I \
LIBRARY
V OF THE
UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA.
33114-
THE MUSICAL BASIS OF VERSE
THE MUSICAL BASIS
OF VERSE
A SCIENTIFIC STUDY OF THE
PRINCIPLES OF POETIC COMPOSITION
By J. P. DABNEY
ITY
LONGMANS, GREEN, AND CO,
91 AND 93 FIFTH AVENUE, NEW YORK
LONDON AND BOMBAY
1901
HAL
COPYRIGHT, 1901, BY
LONGMANS, GREEN, AND CO.
All rights reserved
Press of J. J. Little & Co.
Astor Place, New York
See deep enough and you see musically. ' '
CARLYLE.
PREFACE
I WAS led to the inception of this work by my recogni-
tion of the need a need felt grievously in my own stud-
ies, but even more in the attempt to direct those of
others of a working hypothesis of the Science of Verse
which should be at once rational, coherent, and simple
such a working hypothesis as every music student has
at his right hand.
The study of all the a priori text-books founded as
they are upon a complicated system which will not fit
our modern verse proved a weariness and vexation to
the spirit; for, from Puttenham (" Arte of English
Poesie," 1589) to our own day, although there is much
delightful reading upon the essence of verse, there is little
light upon the paths of metre, but endless ignes fatui. To
follow the various disquisitions of the various metrists is
like wandering through a vast Daedalian labyrinth, wherein,
if at any time some true clew seems to offer itself, it will
be presently snipped away and another diametrical one
substituted ; and, in the end, all lead no-whither. This,
because in every case the supposed true way has been an
artificial and arbitrary one, not the natural one founded
upon primary law ; the primary laws of verse, like those
of music, being laid upon the bed-rock of acoustics.
The first clear note of truth we hear struck is from
Coleridge, when, in his preface to " Christabel " (1816),
he announced that he had discovered a " new principle
of versification ; to wit, that of accents." This declara-
tion raised a storm of abusive criticism from the " Edin-
Vlll
PREFACE
burgh Review," and from other quarters, and there
the matter would seem to have ended ; but he had,
however elementarily, made as great a discovery as Sir
Isaac Newton, when, from a falling apple, he deduced
the law of gravitation.
In 1881 Sidney Lanier published his brilliant " Science
of English Verse," this being the first deliberate attempt
to analyse verse upon its true lines; viz., by musical
notation. Lanier's book did not have the revolutionis-
ing effect which the promulgation of so great and radical
a principle should have had ; partly, perhaps, because the
book is somewhat abstruse for the general reader, but also
partly, it seems to me, because it is not always wholly
logical with itself. Many of the verse-notations, using
as they do the foot-divisions and not the true bar-divi-
sions measured from accent to accent, would seem to be
an attempt to reconcile quantity with accent; whereas,
belonging as they do to different periods, with their
differing metrical standards, they have no correlation.
Also, I do not comprehend the classing together of such
diverse verse as " Hamlet's Soliloquy," Poe's " Raven,"
and Tennyson's " Charge of the Light Brigade " as all in
3-beat measure; because, as I have pointed out (page
49), the 3-beat rhythm cannot exist without such a pre-
dominance of three notes (syllables) to a bar as shall give
the whole verse its organic stamp.
Lanier's supreme glory is that he was a pioneer. Like
Columbus, he plunged boldly into the unknown and dis-
covered a new world; and the world is ours, to possess
as we will.
In the present work, besides the exposition of primary
verse-rhythm, as illustrated by the bar-measurements of
music, I have endeavoured to elucidate a quality of verse
which I have never seen noticed in any work on metre ;
PREFACE ix
viz., motion, and the dynamic relation of verse-motion to
its theme.
The purpose of this book being analytic, and not syn-
thetic ; dealing with the mechanism of verse rather than
with its meaning though the two are not wholly separa-
ble I must be exonerated from any intention of trench-
ing upon the realm of literary criticism, except as inci-
dental to the exposition and development of the logical
lines of my subject.
In all arts there is the art of the art and the science of
the art. The former concerns itself chiefly with the sub-
jective genius of the artist ; the latter, with his concrete
expression, or method ; method being another name for
universal law, and so reducible to an exact science.
Truth, wherever we find it, is superlatively simple.
Through whatever channel we follow the developments
of human thought, we shall find it to be a denuding
process, a removing of the dead husks which ignorance
or superstition or convention have folded about the
precious kernel. All true art is at bottom unified and
concrete; so also the best exposition, or science, of art
will be unified and concrete.
In this treatise upon the " Musical Basis of Verse"
I have endeavoured to state, rationally, coherently, and
simply, what seem to me to be the principles of verse-
technique, these principles being, finally, purely a matter
of vibration.
I have to acknowledge the courtesy of the various
copyright owners who have allowed me to use poems
and extracts in illustration of my text: Mrs. Fields;
Mrs. Lanier; Mr. John Lane (Mr. William Watson's
" Hymn to the Sea " and " England, My Mother," and
Mr. Watts Dunton's " The Sonnet's Voice"); Messrs.
X PREFACE
Macmillan & Co. (Tennyson, Arnold, and Kingsley);
Messrs. A. & C. Black and The Macmillan Co. (Mr.
Symonds's "Greek Poets"); Messrs. Small, Maynard
& Co., and Messrs. Charles Scribner's Sons. Permission
has also been obtained from Messrs. Ellis & Elvey
to quote D. G. Rossetti's " The Portrait " and " The
Wine of Circe," and from Messrs. Smith, Elder & Co.,
to use extracts from copyright poems by Robert
Browning.
CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE
I. THE INHERENT RELATION BETWEEN Music AND VERSE . i
II. THE ARTS OF SOUND 16
III. DIFFERENTIATED MOTION 60
IV. MELODY . 99
V. METRIC FORMS 134
VI. HEROICS 189
VII. BEAUTY AND POWER . 242
!TY
The Musical Basis of Verse
CHAPTER I
THE INHERENT RELATION BETWEEN MUSIC AND VERSE,
HISTORICALLY CONSIDERED
IN the beginning, out of the mists of Time, hand in
hand, came those twin sisters of Art, Music and Verse.
Man, in the exuberant infancy of the race, instinctively
danced, and as he danced he sang. The rhythm of his lips
gave the rhythm to his foot, and the rhythm of his foot
gave the rhythm to his lips; the two interchangeably
linked. Thus was the birth of literature in music.
When we study the history of primitive peoples, we
find that their first instinctive expression before their
EX ressionof c ^ ose un i n with, and sense of, the mystery of
primitive nature has been dulled by developing civilisa-
tion is poetic. Imagination dominates in all
nascent societies, and the first concrete expression of im-
agination is song, or more correctly, chanting. It is either
connected with religious rites or the rehearsal of the deeds
of local heroes. Not infrequently this is accompanied by
dance. The ghost-dances, snake-dances, and others, of
our Indian tribes, are instances in point in our own day,
The older races connected the origin of music with
religion. Emil Nauman, in his " History of Music," says :
2 THE MUSICAL BASIS OF VERSE
" In the ' Rigveda,' one of the four primordial books of
the Brahmins, written in Sanscrit and known under the
oldest Hindu name of the ' Vedas,' there are hymns intended
songs f or mus j c> The existence of these books is
supposed to date from the year 1500 B.C. . . . Their
(the Hindus') oldest songs are to be found in the ' Vedas/
The sacred songs contained in these holy books were
saved from destruction by being written in verse, com-
mitted to memory and chanted a custom common to
the civilised peoples of antiquity. . . . We also meet
in India with musical dramas, the invention of which is
attributed to the demi-god Bharata. Gitagowinda, an
idyllic musical drama of very ancient origin, which tells of
Krishna's quarrels with the beautiful Radha, consists of
the songs of the two lovers, alternating with the chorus
of the friends of Radha." (Book I., chap, i.)
Of the Phrygians, Lydians, and Phoenicians, Nauman
further says: " Amongst all these people we find sculp-
tured reliefs and mural paintings of women and maidens
performing on different instruments, singers beating time
with their hands, and dancing youths and maidens play-
ing the tambourine." (Book I., chap, ii.)
Carsten Niebuhr notices " the custom resorted to by
Egyptian men and women so often represented on
the oldest Egyptian monuments of marking the rhyth-
mical measures of their song by clapping hands in the
absence of drums to serve this purpose." (Nauman,
Book I., chap, ii.)
But it is when we approach the high civilisation of
the Greeks that we find the finest efflorescence of the
unified arts. I cannot do better here than to insert
some passages from John Addington Symonds' " Greek
Poets":
-" Casting a glance backward into the remote shadows
RELATION BETWEEN MUSIC AND VERSE 3
of antiquity, we find that lyrical poetry, like all art in
Greece, took its origin in connection with primitive Na-
Musicai ture-worship. The song of Linus, referred to
rituals of by Homer in his description of the shield of
Achilles, was a lament sun^ by reapers for the
beautiful dead youth who symbolised the decay of sum-
mer's prime. In the funeral chant for Adonis, women
bewailed the fleeting splendour of the spring; and Hya-
cinthus, loved and slain by Phcebus, whom the Laconian
youths and maidens honoured, was again a type of vernal
loveliness deflowered. The Bacchic songs of alternating
mirth and sadness which gave birth, through the dithy-
ramb, to tragedy, and through the Comus-hymn to com-
edy, marked the waxing and waning of successive years,
the pulses of the heart of Nature, to which men listened
as the months passed over them. In their dim begin-
nings these elements of Greek poetry are hardly to be
distinguished from the dirges and the raptures of Asiatic
ceremonial, in which the dance and chant and song were
mingled in a vague monotony generation after genera-
tion expressing the same emotions according to traditions
handed down from their forefathers. But the Greek
genius was endowed with the faculty of distinguishing,
differentiating, vitalising, what the Oriental nations left
hazy and confused and inert. Therefore, with the very
earliest stirrings of conscious art in Greece we remark
a powerful specialising tendency. Articulation suc-
ceeds to mere interjectional utterance. Separate forms
of music and of metre are devoted, with the unerring
instinct of a truly aesthetic race, to the expression of the
several moods and passions of the soul. An unconscious
psychology leads by intuitive analysis to the creation of
distinct branches of composition, each accurately adapted
to its special purpose. . . . (Chap, x.)
4 THE MUSICAL BASIS OF VERSE
" Lyrical poetry in Greece was not produced, like
poetry in modern times, for the student, by men who
Lyrical poet- ^ n< ^ ^ey ^ aVC a taste ^ r versi fy m g- ^ was
ry an organ- intimately intertwined with actual life, and was
so indispensable that every town had its profes-
sional poets and choruses, just as every church in Europe
now has its organist of greater or less pretension. . . .
From Olympus down to the workshop or the sheepfold,
from Jove and Apollo to the wandering mendicant, every
rank and degree of the Greek community, divine or hu-
man, had its own proper allotment of poetical celebration.
The gods had their hymns, nomes, paeans, dithyrambs;
great men had their encomia and epinikia; the votaries
of pleasure their erotica and symposiaca; the mourner his
threnodia and elegies; the vine-dresser had his epilenia;
the herdsmen their bucolica; even the beggar his eiresione
and chelidonisma. . . . (Chap, x.)
" Processional hymns, or prosodia, were strictly lyrical.
They were sung at solemn festivals by troops of men and
Processional maidens walking, crowned with olive, myrtle,
hymns bay, or oleander, to the shrines. Their style
varied with the occasion and the character of the deity
to whom they were addressed. When Hecuba led her
maidens in dire necessity to the shrine of Pallas, the
prosodion was solemn and earnest. When Sophocles,
with lyre in hand, headed the chorus round the trophy of
Salamis, it was victorious and martial. If we wish to
present to our mind a picture of these processional cere-
monies, we may study the frieze of the Parthenon pre-
served among the Elgin marbles. Those long lines of
maidens and young men, 'with baskets in their hands,
with flowers and palm branches, with censers and sacred
emblems, are marching to the sound of flutes and lyres,
and to the stately rhythms of antiphonal chanting. When
RELATION BETWEEN MUSIC AND VERSE 5
they reach the altar of the god, a halt is made ; the liba-
tions are poured ; and now the music changes to a
solemn and spondaic measure 1 for the term spondaic
seems to be derived from the fact that the libation hymn
was composed in a grave and heavy metre of full
feet. . . . (Chap, x.)
" A special kind of prosodia were the Parthenia, or
processional hymns of maidens; such, for example, as
the Athenian girls sang to Pallas while they climbed the
staircase of the Parthenon. ... A fragment (Bergk,
p. 842) only remains to show what they were like.
' No more, ye honey-voiced, sweet-singing maidens,
can my limbs support me: oh, oh, that I were a cerylus,
who skims the flower of the sea with halcyons, of a daunt-
less heart, the sea-blue bird of spring! ' (Chap, xi)
Other lyrical forms greatened into the sublime art of
tragedy.
"It is certain that tragedy arose from the choruses
which danced and sang in honor of Dionysos. These
origin of dithyrambs, as they are called, were the last
tragedy form of lyric poetry to assume a literary shape.
This respectable and literary form of dithyramb
was early transplanted to Athens, where, under the hands
of Lasos, it assumed so elaborate a mimetic character by
means of the higher development of music and dancing
that (like our ballet) it became almost a drama. . . .
' There was also a rustic and jovial dithyramb com-
mon among the lower classes in the same districts, where
the choruses imitated the sports and manners of Satyrs
in attendance on the god." 2
I have dwelt thus long upon the poetic rituals of the
1 Observe the interchange of poetic with musical terras. Music, except
it were one with verse, could not be called spondaic.
"MAHAFFY : " Hist, of Classical Greek Literature," vol. i., chap. xiv.
6 THE MUSICAL BASIS OF VERSE
ancients especially upon those of the Hellenes to illus-
trate that, at that period, not only were music and verse
regarded as one, but that in this indissoluble union they
formed an integral part of the very existence of men.
And while it is true that even among the Greeks music
was still in swaddling clothes, so to speak, being indeed
but the handmaid of poetry, yet the literature to which
it was allied stands as the foundation structure for all
subsequent culture. One civilisation moves upon an-
other. We are the heritors of the ages. The Greeks
bestowed upon us in their literature tragic masterpieces
which have never been surpassed; while their singleness
of ideal in art and their purity and elevation of style
serve as standards for all time.
The revival of learning in the fourteenth and fifteenth
centuries a revival principally stimulated by the inven-
The revival ^ on ^ P rmtm g flung open to the crass Eu-
of learning ropean civilisations a treasure of classic lore
which, in both Latin and Gothic minds, was to
be transmuted " into something new and strange " into
new living literatures for the embodiment of new racial
feeling.
There is no nobler vehicle for the expression of poetic
thought than is furnished by the English language. If it
has not that extreme liquidity peculiar to the
language as Italian and Spanish, whose golden syllables
averse seem to melt one over another like ripples upon
medium rr
summer seas, yet it has a splendid, virile melody
all its own. It is strong, incisive, dynamic, while its opu-
lent vocabulary places in the hands of the artist an in-
strument of many strings, to manipulate at his will. The
preponderance of Anglo-Saxon monosyllables which
may be used either upon accented or non-accented beats
at the option of the writer lends it a peculiar elasticity,
RELATION BETWEEN MUSIC AND VERSE 7
at the same time permitting great possibilities in the
matter of terse, concentrated utterance.
Both the simplification and amplification of the lan-
guage we owe to the Norman.
At the beginning of the eleventh century, with William
the Conqueror, came in a new era. He brought to Eng-
Norman land not only material conquest, but those sub-
invasion. - t j er masteries of the ideal, to which, superim-
posed upon the sturdy stock of rougher orders, we give
the name of civilisation.
He brought in his train the flower of Norman knight-
hood, which, imbued as it was with the chivalry, the mag-
nificence, the refinement, and the growing culture of the
Continent, speedily made itself felt as a new power
throughout the land. In the noble examples of archi-
tecture, which even to-day endure, the Normans left a
lasting monument to the zeal and taste of that vital
period.
But even more revolutionising was their influence upon
manners, social customs, literature, and speech.
The revolution extended to the vernacular. The con-
querors failed to impose their own language upon the con-
quered, but they so modified the parent stock
influence which they received, and so infused it with
oniitera- words of Latin origin, that they made of it
ture
a new language ; made, in fact, out of Anglo-
Saxon, English. The Norman palate revolted at the
Teutonic guttural, and, although we still retain traces of
its spelling in such words as rough, plough, cough, the
Teutonic guttural was discarded. The freer Norman
brain also refused to burden itself with a cumbersome
system of inflection ; and the inflection vanished from
the forming speech. But the crowning lingual achieve-
ment of the Normans was the substitution in verse of true
8 THE MUSICAL BASIS OF VERSE
rhyme for the Anglo-Saxon alliteration ; that is, of end-
rhyme for head-rhyme. 1 This, and the enriching of the
language with many resonant, polysyllabic words of
Latin and Greek origin, which make a splendid foil for
the treasury of inflection-freed monosyllables, rendered
the fruition of a new literature possible.
English literature may be said to begin with Geoffrey
Chaucer. Language, in the infancy of nations, is always
Geoffrey more or less fluid, until a master-hand arises to
Chaucer the crystallise it into literature, and so bring it from
English the realm of the primitive to that of the civil-
literature ised. Such a master was Chaucer. He was
courtier, traveller, scholar, artist. In his diplomatic
journeys to Italy (1372, '74, and '78) he came directly
under the inspiration of the great Italian literatures.
Dante, Petrarch, Boccaccio, became his teachers. From
one he doubtless learned the value of exquisite work-
manship; from another how to tell a story in perfect
form. Chaucer was preeminently a great artist; one
whose mind is an alembic in which all things are, by the
magic of genius, dissolved, to be precipitated into divine,
new creations. He imbibed the spirit of the Italian
revival, but did not become a servile imitator of it. He
did not give us sonnet cycles, but instead, " The Canter-
bury Tales," in which " the tale and the verse go to-
gether like voice and music," " The Legende of Good
Women," and " The Compleynte of Venus."
The ten-syllabled couplet, which he seems to have
been the first to use, set the model of form which epic
1 Earlier sporadic instances of end-rhyme existed, inspired doubtless by
monkish influence ; Latin verse having at a very early period attained to
great perfection in rhyme. Lanier mentions (" Science of English Verse")
an Anglo-Saxon poem with rudimentary end-line rhymes. Also a rhymed
poem in Latin by an Anglo-Saxon poet.
RELATION BETWEEN MUSIC AND VERSE 9
or narrative verse was to wear for many generations; and
which, shorn of its rhyme, it wears as blank verse to-day.
" Thou wert acquainted with Chaucer ! Pardie,
God save his soul,
The first finder of our faire language,"
rhapsodises Occleve.
The times which follow Chaucer are not prolific of
great names until we approach that truly Periclean age
of art, the reign of Elizabeth. But the forces were, nev-
ertheless, gathering. Along the way we find as guide-
lights Occleve, Mallory, Caxton, Shelton, Wyatt, Surrey;
and, shining with an ever-increasing refulgence, Sackville,
Lely, Sidney, Spenser, Bacon, Marlowe; until, from the
summit, flames forth the deathless beacon reared by
Shakespeare.
In spite of the dictum of a prominent English writer
upon music (H. R. Haweis) that the English are not a
The En iish mus ^ ca l people, they have from time imme-
loversof morial been ardent lovers of song; and " the
songs of a nation," says Lowell, " are like wild
flowers pressed between the blood-stained pages of his-
tory. The Infinite sends its messages to us by untutored
spirits, and the lips of little children, and the unboastful
beauty of simple nature."
Byrd, in his" Preface to Psalms, Sonnets, and Songs,"
quaintly says:
' There is not any musike of instruments whatever
comparable to that which is made by the voyces of men ;
where the voyces are good, and the same well-sorted and
ordered."
Among the Anglo-Saxons, as well as among the Celtic
and other northern races of Europe, the harp seems to
have been the instrument mostly in use, of course as
10 THE MUSICAL BASIS OF VERSE
accompaniment to the chant, recitation, or song. ' The
minstrels," says Percy, " were the successors of the an-
cient bards, who, under different names, were admired and
revered from the earliest ages among the people of Gaul,
Britain, Ireland, and the North; and indeed by almost
all the first inhabitants of Europe, whether of Celtic or
Gothic race; but by none more than by our own Teu-
tonic ancestors, particularly by all the Danish tribes.
Among these they were distinguished by the name
Scalds, a word which denotes ' smoothers and polishers
of language.' '
We are told that to possess a harp was the first re-
quirement of a Norman gentleman, and to be able to
perform upon it indispensable to his pretensions to gen-
tility. Chaucer mentions in his poems a great number
of musical instruments, evidence that the development
of music kept pace with that of literature.
When we reach the days of the Tudors we find music
in a very advanced stage. Erasmus says of the people
of England: " They challenge the prerogative of having
the most handsome women, of keeping the best table,
and of being the most accomplished in the skill of music
of any people." l We read of " madrigals, ballets (bal-
lads), and canzonets."
" The ballad and dance-tune," says Ritter, " comple-
mented each other from the very start (of English civili-
sation) and have remained inseparable companions."
In Elizabeth's time we find the names of such com-
posers as Tye, Marbeck, Tallis, Byrd, Morley, etc. ; but,
Music in the* before the days of Elizabeth, contrapuntal
time of composition was well advanced.. The favourite
Elizabeth madngal' ' the light-footed English madri-
gal," Ritter calls it seems to have been quite an elabo-
1 RITTER : " Music in England," chap. ii.
RELATION BETWEEN MUSIC AND VERSE n
rate affair in several parts. The well-known and quaintly
charming " Sumer is icumen in," a canon or " rota" as
it is called, was written as early as 1223.
But what concerns us more than any contrapuntal
developments is the fact that society in the English
Periclean age was simply saturated with musical feel-
ing that musical feeling which comes of freedom,
gayety, and living close to nature. The people of
that day were not the sombre, soul-burdened people
of post-Revolution times, but a careless, light-hearted
race, true children of the Renaissance. There existed
a veritable joie de vivre, and the universal joyousness
rippled, like the joyousness of birds, spontaneously into
song.
" In the time of Elizabeth, not only was music a quali-
fication for ladies and gentlemen, but even the city of
London advertised the musical abilities of boys educated
in Bridewell and Christ's Hospital, as a mode of recom-
mending them as servants, apprentices, and husbandmen.
Tinkers sung catches; milkmaids sung ballads; carters
whistled; each trade, and even beggars, had their spe-
cial songs. The bass viol hung in the drawing-room for
the amusement of waiting visitors; and the lute, cithern,
and virginals, for the amusement of waiting customers,
were the necessary furniture of the barber shop. They
had music at dinner, music at supper, music at weddings,
music at funerals, music at night, music at dawn, music
at work, music at play. He who felt not in some degree
its soothing influence was viewed as a morose, unmusical
being whose converse ought to be shunned and regarded
with suspicion and distrust." 1
1 CHAPPELL : " Popular Music of the Olden Times," vol. i., chap. iii.
The reader will trace in the foregoing an analogy between these times of
rich mental harvest and the lyric days of Greece.
12 THE MUSICAL BASIS OF VERSE
" If music be the food of love, play on ;
Give me excess of it, that, surfeiting,
The appetite may sicken and so die.
That strain again ; it had a dying fall :
O, it came o'er my ear like the sweet south,
That breathes upon a bank of violets,
Stealing and giving odour ! "
Shakespeare makes the duke sigh in " Twelfth Night."
In Shakespeare the sense of union between music and
verse reaches its finest flower. He was its arch-priest.
His heart beat to the universal rhythms. This is
speare's evidenced by his spontaneity and daring in the
sense of management of blank verse, which in his hands
attained a freedom of movement not reached by
any other writer. It is evidenced by his mastery of all
the melodic and metrical resources of his medium ; for he
was supreme in every metric device by which verse may
be varied and enriched, and he employed methods which
in less consummate hands might easily be productive of
a chaos of mere chopped prose, but which, in the hands
of the master, become a complex and wonderful instru-
ment whence issue immortal strains of power and beauty.
His perfect musical ear is even more demonstrated in
the little lyric flights scattered throughout the dramas.
We have no songs more spontaneous, or' instinct with
music, than " Hark, hark, the lark," " Who is Silvia?"
" O come unto these yellow sands," " Come away,
come away, Death," and a host of others. They seem
literally to sing themselves. In some indeed the joyous
lilt loses itself, for very wanton gladness, in a mere inar-
ticulate ripple. As
" It was a lover and his lass,
With a hey, and a ho, and a hey nonino,
RELATION BETWEEN MUSIC AND VERSE 13
That through the green cornfields did pass
In the spring-time, the only pretty ring-time,
When birds do sing, hey ding a ding ding ;
Sweet lovers love the spring."
The high-water mark of the verse of this epoch is also
the high-water mark of music.
From Shakespeare on we have to note a steady deca-
dence. It is true that we catch Shakespearean echoes
Decadence * n ^ e verse f Jonson, Beaumont and Fletcher,
after Campion, Wither, Carew, Herrick, Suckling,
Shakespeare Lovelace> Waller, and others; but these dwin-
dle with the perspective until, by the time of the Restora-
tion, the English Muse was virtually moribund. It is a
far cry from
" Queen and huntress, chaste and fair,"
to the formal rhymed couplet of Dryden's day, " when
men wrote in measured thuds, by rule."
" How was it," asks a writer, 1 " that a people could
lose its ear during a century and a half, as if a violinist
should suddenly prefer a tom-tom to his violin? "
The causes of this prolonged decadence are two-fold.
In the inevitable barren periods which always follow
epochs of great productivity the fallow seasons of nature
the light of inspiration faded, and a cold formalism fell
upon art. Men reverted to a meaningless classicism, and
enveloped verse in conventional fetters as inexorable as
the tentacjes of an octopus. But it is even more due to
the great parliamentary and religious struggles which
began with the Stuarts. The domination of the Com-
monwealth sealed the fate both of music and poetry.
The Puritans, confounding music with popery, looked
1 WILLIAM R. THAYER : " Review of Reviews," October, 1894.
I 4 THE MUSICAL BASIS OF VERSE
upon it as the work of the demon, an art of Antichrist, a
sacrilege not to be tolerated. Nothing was heard in the
land but the droning of psalm-tunes. Artistic inspira-
tion perished beneath the heats of a fanaticism which
could not tolerate beauty as " its own excuse for being."
Surely never before were the Muses subjected to such
a fury of iconoclastic scourging! Small wonder that they
should clasp hands and retire from a people who knew no
longer how to appreciate them ; and perhaps not less that,
when wooed back by passion-laden souls into the splen-
did Renaissance with which our own century opened,
there should no longer be found between them that full
and spontaneous union which had before existed.
If we glance down the vistas of history and examine
the evidences, we shall perceive one fact, that the two
The arts of arts f music and poetry have always waxed
music and anc j waned together. A period of great activ-
poetry wax . .....
and wane ity and exceptional merit in the one has been
together coordinate with a similar manifestation in the
other. This is not due to accident. Both impulses
spring from the same inspirational fountain. They are
different interpretations of
" those mighty tones and cries
That from the giant soul of earth arise,"
which Jubal, far away in the dawn of the world, heard ;
so
" That love, hope, rage, and all experience,
Were fused in vaster being, fetching thence
Concords and discords, cadences and cries,
That seemed from some world-shrouded soul to rise,
Some rapture more intense, some mightier rage,
Some living sea that burst the bounds of man's brief age ! " l
1 GEORGE ELIOT : " The Legend of Jubal."
RELATION BETWEEN MUSIC AND VERSE 15
In those epochs of virtual renascence which civilisation
from time to time experiences high-tides of the soul,
Emerson calls them the minds of men become electric-
ally and rhythmically charged, the outcome being the
music of language poetry or the more developed emo-
tional expression of pure music, according to the dictates
of the creative inspiration of the individual. The great
diapason is always the same; but its vibrations differ-
ently impress, and are differently interpreted by, differ-
entiating genius.
