on the technique so that his attention is diverted from the sense and bhava? If you can achieve some large and free structure in. Page - 173 which quantity takes a recognised place as part of the foundation,—it need not be reproduction of a Sanskrit metre,—that would solve the problem in the affirmative.
31-5-1932 Failure of Early English Hexameter FORMER poets failed in the attempt at hexameter because they did not find the right basic line and measure; they forgot that stress and quantity must both be considered in English., Even though in theory the stress alone makes the quantity, there is another kind of true quantity which must be given a subordinate but very necessary recognition; besides, even in stress there are kinds, true and fictitious, major and minor. In analysing the movement of an English line, one could make three independent schemes according to these three bases and the combination would give the value of the rhythm. You can ignore all this in an established metre and go safely by the force of instinct and habit; but for making so difficult an innovation as the hexameter, instinct and habit were not Page - 174 enough, a clear eye upon all these constituents was needed and it was not there. Longfellow, even dough, went on the theory of accentual quantity alone and in spite of their talent as versifiers made a mess—producing something that discredited the very idea of the creation of an English hexameter. Other poets made no serious or sustained endeavour. Arnold was interesting so long as he theorised about it, but his practical specimens were disastrous. I have not time to make my point clearer for the moment; I may return to it hereafter. Is it true that the laghu-guru is to the Bengali ear as impossible as would be to the English ear the line made up by Tagore: "Autumn flaunteth in his bushy bowers"? In English such a violence could not be entertained for a moment. It was because Spenser and others tried to base their hexameters and pentameters on this flagrant violation of the first law of English rhythm that the first attempt to introduce quantitative metres in English proved a failure. Accent cannot be ignored in English rhythm—it is why in my attempts at Page - 175 quantitative metre I always count a strongly accentuated syllable, even if the vowel is short, as a long one—for the stress does really make it long for metrical purposes.
21-7-1936 I SUPPOSE the Alexandrine has been condemned because no one has ever been able to make effective use of it as a staple metre. The difficulty, I suppose, is its normal tendency to fall into two monotonously equal halves while the possible variations on that monotony seem to stumble often into awkward inequalities. The Alexandrine is an admirable instrument in French verse because of the more plastic character of the movement, not bound to its Stresses but only to an equality of metric syllables. capable of a sufficient variety in the rhythm. In English it does not work so well; a single Alexandrine or an occasional Alexandrine couplet can have a great dignity and amplitude of sweep in English, but a succession fails or has most often failed to impose itself on the ear. All this, however, may Page - 176 be simply because the secret of the right handling has not been found: it is at least my impression that a very good rhythmist with the Alexandrine movement secretly born somewhere in him and waiting to be brought out could succeed in rehabilitating the metre. THE regular octosyllabic metre is at once the easiest to write and the most difficult to justify by a strong and original rhythmic treatment; it may be that it is only by filling it with very original thought substance and image and the deeper tones and sound- significances which these would bring that it could be saved from its besetting obviousness. On the other hand, the melody to which it lends itself, if raised to a certain intensity, can be fraught with a seizing charm that makes us forget the obviousness of the metre.