Thus, of two great artists of our own century whose
souls were steeped in poetry Wagner and Hawthorne
one wrote, not poems (for the opera libretti are sub-
sidiary to the music and would not stand alone as litera-
ture), but music-dramas; and the other has given us,
again not poems, but the most ideal fiction in the lan-
guage.
What inspires this differentiation in the expression of
the ideal we cannot know. We can only be glad that it
is so, and that so great a variety of medium in which to
try its wings is furnished to the human soul.
CHAPTER II
THE ARTS OF SOUND
" MAN did not make the laws of music, he only found
them out," says Charles Kingsley.
" For poetry was all written before time was, and
whenever we are so finely organised that we can pene-
trate into that region where the air is music, we hear
those primal warblings," declares Emerson.
And a little reflection makes us realise that they were
saying the same thing; that both men, as all truly
poetic souls must be, were conscious of those elemental
rhythms potentially identical which are developed
through the minds of men into harmonious expressions
of form and sound.
i a nd Music and poetry poetry being indeed the
poetry, arts music of words are rhythmic utterances of a
cognate order. In other words, music and
poetry are arts of sound. 1
1 " Sound is a vibration. Sound, as directly known to us by the sense of
hearing, is an impression of a peculiar character, very broadly distinguished
from the impressions received through the rest of our senses, and admit-
ting of great variety in its modifications." J. D. EVERETT: "Natural
Philosophy " (" Acoustics ").
" Hauptmann, in ' Harmony and Metre,' says : ' Where sound is to be
produced, there is required an elastic, stretched, uniform material, and a
trembling or vibrating movement thereof. The parts of the body moved
are then alternated in and out of their state of uniform cohesion. The
instant of transition into this state of equality or inner unity is that which
by our sense of hearing is perceived as sound. Sound is only an element of
transition, from arising to passing away of the state of unity. Quickly sue-
THE ARTS OF SOUND I7
Music the most abstract of the arts, and considered
by many to be the highest medium of emotional expres-
sion we have is purely dependent, for the effect upon
the mind, upon vibration.
Poetry, on the other hand, is only partially dependent
upon vibration.
The musician will run his eye over a written score, and
there are instantly realised to his mental ear the melo-
dies and harmonies there technically inscribed; but this
is because he has already heard similar melodies and
chords. To a man born deaf, and who is without any
conception of sound, the same page would be but a pro-
cession of meaningless lines and dots. Let the deaf man,
however, read a verse of poetry, and its intellectual side
would immediately be clear to him. Pie would compre-
hend the meaning of the words; but the acoustic side,
the dynamic force of the rhythm, the melodic effects of
rhyme, and all those exquisite nuances of colour, which
make of a verse of poetry a great art, and which are such
a delight to the trained poetic ear, would be lost upon
him.
Poetry is of itself a species of music. The merit of
true poetry lies largely in its suggestiveness, a suggestive-
Poetr ness on ly to k e fulty brought home by oral in-
be terpretation.
Poetry to be fully interpreted and under-
stood should be read aloud.
There are in our language quantities of lyrics which one
ceeding repetitions of this element make the sound appear continuous.' The
swing of molecules affords a vent for the music within the vibrating sub-
stance. Two hundred and sixty-four swings per second permit the music
hidden in a piano-string to escape in two hundred and sixty-four fragments,
which when pieced into a whole produce the tone C. As with the steel
wire, so with the vocal cords." HENRY W. STRATTON: " The Metaphysics
of Music " (" Mind," 1899).
2
1 8 THE MUSICAL BASIS OF VERSE
cannot read, or hear read, without their instantly trans-
lating themselves to music, and, so to speak, singing
themselves. Who has not had, at some time, the expe-
rience of hearing, spiritedly rendered, some poem with
which he had before been superficially familiar, and has
experienced thereupon a thrill of revelation, as if a flash-
light had suddenly swept his mental horizon ? It was
my own good fortune to receive my first introduction to
Browning's poems through the medium of a vivid spirit
who not only possessed a deep appreciation of, and insight
into, them, but had the rarer faculty of so interpreting
them as to render them equally luminous to others. The
consequence is, not only that Browning has always meant
another thing to me than if I had come to the study
of him callow and alone, but that to this day I can hear
in the poems then read by this gifted teacher the ringing
tones by which they were brought home to me ; and so
the music of them lives undying in my thought.
It is difficult to understand why this oral interpreta-
tion of poetry is not more studied and taught. To hear
noble poetry adequately rendered is as elevating as to
listen to great music, the modulations of the voice infin-
itely revealing the subtler significance of the words, as
well as bringing out the full melodic effects of the verse.
But alas! even among the well-educated, good readers
are lamentably few; for, although we consider it a sine
qua non that our children should be instructed in music,
not one is really taught to read aloud. We should con-
sider it dry work if our acquaintance with music were
limited to reading the scores to ourselves; yet this is the
silent part we accord to verse.
" People do not understand the music of words,"
said Tennyson. " Sound plays so great a part in the
meaning of all language." He. told Miss L - " to
THE ARTS OF SOUND I9
listen to the sound of the sea " in the line from " Enoch
Arden":
" The league-long roller thundering on the reef."
Of Tennyson's own reading of poetry Miss Emily
Tennyson's Ritchie Writes :
reading of " Amongst the experiences of intercourse
with him, nothing was more memorable than
to hear him read his poetry. The roll of his great voice
acted sometimes almost like an incantation, so that when
;t was a new poem he was reading, the power of realis-
ing its actual nature was subordinated to the wonder at
the sound of the tones. Sometimes, as in ' The Passing
of Arthur,' it was a long chant, in which the expression
lay chiefly in the value given to each syllable, sometimes
a swell of sound like an organ's; often came tones of in-
finite pathos, delicate and tender, then others of mighty
volume and passionate strength." *
When thus interpreted, we easily perceive that each
syllable of verse is really a separate note of music;
not the dry symbol of an arbitrary system of measure-
ment.
The analogy between music and poetry has always been
Theanaio more or I GSS consciously recognised. Not only
between are musical terms and tropes so constantly used
"oetlV'part. bv the P ets tnat tnev mav be considered an
iy recog- integral part of verse, but the critics themselves
are continually driven to have recourse to them
to elucidate their own meaning.
Dryden says of Chaucer's verse that " there is the
rude sweetness of a Scptch tune in it."
' Years," says Symonds, writing of Shelley, " filled
with music that will sound as long as English lasts."
1 HALLAM, LORD TENNYSON : "Life of Tennyson," vol. ii., chap. iii.
20 THE MUSICAL BASIS OF VERSE
' This was a vocal year," comments Gosse in his
"Life of Gray."
Saintsbury, in an analysis of Dryden's " Ode to Anne
Killigrew," remarks, " As a piece of concerted music in
verse it [the first stanza] has not a superior."
Instances might be indefinitely multiplied, but these
suffice to evidence the real thought-current a current
so strong, so instinctive, so really incontrovertible, that
the only marvel is that scholars have not long since
abandoned themselves to it, instead of endeavouring
to punt up-stream in the cumbersome bateaux of a past
civilisation.
The Gothic genius derived its primary inspiration from
classic culture, but in no sense formulated itself techni-
The Gothic cally upon the classics. The modern poet
genius anc ] unc j er this term we may include every-
thing post-mediaeval incontinently discarded quantity,
and, with an instinct truer and stronger than tradition
or theory, trusted himself boldly to his ear. For, in the
end, the ear is sole arbiter. Even among those lan-
guages developed directly from the Latin we do not find
any imitation. The " Divina Commedia" of Dante and
the " Sonnets " of Petrarch are not derived from classic
prototypes, but are individual evolutions, while nothing
could be freer than the early Spanish dramatists.
The sense of quantity was lost or discarded very early
in the Christian era. " We are told by Christ (' Metrik
Eari ^ er Griechen und Romer ') that Ritschl consid-
discarding ered the mill-song of the Lesbian women to be
tity an early example of accentual metre in Greek.
. . . In Latin the ' Instructiones ' of the barbarous
Commodianus (about the middle of the third century) is
usually named as the first specimen of accentual verse.
. . . Whatever may be the date of the earliest exist-
THE ARTS OF SOUND 21
ing specimen, there can be no doubt that the feeling for
quantity had long before died out among all but the
learned few." 1
We may account for this substitution of accentual for
quantitative standards partly by the decline of learning;
Music deveu Dut ^ seems to me even better accounted for
oped with by the fact that, at the same time that the art
poetry in .
medieval oi poetry was emerging once more from me-
Europe diaeval night, music was also undergoing a
transformation of its own, and emerging, through the
Gregorian chant and the early monastic composers, into
an independent art. In the cloister were being laid the
scientific corner stones, 2 while, outside, the minnesdnger,
the trouvtres, and the troubadours were pouring into the
ears of the people their wild and passionate lays. Imbued
with this new and vital sense of rhythm, the poets un-
consciously transferred the same to their verse. It was
this which imparted to the movement of the Renaissance
En Hsh * ts s pl en dour. It was not anv reproduction of
verse ac- the old, but literally a new birth.
notto l be ged Considering the fact that English verse is
quantita= acknowledgedly not quantitative, the efforts
of scholars of all time to prove it so appear,
to say the least, herculean. Each man has a system of
scansion of his own, opposed to every other man's; each
1 JOSEPH B. MAYOR: "English Metre" (Preface, p. 8).
2 " Guido of Arezzo (1020) and Franco of Cologne (about 1200 some
writers place him much earlier) are the only names worth mentioning at
this period. The labours of the first culminated in the rise of descant, i.e.,
the combination of sounds of unequal length ; or music in which two or
more sounds succeed each other while one equal to them in length was sus-
tained. The labours of Franco may be connected with a better system of
musical notation, the introduction of sharps and flats, and the cantus mensu-
rabilis, or division of music into bars" HAWEIS : " Music and Morals "
(book ii., sec. i.).
22 THE MUSICAL BASIS OF VERSE .
demolishing the authority before him, to have his own
in turn overthrown. It reminds one of nothing so much
as the contests of chivalry, when no errant knight might
meet another without putting lance in rest to try which
was the better man.
One English metrist, Dr. Guest, holds such stringent
ideals of metrical perfection all based upon quantity
English that he would seem to condemn as illegitimate
metrists a g rea t part of English verse. Another, Dr.
Abbott, would get over the " difficulty of extra sylla-
bles" by "effects of slurring." Mayor disposes sum-
marily of a number of his fellow metrists, but has only
a fresh pabulum of routine scansion to offer. Some
of the scholars have misgivings ; but the fetters of tra-
dition are hard to break. Mr. A. J. Ellis asserts that
" the whole subject of English metres requires investi-
gation on the basis of accent." Yet he appears still to
scan his verse, and superimposes upon this a system of
metrical analysis upon " force, length, pitch, weight,
silence," subdivided into forty-five different expression-
marks for each syllable to be considered ! This system,
he tells us, he has not yet attempted to work out!
Professor Sylvester goes so far as to recommend the
use of " musical nomenclature in verse," but at the
same time does not use it, and offers us a Daedalian maze
of lockjaw terminology which is anything but musical.
John Addington Symonds tells us that " scansion by
time takes the place of scansion by metrical feet; the
bars of the musical composer, where different values
from the breve to the semi-quaver find their place, sug-
gest a truer measure than the longs and shorts of classic
feet."
When we turn to American teachers we find them
much more radical; yet, though they discard the old,
THE ARTS OF SOUND 23
they have not found their way to the new, and seem to
wander, as it were, in fog-lands and without solid ground
American under their feet or at least they place none
metrists under those of the student. Professor Gum-
mere has no better way to measure verse than by " a suc-
cession of stresses. ' ' Professor Hiram Corson also discards
classic traditions and uses for analysis of verse the symbols
XA, AX, XX A, AXX, XAX, etc., a colourless method
which conveys no rhythmic impression to the mind.
It seems admitted by all authorities that English verse
is accentual and not quantitative; by the most advanced,
that English verse will not scan ; furthermore that we
moderns have lost the feeling for quantity. Whether
we have lost anything which was worth the keeping I
leave others to decide; 1 but if we have lost it, " a God's
name," as Spenser says, let us let it go. Let us not try
to mete the culture of one age by the measuring-tape of
another. Let us not put new wine into old bottles.
Yet, if we discard the old, what shall be substituted ?
For there must indubitably be a science, a constructive
principle, of verse. The laws exist whether we recognise
them or not. The earth revolved around the sun before
Galileo's momentous discovery. The law of gravitation
flung apples to the ground before Newton arose to give
that law a name. So, through the centuries, the poets
1 " The distinctive feature of these poets (Melic poets : a term given to
the lyric poets of Greece) was the necessary combination of music, and very
frequently of rhythmical movement or orchestic with their text. When this
dancing came into use, as in the choral poetry of the early Dorian bards,
and of the Attic dramatists, the metre of the words became so complex and
divided into subordinated rhythmical periods, that Cicero tells us such poems
appeared to him like prose, since the necessary music and figured dancing
were indispensable to explain the metrical plan of the poet. I have no doubt
many modern readers of Pindar will recognise the pertinence of this re-
mark." MAHAFFY : " History of Greek Literature," vol. i., chap. x.
24 THE MUSICAL BASIS OF VERSE
have been instinctively singing in obedience to the law
of musical rhythms, although the fact has not yet received
more than a partial recognition.
If we adopt for verse the system of musical notation,
we cut the Gordian knot of scansion fairly in two. We
Adopt for should not be forced to the expedient of divid-
versea j n pr monosyllables in the middle in order to
system of J
musical square a verse of poetry with a particular trie-
notation or y^ as Qne wr jj- er h as done; nor need we
tease our brains over choriambic, proceleusmatic, dactyl-
anap&st, dactyl-iamb, antibacchius, cretic and amphibrach ;
slurred iambs, metrical metamorphoses, initial truncations,
etc. ; nor any of the complicated machineries for smooth-
ing away the so-called difficulties of English verse.
The fact is that, looked at " deep enough " and " seen
musically/' verse construction becomes a wonderfully
simple matter.
As a vehicle of emotional and intellectual expression,
music may be said to begin where language ends. We
might say that music is thought expressed in
construction the abstraction of sound (vibration), without
a simple ^ e interposition of articulate speech. Poetry is
matter .
thought expressed in articulate speech without
any special range in sound. Music is purely abstract, while
poetry, in substance, may be either abstract or concrete.
Poetry is capable of placing a definite image before the
mind, which music, spite of the pretensions of programme
music, cannot do. 1
1 " Although music is distinctly not a definite means of qualitative emo-
tional expression, it is an exceedingly potent vehicle for such expression.
Its quantitative dynamic power is undisputed ; and the qualitative element,
which it lacks, is supplied by the performer. Especially is this true of
vocal music, in which the quality of emotion is distinctly indicated by the
text from which latter the singer takes his cue." W. F. APTHORP : " Ex-
pression in Music " (" Symphony Notes," 1900).
THE ARTS OF SOUND 25
In such lines as these :
" How pleasant, as the yellowing sun declines,
And with long rays and shades the landscape shines,
To mark the birches' stems all golden light,
That lit the dark slant woods with silvery white ;
The willow's weeping trees, that twinkling hoar,
Glanced oft upturn'd along the breezy shore,
Low bending o'er the colour'd water, fold
Their moveless boughs and leaves like threads of gold ; "
WORDSWORTH : " An Evening Walk."
we have as distinct a mental picture of that which the
words describe as if it were painted before us upon a
objective canvas. On the other hand, when we read
verse such lines as the following, we realise that we
have entered the realm of the abstract, the realm in
which music lives and moves and has its being.
" The gleam,
Subiective ^ ne ^S^t that never was on sea or land,
verse The consecration and the poet's dream ; "
WORDSWORTH : " Elegiac Stanzas."
" Sound needed none,
Nor any voice of joy ; his spirit drank
The spectacle \ sensation, soul, and form
All melted into him ; they swallow'd up
His animal being ; in them did he live,
And by them did he live ; they were his life.
In such access of mind, in such high hour
Of visitation from the living God,
Thought was not; in enjoyment it expired."
WORDSWORTH: " The Excursion."
26 THE MUSICAL BASIS OF VERSE
" The awful shadow of some unseen Power
Floats though unseen among us ; visiting
This various world with as inconstant wing
As summer winds "
SHELLEY : " Hymn to Intellectual Beauty."
" Believe thou, O my soul,
Life is a vision shadowy of truth ;
And vice and anguish and the wormy grave
Shapes of a dream."
COLERIDGE : " Religious Musings."
Technically music and verse overlap but a little way ;
therefore, in adopting the symbols of musical notation
Technically for the measurement of verse, we use as models
music and only the forms of primary music such simple
verse over- .
lap only a rhythmic effects as are found, for example, in
little way Folk-music, the world over. With the com-
plicated science of music, verse has nothing to do. We
speak, by that license which permits the borrowing of a
term from one art to use connotatively in another, of
the harmonies in verse; but, technically speaking, har-
mony is the science of many voices together; and verse
is but a single voice, a solo instrument, a melody pure and
simple. Therefore, although in fundamental rhythms
music and verse are identical, the analogy cannot be
pushed beyond the very rudiments of musical form.
Music and poetry are both the result of the discovery
by man that the higher vibrations, either of sound alone^
or of sound with words, when measured off into regular
periods of time, were pleasant Jto the ear. In substance
this was an instinct. All nature is more or less recog-
nisably rhythmic, and it has been more than once sug-
gested that the length of a breath furnished the primitive
THE ARTS OF SOUND 27
quotient for verse. This is very likely true of the metri-
cal outlines early poetry being a species of recitative
and the finer elements of primary rhythm were only
gradually evolved.
The basic principle of music is time ; measurements
of time; uniform measurements of time; which measure-
The basic ments are represented by notes.
ofmu^cand ^he basic principle of verse is time ; meas-
of verse urements of time; uniform measurements of
time; which measurements are represented by words.
Now the quality which measures off sound vibrations-
into regular periods of time is accent. In a group of mu-
Accentthe sical beats the mind instinctively emphasises
special ones and leaves others unemphasised,
ment thus engendering accent. In some cases a
natural pause, or silent beat, takes the place of the ut-
tered note ; and it is this regular succession of accented
beats with unaccented beats, or of accented beats with
pauses, which constitutes primary rhythm.
" Metre 1 (primary rhythm) in music, is the grouping of
two, three, or more tones, as time-units into a whole,
Definition or time-integer, called measure, the first part
of primary of which (the thesis] 2 has an accent, the second
part (the arsis) either no accent or a weak one.
1 The word metre, as applied to verse, refers specifically to the meas-
urement of the line, i.e., to the number of measures (bars or feet), therefore
I prefer here to substitute the term primary rhythm for what Mr. Cornell
designates as metre, because it more exactly expresses that basic movement
within the bar, repeated from bar to bar, common to both music and verse,
and upon which music and verse are both constructed.
In music the word rhythm is used to designate somewhat larger and
more complex groupings of notes than are contained within the compass of
one bar, a conjunction not recognisable in verse.
3 " The thesis signifies properly the putting down of the foot in beating
time, in the march or dance ( ' downward beat ' ), and the arsis, the raising
of the foot ( ' upward beat'). By the Latin grammarians these terms were
28 THE MUSICAL BASIS OF VERSE
Thus the grouping, e.g., of four quarter-notes into a
measure, gives the metre whose signature is 4/4, the prin-
cipal accent being on the first quarter-note, the weak on
the third : thus J I I J In a piece of music em-
bracing a series of measures, the rule is that all meas-
ures have (i) the same number of time-units of equal
length ; and (2) a uniform alternation of accent and non-
accent; i.e., the accent falls on the same metrical part in
one measure as in another. The regularly recurring
accent enables the ear to separate the measures one from
another; for the eye they are separated by means of the
vertical line called the bar. ... To render the
metre of a musical thought intelligible to the ear, it
is requisite that this thought exceed the limit of one
measure. For it is only by the recurrence of the
same elements (the same metrical parts) in the second
measure that the metre can be recognised by the hear-
ing." '
I have quoted verbatim these elementary definitions
of Professor Cornell, because they apply, in every par-
Thc same ticular, to verse. Although verse is not repre-
in verse sented by musical notes, nor divided off met-
rically by bars, it will be convenient in analysing it so to
measure it; and I have, therefore, inserted a series of
examples farther on.
Sometimes the melody may begin directly upon the
made to mean, respectively, the ending and beginning of a measure. By a
misunderstanding which has prevailed till recently, since the time of
Bentley, their true signification has been reversed. The error mentioned
arose from applying to trochaic and dactylic verse a definition which was
true only of iambic or anapaestic." ALLEN and GREENOUGH'S Latin Gram-
mar : " Prosody," chap. ii.
1 J. H. CORNELL : " Theory and Practice of Musical Form," chaps.
i. and ii.
THE ARTS OF SOUND 29
accent of the measure ; at others it is led into by one or
more unaccented notes called the anacrusis. 1
The anacrusis is essentially the beginning on a non-
accent. It neither adds to, nor takes away from, the
time-value of the measures, which are measured from
accent to accent. This is very important to remember in
the application of these principles to verse, because a
very common form of verse is that beginning upon a non-
accented syllable.
Musical no- Music is written by a number of signs
tation called notes, regularly graded as to their rela-
tive time-valuation.
Thus we have the whole note , furnishing the
standard of time-value to all.
We have the half-note f , two of which are required
to furnish the time-value of the whole note.
We have the quarter-note f , two of which are re-
quired to furnish the time-value of a half-note, and four
of which are required to furnish the time-value of a whole
note.
We have the eighth-note ) , two of which are
required to furnish the time-value of a quarter-note, and
eight of which are required to furnish the time-value of a
whole note.
And we have the sixteenth-note ^ , two of which
are required to furnish the time-value of the eighth-note,
and sixteen of which are required to furnish the time-
value of a whole note.
Music-notation runs into much higher denominations,
1 Anacrusis is a Greek word, and was borrowed by music from poetry.
In verse, the anacriisis has also been called a hypermetrical syllable.
30 THE MUSICAL BASIS OF VERSE
but they are omitted here because none smaller than
those given could ever be required in verse-notation.
A dot placed after any note means that it is to be
held half as long again as its original time-value. Thus
we may write a 3-beat measure either I & D D I
or | f f, | or | r ' |
There are also signs for rests, or silences, correspond-
ing in time-values with each note. Thus :
* - -, f - ; f -> ; D_> $ P *.
The rest may take a dot after it in the same way as the
note.
As we do not, in verse-notation, have to consider
tonality, or pitch, we do not require either the staff or
its signatures, but may write our syllabled notes in a
single line.
There are only two forms of primary rhythm; viz., that
based upon two beats to the measure ; and that based upon
three beats to the measure. This is rhythm re-
I wo forms
of primary duced to its units.
rhythm Thus ._ 2 _ beat rhythm :
I 2 12 I 2121
" How sweet the moonlight sleeps upon this bank."
" How" being the anacrusis is outside of the metric
scheme, and we do not begin to measure the metre until
we reach the first accent.
3-beat rhythm :
123123123 i
" There's a bower of roses by Bendemeer's stream."
The same is applicable here; " There's a" being the
non-accented anacrusis.
THE ARTS OF SOUND 31
Now, if we substitute notes for numbers, we shall have
the following:
r i r r i r n r r i r r i r
" How sweet the moon - light sleeps up - on this bank,"
and
r n r r fir rnr rnr
" There's a bow - er of ro - ses by Bendemeer's stream."
Every syllable represents a note. The dot may pro-
long it sometimes, and occasionally the rest may repre-
Every syl= SCnt ** ^ Utj SS a rU ^ G > t ^ 1C measure m USt be
labie repre- full, or a sufficient number of measures in the
verse or line must be full, so as to produce
upon the ear the orderly sequence of that rhythm in
which the poem is written. 1
Roughly speaking, the verse or line may be said to
correspond to the musical phrase ; the whole stanza to
the finished melody.
The accent upon dissyllables and polysyllables is always
fixed ; that is, it is always upon the same syllable of a
word, in whatever position that word may be
placed, and we cannot alter it. 2 On the other
1 In music, syncopation the throwing out of a note, or notes, from the
natural accent is of course common ; but in these instances other voices,
as those of instrumental accompaniment, or, in the case of folk-dancing, a
stamp of the foot, a snap of the fingers, or a clash of castanets, supply the
missing stroke to the ear. For the ear must keep this sense of accent.
Syncopation in verse is not conceivable.
2 A study of the literature of the past shows us that formerly it was cus-
tomary often to write with a wrenched accent ; that is, throwing the accent
arbitrarily upon a syllable where it does not belong. Thus :
" That through the green cornfields did pass." SHAKESPEARE.
This will pass muster musically because cornfields is a compound word, and
32 THE MUSICAL BASIS OF VERSE
hand, monosyllables may be used much as we please, and
we may cast them in the verse or line either as accented
or unaccented, to suit our own purposes. The same
word may, in one and the same sentence, be found first
upon the accented beat, and later upon the unaccented
beat. But it is bad writing to put upon the accented
beat of the measure any weak monosyllable, such as the
articles a and the, the preposition of, the conjunction
and, etc., etc.
In a word of three syllables, if it is cast in 2-beat
rhythm, there will fall an accent upon the third syllable
as well as upon the first, as this third syllable becomes
naturally the thesis of the next measure. Thus:
r rif ri? rif rir.nr
" How pi - ti - ful the cry of those be-reaved."
On the other hand, if the word pitiful be cast in 3-beat
rhythm, it will have but one accent, upon the first syllable.
Thus:
" Oh it was pitiful, near a whole city full."
both syllables are generically heavy, so it does not hurt the ear to throw the
accent out. But the following wrenched accent from Swinburne is inadmis-
sible :
" For the stars and the winds are unto her
As raiment, as songs of the harp-player."
The use of wrenched accent is now rightly condemned ; and the reason is
not far to seek. Although we may vary our metrical schemes to suit, and
may take great liberties with colour and melodic effects, we must not disturb
the accent, because it is the mensural factor, the cornerstone upon which
rests the whole fabric of primary rhythm.
THE ARTS OF SOUND 33
Inserted below are sixteen examples of notated verse;
twelve from modern poets, and four from Shakespeare.
NO. I.
EXAMPLE OF 2 -BEAT RHYTHM. 1
f ir fir r i f r I r
Calm soul of all things ! make it mine
r i r r i r fir fir
To feel, a - mid the ci - ty's jar,
f i f r i f r i f r i r
That there a - bides a peace of thine,
Mr r if fir rir
Man did not make and can - not mar.
MATTHEW ARNOLD : " Lines written in Kensington Gardens."
NO. II.
EXAMPLE OF 2 -BEAT RHYTHM.
ir fir fir fir ^ i
Love. that hath us in the net,
ir fir r i r r if > \
Can he pass and we for - get ?
1 In writing these notations, I have followed the usages of musicians.
The student will readily see that the bar counts metrically whether it is
filled out by a rest or not, because the principle of measurement is from
accent to accent.
34 THE MUSICAL BASIS OF VERSE
if r i r r i f rir v
Man - y suns a - rise and set.
nj r i r rir fir
Many a chance the years be - get.
ir r i r r i r r i r v
Love the gift is love the debt.
ir r i r </. j
E - ven so.
TENNYSON : ' The Miller's Daughter."
NO. III.
EXAMPLE OF 2 -BEAT RHYTHM.
rir rir r i r r i f nr
The cur - few tolls the knell of part - ing day,
nr r i r r i r fir r i r
The low - ing herds wind slow - ly o'er the lea,
nr rir nr rir nr
The ploughman homeward plods his wear - y way,
rir rir rir rir rir
And leaves the world to dark - ness and to me.
GRAY : " Elegy in a Country Churchyard."
THE ARTS OF SOUND 35
NO. IV.
EXAMPLE OF 2 -BEAT RHYTHM.
r nr rir n r nr nr n
One who nev - er turned his back but marched breast forward,
if rir.ri r
Nev - er doubt-ed clouds would break,
if n r rif n r nr nr n
Nev-er dreamed, though right were worst-ed, wrong would triumph,
ir rir rir n r nr nr n
Held we fall to rise, are baf - fled to fight bet - ter,
i r r i r
Sleep to wake.
BROWNING : Epilogue to " Asolando."
NO. V.
EXAMPLE OF 3 -BEAT RHYTHM.
MP * M t t t>\t t> M r
Three fish - ers went sail-ing out in - to the west,
* Ifr fr M fr ^ M f t \ ?
Out in - to the west, as the sun went down,
36 THE MUSICAL BASIS OF VERSE
t \t> t> t\t> t t\r Mr
Each thought of the wom-an who loved him best,
t
And the chil-dren stood watch-ing them out of the town ;
fr i r Mr Hfr ^ M f
For men must work and wom-en must weep,
PI r MP P M r
And there's lit - tie to earn and man - y to keep,
& P i > r i r M ^ r
Though the har - bour bar be moan-ing.
CHARLES KINGSLEY : " The Three Fishers."
NO. VI.
EXAMPLE OF 3 -BEAT RHYTHM.
I f M t> t M ^ r | f f
Where I find her not, beau-ties van - ish ;
Whith-er I f ol - low her, beau-ties flee ;
Is there no meth-od to tell' her in Span-ish
THE ARTS OF SOUND 37
ir M P ^ M p 001 r
June's twice June since she breathed it with me ?
if M P M;P M 1* f I
Come, bud, show me the least of her trac - es,
it>t> t \t> r \t> 01 r
Treasures my la - dy's light - est foot - fall !
M r 1^ 01 r i
Ah, you may flout and turn up your fac - es
r ^ M P i r *
Ros - es, you are not so fair af - ter all !
BROWNING : " Garden Fancies."
NO. VII.
EXAMPLE OF 3 -BEAT RHYTHM.
10 P P I M M
One more un - fort - u - nate,
If M I f y
Wear - y of breath,
M fr P P
Rash - ly im - port - u - nate,
38 THE MUSICAL BASIS OF VERSE
n r
Gone to her death !
Take her up ten - der - ly,
M I f H
Lift her with care;
M p f M
Fashioned so slen - der - ly,
r
Young and so fair.
n
Look at her garments
i r PI
Clinging like cere - ments;
If M i M M
Whilst the wave con - stant - ly
THE ARTS OF SOUND 39
M P r i
Drips from her clothing ;
\t> t> t>\t t> t> \
Take her up in - slant - ly,
P I P f I
Loving, not loathing.
THOMAS HOOD : "The Bridge of Sighs."
NO. VIII.
EXAMPLE OF 3 -BEAT RHYTHM.
i r Mr M r Mr
Clear and cool, clear and cool,
MM 1 00 M & r if
By laughing shallow and dreaming pool ;
if Mr y i r Mr
Cool and clear, cool and clear,
M fr r I fr p M M if;
By shining shingle and foaming weir;
I fr M P P M fr f If
Under the crag where the ouzel sings,
40 THE MUSICAL BASIS OF VERSE
t t> \t f IP 1 f Mf
And the ivied wall where the church bell rings,
if P i P P P i r P i r
Un de - filed for the un - de - filed ;
Play by me, bathe in me, mother and child.
CHARLES KINGSLEY : " The Song of the River."
NO. IX.
EXAMPLE OF 3~BEAT RHYTHM.
\p y r \ t * y \t>
Break, break, break,
Mr c i r
On thy cold grey stones, O sea!
M r ML/
And I would that my tongue could utter
Mfr fr H
The thoughts that a - rise in me.
TENNYSON : ." Break, Break, Break."
THE ARTS OF SOUND
NO. X.
EXAMPLE OF 3~BEAT RHYTHM.
r Mr- ir p i r
Sweet and low,
IP P M t> f
Wind of the western
Sweet and low,
if y i
sea;
if i r i r P i r
Low, low, breathe and blow,
1 p > t> \ t> f
Wind of the western
sea
i^ P pifr r if r ir r i
O - ver the rolling wa - ters go,
IP p Mfr r if P i r y i
Come from the dying moon and blow,
ip p pi r P ir y i
Blow him a - gain to me ;
if P i o P P i r Mpppir r
While my little one, while my pretty one sleeps.
TENNYSON: "The Princess."
42 THE MUSICAL BASIS OF VERSE
NO. XL
EXAMPLE OF 2 -BEAT RHYTHM.
r ic if r K if r i? if f if
It's we two, it's we two, it's we two for aye,
ir r ir r ir if f if f if f if ^
All the world and we two, and heaven be our stay.
ir f \tf f If f if ^if f if f if v
Like a laverock in the lift, sing, O bonny bride !
If f If flf fif f \? if r if ^
All the world was Adam once with Eve by his side.
JEAN INGELOW : " Like a Laverock in the Lift."
NO. XII.
EXAMPLE OF 2 -BEAT RHYTHM.
MLT r ir PI r r i r
Tis the middle of night by the cas - tie clock,
Mir tt\t t> t>\t r i r
And the owls have a - wak - ened the crow - ing cock ;
Tn - whit ! Tu - whoo !
THE ARTS OF SOUND 43
Mr fir x pir fir
And hark, a - gain ! the crow - ing cock,
Mr r i r fir
How drow - si - ly it crew.
COLERIDGE : " Christabel."
NO. XIII
SONG FROM SHAKESPEARE
2 -BEAT RHYTHM
r ir fir rir r i r
When dai - sies pied and vio - lets blue,
r i r r i r r ir r i r
And la - dy - smocks all sil - ver white,
r i r r ir r ir r i r
And cuck - oo - buds of yel - low hue,
r i r r i r r i r r i r
Do paint the mead - ows with de - light,
r i r r i r r i r r i r
The cuck - oo then, on eve - ry tree,
rir r i r r i r r i r
Mocks mar - ried men; for thus sings he,
44 THE MUSICAL BASIS OF VERSE
r i r
Cuck - oo !
r i r r i r r i r r i r
Cuck - oo, cuck - oo, O word of fear,
rir r i r r i r r i r
Un - pleas - ing to a mar - ried ear !
From " Love's Labour's Lost."
NO. XIV
SONG FROM SHAKESPEARE
2 -BEAT RHYTHM
ILT r i r c i r
Under the green - wood tree
r if r i r r i r
Who loves to lie with me,
r i r r i r r i r
And tune his mer - ry note
Lf f i r r i r
Unto the sweet bird's throat,
THE ARTS OF SOUND 45
r iu r i LT r
Come hither, come hither, come hither:
f i f f i r r i r r i r
Here shall he see no en - e - my
r if r if f \LJ
But win - ter and rough weather.
From " As You Like It."
NO. XV
SONG FROM SHAKESPEARE
2 -BEAT RHYTHM
Come a - way, come a - way, death,
r ir f i a f ir r i r
And in sad cypress let me be laid;
f lit f \f
Fly a - way, fly a - way, breath ;
nr
I am slain by a fair, cruel maid.
46 THE MUSICAL BASIS OF VERSE
Mr fir r i r r i r
My shroud of white, stuck all with yew,
i r t>\ r r i
O pre - pare it !
r ' r r ir r Ir r i r
My part of death, no one so true
f
Did share it.
From "Twelfth Night."
NO. XVI
SONG FROM SHAKESPEARE
3 -BEAT RHYTHM
Mr Mr Mr M r
When daff - o - dils be - gin to
Mf Mf H p p- M f
With hey ! the dox - y o - ver the dale,
fir Mr M*> 1 r
Why, then comes in the sweet o' the year;
MM r (f 1 1 t t> i r Mr
For the red blood reigns in the win - ter's pale.
From "The Winter's Tale."
THE ARTS OF SOUND 47
All verse may be analysed upon this basis. If we
should wish, in analysing a verse of poetry, to use a sig-
AII verse nature of time-value, we may write it thus:
upolfthts 2 /4> wm ' c h signifies four measures of 2-beat
basis rhythm; or 2/5, which signifies five measures
of 2-beat rhythm ; or 3/4, which signifies four measures
of 3-beat rhythm ; and so on.
Different There are three different manners of writing
manners verse ; viz. : (i) Strict, (2) With direct attack,
of verse / \ r-
(3) Free.
I have given the name Strict to that style of verse in
which all the lines begin uniformly with the anacrusis;
as in Numbers I, III, V, XIII, XVI. The use of the
anacrusis imparts a certain elegance and suavity as it
were, a legato movement to the verse. Strict verse is
usually employed in the expression of stately and dig-
nified ideas.
Direct attack is, on the other hand, verse written uni-
formly throughout the poem without the anacrusis ; that
is, beginning directly upon the accent of the measure ; as
in Numbers II, IV, VI, VII, X. Direct attack is, of
course, also a strict style of another sort. The direct
attack gives a splendid momentum to the rhythmic move-
ment, much like the first launching spring of a swimmer.
Browning, more than any other modern poet, makes
frequent and masterly use of the direct attack. Fine
instances of it are also to be found in Tennyson's
" Charge of the Light Brigade," Campbell's " Battle of
the Baltic," Scott's "Twist ye, Twine ye," and many
others.
Verse is free when the lines of a poem may begin either
with or without the anacrusis, according to the rhythmic
feeling of the poet and the effect to be produced; as in
Numbers VIII, IX, XII, XIV, XV. Free verse is very
48 THE MUSICAL BASIS OF VERSE
much less used because more difficult to handle with
the proper rhythmic equilibrium in 2-beat rhythm than
in 3-beat rhythm. In 2-beat verse, unless handled with
the finest instinct an instinct which none but the masters
of verse possess the irregularity is apt to appeal to the
ear as superfluous syllables, and to make the rhythm halt
upon its feet. Shakespeare was a past-master of these
effects, and had so fine an ear that he played upon this
not very elastic measure as if it had been an instrument
of many strings. In our century, Coleridge has been
conspicuous for the same rare faculty.
In 3-beat rhythm, free verse is a very common and
most useful medium ; and, although in unskilled hands it
shows some tendency to slovenliness, it is wonderfully
elastic, permitting great freedom of diction and great
variety of verse-cadence.
Styles should not be mixed any more than rhythms.
If we adopt strict verse for our thematic movement to
borrow a term from music we must preserve this style
throughout the poem. If we adopt direct attack, direct
attack must be uniformly preserved. It is only in the
looser, bohemian free verse that they may commingle;
but even here they need a fine ear for nice contrast in
order to produce poetry and not doggerel.
We may now proceed to an analytical examination of
the notated poems.
A comparison of Numbers I and II shows that the two
poems are rhythmically and metrically identical that is,
Detailed they are both cast in 2/4; but the direct attack
notlted 80 * of tne second example gives a distinctly differ-
poems ent cadence. It is less formal, and has more
motion. Exactly the same, also, as the foregoing poems
the same rhythmically and metrically, but varying in
its final cadence is Longfellow's-" Psalm of Life."
THE ARTS OF SOUND 49
" Tell me not, in mournful numbers,
' Life is but an empty dream ! '
For the soul is dead that slumbers,
And things are not what they seem."
Another variety of cadence is given here by the use,
in the first and third lines, of the double^ or feminine
Feminine rhyme ; e.g., numbers, slumbers. But the rJiytJim
ending j las no j- been altered thereby; the last measure
is filled out, that is all, instead of ending, as in the first
two examples, upon the first accented word. The fern-
inine ending gives an added vibration.
Example Number III varies from Number I only in
having one more measure to the verse or line. It is 2/5.
This is one of the purest examples we have of the heroic
verse, so common in English verse, and its greatest
glory. Whether employed in stanzas, rhymed couplets,
or blank verse, it is the most dignified and elevated poetic
medium we have.
Number IV is also in 2-beat rhythm, but it is metri-
cally irregular, the lines being (within the stanza) of dif-
ferent lengths. The poem is not, however, an irregular
poem, because the stanzas are alike.
Number V is our first example of triple, or 3-beat,
rhythm. This poem is also strict, having the anacrusis
regularly throughout.
As we shall see, by an examination of this and the fol-
lowing poems in triple measure, the full three notes, or
Triple syllables, are not required to appear in every
rhythm fi ar ^ nor i n( j eec j j n absolutely every line ; but
it must be clearly indicated at the outset, so that the ear
takes the impression of this rhythm, and it must appear
1 The feminine ending will be found treated with more expansion in
chap. iii.
4
50 THE MUSICAL BASIS OF VERSE
in certainly every other line, so that this impression shall
be continued and not become weakened or lost. In some
extant poems one has to read several lines in order to
discover whether the generic rhythm be 3-beat or 2-beat ;
as in this song from Browning's " Pippa Passes."
" Overhead the treetops meet,
Flowers and grass spring 'neath one's feet;
There was naught above me, naught below
My childhood had not learned to know :
For what are the voices of birds
Ay and of beasts but words, our words,
Only so much more sweet ? ' '
This poem is really in 3-beat rhythm, but there is noth-
ing in the first two lines to indicate this; they are plain
2-beat. The true rhythm is first indicated none too
clearly in the anacrusis of the third line, and does not
distinctly take possession of the ear until the fifth line.
This has always seemed to me an artistic defect. The
rhythmic key-note should be clearly struck at the begin-
ning, so that the ear become imbued with it; and, if
irregularities are to occur, they should come later.
Numbers V and VI are rhythmically and metrically
identical both being 3/4; but, as we saw in a previous
instance, the direct attack of "The Flower's Name"
gives it more vibration; the presence of the feminine
ending in the first and third lines of every quatrain vary-
ing the cadence still further.
We have in the " Bridge of Sighs "Number VII
a very melodious poem, although, less well handled, so
short a line might easily have a choppy, grotesque effect ;
vide some of the " Bab Ballads." It has one slight de-
fect to my ear ; and this is that, the direct attack having
been basically adopted, the irregularity of an anacrusis
THE ARTS OF SOUND 51
has been allowed to creep into several of the later stanzas,
thus preventing entire artistic perfection.
Very similar in movement is James Hogg's " Skylark."
" Bird of the wilderness,
Blythesome and cumberless,
Sweet be thy matin o'er moorland and lea !
Emblem of happiness,
Blest is thy dwelling-place
O to abide in the desert with thee ! "
Here the increased length of the third and sixth lines
gives a good balance to the shorter ones.
In Number VIII we have our first example oifree verse.
There is nothing in the English language more melodious
Free or more rhythmically suggestive than this little
verse lyric. Observe the perfect manner in which
the lines with direct attack are contrasted with the strict
lines, making beautiful verse. Also the prolonged syl-
lables of the first and third lines seem to give a liquid
suggestion, as of gliding waters. The equilibrium be-
tween the full and non-full bars is very nice; and the
full beats of the last line seem to impart to it an accel-
erated motion, as if the gliding changed to rushing.
Of Number IX I might almost repeat my remarks as
to the suggestive effects of the rhythmic management,
except that in " Break, Break, Break " the impression in-
tended is of breaking, not gliding, waters. This is admir-
ably done by the staccato syllables followed by rests.
We seem to get the very impact of the surf. The key to
the rhythm is distinctly struck in the anacrusis of the
second line, and it sweeps in fully in the third. There
is never the slightest doubt.
Number X is also an excellent example of the equilib-
rium of measures with the direct attack preserved uni-
52 THE MUSICAL BASIS OF VERSE
formly throughout. Observe the lulling sound of the
long, full-barred line at the end. These nuances are due,
not to accident, but are the subtle touches of great
masters of verse.
In Number XI we have a lyric famous for its spirited
cadences ; but few persons analyse closely enough to
detect that there is in it quite a Shakespearean freedom
in the handling of the 2-beat rhythm. The prolonged
syllables we and Eve give a fine swing, increased by the
use of the direct attack, while the solitary opening ana-
crusis appeals to the ear, as in some of Shakespeare's
songs, as quite legitimate, if sporadic.
" Christabel " Number XII is rhythmically, perhaps,
the most remarkable of modern poems, inasmuch as Cole-
Doubied ridge, more than any other modern poet, seems
notes J-Q nave quite caught that Elizabethan faculty
of doubling syllables without giving the slightest sense
of superfluous syllables. The rhythmic balance here is
quite as perfect as in Shakespeare's lyrics.
It may be asked why are not these lines, where the
doubled notes, or syllables, occur, in regular triple
rhythm ? They are not in triple rhythm because the
extra syllables are sporadic, not organic; that is, the
whole poem scheme is in 2-beat rhythm, and the sense
of the two beats remains undisturbed to the ear by these
extra syllables, which naturally settle themselves into
the doubled notes indicated in the notations. This
power of writing doubled notes is, however, a ticklish
business and requires the feeling of a master. It may
be studied in its very perfection in the two songs from
Shakespeare given in Numbers XIV and XV. If the
doubled notes are compared with the pure 3-beat move-
ment of Number XVI, the radical difference will be
easily apparent.
THE ARTS OF SOUND 53
The 2-beat rhythm and the 3-beat rhythm are as an-
tipodal and as distinct from each other as oil and water,
Rhythms and quite as impossible to mix as those incon-
inte"-* gruous elements. They are not interchange-
changed able, and one may never be substituted for the
other. To introduce measures of one into a poem cast
in the other is to commit a fault against artistic purity,
and is productive, not of poetry, but of doggerel. No
musical composer would think of writing a piece of music
with one or two bars in 3/8 time, the next in 4/4 time,
another in 12/8, and so on, because this would result in
musical chaos. But the movement which he selects is
adhered to uniformly throughout the piece. 1 Thus is the
composition homogeneous. The same is true of verse.
Of course no poet who is at the same time an artist
ever does confuse them ; but there are some who, for the
elevation of their thought and their eloquence of diction,
take high rank, yet whose ears are too defective for true
rhythmic perfection. There is scarcely a poem of Emer-
son's where this artistic solecism is not committed, the
confusions of rhythm giving to much of his verse that
halting quality, often so painful to the ears of even his
best lovers. Wordsworth too, though in a very much less
degree, was defective of ear. Witness his " Ode to a
Skylark," which opens with a panting triple beat:
" Up with me, up with me into the clouds ! "
but before the end of the first stanza it flats out into a
somewhat broken 2-beat measure, and never regains the
first rhythmic fervour.
This is not to say that music or verse may not be legi-
1 It must always be borne in mind that, in these comparisons, I am re-
ferring only to the simplest forms of musical composition.
54 THE MUSICAL BASIS OF VERSE
timately switched off upon another track, if desired.
When, in music, it is desired to change the rhythm,
The barring there is a double bar drawn across the staff,
off of verse anc j a new s jg na ture the signature of the new
measure is written in. So, with a distinct demarkation
a mental barring off , as it were we may introduce songs
into longer compositions, or we may divide a long poem
into distinct parts. In Swinburne's " Atalanta in Cale-
don," after the chief huntsman's invocation to Artemis,
which is in blank verse (2/5), there comes that brilliant
bit of verbal melody, the hunting chorus, in ringing
3-beat rhythm.
" When the hounds of spring are on winter's traces,
The mother of months in meadow or plain
Fills the shadows and windy places
With lisp of leaves and ripple of rain;
And the brown bright nightingale amourous
Is half assuaged for Itylus,
For the Thracian ships and the foreign faces,
The tongueless vigil, and all the pain."
Another example is in Browning's " Paracelsus, ' ' where,
from the meditative speech in blank verse, ending:
" This is my record ; and my voice the wind's,"
Paracelsus breaks into a song with bounding triple move-
ment very suggestive of the swell of the seas of which it
sings.
" Over the sea our galleys went,
With cleaving prows in order brave,
To a speeding wind and a bounding wave,
A gallant armament : "
Still another example is found in the exquisite little
lyrics scattered, like dainty intermezzi, through the
THE ARTS OF SOUND 55
pages of Tennyson's" Princess." But perhaps the most
notable instance of verse barring off is to be found in
" Maud," where the story is told, not in dramatic form,
nor even in that of the romantic narrative as in Brown-
ing's " Ivan Ivanovitch," " Donald," and others but in
a succession of fervid lyrics, each cast in a separate metri-
cal mould.
We have seen how we may vary the cadence of our
rhythms by writing the verse in different styles, and by
tines of tne use of the feminine ending. We can give
different further metrical variety by employing, and con-
within the trasting with each other, lines of different
stanza lengths within the stanza. This varies the
phrase effects and prevents monotony. The adjustment
of lines of different lengths contrasted in a stanza is not
an arbitrary thing, a question merely of caprice, but is
determined by a natural pause, or breathing-place, in the
rhetoric or in the rhythm alone. When these pauses
occur at the end of a line it is called end-stopped. Similar
pauses occurring in the middle of the verse are known as
ccesuras or ccesural pauses. 1 Exactly in the same way in
music is a melody divided naturally into its component
phrases.
It will be found on comparison that, as a rule, very
long lines do not balance well set against very short ones;
also, that lines of an uneven number of measures balance
each other better than alternations of even and uneven.
Thus a line of five measures naturally calls for an alter-
nating line of three measures rather than one of four,
etc. But for effects of this sort rules cannot be laid
1 Cresura (from ccedo, to cut) means a cutting. This term, as well as
anacrusis, is extensively used in music, the interchangeability of nomencla-
tures in this and other terms demonstrating anew the close structural rela-
tion between the two arts.
56 THE MUSICAL BASIS OF VERSE
down. They are a matter of a trained ear, which the
student must develop for himself.
We also find that the ear will not carry as a unit a very
long line; but that lines of more than five measures are
caesurai apt mentally to divide themselves into two
division periods, because of the very strong caesura
always found in the middle. The poet may at his option
write these long phrases either in one period or two
periods.
Thus " Locksley Hall " is written:
" Love took up the harp of Life, and smote on all the chords with
might ;
Smote the chord of Self, that, trembling, passed in music out
of sight."
But they more naturally fall into two rhythmic periods,
thus:
" Love took up the harp of Life,
And smote on all the chords with might ;
Smote the chord of Self, that, trembling,
Passed in music out of sight."
The same is true of the " May Queen," and some
others. The English Ballad Metre the oldest lyric form
we have will be found sometimes written out in long
lines with rhymed couplets, as in Chapman's Homer ;
sometimes in the shorter quatrains, each alternate line
rhymed, as in Macaulay's " Lays of Ancient Rome."
When we come to irregular poems poems with lines
of irregular lengths, and not divided into uniform stanzas
E uiiibrium t * ie equilibrium between long and short must
of irregular be very nicely preserved, or we shall get an
effect of chopped prose merely, and not a sense
of that perfect metrical balance required for a real poem.
Not having the equipoise afforded by the formal stanza,
THE ARTS OF SOUND 57
we have only the natural pauses to guide us, and these
are sometimes so subtle as to require a very fine ear for
perfect adjustment. Tennyson has given us many irreg-
ular poems, all marvellously balanced. The " Lotos
Eaters" is an example. Observe, in the lines quoted
below, the longer and longer roll to each succeeding line,
like the lazy up-roll of an incoming tide. The effect is
most musical.
" Here are cool mosses deep,
And thro' the moss the ivies creep,
And in the stream the long-leaved flowers weep,
And from the craggy ledge the poppy hangs in sleep."
Wordsworth's ode on the " Intimations of Immortal-
ity " is a beautifully balanced poem. The caesural effects
fall naturally and with great simplicity, and the melody
moves harmoniously throughout. It is a fine touch, at
the last, to drop entirely into the always stately heroic
verse.
Lowell's " Commemoration Ode," on the contrary,
has always impressed me as not well balanced, and very
mechanically divided. The ear gets no sense of natural
pauses, and the theme moves upon hard, cold numbers.
Sidney Lanier was fond of the irregular form, and has
left us some most melodious poems in it; but one of the
most perfect specimens of irregular composition which
I have ever come across is Mrs. James T. Fields's limpid
little " Ode to Spring," which, as it is short, I insert
entire :
" I wakened to the singing of a bird;
I heard the bird of spring.
And lo !
At his sweet note
58 THE MUSICAL BASIS OF VERSE
The flowers began to grow,
Grass, leaves, and everything,
As if the green world heard
The trumpet of his tiny throat
From end to end, and winter and despair
Fled at his melody, and passed in air.
" I heard at dawn the music of a voice.
O my beloved, then I said, the spring
Can visit only once the waiting year;
The bird can bring
Only the season's song, nor his the choice
To waken smiles or the remembering tear !
But thou dost bring
Springtime to every day, and at thy call
* The flowers of life unfold, though leaves of autumn fall."
There is in verse a secondary accent concerning the
verse, the accent of emphasis called by some prosodists
secondary the rhetorical accent or the logical accent,
accent which not only serves to indicate the meaning
of the words, but further brings out the larger metric
swing of the whole line.
Some writers have much discussion about word accent
and 'Verse accent, and their correlation; but it seems so
obvious a proposition that the accent of emphasis shall
coincide with the rhythmic accent that is, that it shall
fall upon a strong syllable, already accented, as scarcely
to need formal statement.
Lanier concerns himself with some hair-splitting dis-
quisition upon further expression marks; but verse read-
ing is a species of tempo rubato, dependent for expression
upon the interpretive genius of the reader, and, therefore,
if it were advisable to formulate rules upon these lines
which it seems to me it is not they would belong rather
THE ARTS OF SOUND 59
to the province of elocution, and would have no place in
a work upon the science of verse.
To sum up the foregoing chapter, we find:
i. That music and verse are both arts of sound, or
Summary of vibration.
foregoing 2. That both music and verse are measured
by a natural accent, recurring at regular in-
tervals, and dividing the notes, or syllables, into succes-
sive groups.
3. That these groups are all uniform, each having the
same time-value as every other.
4. That the measurement of these groups is always to
be made, not necessarily from the opening note, or syl-
lable, but from accent to accent.
Or to formulate still more condensedly:
Music and verse are both dependent for existence as
such, and distinguished from chaos, upon continual, bal-
anced rhythm.
In concluding this chapter, I should like to urge upon
the student of verse the advisability of taking with his
Advisabii- studies in prosody a coordinate elementary
it y of study course in music ; if possible, vocal, since the
voice song is the connecting medium be-
tween music and verse. It need not be with any view
to becoming a musical performer, but should be rudi-
mentarily constructive as far as the developing the under-
standing of metre (primary rhythm), simple phrase divi-
sion, and pure melody. The musically-drilled ear will
instinctively construct rhythmic and melodic verse; while
any student so deficient in these perceptions as to be
unable to grasp the elements of music may be sure that,
even by any poetical license, he will never be able to
produce anything resembling real poetry.
CHAPTER III
DIFFERENTIATED MOTION
THERE is a vital quality in which verse and music
resemble each other and by which they are essentially
differentiated from the other arts, and that is motion.
Music has much more motion than poetry, and may
therefore be considered the freest of all vehicles for emo-
Fbdtyof tional expression. The other arts are station-
other arts arv> They are intellectual snap-shots ; bits of
life snatched from time and space and immutably fixed
upon the mental plates. They catch for us a single
impression ; they perpetuate for us a single moment of
human experience. In such a picture as Millet's " An-
gelus " to use a universally-known example a brown,
nubbly harvest field stretches away indefinitely from us,
until it melts into the paling perspective. In the fore-
ground, beside a rude barrow, stand two of the har-
vesters, a woman and a man. They have heard the echo
of the far-away angelus, the bell of evening prayer, and
stand with bent heads, devoutly murmuring their orisons.