4-2-1932 Page - 177 Combination of Iambics and Anapaests IAMBICS and anapaests can be combined in English verse at any time, provided one does not set out to write a purely iambic or a purely anapaestic metre. Mixed anapaest and iamb make a most beautifully flexible lyric rhythm. It has no more connection with free verse than the constellation of the Great Bear has to do with a cat's tail. "Free" verse indicates verse free from the shackles of rhyme and metre, but rhythmic (or trying to be rhythmic) in one way or another. If you put rhymes, that will be considered a shackle and the "free" will kick at the chain.... THE problem of free verse is to keep the rhythm and afflatus of poetry while asserting one's liberty as in prose to vary the rhythm and movement at will instead of being tied down to metre and to a single unchangeable form throughout the whole length of a poem. But most writers in this kind achieve prose cut up into lines or something that is half and half and therefore unsatisfying. I think few have escaped this kind of shipwreck. Page - 178 IT is no use applying a Bengali ear to English rhythms any more than a French ear to English or an English ear to French metres. The Frenchman may object to English blank verse because his own ear misses the rhyme or the Englishman to the French Alexandrine because he finds it rhetorical and monotonous. Irrelevant objections both. Imperfect rhymes are regarded in English metre as a source of charm, in the rhythmic field bringing in possibilities of delicate variation in the constant clang of exact rhymes.... One cannot expect to seize in poetry the finer and more elusive tones, which are so important, in a learned language, however well-learnt, as in one's native and natural tongue—unless of course one succeeds in making it natural, if not native. I CAN'T say that I have studied or even read Bengali -gadya-chhanda, so I am unable to pronounce. In fact "what is gadya-chhanda Is it the equivalent of European free verse? But there the essence of the thing is that you model each line freely as you like— Page - 179 regularity of any kind is out of court there. Is it the aim to create a kind of rhymed prose metre? On what principle? N seems to want a movement which will give more volume, strength and sonority than Bengali verse can succeed in creating, but which is yet poetry, not prose arranged in lines and not even, at the best, poetic prose cut into lines of different lengths. All things can be tried—the test is success, true poetic excellence. N has sent me some of his gadya-chhanda before. It seemed to me to have much flow and energy, but there is something hanging on to it which weighs, almost drags—is it the ghost of prose? But that is only a personal impression; as I have said, on this subject I am not a qualified judge. OF course, X is right about the desirability of inventing new chhandas and metres. Your friend who combats this view probably means that the very greatest poets seldom invented a metre. I suppose they were too royally lazy to give themselves the trouble and preferred stealing other people's rhythms and polishing them up to perfection,—just as Shakespeare Page - 180 stole bodily all his plots from wherever he could find any worth the lifting. But if that applies to Shakespeare or Virgil, still there are others whose achievements made a consummate metrical invention a companion of a high poetic genius—Alcaeus, Sappho, Catullus, Horace. These poets did a great thing in inventing or transferring from other tongues metres new to the language or introducing Greek metrical forms into Latin or perfecting them' in the direction of a more careful balance or a more flawless elegance. But, apart from such illustrious precedents, a good thing such as the combination of metrical invention with perfect poetry would still be worth doing even if no one had had the good sense to do it before. Unpopularity of New Metres—Cryptic Poetry IT is certainly not true that a good metre must necessarily be an easy metre—easy to read or easy to write. In fact, even with old-established perfectly familiar metres, how many of the readers of poetry have an ear which seizes the true movement and the whole subtlety and beauty of the rhythm? It is only in the more popular kind of poems that it gets Page - 181 in their hearing its full value. It is all the more impossible when you bring in not only new rhythms but a new principle of rhythm—or at least one that is not very familiar—to expect it to be easily followed at first by the many. It is only if you are already a recognised master that by force of your reputation. you can impose whatever you like on your public, for then even if they do not catch your drift, they will still applaud you and will take some pains to learn the new principle. If you are imposing a principle not only of rhythm but of scansion to which the ear in spite of past attempts is not trained so as to seize the basic law of the movements in all its variations, a fair amount of incomprehension, some difficulty in knowing how to read the verse is very probable. Easier forms of a new rhythm may be caught in their movements, even if some will not be able to scan it; but other difficult forms may give trouble. All that is no true objection to the attempt at something new: novelty is difficult for the human mind—or'ear—to accept, but novelty is asked for all the same in all human activities for their growth, amplitude, richer life. As you say the ear has to be educated—once it is trained, familiar with the principle, what was a difficulty becomes easy, the unusual, first condemned as abnormal or impossible, becomes a normal and daily movement. Page - 182 As for the charge of being cryptic, that is quite another matter. On what does it base itself? Obscurity due to inadequate expression is one thing, but the cryptic may be simply the expression of more than can be seized at first sight by the ordinary mind. It may be that the ideas are not of .a domain in which that mind is accustomed to move or that there is a new turn of expression other than the kind which it has been trained to follow. Again the ordinary turn of Bengali writing is lucid, direct, easy (in that it resembles French); if you bring into it a more intricate and suggestive manner in which the connections or transitions of thought are less obvious, that may create a difficulty. To which of these causes is the accusation of being cryptic due? Certainly not the first, since you are accused of having too adequate and not too inadequate a vocabulary. If it is any of the others, then the objection has no great force. A poet can be too easy to read, because there is not much in what he writes and it is exhausted' at the first glance, or too difficult because you have to-burrow for the meaning. But otherwise it makes no difference to the excellence of the work, if the reader can catch its burden at the first glance or has to dwell a little on it for the full force of it to come to the surface. One has perhaps sometimes to do the latter in your poems, but I do not find anything Page - 183 unduly cryptic—certainly there is nothing that can be really called obscure. The feeling, the way of expression, the combinations of thought, word or image tend often to be new and unfamiliar, but that can be very well a strength and a merit, not an element of failure.
28-1-1933 Comments on Some Experiments in Metre (1) *THESE are things decided by the habit or training of the ear. The intervention of a dactylic (or, if you like, anapaestic) line followed by an Alexandrine * This is in reply to the questions put by Arjava (J. A. Chadwick) in the following letter: The wind hush comes, the varied colours westward stream: Were they joy-tinted coral, or song-light seen-heard in a shell fitfully, Drifted ashore by the hours as a waif from the day-wide sea Of Loveliness that smites awake our sorrow-dream? ("Sundown") Is there some way of keeping the loose swinging gait of anapaests within bounds? If one has used them freely in one or more lines, does it sound too abrupt to close with a strict iambic line—as in the final Alexandrine of the above? Page - 184 would to the ear of a former generation have sounded abrupt and inadmissible. But, I suppose, it would not to an ear accustomed to the greater liberty—or even license—of latter-day movements. I do not find that the rhythm of the first three lines is well-worn, though that of the first and third are familiar in type. The second seems to me not only not familiar, but unusual and very effective. The canter of anapaests can, I suppose, be only relieved by variation or alternation with another metre, as you have done here—or by a very powerful music which would turn the canter into a torrent rush or an oceanic sweep or surge. But the proper medium for the latter up till now has been a large dactylic movement like the Greek or Latin hexameter; Swinburne has tried to get it into the anapaest, but with only occasional success because of ____________________________________________________________________ It is perhaps a pity that the rhythm of the first three lines runs in such well-worn familiar channels. Is this intensified by the sing-song of the second line, which slipped into the Saturnian metre lengthened out by anapaests? I was intending the third line to scan
But I see it could also be taken as four dactyls followed by the spondee "day-wide" and the monosyllabic foot "sea". Which is the scansion which you would prefer? And would the four dactyls make the earlier part of a passable hexameter, or would at least one spondee be needed to break up the monotony and too-obvious lilt? Page - 185 his excessive facility and looseness, which makes the sound empty owing to want of spiritual substance. But this third line seems to be naturally dactylic and not anapaestic. Can one speak of catalectic and acatalectic hexameters? If so, this is a very beautiful catalectic hexameter. I may say that the four lines seem to be in their variation very remarkably appropriate and effective, each exactly expressing by the rhythm the spirit and movement of the thing inwardly seen. I am speaking of each line by itself; the only objection that could be made is to the coming together of so many variations in so brief a whole (if it had been longer, I imagine it would not have mattered) as disturbing to the habit of the ear; but I am inclined to think that this objection would rest less on a reality than 'a prejudice. The habit of the ear is not fundamental, it can change. What is fundamental in the inner hearing is not, I think, disturbed by the swiftness of the change from the controlled flow of the first line to the wave dance and shimmer of the second, the rapid drift of the third and then the deliberate subtlety of the last line. Is there in recent poetry an unconscious push towards a new metrical basis altogether for English poetry—shown by the outbreak of free verse, which fails because it is most often not verse at all—and the Page - 186 seeking sometimes for irregularity, sometimes for greater plasticity of verse-movement? Originally,. Anglo-Saxon verse depended, if I remember right, on alliteration and rhythm, not on measured feet; Greece and Rome through France and Italy imposed the foot measure on English; perhaps the hidden seeking for freedom, for elbow-room, for the possibility of a varied rhythmic expression necessitated by the complexity of the inner consciousness might find some vent in a measure which would depend not on feet but on lengths and stresses. I have sometimes thought that and it recurred to me while looking at your second line, for on that principle it might be read
One could imagine a measure made of lines in a given number of lengths like that and each length allowed a given number of stresses; there would b& many combinations and variations possible. For example (not of good poetry, but of the form), A far sail on the unchangeable monotone of a slow slumbering sea, Page - 187 A world of power hushed into symbols of hue, silent unendingly, Over its head, like a gold ball the sun tossed by the gods in their play Follows its curve,—a blazing eye of Time watching the motionless day. Perhaps it is only a curious imagination, too difficult and complex to realise, but it came on me strongly, so I put it down on paper.