Time passes; but in the picture it does not pass. Still
the tenebrous field rolls itself into the gloaming; still, in
the foreground, stand the two reverent figures, fixed in
their attitudes of devotion.
In sculpture we have exactly the same momentary con-
ditions. All emotional expression is as stationary as the
figures upon Keats's " Grecian Urn."
" Fair youth, beneath the trees, thou canst not leave
Thy song, nor ever can those trees be bare ;
DIFFERENTIATED MOTION 6 1
Bold lover, never, never canst thou kiss,
Though winning near the goal "
Laocoon stands before us in his petrified extremity,
forever striving to uncoil those never-uncoiled serpents.
The Discus Player waits with body bent and discus
poised but never hurled. The Dying Gladiator droops
in mortal agony above his shield but the final moment
never arrives ; he does not die.
But with poetry what a difference! Here we have
motion, progression, vibration ; in short, the concrete
Motion manifestation of energy; and energy, the sci-
of poetry entist tells us, ' ' manifests itself as motion, heat,
light, chemical action, sound."
Poetry moves, not only abstractly by the unfoldment
of the thought pictorial, dramatic, spiritual moving in
orderly sequence from premise to conclusion ; but con-
cretely, by the rhythmic vibration of its numbers. We
have in verse, not a solitary impression, but a succession
of impressions; not a single pictorial moment, but a whole
mental panorama. Moved by the master-hand of the
artist, like men upon a chessboard, there pass before us
marvellous presentments of that strange game called
Life. In company with Roland we turn loathingly from
the " hoary cripple with malicious eyes," and plunge
into the " ignoble country." We follow across the
" sudden little river," where he fears to set his foot
" upon a dead man's cheek," on to the " bit of stubbed
ground once a wood," through the marsh, and over the
country of " blotches rankling, coloured gay and grim,"
until we arrive at the mountains:
" Those two hills on the right,
Crouched like two bulls locked horn in horn in fight;
While to the left a tall scalped mountain "
62 THE MUSICAL BASIS OF VERSE
and perceive suddenly, as he did, the " Dark Tower"
itself:
" The round squat turret, blind as the fool's heart,"
Our own nerves quiver in creepy and sympathetic sus-
pense as Roland, dauntless and provocative, sets the
slug-horn to his lips and blows:
" Childe Roland to the Dark Tower came ! "
So, too, we live over with Guinevere her passionate and
guilty tragedy, from
" The golden days
In which she saw him first, when Launcelot came,
Reputed the best knight and goodliest man,
Ambassador, to lead her to his lord
Arthur, and led her forth, and far ahead
Of his and her retinue moving, they,
Rapt in sweet talk or lively, all on love
And sport and tilts and pleasure (for the time
Was Maytime, and as yet no sin was dream'd),
Rode under groves that look'd a paradise
Of blossom,"
to those last direful days when, flying from the conse-
quences of her sin, she seeks asylum in " the holy house
at Almesbury," and one day hears through the sombre
cloisters the dread, whispered word, " The King! "
" She sat
Stiff-stricken, listening ; but when armed feet
Thro' the long gallery from the outer doors
Rang coming, prone from off her seat she fell,
And grovel I'd with her face against the floor :
There with her milk-white arms and shadowy hair
She made her face a darkness from the King :
And in the darkness heard his armed feet
Pause by her."
DIFFERENTIATED MOTION 63
But it is not only thus abstractly, upon the progres-
sion of its themes, that poetry moves. It has further a
Motion of specific, concrete vibration within the measured
rhythm and bar; a vibration which imparts to the ear a I.
greater or less sense of velocity correlative
with the rhythm, metre, and manner employed.
In the famous Virgilian line:
" Quadrupedante putrem sonitu quatit ungula campum "
we are aware of the galloping of the horse, not so much
because the poet informs us that
" He shakes the quivering earth with the four-footed bound of
the hoofs,"
as because, in the rapid beat of the dactylic measure
I, 2, 3; I, 2, 3; I, 2, 3; I, 2, 3; I, 2, 3; I, 2 there is
the verisimilitude of the clatter of galloping horsehoofs.
Furthermore, there is, in the accelerated vibration of the
triple beat, a rush, a vigour, a sense of onward movement,
very distinct and dynamic.
We perceive this sense of velocity even more clearly
in the short, crisp lines of the " Charge of the Light
Brigade ":
" Half a league, half a league,
Half a league onward,
All in the valley of Death
Rode the six hundred.
' Forward, the Light Brigade !
Charge for the guns ! ' he said :
Into the valley of Death
Rode the six hundred.
" Cannon to right of them,
Cannon to left of them,
64 THE MUSICAL BASIS OF VERSE
Cannon in front of them
Volley'd and thunder'd;
Storm'd at with shot and shell,
Boldly they rode and well,
Into the jaws of Death,
Into the mouth of Hell
Rode the six hundred. ' '
Should we feel the breathless impact of this poem if it
were cast, for example, in heroic blank verse, or in the
2/4 measure of ' ' The White Doe of Rylstone " ? I think
not. For it is in the rhythmic rush, quite as much as in
the words, that the impression is conveyed to the imag-
ination. The technical movement of a poem has then
not a little to do wilh the impression which it makes
upon us; and this sense of the movement in verse varies
with the varying metre and rhythm of the numbers,
sources of The primal source of motion in verse is to
.- motion j^ f oun d { n rhythm.
A second, lesser, source of motion is found in the direct
attack; which, as has already been pointed out, has a
strong propulsive force, and seems, as it were, to launch
the verse out into the deeps.
A third, still lesser, source of motion is found in the
feminine ending ; the second, or unaccented syllable,
giving a little back swing, like that of a pendulum.
The feminine ending is the ending of a verse of poetry
with the non-accent, or second beat in the bar; &?> pleasure,
Feminine treasure ; dying, crying; faster, 'vaster ; etc.
ending j t j s so ca n e d j n contradistinction to the mas-
culine ending, which is upon an accent either a mono-
syllable or the accented final syllable of a polysyllable,
the first beat in the bar. Two words may be used instead
of a dissyllable, in which case it is called, not the fem-
inine ending, but the double ending. If the endings are
DIFFERENTIATED MOTION 65
rhymed, they are designated as feminine, or double
rhymes ; if imrhymed, merely as endings.
The feminine ending is a wonderful factor in relieving
metric monotony and producing melodic and motive con-
trast; but it must be used with discretion, or it is liable
to produce, upon the English ear, a cloying effect. In
many of Longfellow's poems, Moore's, and Byron's, we
may observe instances of its possibilities of effeminacy.
It seems used without object, and merely to tickle the
ear, becoming an idle melodic tinkle. Professor Corson
has pointed out the fact that Byron, whenever he wishes
to express the trivial or the grotesque, lapses into it.
Thus:
" Sweet is the vintage when the showering grapes
In Bacchanal profusion reel to earth,
Purple and gushing ; sweet are our escapes
From civic revelry to rural mirth :
Sweet to the miser are his glittering heaps,
Sweet to the father is his first-born's birth,
Sweet is revenge especially to women,
Pillage to soldiers, prize-money to seamen.
" Sweet is a legacy, and passing sweet
The unexpected death of some old lady
Or gentleman of seventy years complete,
Who've made ' us youth ' wait too too long already
For an estate, or cash, or country seat,
Still breaking, but with stamina so steady
That all the Israelites are fit to mob its
Next owner for their double-damned post-obits."
" DON JUAN," canto i., stanzas 124, 125.
There is, however, nothing intrinsically meretricious in
the feminine ending; quite the contrary. In the hands
5
66 THE MUSICAL BASIS OF VERSE
of a master, it can be made to give out nothing but
strains of pure beauty. Browning, more than any other
poet, has exploited the feminine ending, and has handled
it with " imperial grace."
The 2-beat rhythm has less internal vibration, there-
fore less motion, than is to be found in the 3-beat rhythm.
Purely ethical poets poets of a contemplative order, cold
and without passional fires affect it chiefly and make
imperfect, if any, use of the more motive 3-beat rhythm.
We cannot turn the pages of Wordsworth, Coleridge,
Arnold, Emerson, without recognising this to be the
chief resource of their muse. It is the full-rounded
artists, whose inspiration runs the whole gamut of human
experience, who have discovered and utilised the cadence
variety possible to the 3-beat rhythm.
Generally speaking, we might, therefore, characterise
Poetry of the 2-beat rhythm as the medium of the Poetry
Tnd^oetry f Reflection; and the 3-beat rhythm as
of motion more specifically the medium of the Poetry
of Motion.
The noblest expression of 2-beat rhythm is to be found
in strict 2/5 verse, or the line of five bars with two beats
to the bar. It is always dignified, while shorter metrical
divisions may be trivial, and longer are awkward for long-
sustained themes. In blank verse the medium best
suited to heroic themes it reaches its greatest elevation,
and also its most elastic presentment ; because, blank
verse not being, strictly speaking, song, but rather a
species of recitative, it admits of greater irregularity of
notation than is possible within the close stanza. 1
" The Italians called it stanza, as if we should say a resting-place."
PUTTENHAM : "Art of English Poesie."
" So named from the stop or halt at the end of it. Cognate with Eng-
lish stand" SKEATS'S "Etymological Dictionary."
DIFFERENTIATED MOTION 67
stateHness or ^ mar y heroic quatrain is stately, but,
of heroic long continued, bears a certain stamp of mo-
notony.
" Still doth the soul, from its lone fastness high,
Upon our life a ruling effluence send ;
And when it fails, fight as we will, we die,
And while it lasts, we cannot wholly end."
MATTHEW ARNOLD : " Palladium."
This stanza, because of its common selection for elegy,
is known in English as the elegiac stanza. It must not
be confounded with the classical elegiac verse.
In the Spenserian stanza, with the varied rhyme-
melody and the stately rounding of the final Alexan-
drine, we have a noble verse-form.
The stanza of Shelley's " Ode to the West Wind "
bits of Italian terza rima, separated at regular intervals
into stanzas by a rhymed couplet is felicitous and beau-
tiful.
There are plenty of other beautiful variants of 2/5 verse
some with the break of an occasional shorter line, like
Keats's " Ode to a Nightingale," Arnold's " Scholar
Gypsy," etc., but the reader will easily find them for
himself.
Of all the metric forms we have, the strict 2/4 verse
_. , (verse of four bars of two beats to the bar)
Monotony x '
of common has the least internal music. Its cadences
are tame and flat, with an inevitable aroma
of monotony.
The feeblest of all vehicles for poetic expression is,
perhaps, the quatrain of alternating lines of 2/4 and
2/3- 1
1 Known in the hymn books as common metre.
68 THE MUSICAL BASIS OF VERSE
" I travel I'd among unknown men,
In lands beyond the sea j
Nor, England ! did I know till then
What love I bore to thee."
WORDSWORTH : " I Travell'd among Unknown Men."
Verse in this form runs great danger of degenerating
into the utterly commonplace, and ringing out, not
poetry, but the mere sing-song of a nursery jingle. We
get more music in Tennyson's " Brook/' where the addi-
tion of the feminine ending seems to give it a fresh swing,
and imparts to it a terminal ripple eminently suggestive.
" I come from haunts of coot and hern,
I make a sudden sally,
And sparkle out among the fern,
To bicker down a valley."
A shorter line 2/3 or even 2/2 has more movement,
owing perhaps to the rapid succession of metric divisions.
" When spring comes laughing
By vale and hill,
By wind-flower walking
And daffodil,
Sing stars of morning,
Sing morning skies,
Sing blue of speedwell,
And my Love's eyes."
AUSTIN DOBSON : " A Song of the Four Seasons."
Let us now examine and see how we can, as it were,
HOW to build build up motion in the 2/4 quatrain. We will
up motion ta k e a ser j es O f progressive examples in verse-
motion to show the larger and larger rhythmic swing
possible.
DIFFERENTIATED MOTION 69
" Art thou a statesman, in the van
Of public business train' d and bred ?
First learn to love one living man !
Then mayst thou think upon the dead."
WORDSWORTH : " A Poet's Epitaph."
" 'Tis sweet to him, who all the week
Through city crowds must push his way,
To stroll alone through fields and woods,
And hallow thus the Sabbath day."
COLERIDGE : " Homesick."
" Thy summer voice, Musketaquit,
Repeats the music of the rain ;
But sweeter rivers pulsing flit
Through thee, as thou through Concord Plain."
EMERSON : " Two Rivers."
" Like driftwood spars, which meet and pass
Upon the boundless ocean-plain,
So on the sea of life, alas !
Man meets man meets, and quits again."
ARNOLD : " The Terrace at Berne."
This verse certainly moves upon a dead level of utter
monotony. But the direct attack will give it fresh im-
pulse.
" I am old, but let me drink;
Bring me spices, bring me wine ;
I remember, when I think,
That my youth was half divine."
TENNYSON: " The Vision of Sin."
With both the direct attack and the feminine ending,
we get still more motion.
70 THE MUSICAL BASIS OF VERSE
" ' Guidarello Guidarelli ! '
Rang the cry from street and tower,
As our Guido rode to battle
. In Ravenna's darkest hour."
S. WEIR MITCHELL: " Guidarello Guidarelli."
In the beautiful little spinning song given below, we
seem to get the acme of motion possible to 2-beat verse.
It is achieved partly by the use of the direct attack and
alternate feminine endings, but a great deal by the effect
of the long swinging line. One seems to catch the very
whir of the wheel.
" Moon in heaven's garden, among the clouds that wander,
Crescent moon so young to see, above the April ways,
Whiten, bloom not yet, not yet, within the twilight yonder ;
All my spinning is not done, for all the loitering days.
" Oh, my heart has two wild wings that ever would be flying !
Oh, my heart's a meadow lark that ever would be free !
Well it is that I must spin until the light be dying ;
Well it is the little wheel must turn all day for me ! "
JOSEPHINE PRESTON PEABODY : " Spinning in April."
Many poets have employed the 2/4 verse in rhymed
couplets for long poems, but it seems an inadequate
Use of the measure for sustained action. It has not the
short coup- staying power of the heroic verse, and the lim-
ited swing of the shorter line renders the con-
stantly recurring rhyme tiresome and mechanical, like
the clip clip of a woodman's hatchet chopping a fagot
into lengths. Wordsworth has written " The White Doe
of Rylstone " and other poems in it; Byron has used it
extensively ; and Scott has cast most of his longer poems
in it. He probably used this measure because, like Byron
and other young men of that day, he was much under
DIFFERENTIATED MOTION 7 1
the ascendency of Wordsworth. Scott's diction is, how-
ever, bold and ringing; and the interspersion, at inter-
vals, of the shorter 2/3 line seems to divide the text
roughly into stanzas, and gives, as it were, a breathing
space. But at best it is a poor vehicle beside 2/5 verse,
and all of these poems would have gained in dignity and
power had they been cast in blank verse, or even in heroic
rhymed couplets.
Scott's instincts were those of the true artist, but his
muse was too facile for a nature not self-exacting, and he
suffered, like Byron, from too universal a popularity and
absence of criticism to achieve the highest artistic results.
Neither Wordsworth, Coleridge, nor Emerson was a
metric artist of a high order. Arnold was artistically
much greater, yet, it seems to me, not really great. His
critical judgment of what art should be certainly exceeds
that of any person, yet in his own work he made use of
a very limited number of forms, and easily lapses into a
monotonous 2/4 measure.
Let us examine now how Tennyson a past-master of
artistic technique handled the 2-beat rhythm. Tenny-
Tennyson's son ' s use f heroic verse is always pure, ele-
use of 2-beat vated, and resonant. He was opulent of re-
source and sure of touch. His use of forms is
never a lottery as with lesser craftsmen. Whatever
effects of rhythm or melody he employs, it is always with
distinct and unerring purpose. For dignity, melody,^
fluidity, enjambement? and perfect caesural balance, his
blank verse is virtually beyond criticism. It will be
treated more at large in a future chapter, and we will
confine ourselves here to an analysis of some of his lyric
forms. He employs 2/4 verse very little in its baldest
1 Enjambement. Running of a verse into the next line to complete the
72 THE MUSICAL BASIS OF VERSE
shape, but, when he does do so, he contrives to endow
it with some subtle virtue of melody. More often we
find variants, as in " Mariana."
" With blackest moss the flower-plots
Were thickly crusted, one and all \
The rusted nails fell from the knots
That held the pear to the gable-wall.
The broken sheds look'd sad and strange :
Unlifted was the clinking latch ;
Weeded and worn the ancient thatch
Upon the lonely moated grange.
She only said, * My life is dreary,
He cometh not/ she said;
She said, ' I am aweary, aweary,
I would that I were dead ! ' "
Here we have a stanza composed of three quatrains;
the first, in ordinary strict 2/4 measure with alternating
rhyme ; the second, with the first and fourth lines rhymed,
the two central ones rhyming together (this variation
alone is a refreshment to the ear) ; and in the third (again
an alternating quatrain), the second and fourth lines are
shortened a bar, while the first and third carry the femi-
nine ending. Yet so homogeneous is the stanza that
the ordinary reader would not be aware that the metrical
scheme was not uniform throughout.
In this song from " The Miller's Daughter" not a
quatrain, by the way, but a sestet note the sweet insist-
ence of the rhyme.
" Love that hath us in the net,
Can he pass, and we forget ?
Many suns arise and set.
Many a chance the years beget.
Love the gift is Love the debt.
Even so."
DIFFERENTIATED MOTION 73
Here we have the impulse of the direct attack, and the
pretty touch of the little half-phrase, like a sighing echo,
at the end.
In " The Lady of Shalott " we have the same melodic
idea of repeated rhyme ; but the stanza is divided with
central and terminal rhymes, the last line being short-
ened to 2/3, which rounds it well off. This poem is an
example of free verse, somewhat rare, and difficult to do
well, in 2-beat rhythm.
" On either side the river lie
Long fields of barley and of rye,
That clothe the wold and meet the sky ;
And thro' the field the road runs by
To many-tower 'd Camelot ;
And up and down the people go,
Gazing where the lilies blow
Round an island there below,
The island of Shalott."
And in this song from "Maud" what an ecstatic,
spring-like lilt we catch in the direct 2/3 verse !
" Go not, happy day,
From the shining fields,
Go not, happy day,
Till the maiden yields.
Rosy is the West,
Rosy is the South,
Roses are her cheeks,
And a rose her mouth."
In " The Two Voices " we have three uniform-rhymed
lines. This gives " a close emphasised stanza. The
poem consists in a great part of a succession of short,
74 THE MUSICAL BASIS OF VERSE
epigrammatic arguments, pro and con, to which the
stanza is well adapted." i
" A still small voice spake unto me,
' Thou art so full of misery,
Were it not better not to be ? '
" Then to the still small ycjice I said :
1 Let me not %asf>ih endte& shade
AVhat is so wonderfully made.'
" To which the voice did urge reply:
' To-day I saw the dragon-fly
Come from the wells where he did lie.
" ' An inner impulse rent the veil
Of his old husk: from head to tail
Came out clear plates of sapphire mail.' "
In " The Palace of Art," the stanza is a quatrain of
which the first line is 2/5 verse; the second, 2/4 verse;
the third, again 2/5 verse ; and the fourth drops into the
still shorter 2/3 verse.
" One seem'd all dark and red a tract of sand,
With some one pacing there alone,
Who paced for ever in a glimmering land,
Lit with a low large moon.
" One show'd an iron coast and angry waves.
You seem'd to hear them climb and fall
And roar rock-thwarted under bellowing caves,
Beneath the windy wall.
" And one, a full-fed river winding slow
By herds upon an endless plain,
The ragged rims of thunder brooding low,
With shadow-streaks of rain."
1 HIRAM CORSON : " Primer of English Verse," chap, vi., p. 78.
DIFFERENTIATED MOTION 75
Of this stanza Peter Bayne says, "It is novel, and it
is only by degrees that its exquisite adaptation to the
style and thought of the poem is perceived. The ear
instinctively demands in the second and fourth lines a
body of sound not much less than that of the first and
third; but in Tennyson's stanza, the fall in the fourth
line is complete; the body of sound in the second and
fourth lines is not nearly sufficient to balance that in the
first and third ; the consequence is that the ear dwells on
the alternate lines, especially on the fourth, stopping
there to listen to the whole verse, to gather up its whole
sound and sense. I do not know whether Tennyson ever
contemplated scientifically the effect of this. I should
think it far more likely, and indicative of far higher
genius, that he did not. But no means could be con-
ceived for setting forth to more advantage those separate
pictures, ' each a perfect whole,' which constitute so great
a portion of the poem." 1
Most writers agree that, as an adaptation of means to
ends, no stanza is more felicitous than that employed in
" In Memoriam." A certain elegiac monotony a minor
key of verse being desired, it is found in the 2/4 quat-
rain, not in its usual form of alternating rhymes, but with
the two central lines rhymed, the first line waiting for its
complement until the last. 2
" By the rhyme-scheme of the quatrain, the terminal
rhyme emphasis of the stanza is reduced, the second and
third verses being the most clearly braced by the rhyme.
The stanza is thus admirably adapted to that sweet con-
1 See " Primer of English Verse," p. 81.
3 " This stanza is not original with Tennyson, Ben Jonson having em-
ployed it in an elegy in his ' Underwoods ; ' and Dante Gabriel Rossetti,
just before 'In Memoriam' appeared, in 'My Sister's Sleep.'" HIRAM
CORSON : " A Primer of English Verse," p. 70.
76 THE MUSICAL BASIS OF VERSE
tinuity of flow, free from abrupt checks, demanded by
the spiritualised sorrow which it bears along. Alternate
rhyme would have wrought an entire change in the tone
of the poem." *
" Sweet after showers, ambrosial air,
That rollest from the gorgeous gloom
Of evening over brake and bloom
And meadow, slowly breathing bare
" The round of space, and rapt below
Thro' all the dewy-tassell'd wood,
And shadowing down the horned flood
In ripples, fan my brows and blow
" The fever from my cheek, and sigh
The full new life that feeds thy breath
Throughout my frame, till Doubt and Death,
111 brethren, let the fancy fly
" From belt to belt of crimson seas
On leagues of odour streaming far,
To where in yonder orient star
A hundred spirits whisper ' Peace.' "
The 3-beat rhythm is instinct with motion. It has an
inherent bounding swiftness which the 2-beat rhythm
Mobile entirely lacks. It runs, it leaps, it laughs, it
3?beat y fl* es > it: gallops; therefore poets have instinct-
rhythm ively selected it as the vehicle of their most
fervid thought. Wherever rapid or passionate action is
to be expressed, it will be found a most effective me-
dium. ' The good news " is carried from Ghent to Aix
upon it; Pheidippides runs in it; the Light Brigade
charges to it; the Sea Fairies dance to it; the pace of
1 HIRAM CORSON : " A Primer of English Verse," chap, vi., p. 70.
DIFFERENTIATED MOTION 77
Arethusa's melodious flight is tuned to it; and upon its
numbers a thousand imperishable love lyrics breathe out
their impassioned music.
With the resource of invention, such as we know it
to-day, the 3-beat rhythm seems to be a very late devel-
Absence of opment. In the centuries preceding ours it
triple move- appears conspicuous by its absence. The Eliz-
Eiizabethan abethans seem not to have been acquainted
poetry with it, or certainly never to have used it con-
sciously; another proof, if any were needed, of how en-
tirely free the technique of the Renaissance literature was
from any influence from the classics. They had the
models of the classic dactyls and anapaests, which they
might have imitated, and in which some men more
pedants than creators did write; but it never became
germane to the language and left no permanent imprint.
Says Edmund Gosse, " The dactylic and anapaestic
movement was conspicuously unknown to the Eliza-
bethans. I purposely take no note here of the experi-
ments in tumbling, rimeless measure made by certain
Elizabethans. These were purely exotic, and, even in
the hands of Campion himself, neither natural nor sue-
cessful." 1
Sir Philip Sidney, Fulke Greville, Gabriel Harvey, and
others even the most melodious Edmund Spenser pro-
posed wild schemes for bringing English verse under the
restrictions of the classic laws of quantity. Spenser
seems, however, to have soon recovered from his " arti-
ficial fever," and, in one of his letters to Harvey, he ex-
claims fervently: " Why, a God's name, may not we, as
else the Greeks, have the kingdom of our own language,
and measure our accents by the sound, reserving quantity
to the verse? "
1 EDMUND GOSSE : " From Shakespeare to Pope," p. 9.
:> THE M&SICAL BASIS Of VE&SE
The tide of feeling for true rhythmic values was too
strong to be stemmed; and English verse went on its
way rejoicing, taking cognisance neither of theory nor
theorist, bat singing itself out according to its own
divine instinct.
Previous to Elizabeth there are a few sporadic traces
of 3-beat rhythm; although here, too, was the sugges-
tion in the Anglo-Saxon verse, which, although
[te not measured by syllables, is divided into cer-
tain heavy stresses, resembling an imperfect
triple movement.
There is a very old comedy entitled " Gammer Gur-
ton's Needle " (see page 199 of this book) in which is
inserted a song undoubtedly much older than the play
the chorus of which has a distinct triple lilt.
" Back and side go bare, 30 bare,
Both hand and foot go cold;
But belly, God send thee good ale enough
Whether^ be new or old."
Lanier gives a " Song of Ever and Never," belonging
to the early part of the sixteenth century; and " The
Battle of Agincourt," * also early sixteenth century, both
of which are in 3-beat measure, and may be older than
the foregoing.
*' Agincoort, Agincourt!
Know ye not Agincoort ?
Where English slue and hurt
All their French I oeroen ?
With our pikes and bills brown,
How the French were beat downe,
Shot by our bowmen."
JL, Bale's and ForahalFs "Bishop Ptacy*s
-=--=:--:'-= -N = ..:_ = J
DIFFERENTIATED MOTION 79
There is also a " Battle of Agincourt" by Michael
Drayton (1563-1631) which may have been imitated from
the preceding. 1
" Fair stood the wind for France
When we oar sails advance,
Nor now to prove our chance
Longer will tarry;
But potting to the *"ai?,
At Kaux, the mouth of Seine,
With all his martial train,
Landed King Harry."
Shakespeare, saturated as he was with music, ripples
wonderfully near the triple rhythm, and occa-
* sionally breaks, for a few exotic bars, into the
rhythm tnie lilt. As:
" 'Ban, 'Ban, Ca Caliban,
Has a new master get a new man."
Yet it is clear it has no part in his intention as a special
form ; and the only plays in which I find it deliberately
used in a song are " The Winter's Tale " and " Othello.
Desdemona's song is famous.
" The poor soul sat sighing by a sycamore tree,
Sing all a green willow;
Her hand on her bosom, her head on her knee,
Sing willow, willow, willow :
The fresh streams ran by her, ?nd murmur* d her mrem*
Sing willow, willow, willow :
Her salt tears fell from her, and soften'd the stones; "
8o THE MUSICAL BASIS OF VERSE
The rhythmic balance is here not perfectly true, for
the ear loses the movement in the refrain. These lines
are from an old ballad called " A Lover's Complaint,
being Forsaken of his Love." The entire ballad is given
in " Percy's Reliques." There it is the plaint of a man;
Shakespeare assigns it to a woman.
The other songs are put into the mouth of that delight-
ful vagabond, Autolycus, and have a rollicking, exuberant
lilt.