I have written two more stanzas of the stress- scansion poem so as to complete it and send them to you. In this scansion as I conceive it, the lines may be analysed into feet, as you say all good rhythm can, but in that case the foot measures must be regarded as a quite subsidiary element without any fixed regularity—just as the (true) quantitative element is treated in ordinary verse. The whole indispensable structure of the lines depends upon stress and they must be read on a different principle from the current view—full value must be given to the true stresses and no fictitious stresses, no weight laid on naturally unstressed syllables Page - 188 should be allowed–that is the most important point, Thus:
A far sail on the unchangeable monotone of a slow slumbering sea, A world of power hushed into symbols of hue,: silent unendingly; Over its head like a gold ball the sun tossed by the gods in their play Follows its curve,—a blazing eye of Time watching the motionless day. Here or otherwhere,—poised on the un reachable abrupt snow-solitary ascent Earth aspiring lifts to the illimitable Light, then ceases broken and spent, Or in the glowing expanse, arid, fiery and austere, of the desert's hungry soul,— A breath, a cry, a glimmer from Eternity's face, in a fragment the mystic Whole. Moment-mere, yet with all eternity packed, lone, fixed, intense, Out of the ring of these hours that dance and die, caught by the spirit in sense, Page - 189 In the greatness of a man, in music's outspread. wings, in a touch, in a smile, in a sound, Something that waits, something that wanders and settles not, a once Nothing that was all and is found. It is an experiment and I shall have to do more before I can be sure that I have caught the whole spirit or sense of this movement; nor do I mean to say that stress-scansion cannot be built on any other principle,—say, on one with more concessions to the old music or with less, breaking more away in the direction of free verse; but the essential, I think, is there.
19-4-1932 P.S. It is with some hesitation that I write "a once Nothing", because I am far from sure that the "once" does not overweight the rhythm and make the expression too difficult and compact; but on the other hand without it the sense appears ambiguous and incomplete,—for "a Nothing that was all" might be taken in a too metaphysical light and my object is not to thrust in a metaphysical subtlety but to express the burden of an experience. Page - 190 In the final form I shall probably risk the ambiguity and reject the intruding "once". Comments On Some Experiments in Metre
I certainly think feet longer than the three
syllable maximum can be brought in and ought to be. I do not see for instance
why a foot like this
or
I agree that this freedom would be more pressingly needed in longer metres than in short ones, bat they need not be excluded from the short ones either. Page - 191 Comments On Some Experiments in Metre I have to admit that I am beaten by your metre. I have written something, but I am afraid it is a fake. I will first produce the fake: A gold moon / -raft floats / and swings / slowly And it casts / a fire / of pale / holy / blue light On the dra / gon tail / aglow / of the / faint night That glim / mers far,—/ swimming, The illu / mined shoals / of stars / skimming, Overspread / ing earth / and drown / ing the/ heart in sight With the / ocean-depths / and breadths / of the Infinite. That is the official scansion, and except in the last foot of the two last lines it professes to follow very closely the metre of N's poem. But in fact it is full of sins and the appearance is a counterfeit. In the first line the first foot is really an anti-bacchius: "A gold moon/-raft floats / ....", and quantitatively, though not accentually, the second is a spondee which also disturbs the true rhythmic movement. "Slowly" and "holy" are in truth trochees disguised as pyrrhics, and if "slowly" can pass off the deceit a little, "holy" is quite unholy in the brazenness of its pretences. If I could have got a Page - 192 compound adjective like "god-holy", it would have been all right and saved the situation, but I could find none that was appropriate. The next three lines are, I think, on the true model and have an honest metre. But the closing cretic of my last two lines is nothing but a cowardly flight from the difficulty of the spondee. I console myself by remembering that even Hector ran when he found himself in difficulties with Achilles and that the Bhagavat lays down palayanam (flight) as one of the ordinary occupations of the Avatar. But the evasion is a fact and I am afraid it spoils the correspondence of the metres. I have some idea of adding a second stanza,—this one will look less guilty perhaps if it has a companion in sin—but if you wish to use this, you need not wait for the other as it may never take birth at all.
A gold moon-raft floats and swings slowly And it casts a fire of pale holy blue light On the dragon tail aglow of the faint night That glimmers far, swimming, The illumined shoals of stars skimming, Overspreading earth and drowning the heart in sight With the ocean-depths and breadths of the Infinite. Page - 193 A gold moon-ship sails or drifts ever In our spirit's skies and halts never, blue-keeled, And it throws its white-blue fire on this grey field, Night's dragon loop,—speeding, The illumined star-thought sloops leading To the Dawn, their harbour home, to the Light unsealed, To the sun-face Infinite, the Untimed revealed. Comments On Some Experiments in Metre Lines from "Ilion", an unfinished poem in English hexameter (quantitative):
Page - 194 Triumph and agony changing hands in a desperate measure Paced and turned, as a man and a maiden trampling the grasses Face and turn and they laugh for their joy in the dance and each other. These were gods and they trampled lives. But though Time is immortal, Mortal his works are and ways and the anguish ends like the rapture. Artisans satisfied now with their works in the plan of the transience, Beautiful, wordless, august, the Olympians turned from the carnage. Vast and unmoved they rose up mighty as eagles ascending, Fanning the world with their wings. In the bliss of a sorrowless ether Calm they reposed from their deeds and their hearts were inclined to the Stillness. Less now the burden laid on our race by their star-white presence, There was a respite from height; the winds breathed freer, delivered. But their immortal content from the struggle titanic departed. Vacant the noise of the battle roared like a sea on the shingles; Page - 195 Wearily hunted the spears their quarry, strength was disheartened; Silence increased with the march of the months on the tents of the leaguer. The principle is a line of six feet, preponderantly dactylic, but anywhere the dactyl can be replaced by a spondee; but in English hexameter a trochee can be substituted, as the spondee comes in rarely in English rhythm. The line is divided by a caesura, and the variations of the caesura are essential to the harmony of the verse. An example of Alcaics from the "Jivanmukta" (Alcaics is a Greek, metre invented by the poet Alcaeus):
Page - 196 But in English, variations (modulations) are allowed, only one has to keep to the general plan. Swinburne's Sapphics are to be scanned thus:
Two trochees at the beginning, two trochees at the end, a dactyl separating the two trochaic parts of the line—that is the Sapphics in its first three lines, then a fourth line composed of a dactyl and a trochaic. Nursery Rhymes and Popular Songs THE question you have put, as you put it, can admit of only one answer. I cannot agree that nursery rhymes or folk songs are entitled to take an important place or any place at all in the history of the prosody of the English language or that one should start the study of English metre by a careful examination of Page - 197 the rhythm of "Humpty Dumpty", "Mary, Mary,. quite contrary" or the tale of the old woman who lived in a shoe. There are many queer theories. abroad nowadays in all the arts, but I doubt whether any English or French critic or prosodist would go so far as to dub "Who killed Cock Robin?" the true movement of English rhythm, putting aside Chaucer, Spenser, Pope or Shelley as too cultivated and accomplished or too much under foreign influence or to seek for his models in popular song or the products of the café chantant in preference to Hugo or Musset or Verlaine. But perhaps something else is meant—is it that one gets the crude indispensable elements of metre better from primitive, just-shaped or unshaped stuff than from more perfect work in which these are overlaid by artistic developments and subtle devices; an embryo or a skeleton is more instructive for the study of men than the developed flesh-and-blood structure? That may have a certain truth in some lines of scientific research, but it cannot stand in studying the technique of an art. At that rate one could be asked to go for the basic principles of musical sound to the jazz or even to the hurdy-gurdy and for the indispensable rules of line and colour to the pavement-artist or to the sign-board painter. Or perhaps the suggestion is that here one gets the primary unsophisticated Page - 198 rhythms native to the language and free from the artificial movements of mere literature. Still, I can hardly fancy that the true native spirit or bent of English metre is to be sought or can be discovered in Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall, Humpty Dumpty had a great fall and is lost in Rarely, rarely comest thou, Spirit of Delight. Popular verse catches the child ear or the common ear much more easily than the music of developed poetry because it relies on a crude jingle or infantile lilt—not because it enshrines in its movements the true native spirit of the chant. I hold it to be a fallacy to think that the real spirit and native movement of a language can be caught only in crude and primitive forms and that it is disguised in the more perfect work in which it has developed its own possibilities to their full pitch, variety and scope. It is as if one maintained that the true note and fundamental nature of the evolving soul were to be sought in the earthworm or the scarabaeus and not Page - 199 in the developed human being—or in the divinised man or Jivanmukta. As for foreign influences, most of the elements of English prosody, rhyme, foot-scansion, line-lengths, stanza-forms and many others have come in from outside and have altered out of all recognition the original mould, but the spirit of the language found itself as much in these developments as in the first free alliterative verse—as much and more. The spirit of a language ought to be strong enough to assimilate any amount of imported elements or changes of structure and measure.