" When daffodils begin to peer,
With hey ! the doxy over the dale,
Why, then comes in the sweet o' the year;
For the red blood reigns in the winter's pale.'*'
And later comes the jolly catch:
" Jog on, jog on, the footpath way,
And merrily hent the stile-a:
A merry heart goes all the day,
Your sad tires in a mile-a." '
'The Winter's Tale" was among the last known
works to leave the poet's hand. Had he lived to the
ripe age of a Wordsworth or a Tennyson, it is very possi-
ble that the 3-beat rhythm would not have had to wait
for the days of Waller and Cleveland for its exposition.
According to Mr. Gosse, Waller seems the first poet to
1 1 find a number of instances of single couplets throughout the dramas ;
also a portion of a song of Silence's in the second part of " Henry IV,"
which shows rough triple rhythm. The fool's catch in " Lear," " Have more
than thou showest," and several other of his short strains, have the ring of
triple time ; while lago's drinking song (one stanza) in " Othello," " And
let me the canakin clink, clink," is quite pure in movement. With the excep-
tion of Desdemona's song, this measure seems to be always put into the
mouths of rogues or clowns, which would point to its being less a matter of
invention than a reversion to the refrains of thfe people.
DIFFERENTIATED MOTION 81
make deliberate use of the triple rhythm. " Up to his
(Cleveland's) time, and to that of Waller, the triple or
Waiier the anapaestic cadence, which is now so familiar
first to make to us> anc j w hi c h the facilities of its use have
use of triple even vulgarised, had not been used at all. The
rhythm great Elizabethan poets had achieved their
marvellous effects without its ever occurring to them
that they had at their elbow a dancing or lilting cadence
which the very ballads of the peasantry might have re-
vealed to them. . . . Shakespeare, of course, in
such songs as ' Come away, come away, Death/ 1 glides
into the triple cadence; and so, as my friend Coventry
Patmore points out, does the early Elizabethan, Phaer,
in his version of the ' ^Eneid.' I have remarked an-
other instance in a ballad of Bishop Corbet's. But these
felicities were the result either of accident or, in the case
of Shakespeare, for instance, of an art above art. . . .
In Waller's 1645 volume of poems there is a copy of
verses called ' Chloris and Hilas,' which is written in fal-
tering but unmistakable dactyls. Waller, long after-
wards, said that it was composed to imitate the motions
of a Sarabande. Here are portions of it, those in which
the triple cadence is most audible:
" * Hilas, O Hilas, why sit we mute
Now that each bird saluteth the spring ?
Wind up the slackened strings of thy lute,
Never canst thou want matter to sing !
" ' Sweetest, you know the sweetest of things,
Of various flowers the bees do compose,
Yet no particular taste it brings
Of violet, woodbine, pink or rose.' "
*I have already shown in chap. ii. that "Come away, come away,
Death " is not true triple rhythm.
6
82 THE MUSICAL BASIS OF VERSE
Waller would seem to have hit upon this movement
" almost by chance, by his surprising quickness of ear,"
Cleveland's and not to have prosecuted the experiment.
triple* " Cleveland, on the other hand, deliberately
rhythm studied, not once, but repeatedly, anapaestic
effects of a really very delicate kind. The first edition
of Cleveland's poems was published in 1647; but on this
we can build no theory of Waller's priority of compo-
sition. Born eight years earlier than Cleveland, Waller
is likely to have been first in the field. But as Cleve-
land's lyrical poems are, I believe, practically unknown,
even to scholars, and as this point of the introduction
of the triple cadence is one of greatest interest, I will
quote one or two examples. In a strange, half-mad,
indecorous lyric called ' Mark Anthony,' I find these
lines:
" ' When as the nightingale chanted her vespers,
And the wild forester crouched on the ground ;
Venus invited me in th 1 evening whispers
Unto a fragrant field with roses crowned.'
" This drags a little; but the intention is incontestable.
This is better:
.
' Mystical grammar of amourous glances,
Feeling of pulses, the physic of love,
Rhetorical courtings and musical dances,
Numb' ring of kisses arithmetic prove.'
" Another poem, called ' Square-Cap,' evidently written
at Cambridge in the author's undergraduate days, gives
us a totally distinct variety of the anapaestic 1 cadence:
1 Mr. Gosse's use of " anapaest" and " dactyl " is purely conventional,
for none of these poems are strictly either.
DIFFERENTIATED MOTION 83
" ' Come hither Apollo's bouncing girl,
And in a whole Hippocrene of sherry,
Let's drink a round till our brains do whirl,
Tuning our pipes to make ourselves merry;
A Cambridge lass, Venus-like, bora of the froth
Of an old half-filled jug of barley-broth,
She, she is my mistress, her suitors are many,
But she'll have a square-cap if e'er she have any.'
' There is quite a ring of John Byrom or of Shenstone
in these last lines, the precursors of so much that has
pleased the ear of the eighteenth and nineteenth cen-
turies." l
Towards the end of the eighteenth century we find
a formal triple movement coming more and more into
Eighteenth- use, and, by the early part of this century,
tripic ry becoming quite general. Scott, Campbell,
rhythm Moore, Byron, and a host of their contempora-
ries used it freely, but still in somewhat mechanical num-
bers. For it is the nice adjustment of prolonged syllables
and of pause effects which make the balance of melody
in 3-beat verse.
Steady, full bars, unless used, as by Victorian poets,
for a distinct impressional purpose, become wearisome
to the ear. Here are a few typical strains.
" When forced the fair nymph to forego,
What anguish I felt at my heart !
Yet I thought but it might not be so
'Twas with pain that she saw me depart.
She gazed as I slowly withdrew ;
My path I could scarcely discern :
So sweetly she bade me adieu,
I thought that she bade me return.'"'
WILLIAM SHENSTONE : " Absence."
1 EDMUND GOSSE : " From Shakespeare to Pope : The Reaction."
84 THE MUSICAL BASIS OF VERSE
" Would my Delia know if I love, let her take
My last thought at night and the first when I wake ;
When my prayers and best wishes preferred for her sake.
" Let her guess what I muse on, when, rambling alone,
I stride o'er the stubble each day with my gun,
Never ready to shoo't till the covey is flown.
" Let her think what odd whimsies I have in my brain,
When I read one page over and over again,
And discover at last that I read it in vain."
WILLIAM COWPER : " The Symptoms of Love."
" Come, rest on this bosom, my own stricken deer !
Tho' the herd have fled from thee, thy home is still here,
Here still is the smile that no cloud can o'ercast,
And the heart and the hand, all thine own to the last.
" Oh ! what was love made for, if 'tis not the same
Thro' joy and thro' torments, thro' glory and shame ?
I know not I ask not if guilt's in that heart,
I but know that I love thee, whatever thou art."
THOMAS MOORE : " Come Rest on this Bosom."
These are certainly elementary, and full of what Car-
lyle calls " a- rocking-horse canter." They also strike
Nineteenth- a false note in sentiment, which makes the mat-
trtpie ry ter worse ' The following, though the same
rhythm in metrical method, is more elevated, because
more genuine, and has the touch of the Byronic fire of
diction.
lt The Assyrian came down like the wolf on the fold,
And his cohorts were gleaming in purple and gold ;
And the sheen of their spears was like stars on the sea,
When the blue wave rolls nightly on deep Galilee.
DIFFERENTIATED MOTION 85
" Like the leaves of the forest when summer is green,
That host with their banners at sunset were seen :
Like the leaves of the forest when autumn hath blown,
That host on the morrow lay wither'd and strown."
BYRON : " The Destruction of Sennacherib."
And in the following metrically more compact we
sweep truly melodious chords:
\ v N
" Since our Country, our God O my Sire !
Demand that thy daughter expire ;
Since thy triumph was bought by thy vow
Strike the bosom that's bared for thee now !
" And the voice of my mourning is o'er,
And the mountains behold me no more :
If the hand chat I love lay me low,
There cannot be pain in the blow."
BYRON : " Jephtha's Daughter. 11
Byron, though he lacked the spiritual ideal necessary
to the making of the greatest of poets, was a brilliant
artist, a master of technique.
Shelley, who drank infinitely deeper from the fountains
of true inspiration than his contemporaries, has given us
beautiful music in triple movement, but none more
motive and sparkling than his " Arethusa," a direct pre-
cursor of some of the perfected motion of our own time.
" Arethusa arose
From her couch of snows
In the Acroceraunian mountains,
From cloud and from crag,
With many a jag,
Shepherding her bright fountains.
86 THE MUSICAL BASIS OF VERSE
She leapt down the rocks,
With her rainbow locks
Streaming among the streams ;
Her steps paved with green
The downward ravine
Which slopes to the western gleams :
And gliding and springing
She went, ever singing
In murmurs as soft as sleep.
The earth seemed to love her,
And Heaven smiled above her,
As she lingered toward the deep."
SHELLEY : " Arethusa."
But none of the Georgian poets ever wholly fathomed
the music of the 3-beat rhythm such varied cadences as
The erfect we et * n " Break, Break, Break " ; " Cool and
triple move- Clear"; "Come into the Garden, Maud";
cTmein ly and a host of other ty 1 ^ 8 - This crowning
withvicto- achievement remained for the masters of the
Victorian era; and such consummate handling
of it have they given us, and some notably Tennyson
and Browning have so played upon this triple rhythm,
in such an infinity of metrical combinations, that it would
almost seem as if art could go no farther.
In triple rhythm the line of four bars is not open to
the same objection as in 2-beat rhythm, and has not that
suggestion of thinness and monotony. The fuller bars
for, whether represented by the full complement of
notes, or by notes and pauses, the bar is fuller give in
effect a body of sound equivalent to a longer line of the
other rhythm. In fact a very long line in triple rhythm
is not perfectly easy to handle well, and requires the most
perfect caesural balance to present to the ear a sense of
harmonious unity.
DIFFERENTIATED MOTION 87
We find lines of 3/4 and 3/3 the commonest and most
Examples of easily satisfactory presentment of this rhythm,
perfect \ give, from modern verse, a few illustrative
rhythm examples of developed triple rhythm.
" Strong, free, with a regal ease,
Over the scrub and the scrag,
His nostrils spread to the spicy breeze,
Bounds the majestic stag.
" He tosses his head with the antlers wide
Till he sweeps his loin with the horn;
Splendid he is in his power and pride,
Beautiful in his scorn !
" What shall tire him, what shall break
The furious rush of his power ?
Lives there a creature can overtake
The stag in his sovereign hour?
" Oh, fierce, fierce is that strenuous heat
As it sweeps from holt to hollow ;
But fleet, fleet are the fateful feet
Of the unleashed hounds which follow.
" Now, on a bank where the weeds grow rank,
He turns as the death- pang grips ;
The sweat breaks dank from his quivering flank,
And the blood-foam froths his lips."
JOHN BASS : " The Hunting of the Stag."
The free verse of this poem is admirably adapted to its
rushing spirit, and the strain springs loosely and buoyantly
along. The prolonged syllables are specially effective.
Observe that the words strong (first stanza), fierce and
fleet (fourth stanza) are held through the bar three whole
beats. This gives a momentary reining-in effect, after
which the full bars seem to bound recklessly forward.
88 THE MUSICAL BASIS OF VERSE
This same elastic measure lends itself wonderfully to
the vivid numbers of one of our great love-lyrics, thus
expressing the motion of passion. In the first stanza the
word come is twice held through the bar, giving the same
pause-effect as in the preceding example ; after which
the music sweeps in with rich, balanced cadences.
" Come into the garden, Maud,
For the black bat, night, has flown,
Come into the garden, Maud,
I am here at the gate alone ;
And the woodbine spices are wafted abroad,
And the musk of the roses blown.
" There has fallen a splendid tear
From the passion-flower at the gate.
She is coming, my dove, my dear;
She is coming, my life, my fate;
The red rose cries, ' She is near, she is near ; '
And the white rose weeps, * She is late ; '
The larkspur listens, ' I hear, I hear; '
And the lily whispers, ' I wait.'
" She is coming, my own, my sweet;
Were it ever so airy a tread,
My heart would hear her and beat,
Were it earth in an earthy bed ;
My dust would hear her and beat,
Had I lain for a century dead ;
Would start and tremble under her feet,
And blossom in purple and red."
TENNYSON : ' ' Maud . " l
1 It is significant that, in this passionate lyric-drama, almost every single
section is in triple measure, as though the fires were too hot for anything
less vibratory.
DIFFERENTIATED MOTION 89
The next two quotations are examples of triple rhythm
as expressing rapid motion. The impression to be con-
veyed to the ear is that of speed superlative speed ; an
impression which is, by means of the full, reiterated
beats, certainly attained.
" I sprang to the stirrup, and Joris, and he ;
I galloped, Dirck galloped, we galloped all three ;
' Good speed !' cried the watch, as the gate-bolts undrew;
' Speed ! ' echoed the wall to us galloping through;
Behind shut the postern, the lights sank to rest,
And into the midnight we galloped abreast.
" Not a word to each other; we kept the great pace
Neck by neck, stride by stride, never changing our place ;
I turned in my saddle and made its girths tight,
Then shortened each stirrup, and set the pique right,
Rebuckled the cheek-strap, chained slacker the bit,
Nor galloped less steadily Roland a whit."
BROWNING : " How They Brought the Good News from Ghent
to Aix."
Here again we have the galloping hoof-beats, only even
more accentuated by the short line closely bound by the
rhymes. This poem is in strict verse advisedly so.
Free verse could not have given the uniform clang of
the hoof-beats. The anacrusis is required for the cumu-
lative effect ; and so vivid is the verisimilitude that the
reader himself becomes the actor, and, as the breathless
periods pile up, finds himself rushing, break-neck, through
the sleeping towns, to drop exhausted but triumphant
in the market-place at Aix.
Here is another example of speed.
" Archons of Athens, topped by the tettix, see, I return!
See, 'tis myself here standing alive, no spectre that speaks !
90 THE MUSICAL BASIS OF VERSE
Crowned with the myrtle, did you command me, Athens
and you,
' Run Pheidippides, run and race, reach Sparta for aid !
Persia has come, we are here, where is She ? ' Your command
I obeyed,
Ran and raced : like stubble, some field which a fire runs
through,
Was the space between city and city : two days, two nights did
I burn
Over the hills, under the dales, down pits and up peaks.
" Into their midst I broke : breath served but for * Persia has
come !
Persia bids Athens proffer slaves' -tribute, water and earth;
Razed to the ground is Eretria but Athens, shall Athens
sink,
Drop into dust and die the flower of Hellas utterly die,
Die, with the wide world spitting at Sparta, the stupid, the
stander-by ?
Answer me quick, what help, what hand do you stretch o'er
destruction's brink ?
How, when ? No care for my limbs ! there's lightning in
all and some
Fresh and fit your message to bear, once lips give it birth ! ' "
BROWNING: "Pheidippides."
In these long lines we have the panting heats of the
foot-racer. Not the full, uninterrupted beats of the gal-
loping horse, but plenty of prolonged syllables, as a man
might draw his breath irregularly, slackening, as his wind
failed a little, then accelerating once more.
The next two poems are 3-beat rhythm illustrative of
sea-motion. The first has already been given in another
chapter as an example of verse-notation ; but I repeat it
here because, as an example of broken motion, I know of
no other so good.
DIFFERENTIATED MOTION 91
" Break, break, break,
On thy cold grey stones, O Sea!
And I would that my tongue could utter
The thoughts that arise in me.
" O well for the fisherman's boy,
That he shouts with his sister at play !
O well for the sailor lad,
That he sings in his boat on the bay !
" And the stately ships go on
To their haven under the hill ;
But O for the touch of a vanish' d hand,
And the sound of a voice that is still !
" Break, break, break,
At the foot of thy crags, O Sea !
But the tender grace of a day that is dead
Will never come back to me."
TENNYSON: "Break, Break, Break."
Almost all verse may be regarded as legato in quality ;
but in the first line of the first and last stanzas of this
poem we get a graphic staccato ; one syllable (or note)
then two rests short, sharp, incisive the very impact
of breaking surf. With the second stanza comes in the
legato movement, which reaches its fullest sweep in the
last two lines of the third stanza. Then, in a fresh burst
of grief, once more the sharp, reiterated staccato. These
repetitions intensify the accent. Two, would have failed
of the effect ; four, would have overdone it. Merely as
a piece of technique, and quite without regard to its lit-
erary value, I know of nothing more organically express-
ive than this little surf song, so full of storm and stress,
and foiled effort.
92 THE MUSICAL BASIS OF VERSE
In the next poem we get the slow swing of deep-sea
rhythms.
" Come, dear children, let us away ;
Down and away below !
Now my brothers call from the bay,
Now the great winds shoreward blow,
Now the salt tides seaward flow ;
Now the wild white horses play,
Champ and chafe and toss in the spray.
Children dear, let us away !
This way, this way !
.
" Children dear, was it yesterday
(Call yet once) that she went away ?
Once she sate with you and me,
On a red gold throne in the heart of the sea,
And the youngest sat on her knee.
She comb'd its bright hair, and she tended it well,
When down swung the sound of a far-off bell.
She sigh'd, she look'd up through the clear green sea;
She said : ' I must go, for my kinsfolk pray
In the little grey church on the shore to-day.
'Twill be Easter-time in the world ah me !
And I lose my poor soul, Merman ! here with thee.'
I said : ' Go up, dear heart, through the waves ;
Say thy prayer, and come back to the kind sea-caves ! '
She smiled, she went up through the surf in the bay."
MATTHEW ARNOLD : " The Forsaken Merman."
In this poem we get a distinct impression of undula-
tion ; not the restless surface agitation of comber and
surge and surf, but a full, fluid movement, suggestive of
great sea deeps, where the long, slow swell laps the
ledges and fringes out the great fronds of algae. The
DIFFERENTIATED MOTION 93
triple rhythm gives, of course, the primary motion ; but
the undulatory effect is due to the metric irregularity of
the lines, which, uneven, yet rising and falling with per-
fect caesural balance, reproduce marvellously the irregular
regularity of wave-motion, the sighing, sounding, surg-
ing dithyrambs of the sea.
A very short triple rhythm has an exuberant play.
" Christmas is here :
Winds whistle shrill,
Icy and chill,
Little care we :
Little we fear
Weather without,
Sheltered about
The Mahogany Tree."
THACKERAY : " The Mahogany Tree."
Another well-known poem one of luminous aspiration
begins with the same metric scheme, but sweeps into
larger cadences. Observe that the 3/4 lines of the latter
part of the poem simply double the 3/2 lines of the first
half; but this sustained sweep at the end gives a fulness
and dignity which the short, equal metric periods of the
previous poem lack.
"All that I know
Of a certain star
Is, it can tKrow
(Like the angled spar)
Now a dart of red,
Now a dart of blue ;
Till my friends have said
They would fain see, too,
My star that dartles the red and the blue !
94 THE MUSICAL BASIS OF VERSE
\ \ \ \
Then it stops like a bird ; like a flower hangs furled; j
They must solace themselves with the Saturn above it.
i i v
What matter to rite if their star is a world ?
Mine has opened its soul to me; therefore I love it."
BROWNING : " My Star."
We have already studied, farther back, the intense,
rushing movement of the " Charge of the Light Brigade."
Probably no poem in the language is imbued with a more
concentrated motion than this one. This motion is
achieved by the triple rhythm, by the direct attack, by
the feminine cadences of the rhyming lines, and, last but
not least, by the short line with its incisive caesural effects.
These are all the sources of verse-motion focussed into
one movement.
It has been suggested that the " Charge of the Light
Brigade" was modelled upon the "Battle of Agin-
court " ; x but that such a master-craftsman as Tennyson
should consciously imitate anything is not conceivable.
The probable fact is that, all forms and all possibilities
of forms being latent in his mind, when the theme agi-
tated and heated the imagination, that form instinctively
presented itself which should most adequately express
speed, impetuous impact, and emotional fire.
It is my belief that, where real inspiration is present,
form is virtually self-selective; for there is a deeper
Formvir- internal relation between the thought and its
tuaiiyseif- material expression than the passing reader
detects. By some psychological law, not yet
clearly understood, but which we may class as a law of
1 Those who are interested will find in Sidney Lanier's " Science of Eng-
lish Verse," p. 175, a comparison of five battle songs, from the seventh to
the nineteenth centuries, in which is traced cleverly the fit metric analogy.
DIFFERENTIATED MOTION 95
sympathetic vibration, the super-heated thought 1 corre-
lates to itself words, and syntax (the construction of
sentences), and metric forms, which are best suited to
embody and express its particular spirit. In other words
it correlates to itself forms of harmonious motion. For
in the heats of creation matter and manner become one.
Only thus may we explain the concrete verisimilitude,
the wonderful organic correspondence, between form and
sense which we find in all the deeply true poems of the
world. For a grave thought, a solemn adagio measure ;
for a delicate or rapid conception, an equally delicate or
rapid movement. Any sacrifice of this inherent fitness
destroys the vividness of the impression. One could
not, for example, imagine Shelley's " Skylark" 2 cast in
the elephant paces of Whitman; nor Ariel's aery mes-
sages hammered out in the Dryden rhymed-couplet.
I do not mean by this that nothing is retouched in a
poem. Words may supplement each other; whole lines,
or even whole stanzas, be recast; but the general form
in which the poem, in the heats of creation, took shape,
will remain uninfringed, because it is an integral part
with the birth of the thought. Be very sure that the
man who has to beat about for his form has within him
no inspirational fire, but only some farthing dip which he
believes to be such.
The improvisational or spontaneous character of all
the best poetry is well known. 3 We read in Tennyson's
1 The scientific definition of heat is : a manifestation of molecular mo-
tion. The greater the motion, the greater the heat.
2 " The quick pulses of his panting measure seem to give us the very
beats of those quivering wings," is the vivid comment made by Richard
Hutton upon the rhythmic animus of this beautiful poem.
3 " I appeal to the poets of the present day, whether it is not an error to
assert that the finest passages of poetry are produced by labour and study."
SHELLEY : " Defence of Poetry."
96 THE MUSICAL BASIS OF VERSE
" Life" how, pacing beneath his trees at Farringford,
many of his most beautiful numbers burst like lyric lavas
from his brain, perfect, and wearing the imperishable
forms by which we know them to-day. We are told by
his son, in the " Life," that " many of his shorter poems
were made in a flash."
Browning " wrote most frequently under that lyrical
inspiration in which the idea and the form are least sep-
arable from each other." " Mrs. Browning told Mr.
Prinsep that her husband could never alter the wording
of a poem without rewriting it, practically converting it
into another." l
Shelley, nervous and impatient, and with a poetic fac-
ulty simply immense, threw off his verse in its first pant-
ing heats and retouched little; being reproached by his
contemporaries for this seeming carelessness.
" He composed with all his faculties, mental, emo-
tional, and physical, at the utmost strain, at a white heat
of intense fervour, striving to attain one object, the truest
and most passionate investiture for the thoughts which
had inflamed his ever-quick imagination. . . . He
was intolerant of detail, and thus failed to model with
the roundness that we find in Goethe's works." 2
Lowell, we are told, " in a sort of poetic frenzy, that
lasted forty-eight hours, almost without food or sleep,"
composed the " Vision of Sir Launfal." 3
When Shakespeare wishes to introduce to us the fairy
Form cor- folk of his imagination, he does so in dancing
thlf inform- ^ ts ^ delicate rhythms and gossamer imagery.
ing thought Caliban, coarse and earthy, speaks in crude
measures which befit his elemental condition.
'MRS. SUTHERLAND ORR : " Life of Browning," chap, xviii.
. 2 JOHN ADDINGTON SYMONDS: " Life of Shelley," chap. viii.
3 WILLIAM CRANSTON LAWTON : " New England Poets: Lowell."
DIFFERENTIATED MOTION 97
Browning sings us a song of a " Toccata of Galuppi's,"
all through the voluptuous images of which he permits
us to catch echoes of this somewhat formal, and now
extinct, musical form. In " Abt Vogler," on the other
hand, with the swell of the organ in his ears, it gets itself
into the poem, which is uttered in verse-equivalent of
chords; long, full, sustained metric periods, and long,
full, almost over-weighted stanzas. And what could
be more expressive than the " Grammarian's Funeral,"
with the lengthy, almost dithyrambic line contrasted so
abruptly with the short, ecstatic one, suggesting the
rough, stiff scramble up the mountain side, interspersed
with celebrant song ?
Yet are none of these effects of deliberate intention,
else could they not be so happy. But rather are they
intuitional, the instinctive action of that vibratory centre
upon which in all men thought plays, and which, in the
artist, becomes of peculiar sensitiveness. 1
Professor Masson advances the theory that " at a certain
pitch of fervour or feeling, the voice does instinctively lift
itself into song. All extreme passion tends to cadence.
. . . When the mind of man is either excited to a certain
pitch, or engaged in a certain kind of exercise, its trans-
actions adjust themselves in a more express manner than
usual to time, as meted out in beats or intervals. . . .
The law, as stated hypothetically, is, that the mind, either
when excited to a certain pitch, or when engaged in a
1 This, of course, does not obviate the intellectual processes by which a
poem especially the larger works of art is conceived, rounded out, polished,
and perfected. Yet I am sure that, even in such stupendous objective art
as we have, for instance, in Dante or Milton, those lines and passages which
live immortal were less the product of reason than the revelation of the
vision.
The conscious working in of such material is what Wordsworth means
when he speaks of "emotion recollected in tranquillity."
7
9 8 THE MUSICAL BASIS OF VERSE
particular kind of exercise, takes on in its transactions
a marked concordance with time as measured by beats." 1
I should not go so far as to claim that all super-heated
thought resolves itself rhythmically; because the mind
of a mathematician, or of a scientist, or of a capitalist,
might be, and often is, " excited to a certain pitch or
fervour of feeling," and the voice will certainly not " lift
itself into song"; but it is quite true that, with the
accelerated mental vibration incident to the stress of
a great idea or a great passion, thought ceases to be an
intellectual process and becomes an emotional, or in-
tuitional one. And the largest vehicles for emotional
expression are, either poetry proper, or that more ethe-
realised poetry music. So that, if a man's habit of
thought be already rhythmic, if he be a natural poet or
musician, the expression of this emotion will of necessity
be rhythmic.
Creation true creation is a raptus, in which vision is
clarified and thought becomes ebullient, a volcano of
living possibilities. Within this psychic agitation lie,
fluid and intermingled as in the material molten forces
all elements; words, tropes, images, rhythms, metres,
colours, proportions; to issue thence, when the perfect
moment arrives, in lyric fusion white-hot.
1 DAVID MASSON : " Essays : Theories of Poetry."
CHAPTER IV
MELODY
SHOULD poetry be rhymed ?
HOW the We may answer this question by another:
poets formu- what, essentially, and as differentiated from
prose, constitutes poetry ? Here are a few
definitions from the initiate themselves.
" Poetry is a part of learning, in measure of words for the most
part restrained, but in all other parts extremely licensed, and
doth truly refer to the imagination." BACON.
"That art,
Which you say adds to nature, is an art
That nature makes." SHAKESPEARE.
" Poetry is articulate music." DRYDEN.
" The vision and the faculty divine." COLERIDGE.
" Poetry is emotion recollected in tranquillity." WORDSWORTH.
" The best and happiest moments of the best and happiest
minds." SHELLEY.
" Poetry is the utterance of a passion for truth, beauty, and
power, embodying and illustrating its conception by imagina-
tion and fancy, and modulating its language on the principle of
variety in uniformity." LEIGH HUNT.
" Poetry is thought and art in one." MATTHEW ARNOLD.