23-2-1933 Difference between a Song and a Poem No, a song is not a kind of poem—or at least need not be. There are some very good songs which are not poems at all. In Europe, song-writers as such or the writers of the librettos of the great operas are not classed among poets. In Asia the attempt to combine song-quality with poetic value has been more common; in ancient Greece also lyric poetry was often composed with a view to being set to music. But still poetry and song-writing, though they can be Page - 200 combined, are two different arts, because the aim and the principle of their building is not the same. The difference is not that poetry has to be understood and music or singing has to be felt (anubhuti); that one has to reach the soul through the precise written sense and the other through the suggestion of sound and its appeal to some inner chord within us. If you only understand the intellectual content of a poem, its words and ideas, you have not really appreciated the poem at all, and a poem which contains only that and nothing else, is not true poetry. A true poem contains something more which has to be felt just as you feel music and that is its more important and essential part. Poetry has a rhythm, just as music has, though of a different kind, and it is the rhythm that helps this something else to come out through the medium of the words. The words by themselves do not carry it or cannot bring it out altogether and this is shown by the fact that the same words written in a different order and without rhythm or without the proper rhythm would not at all move or impress you in the same way. This something else is an inner content or suggestion, a soul-feeling or soul-experience, a life-feeling or life experience, a mental emotion, vision or experience (not merely an idea), and it is only when you can catch this and reproduce some vibration of the Page - 201 experience—if not the experience itself—in you that you have got what the poem can give you, not otherwise. The real difference between a poem and a song is that a song is written with a view to be set to musical rhythm and a poem is written with the ear listening for the needed poetic rhythm or word-music. These two rhythms are quite different. That is why a poem cannot be set to music unless it has either been written with an eye to both kinds of rhythm or else happens to have (without especially intending it) a movement which makes it easy or at least possible to set it to music. This happens often with lyrical poetry, less often with other kinds. There is also this usual character of a song that it is satisfied to be very simple in its content, just bringing out an idea or feeling, and leaving it to the music to develop its unspoken values. Still this reticence is not always observed; the word claims for itself sometimes a larger importance.
4-7.1931 IN a sonnet, thought should be set to thought, line added to line in a sort of architectural sequence, or Page - 202 else there should be a progression like the pressing of waves to the shore, with the finality of arrival swift in a closing couplet or deliberate as in the Miltonic form. As to your other proposition, I am not sure that satiric verse and the metaphysical lyrical can rightly be put together. Naturally, a great poetic genius could or might do it with success; but genius can do anything. Satire is more often than not a kind of half poetry, because its inspiration comes primarily from. the critical mind and a not very high part of it, not from the creative vision or moved intensity of poetic feeling. Creative vision or the moved intensity can come in to lift this motive but, except rarely, it does not lift it very high. It is Dryden and Juvenal who have oftenest made something like genuine poetry out of satire, the first because he often changes satire into a vision of character and the play of psychological forces, the other because he writes not from a sense of the incongruous but from an emotion, from a strong poetic "indignation" against the things he sees around him. Aristophanes is a comic creator—like Shakespeare when he turns in that direction—the satire is only a strong line in his creation; that is a different kind of inspiration, not the ordinary satire. Pope attempted something creative in his Rape of the Lock, but Page - 203 the success, if brilliant, is thin because the deeper creative founts and the kindlier sources of vision are not there. Page - 204 |
should not be as legitimate as the anapaest.
Only, of course, if frequently used, they would mean
the institution of another principle of harmony not
provided for by the essentially melodic basis of
English prosody in the past; as