Professor Corson, in his lectures on " The ^Esthetics of
ioo THE MUSICAL BASIS OF VERSE
Verse," has defined poetry as " definite thought wedded
to music which is indefinite."
According to Emerson, " the Zoroastrian definition of
poetry, mystical, yet exact, is ' Apparent pictures of
unapparent natures.' ' Emerson's own definition is,
" Poetry is the perpetual endeavour to express the spirit
of the thing." And again he calls it, "This delirious
music in the brain."
These definitions are, however, vague and altogether
inconclusive. They deal with abstractions and not with
potentialities. They do not define wherein poetry as an
art differentiates from prose as an art ; because the ele-
ments with which they deal are as much concomitants of
all ideal prose as of poetry. Professor Corson comes
nearest to the truth by claiming for poetry its indissolu-
ble union with music; but he is still generalising, and
evades the final issue. Because, when we examine
closely, we perceive that the radical difference between
prose and poetry is organic, is not one of essence but
purely of form.
I should say that the distinctive quality of poetry, and
that which differentiates it from prose, is dependent upon
Form the three conditions: viz.:
quality which Ti Uniform and inter consistent accent (en-
differentiates .
poetry from gendering primary rhythm).
P rose 2. Balanced pause-effects (giving metrical
divisions of verse and stanza).
3. Melody.
Says Professor Corson: " The fusing or combining prin-
ciple of a verse is Melody. We often meet with verses
which scan, as we say, all right, and yet we feel that
they have no vitality as verses. This may, in most cases,
be attributed to their purely mechanical or cold-blo.oded
\ structure. They are not the product of Jeeling, which
MELODY 10 1
attracts to itself (a great fact) vocal elements,^either
vowels or consonants, which chime well together and in
accord with the feeling^ but they are rather the product
of literary skill. The writer had no song, no music in
his soul/' 1
Of the three conditions of verse enumerated above,
none can be omitted and the resultant composition be
poetry. The first two have already been treated in
chapters ii and iii. In this chapter we will try to eluci-
date the principles of Melody.
The most palpable and also the largest factor in mel-
ody is rhyme. While it is possible to attain melody with
Factors of subtler devices, and to dispense with rhyme,
verse- this has seldom been, in English, a successful
experiment, and the instances are few in which
unrhymed verse can be truly called poetry. I except
blank verse, which will be treated by itself.
Other sources of melody are: (i) Tone-colour and Pho-
netic Consonance; (2) Alliteration and Onomatopoeia;
(3) Repetitions and Refrains.
If we go once more to the sister art of poetry, music,
we may find a logical acoustic reason for the demand of
the human ear for rhyme.
It is a general canon of composition that a simple mel-
ody shall end upon its tonic, or key-note. 2 Otherwise
Principle of there is not produced upon the ear a sensation
the tonic o f re p Ose or completion. The reason of this
is that, in the tonic chord, or triad, that is, the key-note
of a melody, with the super-addition of the third above
it and the fifth above it, we have the only perfect
cadence producible in music. When preceded by the
1 HIRAM CORSON : " A Primer of English Verse," chap. ii.
2 It must be borne in mind that in all these technical comparisons of
verse with music, I confine myself to the very simplest melodic forms.
102 THE MUSICAL BASIS OF VERSE
dominant, it is called the perfect authentic cadence. This
is because there is in other chords a sense of incomplete-
ness, a quality which requires to go on, to modulate or
progress into some further chord. In the tonic chord
alone the ear makes no demand for further progression
because, for that theme, it is the end is complete in
itself. Thus it is that, through however many modula-
tions the ear may be dragged, (and in much of the music
of our own day a tonal labyrinth it is!) we must drop at
last upon the tonic for rest. Browning has beautifully
symbolised this in " Abt Vogler " where, after restless
progressions of vision and image and speculation, the
spirit drops back for anchorage to the simple starting-
point the soul-centre the spiritual key-note.
(f Well, it is earth with me ; silence resumes her reign :
I will be patient and proud, and soberly acquiesce.
Give me the keys. I feel for the common chord again, 1
Sliding by semitones, till I sink to the minor, yes,
And I blunt it into a ninth, and I stand alien ground,
Surveying awhile the heights I rolled from into the deep;
Which, hark, I have dared and done, for my resting-place is
found,
The C Major of this life : so, now I will try to sleep."
I have gone at some length into these elements of
melodic balance, for it seems to me that in them we de-
tect the logical reason why rhymed verse some form of
rhymed verse has so far presented, and probably will
1 The common chord is the chord of C Major, thus :
This chord, and the scale it represents, is selected as typical and to furnish
the model for other scales, because it is written upon the staff as it stands,
without the need of accidentals (sharps or flats).
MELOD Y
103
always continue to present, to the human ear the most
satisfying results. I will insert here a little melody of
Mozart's selecting purposely a theme almost universally
knownby way of elucidating further this fundamental
idea.
A B ^ C
between
Reading the treble staff (where the thematic movement
is given) it will be observed that this melody is divided
Analogy * nto two phrases, the first or out-swinging
half (A to B) poising itself as it were in air,
( to ^ e technical, upon a note of the dominant
cadence cor- chord) ; the second (B to C), by a return-swing
respondence , , \ , . .
of the mental pendulum, bringing us once more
to rest upon the tonic, or key-note. It is exactly at this
point that the analogy between the verse-scheme and the
music-scheme comes in. The chord of the dominant is
called the half-cadence because it leads directly into the
chord of the tonic, or full cadence; therefore at B there
\$ prepared a tone which the tonic, at C, is required to
complete. In exactly the same way, in any rhymed
stanza, the first word of the rhyme prepares or introduces
a tone which the last rhyme is required to complete.
Take for example an ordinary quatrain, which is what
this little theme practically represents. Thus:
" Once more the gate behind me falls;
Once more before my face
I see the moulder' d Abbey walls,
That stand within the chace."
1 First eight bars of Trio of Minuet, from Mozart's Symphony in E[>, Op.
58. (Arr. for pianoforte, four hands.)
104 THE MUSICAL BASIS OF VERSE
Here the word face stands for the half-cadence and
requires the answering word, chace, to make tonal com-
pleteness. Half-way between A and B, in the theme
given on page 103, there is a place where the music swings
away from cadence: these two points have their corre-
spondence in the stanza in the words falls and walls, of
the first and third lines. This is a secondary sequence,
which, as it is not required for the tonal completeness of
the stanza, we may call the off-rhymes ; while the rhymes
face and chace of the second and fourth lines, as they are
required for tonal completeness, we call t\\.e finish-rhymes.
Stanzas with more complex and irregular rhyme-
schemes may be compared with more irregular melodic
themes, where, through modulation, the final tonic is
delayed ; but of course such comparisons are elementary
and cannot be pushed far.
Rhyme we must then regard as the cadence-correspond-
ence of verse. Man, Emerson tells us,
" Through worlds, and races, and terms, and times,
Saw musical order and pairing rhymes."
The melodic balance of a stanza seems to lie in the last
The melodic line. If rhyme exist in previous lines and not /
stanza* uL* in t ^ ie l ast ^ e ear wi ^ not receive an impres-r
in last line s ion of tonal finish. Thus if the foregoing
stanza stood as follows:
" Once more the gate behind me falls;
Once more before my face
I see the moulder' d Abbey walls,
That stand within the wood,"
we could not call the stanza a rhymed stanza, because,
although the first and third lines rhyme, there is no ter-
minal rhyme, and so to the ear no sense of melodic com-
MELODY 105
pleteness. Therefore, although we may easily omit off-
rhymes, we cannot omit finish-rhymes, and maintain
melodic completeness.
For the same reason it is obvious that, when rhymes
are placed irregularly through a stanza, they must not
Rhymes ^ e to ^ ar a P art ^ or tne ear to correlate them
must not be and carry them as a tonal unit. " Pheidip-
pides " has, I think, somewhat this defect,
the rhyme-scheme being needlessly complex. There are
eight lines to the stanza, the first four each having a dif-
ferent tonal ending. The last four reverse the scheme,
the fifth rhyming with the fourth, the sixth with the
third, while the last two are again twisted about, the
seventh rhyming with the first, and the eighth with the
second. Melodic coherence is thus, in a measure, de-
stroyed the very long line being a further erasive factor,
and, except in the two central lines, the ear catches no
distinct tonal impression.
It is always best to use, among rhymes, a large pro-
portion of monosyllables. The strength of our language
lies in its monosyllables. Thus, such rhymed tones as
suddenly, universally, lack strength, and the lines wherein
they occur would gain in virility should one of the rhymes
be instead a monosyllable, as sky.
In English, in order to have rhyme, it is necessary to
have absolute coincidence of the terminal consonant
Rhyme sounds. We also require coincidence of ter-
absoiuteco- m inal vowel sounds ; but some stretching of
incidence these is permissible, while none at all is per-
consonant missible in the consonant sounds. Thus art
sounds but an d ivcrt may be considered as rhymes, but
not of
vowels time and fine may not. Words need not be
spelled alike indeed in our unphonetic language we may
not compel such a condition, but they must strike the
io6 THE MUSICAL BASIS OF VERSE
same tone; as hear, sphere ; shoe, through; news, confuse.
Certain words which are spelled differently but pro-
nounced exactly alike, both as to consonant and vowel
sounds, such as air, heir ; there, their ; sent, scent, cent
cannot be considered rhymes because they are not con-
trasted tones, but, both in vowel and consonant sounds,
phonetically identical.
It has become the custom in these latter days with
that tendency of eras barren in production to riot in
hyper-criticism, which hyper-criticism rules out as im-
perfect and untrue all rhymes not absolutely coincident
in vowel cadence. Such rhymes as the following: De-
fender, Leander : (Keats). Valley, melancholy : (Keats).
Near it, spirit, inherit : (Shelley). Wert, art : (Shelley).
Moon, alone: (Tennyson). With her, together : (Tenny-
son). Valleys, lilies: (Tennyson). Chatters, waters:
(Wordsworth). Weary, sanctuary : (Wordsworth). Re-
turning, morning : (Gray). Beech, stretch: (Gray).
The question arises, why if these rhymes are in-
admissible, because tonally defective have the greatest
imperfect and best artists of verse, of all time, used
cadence them ? The fact is that they are not tonally
defective. We have already examined the tonic chord,
or perfect authentic cadence, of music, and see that it
consists of the tonic or key-note, with the addition of its
third and fifth, which complete it tonally. Now it is
quite as correct for a melody to end upon either the third
or the fifth as upon the tonic, because either of these
notes is a component of the perfect chord, the correlating
ear instinctively supplying the fundamental note. This
sort of ending is called the Imperfect Authentic Cadence.
Now, in verse, when vowel sounds are so closely re-
lated as to give practically a coincident vibration, we
may consider them in the light of the musical imperfect
MELODY 107
cadence and so admit them to use. Such rhymes as the
list given above belong to the verse imperfect cadence,
and, used with discretion, are just as tonally satisfying
to the ear as the perfect cadence ; because, although they
have not the sense of absolute finality of the tonic, or
true rhyme, they produce upon the ear the same tonal
impression. Of course it requires much nicety of ear to
distinguish between tones which are correlated and those
which are not. A conspicuous absence of this discrim-
inative faculty is observable in the odd, flashing, often
wonderfully prismatic, bits of verse bits, rather than
coherent verses of the late Emily Dickinson ; where are
frequent such startling tonal combinations as denied,
smiled; book, think; all, soul; own, young ; etc.
No, we cannot rule out the imperfect cadence. In
a language which admits six sounds of A ; six sounds of
E; three sounds of I; five sounds of O; and five sounds
of U not to mention combined vowel sounds, should
we discard all the beautiful melodic effects possible with
this factor, we should have verse-poverty indeed, instead
of, as we really have, great opulence.
And the fact remains that in the end it is the poets,
and not the critics, who determine what words or rhymes
shall be used, simply by using them. They present us
with a coin which passes current by reason of its very
adaptability. They fill our literature with tones attuned
to finer cadences than is ever pedagogically attainable.
' We, the musicians, know," says Abt Vogler.
We have already seen how the feminine ending be-
comes an added factor in motion. In the same way
Feminine feminine rhymes become an added factor in
facto 1 ? melody by prolonging the cadence. Double
melody O r feminine rhymes must, of course, always be
used with restraint and a good ear. It is not quite such
io8 THE MUSICAL BASIS OF VERSE
good art to set two monosyllables against a dissyllable
as to have both composed of either dissyllables or mono-
syllables. Thus Aurora and for her is not so pure as for
her and bore her. Such rhymes as fabric and dab brick
used by Browning are entirely inadmissible, because
over-strained, grotesque, and cacophonous. Many of
Mrs. Browning's double rhymes are also questionable.
Rhymes should be apposite in sound as well as in senti-
ment.
Triple rhymes are apt to have a grotesque effect, but
a notable exception is Hood's " Bridge of Sighs," where
Triple they are so handled as to seem to add a note
IpftTbe of P at h os to the theme. Remarkable corn-
grotesque binations of them may be found in the " Bab
Ballads " ; and in Browning's " Pacchiarotto " and " Flight
of the Duchess " there are some wonderful triple rhymes,
but they impress one almost more as tonal gymnastics
than as legitimate music. As a rule it is best to avoid
rhymes of more than two syllables, as it adds nothing to
the melody of, and is apt to detract from, the dignity of
a poem.
I have already pointed out that rhymes should not be
too far apart for the ear to coordinate them tonally.
Rhyme ^ ut ^ ' ls c l ul ' te as Da d to overload rhyme need-
should not be lessly and produce tonal indigestion. Very
wonderful effects are producible by rhyme-
repetitions when they are organic and for a purpose as
I shall presently show but they need the finest percep-
tion to adjust. It is invaluable to study and analyse the
rhyme-schemes of the best verse, and to determine for
one's self wherein the melodic secret lies. In the sonnet
a metric form so perfect that its use has suffered no
eclipse in five centuries the intrinsic virtue lies in the
rhymed sequences. Kindred to it in basic purpose is
MELODY 109
the beautiful Spenserian stanza. The rhyme-groupings
in Keats's odes are balanced with wonderful delicacy,
giving them that melodious flow which makes of the
poems perennial music.
Verse rhyme-schemes will be treated in detail in the
next chapter.
There is a certain coordination of thought by which
the concept of one sound seems to draw to it, as the
magnet draws the steel, cognate or related sounds, so
that all impinge upon the ear as a harmonious whole.
This tonal inter-relation or correspondence is only an-
other manifestation of that law of sympathetic vibration
previously noted, which, in this conjunction, operates
to the fluency of melody within the verse. Thus we
see that the poet not so much seeks his effects as
they seek him ; and, to the trained imagination, tone
combinations present themselves naturally, as by right
divine.
Within this law of inter-related tones is comprehended
Rhyme and its two great coefficients, Tone-colour and
Tone-colour Alliteration. Refrains would seem to be a
of verse \&\\s further differentiated.
The term Tone-colour (the word colour being borrowed
from a visual art, painting, and tone from poetry's sister
art, music) means those gradations of melodic light and
shade producible to the ear by nice adjustments of vowel
consonances and contrasts within the verse and stanza. 1
" When the voice utters the sound denoted by the English character A,
it makes, not a single tone, but a tone composed of a number of other tones.
When it utters the sound denoted by the English character O, it again utters
a tone which is not single, but composed of a number of other tones ; and
the difference between the two sounds, by which the ear distinguishes A from
O, is due to the fact that certain of the ingredient sounds are prominent in
A, while certain others are prominent in O. As in making the colour purple
no THE MUSICAL BASIS OF VERSE
Professor Max Miiller tells us, in the " Science of Lan-
guage," concretely just what vowels are. "What we
what call vowels are neither more nor less than the
vowels are qualities, or colours, or timbres of our voice,
and these are determined by the form of the vibrations,
which form again is determined by the form of the buccal
tubes. ... Vowels are produced by the form of the
vibrations. They vary like the timbre of different instru-
ments, and we in reality change the instruments on which
we speak when we change the buccal tubes in order to
pronounce a, e, i, o, u." (Lecture iii.)
Thus when we speak of Keats as " a great colourist,"
and Wordsworth as not" a great colourist," we mean that
the verse of the former is filled with rich ancLvarvinp-
toae^iCojTi^matipns, while in that of the latter this rich-
ness and variety are virtually absent.
Coleridge, who at his best had a fine feeling for colour,
used to call the attention of his children to the melody
of such a verse as this, from " Love ":
out of a composition of red and violet, we should have different shades of
purple according as we should make the red or violet more prominent in the
mixture ; so in making up a sound, the buccal cavity manages, by coordina-
tions of muscles which are learned in childhood, to render now one, now
another ingredient-sound more prominent, and thus to bring out different
shades of tone. It is a certain shade of tone which we call A, another
which we call O, another which we call E, another which we call U; and
so on : and the ear discriminates one of these shades of tone from another,
as the eye discriminates one shade of colour from another. It is this analogy
between processes belonging to sound and processes belonging to light which
has originated the very expressive term, ' Tone-colour' in acoustics." SID-
NEY LANIER : " The Science of English Verse," chap. xi.
" The tongue, the cavity of the fauces, the lips, teeth, and palate, with
its velum pendulum and uvula performing the office of a valve between the
throat and nostrils, as well as the cavity of the nostrils themselves, are all
concerned in modifying the impulse given to the breath as it issues from the
larynx, and in producing the various vowels and consonants." MAX MtJL-
LER : " Science of Language," Second Series; lecture iii.
MELODY HI
' I played a s^ft and doleful air,
I sang an 01d and moving story,
An 01d rude s^ng, that suited well
That ruin, wild and binary."
Here O and U are the vowels played upon ; but often
the nuances will slide through the whole gamut of vowel
Effects of sounds, subtly interweaving them one with
toning another. The ear takes pleasure in having the
tone-impression renewed, recombined, and contrasted,
drinking in as a melodic whole both the variation and the
repetition. Certain tones repeated bear a subtle relation
to the interweaved figures in musical compositions.
To attempt to lay down lines for the melodic effects
achieved through toning would be futile, as these depend
entirely upon the feeling and auditory sensitiveness of
the artist. The most valuable course of training in this
particular is to study the great colourists among the poets,
and so to saturate one's self with the underlying spirit
of verse-tones that, when composing, the right ones will
instinctively present themselves. I give a few illustra-
tive examples of rich vowel effects; but the student will
find plenty upon every page of the great poets.
" At last they heard a home that shrilled cleare
Throughout the wood that ecchoed againe,
And made the forrest ring, as it would rive in twaine."
SPENSER : " Faerie Queene," ii., 3, 20.
" How sweet the moonlight sleeps upon this bank !
Here will we sit, and let the sounds of music
Creep in our ears : soft stillness and the night
Become the touches of sweet harmony.
Sit, Jessica. Look, how the floor of heaven
Is thick inlaid with patines of bright gold :
H2 THE MUSICAL BASIS OF VERSE
There's not the smallest orb which thou behold' st
But in his motion like an angel sings,
Still quiring to the young-eyed cherubims :
Such harmony is in immortal souls; "
SHAKESPEARE : " The Merchant of Venice," v. i.
" She was a gordian shape of dazzling hue,
Vermilion-spotted, golden, green, and blue ;
Striped like a zebra, freckled like a pard,
Eyed like a peacock, and all crimson barr'd ;
And full of silver moons, that, as she breathed,
Dissolved, or brighter shone, or interwreathed
Their lustres with the gloomier tapestries "
KEATS : " Lamia."
" Then saw they how there hove a dusky barge,
Dark as a funeral scarf from stem to stern,
Beneath them ; and descending they were ware
That all the decks were dense with stately forms
Black-stoled, black-hooded, like a dream by these
Three queens with crowns of gold and from them rose
A cry that shivered to the tingling stars,"
TENNYSON : " The Passing of Arthur."
" The lady sprang up suddenly,
The lovely lady, Christabel !
It moaned as near, as near can be,
But what it is she cannot tell.
On tne other side it seems to be,
Of the huge, broad-breasted old oak tree."
COLERIDGE : " Christabel."
Of this last quotation Professor Corson remarks: " The
form of this stanza is quite perfect. Note the suggestive-
ness of the abrupt vowels in the first verse, the abate-
ment required for the proper elocution in the second
verse, the prolongable vowels and sub-vowels of the
MELODY 113
third, and then the short vowels again in the fourth.
Then note how the vowels in the last verse swell respon-
sive to the poet's conception, and how encased they are
in a strong framework of consonants." 1
Verse-toning depends quite as much upon the con-
cordance and melodic adjustment of consonant sounds as
upon the skilful variation and adaptation of the vowel
sounds.
Turning again to the " Science of Language," we
find consonants scientifically defined. ' There is no
What reason why languages should not have been
consonants entirely formed of vowels. There are words
consisting of vowels only, such as Latin eo t
I go ; ea, she ; eoa, eastern ; the Greek eioeis (but for the
final j); the Hawaiian hooiaioai, to testify, (but for its
initial breathing). Yet these very words show how un-
pleasant the effect of such a language would have been.
Something else was wanted to supply the bones of lan-
guage, namely, the consonants. Consonants are called
in Sanscrit vyanjana, which means ' rendering distinct or
manifest,' while the vowels are called svara, sounds."
(Lecture iii.)
In casting a verse of poetry, harsh or barbarous con-
trasts of consonants, and juxtapositions of those difficult
to be pronounced together, must, as a rule, be avoided.
We all remember the unpronounceable catches with
which, as children, we used to test each other's powers of
articulation. For instance :
" 'Midst thickest mists and stiff est frosts,
With strongest fists and stoutest boasts,
He thrusts his fists against the posts,
And still insists he sees the ghosts."
1 " Primer of English Verse," chap. ii.
H4 THE MUSICAL BASIS OF VERSE
This quatrain is not poetry, not so much because of
absence of meaning, as because it is, from beginning to
phonetic end, the most racking cacophony; and cacoph-
consonance O ny can never be poetry. We must steer clear
of the " consonantal rocks," as some one has felicitously
put it. Thus the whole verse becomes tonally organic.
Word fits to word with such perfection of rhetorical join-
ery that the poem flows with the unified impulse of
a running stream. To this consonantal fitness some give
the name of phonetic consonance. I much prefer it to
the jaw-breaking term phonetic syzygy 1 employed by Syl-
vester, and followed by Lanier and others. It is not
necessary to give special examples of phonetic con-
sonance, as these form a large part of all toning, con-
trasting and separating the vowel nuances. Neither this
nor alliteration which is a form of phonetic consonance
are really separable from the general studies in colour,
as all are integral parts of one melodic purpose.
Dissonances are also, at times and for special ends,
permissible. Shakespeare, where it serves the theme,
has many instances of sharp, even harsh, consonantal
contrasts. Browning who may be called the Wagner
pf verse abounds with them ; and he has so enlarged
the scope of verse that he may be pardoned if, like his
great contemporary, he sometimes loses the tonal cen-
tre of gravity and slips over into pure, unmitigated
cacophony. 2
1 From the Greek syzygos : yoked together.
8 Browning's roughnesses will be found to be not metric, but always in
the diction. Moreover, in a great number of instances whether with the
best artistic taste or not this is done with intention and a view to produc-
ing a special effect. We see this in " Holy Cross Day," which opens with
a movement almost grotesque, but flows out, as the theme deepens, into
large, forcible, solemn measures. Another example is " The Grammarian's
Funeral," which begins with an onomatopoeic scramble, but deepens into
MELODY 115
In the eyes of many metrists, colour-toning is of more
importance even than rhyme, since rhyme furnishes only
the terminal tones, whereas tone-colour furnishes the in-
ternal music which is inherent in all true poetry whether
verse be rhymed or not. In blank verse all the melody
lies, of course, in the internal toning.
Next to tone-colour, and rivalling it in the distribution
of tone-values, stands alliteration, with its subdivision of
onomatopoeia. Alliteration is the repetition
Alliteration
of a letter generally a consonant at the be-
ginning of, or within, several contiguous words of a verse,
or words almost contiguous. Thus :
" With /isp of /eaves, and ripple of rain." SWINBURNE.
"Stinging, ringing spindrift, nor the/ulmar/'lying j /ree."
KIPLING.
" Murmuring irom Glarawara's inmost caves." WORDSWORTH.
" Am/ drowsy tink/ings /u//the distant fo/ds." GRAY.
" The /eague-/ong ro//er thundering on the reef." TENNYSON.
'" The moan of doves in immemorial 'e/ms,
And murmuring of innumerable ^ees." TENNYSON.
" The are, /ack <r/iff r/anged round him." TENNYSON.
These repetitions give a tone-consonance very closely
related to rhyme, and bind together special words within
the verse exactly in the same manner in which rhyme
splendid meteoric climax. Browning can be melodic enough, too, when he
chooses. " The Flower's Name," " Rabbi Ben Ezra," " Over the Sea our
Galleys Went," " Heap Cassia Buds," " One Way of Love," " Meeting at
Night," " A Toccata of Galuppi's," " Memorabilia," " There's a Woman
Like a Dew-drop," " One Word More," and a host of others, are full of a
41 rich and haunting music " not easily to be matched in English verse.
n6 THE MUSICAL BASIS OF VERSE
binds together, and tonally unifies, special verses within
the stanza.
Thus, in the first quotation, / correlates lisp and leaves,
while r correlates ripple and rain. In the second quota-
tion the alliteration extends to whole groups of letters:
inging, inging, in, i; and then the /in spindrift intro-
duces the second alliteration on /. In the third, the
alliteration is upon m and r. In the fourth, it plays
between the letters d and // this and the following ones
taking on that more subtle correspondence of initial with
internal alliteration. In the fifth, the play is upon
/ and r. The sixth is a very subtle web of m, n, and /.
This internal alliteration does not appeal so quickly to
the eye as initial alliteration, and many persons would
read this passage without in the least detecting the rela-
tion of sounds, merely having an aesthetic pleasure in
the harmonious flow of the verse. In the seventh, we
have again initial alliteration, sharp and resonant, upon
b and cl; the / and ck in black introducing the second
alliterative tone.
The key to harmonious alliteration lies, I think, in the
etymological grouping of consonants, these being along
Theke to purely phonetic lines. English teachers do
harmonious not make much of these groupings, and we
alliteration haye ^ ^^ tQ ^ Q reek grammar f or sug .
gestions in making a table of them.
TABLE OF CONSONANT GROUPS
Liquids : /, m, n, r. (/and r are also called trills.)
Aspirate : h.
Sibillant : (or spirant) s.
SMOOTH. MIDDLE. ROUGH.
Labials : p. b. ph or/
Palatals: k. ^(hard). ^(guttural).
Linguals : /. d. th.
MELODY 117
Of the consonants not included in the above table, c is
either s or k, according as it is hard or soft. J and soft
g, which do not exist phonetically in Greek, Professor
Miiller classes as soft aspirates. Q is another sound of k.
V is another sound of f. W and y we consider phoneti-
cally vowels.
X and z are called by the Greeks double consonants be-
cause they are compound in sound, x being composed of
k sound and s sound ; z being composed of d and soft s.
But none of the letters indicated in this last paragraph
are often used alliteratively.
Now it is evident that, if the alliterative letters come
from the same group, the sound of the verse will be
peculiarly suave ; and, conversely, if they come from con-
trasted groups, the sound will be more dissonant. Thus,
' The league-long roller," etc., has its alliterations from
the same consonant group ; while " The bare, black cliff,"
etc., has them from sharply contrasted groups, and thus
gives phonetically the desired impression of harshness.
The feeling for alliteration lies deep at the core of Eng-
lish speech. It is our one inheritance from the literature
Deep feeling of the Anglo-Saxons ; and a priceless one it is!
foraiiit- if- becomes difficult to imagine how harsh Eng-
eration in ....
English hsh diction would be, wanting this softening
verse anc j binding element. In Anglo-Saxon verse
alliteration took the place of rhyme. The introduction
in the fourteenth century of French and Italian forms
swept aside the clumsier Teutonic methods, and made of
the new speech something more melodious and plastic.
Chaucer, giving it classic form, caught, and interwove
with echoes of the warm southern tones, this fine, native
melodic element. Spenser may be said to clasp hands
with Chaucer across two centuries for between them
lie no great English poets and such melodic hints as
n8 THE MUSICAL BASIS OF VERSE
the older artist left, the younger caught up and devel-
oped into a lofty music which has never been surpassed.
Subsequent poets owe much of their tonal inspiration to
Spenser; but it was particularly in his rescue and elabo-
ration of alliteration his genius putting upon the coin
a stamp which made it current for all time that he laid
a debt upon his countrymen. Here are some examples
from the older poets.
" The heraudes lefte hir priking up and doun;
Now ringen trompes loude and clarioun ;
Ther is namore to seyn but west and est
In goon the speres ful sadly in arest ;
In goth the sharpe spore into the syde.
Ther seen men who can juste and who can ryde ;
Ther shiveren shaftes upon sheeldes thikke ;
He feleth thurgh the herte-spoon the prikke.
Up springen speres twenty foot on highte ;
Out goon the swerdes as the silver brighte."
CHAUCER: " Canterbury Tales," 2601.
" By this the northerne wagoner had set
His sevenfold teme behind the stedfast starre
That was in ocean waves yet never wet,
But firme is fixt, and sendeth light from farre
To al that in the wide deepe wandring arre ; "
SPENSER: "Faerie Queene," ii. i.
" Love in a humour play'd the prodigal,
And bade my senses to a solemn feast ;
Yet more to grace the company withal,
Invites my heart to be the chief est guest :"
MICHAEL DRAYTON : Sonnet.
" Upon her head she wears a crown of stars,
Through which her orient hair waves to her waist,
By which believing mortals hold her fast,
MELODY 119
And in those golden cords are carried even,
Till with her breath she blows them up to heaven.
She wears a robe enchased with eagles' eyes,
To signify her sight in mysteries :
Upon each shoulder sits a milk-white dove, m
And at her feet do witty serpents move."
BEN JONSON : " Truth," from " Hymenaei."
" Care-charmer Sleepe, Sonne of the sable night, !
Brother to death, in silent darkness born,
Relieve my languish and restore the light ;
With dark forgetting of my care returne,
And let the day be time enough to mourne
The ship-wracke of my ill-adventured youth :
Let waking eyes suffice to waile their scorn
Without the torment of the night's untruth."
SAMUEL DANIEL : Sonnet.
" Come live with me, and be my love,
And we will all the pleasures prove,
That valleys, groves, or hill, or field,
Or woods and steepy mountains yield;
" Where we will sit upon the rocks,
And see the shepherds feed their flocks,
By shallow rivers, to whose falls
Melodious birds sing madrigals."
-CHRISTOPHER MARLOWE: "The Passionate Shepherd to his
Love."
" Lay a garland on my hearse
Of the dismal yew;
Maidens, willow branches bear,
Say I died true.
120 THE MUSICAL BASIS OF VERSE
" My love was false, but I was firm
From my hour of birth.
Upon my buried body lie
Lightly, gentle earth!"
BEAUMONT and FLETCHER : " The Maid's Tragedy."
" Oberon. My gentle Puck, come hither. Thou rememberest
Since once I sat upon a promontory,
And heard a mermaid on a dolphin's back
Uttering such dulcet and harmonious breath
That the rude sea grew civil at her song
And certain stars shot madly from their spheres, \
To hear the sea-maid's music.
"Puck. I remember.
"Oberon. That very time I saw, but thou couldst not,
Flying between the cold moon and the earth,
Cupid all armed : a certain aim he took
At a fair vestal throned by the west,
And loosed his love-shaft smartly from his bow,
As it should pierce a hundred thousand hearts :
But I might see young Cupid's fiery shaft
Quenched in the chaste beams of the watery moon,
And the imperial votaress passed on
In maiden meditation, fancy-free."
SHAKESPEARE: " Midsummer Night's Dream," ii. i.
Alliteration makes resounding music, but its abuse is
too easy. It requires a master-touch and the finest of
Alliteration self-restraint to use it with that subtlety which
easily charms, and not wearies the ear. One must
not " hunte the letter to the death," admon-
ishes George Gascoigne. A radical defect in much of
Swinburne's verse is that it is bitten by what John Bur-
roughs aptly calls " a leprosy of alliteration."
" Onomatopoeia 1 is that principle in language by which
1 From the Greek Onoma, name ; and poieo, make.
MELODY 121
words are formed in imitation of natural sounds," says
the Standard Dictionary. Also, " an imitative word."
Onomato- Max Muller tells us that " interjections, though
poeia they cannot be treated as parts of speech,
are nevertheless ingredients of our conversation ; so are
the clicks of the Bushmen and Hottentots, which have
been well described as remnants of animal speech. Again
there are in many languages words, if we may call them
so, consisting of the mere imitations of the cries of ani-
mals or the sounds of nature, and some of them have
been carried along by the stream of language into the
current of nouns and verbs," (Lecture vii.).
Such words as clinch, split, roar, murmur, bubble, whis-
per, sibillant, thundering, etc., are onomatopoeic.
Onomatopoeia is distinctly connotative. An onomato-
poeic word is a species of trope which, merely by the
sound, makes, to the mind an image or picture of that
which the word rhetorically expresses.
The examples given on page 115 for alliteration are all
more or less onomatopoeic. In the line " Murmuring
from Glaramara," etc., the alliterated letters are m and r,
which, interweaved with tones of the vowel a, give a sub-
dued murmurous echo, very suggestive of the soft, re-
verberant music of hidden waters. In the " league-long
roller" the prolonged vowel cadence could mean nothing
else but what it does mean, and it is capped by the
strong onomatopoeic word " thundering." In the two
lines beginning " And moan of doves " the web of m and
n and / makes a subtle onomatopoeic murmurous effect
all through the quotation. There is a fine reverberation
in such lines as these of Kipling:
" Jehovah of the Thunders,
Lord, God of Battles, aid!"
122 THE MUSICAL BASIS OF VERSE
In the following lines from " Paradise Lost " the sub-
stantives, adjectives, and verbs are distinctly onomato-
poeic, giving by their very sound the sense of unwieldi-
ness:
" That sea-beast
Leviathan, which God of all his works
Created hugest that swim the ocean stream."
This effect is heightened by the doubled notes in the bar
" hugest that." And again:
" part, huge of bulk,
Wallowing unwieldy, enormous in their gait,
Tempest the ocean."
These effects are what Tennyson meant by the term
" the marriage of sense with sound; " and happy is the
poet who possesses that superlative feeling for tone
which instinctively supplies the right word in colour as
well as meaning.
There is a golden thread of onomatopoeia running all
through language. In the imaginative diction of verse
it becomes more apparent, and is especially so in alliter-
ative effects. That alliteration will be most vivid and
organic which is at the same time the most onomatopoeic.
The foregoing elements of verse are indissolubly linked
together; they govern the euphonious distribution of
vowel and consonant tones, and so fuse and combine into
a perfect whole the entire verse, that one may justly
apply to it the beautiful term, " articulate music."
I have elsewhere pointed out the danger of over-harp-
ing upon one rhyme. When rhyme-repetition is used
arbitrarily, and without purpose, it is likely to become
MELODY 123
as deadly to the ear as the grind of a hand-organ.
But in a certain class of poems, and when used with
Rhyme- discrimination, rhyme repetition and phrase-
repetition as repetition (refrains) may be made to play an
important part in the melody of verse.
verse
melody j n ^ e rhyme-groups below, from Tenny-
son's " Lotos Eaters," the iterated tone produces upon
the ear a soothing, lulling impression, which is height-
ened in the first example by adding a bar to each suc-
cessive line, so that it gives the effect of the incoming of
a lazy tide.
Here are cool mosses deep,
And thro' the moss the ivies creep,
And in the stream the long-leaved flowers weep,
And from the craggy ledge the poppy hangs in sleep.
How sweet it were, hearing the downward stream,
With half -shut eyes ever to seem
Falling asleep in a half-dream !
" Music that gentlier on the spirit lies
Than tired eyelids upon tired eyes ;
Music that brings sweet sleep down from the blissful skies."
Browning's "A Toccata of Galuppi's " is made into
wonderful cadences by binding together each stanza by
a single tone.
" O Galuppi, Baldassaro, this is very sad to find !
I can hardly misconceive you ; it woul d prove me deaf and blind ;
But although I take your meaning, 'tis with such a heavy mind !
124 THE MUSICAL BASIS OF VERSE
" Here you come with your old music, and here's all the good
it brings.
What, they lived once thus at Venice where the merchants were
the kings,
Where St. Mark's is, where the Doges used to wed the sea with
rings ?
" Was a lady such a lady, cheeks so round and lips so red,
On her neck the small face buoyant, like a bell-flower on its
bed,
O'er the breast's superb abundance where a man might base his
head?"
Titania, in" Midsummer Night's Dream" (iii. i), ex-
horts the fairies to care for Bottom in a stanza of honeyed
rhyme-repetition.
" Be kind and courteous to this gentleman;
Hop in his walks and gambol in his eyes ;
Feed him with apricocks and dew-berries,
With purple grapes, green figs and mulberries ;
The honey-bags steal from the humble-bees,
And for night-tapers crop their waxen thighs,
And light them at the fiery glow-worm's eyes,
To have my love to bed and to arise ;
And pluck the wings from painted butterflies
To fan the moonbeams from his sleeping eyes :
Nod to him, elves, and do him courtesies."
This certainly is " linked sweetness long drawn out."
It would seem as if rhyme could be pushed no farther;
yet it can. In " Through the Metidja," Browning has
achieved a marvellous desert effect by the use, through
five stanzas in all, forty lines of a single tone. No
picture-drawing in words could convey to the mind
MELODY 125
a more poignant impression than does this word-organ-
point of the immeasurable monotony of the great desert. 1
It is a consummate touch.
" As I ride, as I ride,
With a full heart for my guide,
So its tide rocks my side,
As I ride, as I ride,
That, as I were double-eyed,
He in whom our Tribes confide,
Is descried, ways untried,
As I ride, as I ride.
" As I ride, as I ride
To our Chief and his Allied,
Who dares chide my heart's pride
As I ride, as I ride ?
Or are witnesses denied
Through the desert waste and wide
Do I glide unespied
As I ride, as I ride ? ' '
As in the foregoing poem, we often find central rhymes
balancing terminal rhymes and producing, as in internal
Balanced alliteration, much more subtle effects than the
term'in'aT" 11 obvious terminal consonance. The internal
cadence music of the following song from Tennyson's
" Princess " is very delicate.
1 Wagner achieves a similar effect in " Rheingold," where the superim-
posed melodies of the Rhine daughters are rippled over one tremendous
major triad, held from beginning to end. By this cataract of monotonous
tone, he makes the listener feel the eternal pulse of the waters. Both these
effects are emotional impressions.
126 THE MUSICAL BASIS OF VERSE
" The splendour falls on castle walls
And snowy summits old in story;
The long light shakes across the lakes,
And the wild cataract leaps in glory.
Blow, bugle, blow, set the wild echoes flying,
Blow, bugle; answer, echoes, dying, dying, dying.
" O hark, O hear ! how thin and clear,
And thinner, clearer, farther going ;
O sweet and far, from cliff and scar,
The horns of elfland faintly blowing !
Blow, let us hear the purple glens replying :
Blow, bugle ; answer, echoes, dying, dying, dying.
" O love, they die in -yon rich sky,
They faint on hill or field or river :
Our echoes roll from soul to soul,
And grow forever and forever.
Blow, bugle, blow, set the wild echoes flying,
And answer, echoes, answer, dying, dying, dying."
In the following excerpt from a poem entitled
" Grishna," by Sir Edwin Arnold, there is a splendid
sensuous music produced by the central rhyme-repe-
titions, which are everywhere very warm in tone.
" With fierce noons beaming, moons of glory gleaming,
Full conduits streaming, where fair bathers lie;
With sunsets splendid, when the strong day, ended,
Melts into peace, like a tired lover's sigh
So cometh summer nigh.
" And nights of ebon blackness, laced with lustres
From starry clusters ; courts of calm retreat,
Where wan rills warble over glistening marble ;
Cold jewels, and the sandal, moist and sweet
These for' the time are meet."
MELODY 127
But perhaps the crowning example of repeated tones,
internal and external producing, as it were, a succession
of tonal waves upon the ear is to be found in Poe's
" Raven."
" Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered weak and
weary,
Over many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore
While I nodded, nearly napping, suddenly there came a tap-
ping
As of some one gently rapping, rapping at my chamber door.
1 'Tis some visitor,' I muttered, ' tapping at my chamber door
Only this and nothing more.'
" Ah, distinctly I remember it was in the bleak December,
And each separate dying ember wrought its ghost upon the
floor.
Eagerly I wished the morrow ; vainly I had sought to borrow
From my books surcease of sorrow sorrow for the lost Lenore
For the rare and radiant maiden whom the angels name
Lenore
Nameless here forevermore.
" And the silken sad uncertain rustling of each purple curtain
Thrilled me filled me with fantastic terrors never felt before ;
So that now, to still the beating of my heart, I stood repeating
' 'Tis some visitor entreating entrance at my chamber door
Some late visitor entreating entrance at my chamber door;
This it is and nothing more.'
" And the Raven, never flitting, still is sitting, still is sitting
On the pallid bust of Pallas just above my chamber door;
And his eyes have all the seeming of a demon's that is dreaming,
And the lamplight o'er him streaming throws his shadow on
the floor ;
And my soul from out that shadow that lies floating on the floor,
Shall be lifted nevermore."
128 THE MUSICAL BASIS OF VERSE
The rich interweaved tones, the rhyme-correspond-
ences, with feminine cadence, and the repetitions and
refrains make this poem, melodically, one of the most
remarkable in our language. The whole rings with
a weird melody very consonant with the theme. Poe,
more than any other poet, has exploited this peculiar
grace of verse; but in the " Raven " he has touched high-
water mark. Some of his other poems "Ullalume"
for instance are of such tenuity that one examines them
more as essays in verse-tones than as meaning poems.
This brings us directly to the cognate division of Re-
frains. A refrain (or burden) is the repetition of a single
Refrains as P nrase at the end of each stanza of a poem,
a factor of Occasionally it comes in the middle of the
stanza; more seldom, at every two or three
stanzas. Here is a ringing refrain.
" My heart is wasted with my woe,
Oriana.
There is no rest for me below,
Oriana.
When the long dun wolds are ribb'd with snow,
And loud the Norland whirlwinds blow,
Oriana,
Alone I wander to and fro,
Oriana.
" She stood upon the castle wall,
Oriana :
She watch' d my crest among them all,
Oriana :
She saw me fight, she heard me call,
When forth there stepp'd a foeman tall,
Oriana,
Atween me and the castle wall,
Oriana.
MELODY 129
" The bitter arrow went aside,
Oriana :
The false, false arrow went aside,
Oriana :
The damned arrow glanced aside,
And pierc'd thy heart, my love, my bride,
Oriana !
Thy heart, my life, my love, my bride,
Oriana!"
TENNYSON : " The Ballad of Oriana."
The solemn iteration of this refrain is like the tolling
of a bell, and thrills the nerves in the same way.
Belonging in the same category is the " Sands of Dee."
The constant repetition of fateful, connotative phrases
holds the imagination suspended and intensifies the
tragedy of the situation.
" ' O Mary, go and call the cattle home,
And call the cattle home,
And call the cattle home,
Across the sands o' Dee ; '
The western wind was wild and dank wi' foam,
And all alone went she.
" The creeping tide came up along the sand,
And o'er and o'er the sand,
And round and round the sand,
As far as eye could see ;
The blinding mist came down and hid the land
And never home came she.
" ' O, is it weed, or fish, or floating hair
A tress o' golden hair,
O' drowned maiden's hair,
Above the nets at sea ?
9
THE MUSICAL BASIS OF VERSE
Was never salmon yet that shone so fair,
Among the stokes on Dee.'
They rowed her in across the rolling foam,
The cruel, crawling foam,
The cruel, hungry foam,
To her grave beside the sea ;
But still the boatmen hear her call the cattle home
Across the sands o' Dee."
CHARLES KINGSLEY : " The Sands of Dee."
In our next quotation we catch the music of waters.
Compare this echoing, melodious rush with the adjective-
clang of " How the Water Comes Down at Lodore."
Here, as in the " Raven," we find the internal conso-
nances saturating with colour the verse, which is crowned
by the melodious refrain.
" Out of the hills of Habersham,
Down the valleys of Hall,
I hurry amain to reach the plain,
Run the rapid and leap the fall,
Split at the rock and together again,
Accept my bed, or narrow or wide,
And flee from folly on every side
With a lover's pain to attain the plain
Far from the hills of Habersham,
Far from the valleys of Hall.
"All down the hills of Habersham,
All through the valleys of Hall,
The rushes cried Abide, abide,
The wilful waterweed held me thrall,
The laving laurel turned my tide,
MELODY 131
The ferns and the fondling grass said Stay,
The dewberry dipped for to work delay,
And the little reed sighed Abide, abide,
Here in the hills of Habersham,
Here in the valleys of Hall"
SIDNEY LANIER : " Song of the Chattahoochee." 1
Delicate melodic effects are sometimes obtained by
refrain-inversions. Thus in " The Song of the River"
Retrain- (see page 39) we read in the first line " Clear
inversions anc j coo ^ c j ear an( j coo \ t " an d the third " Cool
and clear, cool and clear," the inversion giving variety
to the repetend. A charming effect of refrain-inversion
being indeed the making of it occurs in the following
little lyric.
" There is no spring, though skies be blue and tender,
And soft the warm breath of a gentler air;
Though scarves of green veil all the birches slender,
And blossoms star the open everywhere.
Though beauty breathe in every living thing,
Except thou lovest me there is no spring.
" There is no winter, though the sky may darken,
And chilly death hide all the world in snow;
No sound of spring, though all the soul may hearken,
No message from the flowers tombed below.
Though desolate the earth, the air, the sea,
There is no winter if thou lovest me ! "
ABBIE FARWELL BROWN: " Love's Calendar."
To get the very perfection of repetends and refrains
we must, however, go back to the seventeenth century.
1 From " Poems of Sidney Lanier." Copyright 1884, 1895, by Mary Day
Lanier, and published by Charles Scribner's Sons.
I3 2 THE MUSICAL BASIS OF VERSE
Nothing more spontaneously dainty than the following
exists. Such a lilt cannot quite be caught to-day.
" Why so pale and wan, fond lover ?
Prithee, why so pale ?
Will, when looking well can't move her,
Looking ill prevail ?
Prithee, why so pale ?
" Why so dull and mute, young sinner ?
Prithee, why so mute ?
Will, when speaking well can't win her,
Saying nothing do't ?
Prithee, why so mute ? "
SIR JOHN SUCKLING: " Why so Pale and Wan ? "
But the scope of the refrain is, in the end, limited, and
limits the verse. It would handicap strong emotion, so
, that in really fervid verse we never find it
Scope of the
refrain used. The utterance of passion cannot pause
limited for studied mellifluence.
Besides the details of verse-music already illustrated,
a poem should have a certain tonal homogeneity which
homogeneity is the result of unity in its controlling pur-
pose making its movements appeal to us as a whole.
In the perfect poem, stanza will modulate into stanza
sequently and harmoniously, in confluent waves of
sound, so that not one could be omitted and the poem
remain quite perfect; for the lyric unity of a poem is its
final test. This quality of homogeneity, or lyric unity,
may rightly be called harmony, because here the word is
used in its universal sense of concord, or completeness of
balance.
Thus, having followed to their conclusion the under-
MELODY 133
lying laws, the formative principles, of verse, we find
that verse has motion, melody, and harmony ; but not
pitch. 1
1 I must once more emphasise the fact that there can be in verse no such
thing as musical tonality, or pitch, although some teachers of metre claim for
it this quality. As I have elsewhere pointed out, verse is a single voice, a
melody. It is a melody because it has rhythmic vibration and tonal inter-
relation ; but the exact point in which the melody of verse differs from the
melody of music is just this one of pitch. Music has definite pitch, but
verse has no such quality. The modulations of the voice in reading or re-
citing poetry dependent as they are upon the perceptive and interpretive
genius of the reader or reciter cannot be so considered.
CHAPTER V
METRIC FORMS
CERTAIN metrical denominations have been used by
certain poets in certain lands, and have found such pop-
ular acceptance that other poets have imitated the forms,
not only in the same languages and lands but sometimes
in other languages and lands; so that they have been
adopted from literature to literature, and become as it
were cosmopolitan.
Italy was the fountain-head, not only of the literary
thought of the early Renaissance, but of most of the
Italy the forms into which that thought crystallised.
fountain- From Italy these art forms filtered through
head of J . . , , i
metric other countries, often undergoing local changes
forms which carried them into still further evolutions,
and multiplied variants of the originals. England
opened to all these new influences by the Norman Con-
quest proved a grateful soil and readily assimilated all
which came to it; using some forms imitatively while
transforming others to fit the peculiar demands of her
language and her muse, until they ceased to be alien,,
became germane to her thought and a part of her litera-
ture. While some of the forms blank verse, for instance
were imported directly from Italy, the immediate chan-
nel for most of them was France, where, throughout the
middle ages and the early Renaissance, minstrelsy of all
sorts reigned supreme. Indeed the Romance poets of
METRIC FORMS 135
southern France had no little hand in shaping the nascent
literatures of Europe.
In this chapter it is proposed to consider first those so
assimilated as to be distinctively English, and afterwards
those which have been used in direct imitation of foreign
models, and so have preserved their identity.
No consideration of English forms would be complete
without an examination of the one indigenous verse-form,
Anglo-Saxon the Anglo-Saxon ; although it is true that the
epic form Anglo-Saxon, further than by bestowing upon
English poetry the melodic factor of alliteration, has fur-
nished to it no forms, and has left upon it no imprint.
This is obviously because of the more artistic genius of
the continental forms, which prevailed inevitably by
reason of their inherent fitness. In nothing is this more
clearly evidenced than in the fate of two great works,
almost contemporaneous, of the fourteenth century;
William Langland's " The Vision of Piers the Plow-
man " (about 1362), and Geoffrey Chaucer's " Canterbury
Tales " (about 1374-1382). Between the ethical signifi-
cance of the two works there can be no comparison.
" Piers the Plowman" is a great and solemn allegorical
epic; the " Canterbury Tales " is a cycle of breezy metri-
cal romances. But to-day four centuries later the
" Canterbury Tales " is delightful reading, full of a fresh
realism and a sparkling humour whose charm never palls ;
while, except for the profounder researches of the
student, the great allegory lies forgotten upon dusty
shelves. Now what is the cause of the survival of the
lesser work in face of the oblivion which has overtaken
the greater ? Simply the difference in the forms into
which they were cast.
" The poem of Langland was forgotten. Nor was any
other destiny possible to it. Consciously or uncon-
136 THE MUSICAL BASIS OF VERSE
sciously, Langland rejected all elements of the common
life offered from above, from culture, learning, knight-
hood. His ' Visions ' are uncouth, primitive, amor-
phous; redolent of the soil, but heavy with it as well.
Rewrote in a revival of the old alliterative metre dear to
his Saxon forefathers; and the movement of his verses
is that of the labourer in the field, not that of the lady
in the dance:
" ' Duke of this dim place, anon undo the gates,
That Christ may comen in, the Kinge's son of heaven.'
" It was a noble metre; it had held sway over English
poetry for six hundred years a far longer reign than that
of the heroic blank verse, its upstart successor. Splen-
did passions had found expression in its surging, swaying
lines. Yet when Langland chose it for his vehicle it was
already doomed. Its grave inward music, its slow un-
relieved majesty, were of pure Teuton strain. They
could not satisfy the community into which was grad-
ually filtering from above a new element and a new
spirit." 1
In the Anglo-Saxon versification there is perceivable
a rough triple movement. The verse may be described
as 3/4, with a sharp caesura in the middle. The notation
of the bars is very irregular, there sometimes being two
syllables only, and at others more than three.
Also occasionally the line runs out longer. This verse
was recited, or chanted, by the bards to the accompani-
ment of their harps ; and it is easy to see how the volume
of syllables could be prolonged or shortened to a given
cadence, exactly as is the case in church chanting to-day,
thus giving what Lanier calls " an ordered riot of sounds."
J ViDA D. SCUDDER : " Social Ideals in .English Letters," chapt. i.
part iv.
METRIC FORMS 137
The scheme of alliteration the only binding element
which this verse shows is in general two alliterated let-
ters in the first section, and one in the second, though
this rule does not seem absolute. Here is a short quo-
tation from " The Battle of Maldon," sometimes called
' The Death of Byrhtnoth," a poem dating about 993. 1
" Byrhtnoth mathelode, bord hafenode,
wand wacne aesc, wordum maelde,
yrre and anraed, ageaf him andsware;
'Gehyrst thu, saelida, hvvaet this folc segeth ?
Hi willath eow to gafole garas syllan,
aettrene ord and ealde swurd,
tha heregeatu the eow act hilde ne deah.
Brimmana boda, abeod eft ongean ;
sege thinum leodum micle lathre spell,
thaet her stent unforcuth eorl mid his werode,
the wile geealgian ethel thysne,
yEthelraedes card, ealdres mines,
folc and foldan : feallan sceolan
haethene aet hilde ! ' "
To this Lanier furnishes the accompanying transla-
tion:
" Byrhtnoth cried to him, brandished the buckler,
shook the slim ash, with words made utterance, wrathful
and resolute, gave him his answer: ' Hearest thou, sea-
rover, that which my folk sayeth ? Yes, we will render
you tribute in javelins poisonous point and old-time
blade good weapons, yet forward you not in the fight.
1 Of the versification of " Byrhtnoth," Lanier says: " In most lines the
three first bars or feet begin with the same consonant ; in others the three
first bars begin with a vowel, though not necessarily the same vowel ; in
others the two middle bars begin with the same consonant ; in others the
first and third bars begin with the same consonant. These four alliterative
types are rarely departed from." " Science of English Verse," page 145.
138 THE MUSICAL BASIS OF VERSE
Herald of pirates, be herald once more: bear to thy peo-
ple a bitterer message, that here stands dauntless an
earl with his warriors, will keep us this country, land of
my Lord Prince Athelraed, folk and field: the heathen
shall perish in battle/ '
The earliest, most wide-spread, and, in one way most
important, verse-form developed in England is the Eng-
The English lish Ballad. It differs from others in that it
Ballad w , s no ^ an expression of literary or cultured
feeling, but of the thoughts, desires, and impulses of the
people. Therefore is it more spontaneous, and less an
achievement of artistic craftsmanship than a popular
growth. In essence it had for progenitor the bardic epics
of the earliest ages. ' The minstrels were an order of
men in the Middle Ages, who subsisted by the arts of
poetry and music, and sang to the harp verses composed
by themselves or others. They also appear to have
accompanied their songs with mimicry and action, and to
have practised such various means of diverting as were
much admired in those rude times, and supplied the
want of more refined entertainment. These arts ren-
dered them extremely popular in this (England) and all
the neighbouring countries; where no high scene of fes-
tivity was deemed complete that was not set off with the
exercise of their talents; and where, so long as the spirit
of chivalry subsisted, they were protected and caressed,
because their songs tended to do honour to the ruling
passion of the times, and to encourage and foment a
martial spirit." *
Genesis of The earliest ballads which we possess are of
the ballad mu ch antiquity and considerably antedate
Chaucer. This form of poetry obtained its greatest
1 THOMAS PERCY: " Reliques of Ancient English Poetry," vol. i.;
" Essay 0*1 the Minstrels."
METRIC FORMS 139
dominance in the northern shires of England and in
southern Scotland, thus partaking of the rugged north-
ern spirit. As it made its way southward and was
adopted into courtly circles, it became a more polished
instrument, but was also shorn of much of the native
vigour and spontaneity of the earlier verse.
Ballads were doubtless passed orally from mouth to
mouth, perhaps from generation to generation, and came
at last to be written those which were written, for pre-
sumably many were not by persons quite other than
those who composed them.
The metric form which the ballad took had of necessity
a foreign origin. The so-called English Ballad Metre is
technically a verse of seven bars of 2-beat rhythm (2/7)
with a strong central caesura which naturally divides it
into two sections. Written in full it stands as follows:
rir rir nr riv rir nr rir
" Ye gen-tle-men of England who live at home at ease
nr rir nr nr nr nr nr
How little do ye think up - on the dangers of the seas."
This form was developed from the Latin Septenary,
which found its way to England with other foreign influ-
The Latin ences at the time of the Conquest. " In late
septenary Latin poetry a metre had become common
which consisted of a half-verse of four accents, the last
accent falling on the last syllable, joined to a half-verse
of three accents with double (feminine) ending: on
account of the seven accents of the whole verse the
1 The central bar may be full, or may be filled out with a rest.
140 THE MUSICAL BASIS OF VERSE
metre was called Septenarius. It was furnished with
end-rime. Both in the church hymns, and in the songs
of wandering' clerks,' who strolled from nation to nation
secure in their common language, this metre was very
popular. Cf. the following opening couplet of a con-
vivial song:
" ' Meum est proposittim in taberna mori
6t viniim apposittim sitienti ori ! '
" This measure was soon used for English verse." l
In becoming adopted as an English metric medium it
suffered, however, a certain transformation. For the
feminine ending of the Latin, there was substituted the
sterner masculine ending, for which the English poets
have always had a strong instinct ; and, correlatively
with the docking the last bar of its unaccented syllable,
there comes the prefixing to the verse of the anacrusis.
The cadence of the verse is thereby radically altered.
There is a certain sing-song quality inherent in this
measure which rendered it well adapted to the simple
airs to which the ballads were sung.
Sometimes we find the ballad metre written out in
couplets of 2/7 verse, as in the foregoing example. More
often, however, it is divided by the central pause, and
appears in a quatrain of alternating 2/4 and 2/3 verse.
Doubtless the former was the original form of the Eng-
lish Septenary. Percy mentions that a number of ballads
which he gives in the " Reliques " as quatrains, appear
in the "Folio" as long couplets. Chapman, in his
translation of Homer, has selected these long, swinging
lines, which indeed seem to carry more dignity than
when split into quatrains. ' The rushing gallop of the
1 FRANCIS B. GUMMERE : " A Handbook of Poetics," chap. vii.
METRIC FORMS 141
long fourteen-syllable stanza in which it is written has
the fire and swiftness of Homer," comments Stopford
Brooke.
" But, ere stern conflict mixed both strengths, fair Paris stepped
before
The Trojan host; athwart his back a panther's hide he wore,
A crooked bow, and sword, and shook two brazen-headed darts,
With which, well armed, his tongue provoked the best of
Grecian hearts
To stand with him in single fight. Whom when the man
wronged most
Of all the Greeks, so gloriously saw stalk before the host;
As when a lion is rejoiced, with hunger half forlorn,
That finds some sweet prey, as a hart, whose grace lies in his
horn,
Or sylvan goat, which he devours, though never so pursued
With dogs and men; so Sparta's king exulted when he viewed
The fair-faced Paris so exposed to his thirsted wreak
Wherof his good cause made him sure."
GEORGE CHAPMAN: " The Iliad," book III.
And here is a fine modern specimen:
" Come, see the Dolphin's anchor forged 'tis at a white heat
now;
The bellows ceased, the flames decreased, though on the
forge's brow
The little flames still fitfully play through the sable mound,
And fitfully you still may see the grim smiths ranking round,
All clad in leathern panoply, their broad hands only bare ;
Some rest upon their sledges here, some work the windlass
there."
SAMUEL FERGUSSON : " The Forging of the Anchor."
142 THE MUSICAL BASIS OF VERSE
The earliest ballads are extremely loose in versifica-
tion, sometimes running the line out beyond metrical
Ancient limits, and often crowding extra syllables into
ballads f-he bar, so that in places the verse seems for
a time to depart into triple rhythm. Indeed some bal-
lads " MaryAmbree," for instance are distinctly triple
throughout. 1
But we find as the ballad approaches its entrance into
literature, it grows smoother and more carefully propor-
tioned. I give a few extracts from Percy's " Reliques of
Ancient Poetry." Many ballads were divided into parts,
anciently called fits.
" The Pers& owt of Northombarlande, 8
And a vowe to God mayd he,
That he wolde hunte in the mountayns
Off Chyviat within dayes thre
In the mauger of dought Dogles,
And all that ever with him be.
" The fattiste hartes in all Cheviat
He sayd he wold kill, and cary them away :
Be my feth, sayd the dougheti Dogles agayn,
I wyll let that hontyng yf that I may.
" Then the Pers owt of Banborowe cam,
With him a myghtye meany :
With fifteen hondrith archares bold ;
The wear chosen out of shyars thre.
1 There are also many ballads cast not in ballad metre, but in other stan-
zaic forms : "A Ballad of Luther," " On Thomas, Lord Cromwell," " Lit-
tle John Nobody," " Guy and Amarant," etc.
2 Percy assigns " Chevy Chace " to the early part of the fifteenth cen-
tury ; but there are fragmentary ballads of greater antiquity.
J 43
This begane on a monday at morn
In Cheviat the hillys so he ;
The chyld may rue that ys un-born,
It was the mor pitte.
The dryvars thorowe the woodes went
For to reas the dear ;
Bomen bickarte uppone the bent
With ther browd aras cleare.
" Then the wyld thorowe the woodes went
On every syde shear ;
Grea-hondes thorowe the greves glent
For to kyll thear dear. ' '
-The Ancient Ballad of " Chevy Chace," The First Fit.
" Nowe on the Eldridge hilles He walke
For thy sake, fair ladie ;
And He either bring you a ready token
Or He never more you see.
" The lady is gone to her own chaumbere,
Her maydens following bright :
Syr Cauline lope from care-bed soone,
And to the Eldridge hills is gone,
For to wake there all night.
" Unto midnight that the moone did rise,
He walked up and downe ;
Then a lightsome bugle heard he blowe
Over the bents soe browne :
Quoth hee, ' If cryance come till my heart,
I am ffar from any good towne.'
144 THE MUSICAL BASIS OF VERSE
" And soone he spyde on the mores so broad,
A furyous wight and fell ;
A ladye bright his brydle led,
Clad in a fayre kyrtell.
" And soe fast he called on syr Caullne,
' O man, I rede thee flye,
For, but if cryance come till thy heart,
I weene but thou mun dye.'
" He sayth, ' No cryance comes till my heart,
Nor, in faith, I wyll not flee ;
For, cause thou minged not Christ before,
The less me dreadeth thee.' "
" Sir Cauline," Part First.
' I can beleve, it shall you greve,
And somewhat you dystrayne ;
But, aftyrwarde, your paynes harde
Within a day or twayne
Shall sone aslake ; and ye shall take
Comfort to you agayne.
Why sholde ye ought ? for, to make thought,
Your labour were in vayne.
And thus I do ; and pray you to,
As hartely as I can ;
For I must to the grene vvode go,
Alone, a banyshed man.
Now syth that ye have shewed to me
The secret of your mynde,
I shall be playne to you agayne,
Lyke as ye shall me fynde.
METRIC FORMS 145
Syth it is so, that ye wyll go,
I wolle not leve behynde ;
Shall never be sayd the Not-browne Mayd
Was to her love unkynde :
Make you redy, for so am I,
Although it were anone ;
For, in my mynde, of all mankynde
I love but you alone."
" The Not-browne Mayd."
" He armed rode in forrest wide
And met a damsell faire,
Who told him of adventures great
Whereto he gave good eare.
ft Such wold I find, quoth Lancelot :
For that cause came I hither,
Thou seemst, quoth she, a knight full good,
And I will bring thee thither.
" Whereas a mighty knight doth dwell,
That now is of great fame :
Therefore tell me what wight thou art,
And what may be thy name.
" My name is Lancelot du Lake,
Quoth she, it likes me than ;
Here dwell es a knight who never was
Yet matcht with any man :
" Who has in prison threescore knights
And four, that he did wound ;
Knights of King Arthur's court they be,
And of his table round."
" Sir Lancelot du Lake."
10
146 THE MUSICAL BASIS OF VERSE
The smoother movement of this last excerpt betrays
its more modern composition. There is also a " Chevy
Chase" dating from Elizabeth's day, which was, until
the discovery by Bishop Percy, regarded as the original.
A brief comparison of the two shows the gain in versifi-
cation of the later one, and also its loss in native aroma.
" God prosper long our noble king,
Our lives and safetyes all ;
A woeful 1 hunting once there did
In Chevy-Chace befall ;
" To drive the deere with hound and home,
Erie Percy took his way ;
The child may rue that is unborne
The hunting of that day.
" The stout Erie of Northumberland
A vow to God did make,
His pleasure in the Scottish woods
Three summer days to take ;
" The cheefest harts in Chevy-Chace
To kill and beare away.
These tydings to Erie Douglas came,
In Scotland where he lay."
The Modern Ballad of " Chevy-Chace."
The most remarkable ballad of modern times from
a literary point of view, of any time is Coleridge's
Coleridge's " Rime of the Ancient Mariner." In its sub-
jective weirdness and horror it is quite unique,
its effect being heightened by the somewhat broken
rhythms, whose antique atmosphere Coleridge has won-
derfully reproduced.
METRIC FORMS 147
" It is an ancient Mariner,
And he stoppeth one of three.
' By thy long grey beard and glittering eye,
Now wherefore stopp'st thou me ?
' * The Bridegroom's doors are opened wide,
And I am next of kin ;
The guests are met, the feast is set :
May'st hear the merry din.'
" He holds him with his skinny hand,
' There was a ship, ' quoth he.
' Hold off ! unhand me, grey-beard loon ! '
Eftsoons his hand dropped he.
" He holds him with his glittering eye
The Wedding-Guest stood still,
And listens like a three years' child :
The Mariner hath his will."
" Rime of The Ancient Mariner," Part I.
f And the good south wind still blew behind,
But no sweet bird did follow,
Nor any day for food or play
Came to the mariner's hollo !
' And I had done a hellish thing,
And it would work 'em woe :
For all averred I had killed the bird
That made the breeze to blow.
' Ah wretch ! ' said they, < the bird to slay,
That made the wind to blow ! '" Ibid., Part II.
With throats unslaked, with black lips baked,
We could nor laugh nor wail ;
148 THE MUSICAL BASIS OF VERSE
Through utter drought all dumb we stood !
I bit my arm, I sucked the blood,
And cried, * A sail ! a sail ! '
"With throats unslaked, with black lips baked,
Agape they heard me call :
Gramercy ! they for joy did grin,
And all at once their breath drew in,
As they were drinking all.
" ' See ! see ! (I cried) she tacks no more
Hither to work us weal,
Without a breeze, without a tide,
She steadies with upright keel ! '
" The western wave was all aflame,
The day was well nigh done !
Almost upon the western wave
Rested the broad bright sun ; f
When that strange shape drove suddenly
Betwixt us and the sun." Ibid., Part III,
" Alone, alone, all, all alone,
Alone on a wide, wide sea !
And never a saint took pity on
My soul in agony.
" The many men, so beautiful !
And they all dead did lie :
And a thousand thousand slimy things
Lived on ; and so did I.
" I looked upon the rotting sea,
And drew my eyes away ;
I looked upon the rotting deck,
And there the dead men lay."
METRIC FORMS 149
" I looked to heaven, and tried to pray;
But or ever a prayer had gusht,
A wicked whisper came, and made
My heart as dry as dust." Ibid., Part IV.
Macauiay's Later Macaulay, in his " Lays of Ancient
ballads Rome, ' ' has given us some ringing ballad music.
" Lars Porsena of Clusium
By the Nine Gods he swore
That the great house of Tarquin
Should suffer wrong no more.
By the Nine Gods he swore it,
And named a trysting day,
And bade his messengers ride forth,
To east and west and south and north,
To summon his array.
" East and west and south and north
The messengers ride fast,
And tower and town and cottage
Have heard the trumpet's blast.
Shame on the false Etruscan
Who lingers in his home
When Porsena of Clusium
Is on the march for Rome."
T. B. MACAULAY: " Horatius."
Ho ! maidens of Vienna ;
Ho ! matrons of Lucerne ;
Weep, weep, and rend your hair for those
Who never shall return.
Ho ! Philip, send, for charity,
Thy Mexican pistoles,
150 THE MUSICAL BASIS OF VERSE
That Antwerp monks may sing a mass
For thy poor spearmen's souls.
Ho ! gallant nobles of the League,
Look that your arms be bright ;
Ho ! burghers of St. Gene vi eve,
Keep watch and ward to-night.
For our God hath crushed the tyrant,
Our God hath raised the slave,
And mocked the counsels of the wise,
And the valour of the brave.
Then glory to his holy name,
From whom all glories are ;
And glory to our Sovereign Lord,
King Henry of Navarre."
T. B. MACAULAY: " Ivry."
Alongside of the ballad, and coeval with it, there grew
up another measure called the Short Couplet. This is
The short a rhymed couplet of 2/4 verse, usually strict.
couplet j t i s indirectly of Latin origin, but came into
England directly from France, where it was much in
vogue. It became a great favourite. An early example
may be seen in " The Owl and the Nightingale " (about
1250). Chaucer employs it in " The House of Fame"
and " The Boke of the Duchesse."
" Now herkneth, as T have you seyd,
What that I mette or I abreyd.
Of Decembre the tenthe day,
Whan hit was night, to slepe I lay
Right ther as I was wont to done,
And fil on slepe wonder sone
As he that wery was for-go
On pilgrimage myles two "
CHAUCER : "The House of Fame."
METRIC FORMS IS 1
We perceive this to be the favourite metre of Scott,
Byron, Wordsworth, and others, which was mentioned
on page 70 as being monotonous and without much
motion.
The Alexandrine, or strict 2/6 verse, is also an old
metre, and came into England with those already de-
Thc scribed. In France it grew to be the classical
Alexandrine standard ; but in England it has not put down
vital roots, and, although much verse has been written
in it, it embalms nothing with the stamp of immortality.
The cause is not far to seek. It is clumsy, heavy, in-
elastic, and the caesura, falling always exactly in the mid-
dle of the line, seems to jerk it into two wooden metric
periods. " The droning old Alexandrine," Lowell calls
it. Here is a sample:
" Upon a thousand swans the naked Sea-Nymphs ride
Within the oozy pools, replenish' d every tide :
Which running on, the Isle of Portland pointeth out
Upon whose moisted skirt with sea-weed fring'd about,
The bastard coral breeds, that, drawn out of the brack,
A little stalk becomes, from greenish turn'd to black :
Which th' ancients, for the love that they to Isis bare
(Their Goddess most ador'd) have sacred for her hair.
Of which the Naides, and the blue Nereids make
Them tawdries for their necks : when sporting in the lake,
They to their sacred bow'rs the Sea- gods entertain."
MICHAEL DRAYTON : " Polyolbion, " Second Song.
But, although the Alexandrine is ill adapted for sus-
tained movement, an occasional one contrasts well with
some other metres. Robert Mannyng (about the begin-
ning of the fourteenth century) wrote a Chronicle of
England in Alexandrines. They were common in the
miracle plays, and even up to the time of Elizabeth were
152 THE MUSICAL BASIS OF VERSE
greatly in favour ; so we are not surprised to find the early
drama well tinctured with them. Marlowe abounds in
Alexandrines. There is also a fair sprinkling of them in
Shakespeare; and, though it has been pointed out that
these generally occur divided between two speakers, this
is not always the case; witness Hamlet's:
" What's Hecuba to him or he to Hecuba,"
The Alexandrine was often combined with the ballad
metre, as in the lines of Surrey's:
" Layd in my quiet bed, in study as I were,
I saw within my troubled head a heape of thoughtes appeare."
A halting metrical movement enough ; as if one should
Pouiter's yoke a camel with an ox. This Gascoigne
measure ca u s < p ou lter's measure." 1
The superiority of heroic verse 2 strict 2/5 verse over
either 2/4 or 2/6 is easily manifest. It has more move-
The heroic ment than the latter, more strength than the
rhymed former, and combines plasticity with dignity.
Although domesticated in England rather later
than the other continental forms, it seems to have been
used empirically even before Chaucer gave it the mint-
stamp of his genius. The heroic rhymed couplet has by
its very adaptedness been a favourite medium for metrical
romance, and eventually prevailed above all others.
1 " Because the poulterer giveth XII for one dozen and XIIII for
another."
2 Observe the metric sequence, so early perfected : in the short couplet,
2/4 verse ; in the heroic couplet, 2/5 verse ; in the Alexandrine, 2/6 verse ;
in the ballad metre, 2/7 verse. But any contemporary use of triple measure
would seem to be accidental, and remains unclassified.
METRIC FORMS 153
Chaucer's use of it is spontaneous and quaintly charm-
ing.
" Whan that Aprille with his shoures sote
The droghte of Marche hath perced to the rote,
And bathed every veyne in swich licbur,
Of which virtu engendred is the flour ;
Whan Zephirus eek with his swete breeth
Inspired hath in every holt and heeth
The tendre croppes, and the yonge sonne
Hath in the Ram his halfe cours y-ronne,
And smale fowles maken melodye,
That slepen al the night with open ye,
(So priketh hem nature in hir corages):
Than longen folk to goon on pilgrimages "
CHAUCER : Prologue to " Canterbury Tales." '
The heroic rhymed couplet was in use for early drama
and was not readily displaced by the more adapted dra-
matic medium of blank verse. Shakespeare's earlier
plays abound with rhymed couplets. It is only by the
time of his middle period the period of the great trage-
dies that we find these entirely disappearing.
" Helena. Call you me fair ? that fair again unsay.
Demetrius loves your fair : O happy fair !
Your eyes are lode-stars, and your tongue's sweet air
More tuneable than lark to shepherd's ear,
When wheat is green, when hawthorn buds appear.
Sickness is catching : O, were favour so,
Yours would I catch, fair Hermia, ere I go ;
My ear should catch your voice, my eye your eye,
My tongue should catch your tongue's sweet melody."
SHAKESPEARE: " Midsummer Night's Dream," L, i.
1 Skeat has been followed in the quotations from Chaucer.
154 THE MUSICAL BASIS OF VERSE
" Romeo. Good heart, at what ?
" Benvolio. At thy good heart's oppression.
" Romeo. Why, such is love's transgression.
Griefs of mine own lie heavy in my breast,
Which thou wilt propagate, to have it prest
With more of thine ; this love that thou hast shown
Doth add more grief to too much of mine own.
Love is a smoke rais'd with the fume of sighs;
Being purg'd, a fire sparkling in lovers' eyes ;
Being vex'd, a sea nourish'd with lovers' tears :
What is it else ? a madness most discreet,
A choking gall, and a preserving sweet
Farewell, my coz.
" Benvolio. Soft ! I will go along;
An if you leave me so, you do me wrong."
SHAKESPEARE: " Romeo and Juliet," i., 2.
In the period of the Restoration, the heroic rhymed
couplet again comes to the front; but it is an emascu-
lated rhymed couplet, shorn of enjambement. Revived
with authority by Waller and his pupil, Denham, per-
fected by Dryden, and polished to the facets of a gem
by Pope, it was made to sing every strain, grave or gay.
But no amount of scholarship or cleverness could save it
from seeming an artificial and mechanical movement;
the epigrammatic periods falling upon the ear with the
wearisome regularity of a machine. 1
" Those antique minstrels sure were Charles-like kings,
Cities their lutes, and subjects' hearts their strings,
On which with so divine a hand they strook
Consent of motion from their breath they took."
EDMUND WALLER : " Upon His Majesty's Repairing of Paul's."
1 The distinguishing characteristic of the romantic poetry had been over-
flow, that of the didactic, which followed it, was the end-stopped distich.
METRIC FORMS 155
" O could I flow like thee, and make thy stream
My great example, as it is my theme !
Though deep, yet clear ; though gentle, yet not dull ;
Strong without rage, without o'erflowing full."
SIR JOHN DENHAM : " Cooper's Hill."
" ' Thy praise (and thine was then the public voice)
First recommended Guiscard to my choice ;
Directed thus by thee, I look'd, and found
A man I thought deserving to be crown' d;
First by my father pointed to my sight,
Nor less conspicuous by his native light;
His mind, his mien, the features of his face,
Excelling all the rest of human race : ' "
JOHN DRYDEN: " Sigismonda and Guiscardo."
" Force first made conquest, and that conquest law;
Till superstition taught the tyrant awe,
Then shar'd the tyranny, then lent it aid,
And gods of conquerors, slaves of subjects made;
She, midst the lightning's blaze and thunder's sound,
When rock'd the mountains and when groan' d the ground,
She taught the weak to bend, the proud to pray
To power unseen, and mightier far than they : "
ALEXANDER POPE : " Essay on Man," iii., iv.
In our own century, once more freed and with the
overflow restored to it, the heroic couplet has been made
to do fine things. One of the most beautiful examples
may be studied in Keats's " Lamia." But no poet, an-
cient or modern, has handled the heroic couplet with
greater mastery than Browning. He swings his periods
along with a broad, free movement, which, if not always
rounded to perfect grace, is yet entirely without taint
either of formalism or sugariness. He employs it exten-
1 56 THE MUSICAL BASIS OF VERSE
sively in his romantic poems. I have room for only one
quotation:
" ' Since I could die now of the truth concealed,
Yet dare not, must not die, so seems revealed
The Virgin's mind to me, for death means peace,
Wherein no lawful part have I, whose lease
Of life and punishment the truth avowed
May haply lengthen, let me push the shroud
Away, that steals to muffle ere is just
My penance-fire in snow ! I dare I must
Live by avowal of the truth this truth
I loved you. Thanks for the fresh serpent's tooth
That, by a prompt new pang more exquisite
Than all preceding torture, proves me right !
I loved you yet I lost you ! May I go
Burn to the ashes, now my shame you know ? ' "
ROBERT BROWNING: " A Forgiveness."
Very different from the foregoing is the stately and
melodious Spenserian stanza in that far from being in
The any sense an evolution or a growth, it is the
Spenserian deliberate invention of a single gifted mind.
Edmund Spenser, experimenting with the vari-
ous new Italian forms which had recently found their
way to England and bewitched the fancy of men of let-
ters, produced alone this noble metric form. Lowell
thus gives us Spenser's processes:
' The delicious abundance and overrunning luxury of
Spenser appear in the very structure of his verse. He
found the ottava rima too monotonously iterative; so,
by changing the order of his rhymes, he shifted the
couplet from the end of the stave, where it always seems
to put on the brakes with a jar, to the middle, where it
may serve at will as a brace or a bridge. He found it
not roomy enough, so first ran it over into another line,
METRIC FORMS 15 7
and then ran that added line over into an alexandrine,
in which the melody of one stanza seems forever longing
and feeling forward after the one to follow. There is no
ebb and flow in his metre more than on the shores of the
Adriatic, but wave follows wave with equable gainings
and recessions, the one sliding back in fluent music to be
mingled with and carried forward by the next." 1
Professor Corson repudiates the idea that the Spen-
serian stanza is built upon the ottava rima. " If Spenser
corson's was indebted to anyone for the eight lines of
idea of the hj s stanza, he was indebted to his master
Spenserian Chaucer, who, in the ' Monk's Xale,' uses an
stanza eight-line stanza with a rhyme-scheme identi-
cal with that of the eight heroic lines of the Spenserian
stanza, that scheme being a b, a b, b c, be. Chaucer also
uses this stanza in his ' A B C ' (a Hymn to the Virgin)
in ' L' Envoy de Chaucer a Bukton,' and in ' Ballade
de Vilage sauns Peynture.' The Envoy to his ' Com-
pleynte of a Loveres Lyfe ' (or the Complaint of the
Black Knight) is also in this stanza. The following is a
stanza from the ' Monk's Tale ' according to the Ells-
mere text :
" ' Alias, fortune ! She that whilom was
Dredful to kinges and to emperoures,
Now gaureth al the peple on hir, alias !
And she that helmed was in starke stoures,
And wan by force tounes stronge and toures,
Shal on hir heed now were a vitremyte.;
And she that bar the ceptre ful of floures
Shal bere a distaf, hir cost for to quyte.'
" By this rhyme-scheme the couplet instead of being at
the end is brought in the middle, where it serves to bind
1 JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL: Essay on Spenser, "Among my Books,"
vol. ii.
V -V
: \\v
158 THE MUSICAL BASIS OF VER$E .% .. V
\" A V W
is in fact wriat the!". ,V V
trains, with this v last \ A \ \
together the two quatrains. That
eight verses are, namely, two quati
line of the first and the first line of the second
Formula of . \ \ <. \
Spenserian rhyming together. To these the poet added asv.^y k
a supplementary harmony, and in order to im-
part a fine sweeping close to his stanza, the alexandrine,
making it rhyme with the second and fourth verses of
the second quatrain." *
It would not be possible to define more clearly than
does the foregoing eloquent passage, just what the Spen-
serian stanza is, in metric dignity being worthy to stand .
beside the sonnet, while in rich melodious flow it cer-
tainly surpasses it.
" A gentle Knight was pricking on the plaine,
Ycladd in mightie armes and silver shielde,
Wherein old dints of deepe woundes did remaine,
The cruell markes of many a bloody fielde ;
Yet armes till that time did he never wield :
His angry steede did chide his foming bitt,
As much disdayning to the curbe to yield :
Full jolly knight he seemd, and faire did sitt,
As one for knightly giusts and fierce encounters fitt.
" And on his brest a bloodie crosse he bore,
The deare remembrance of his dying Lord,
For whose sweete sake that glorious badge he wore,
And dead, as living ever, him ador'd :
Upon his shielde the like was also scor'd,
For soveraine hope which in his helpe he had.
Right, faithfull, true he was in deede and word;
But of his cheere did seeme too solemne sad;
Yet nothing did he dread but ever was ydrad."
" Faerie Queene," book i., canto i.
1 HIRAM CORSON : " Primer of English Verse," chap. vii.
METRIC FORMS
59
" Eftsoones they heard a most melodious sound,
Of all that mote delight a daintie eare,
Such as attonce might not on living ground,
Save in this Paradise, be heard elsewhere :
Right hard it was for wight which did it heare,
To read what manner musicke that mote bee ;
For all that pleasing is to living eare
Was there consorted in one harmonee ;
Birdes, voices, instruments, windes, waters, all agree.
" The joyous birdes, shrouded in chearefull shade
Their notes unto the voice attempred sweet ;
Th' Angel icall soft trembling voyces made
To th' instruments divine respondence meet ;
^With the base murmure of the waters fall ;
The waters fall with difference discreet,
>w soft, now loud, unto the wind did call ;
g wind low answered to all."
" Faerie Queene," book ii., canto xii.
iser was the teacher of many subsequent poets,
of those who did not directly imitate him ; for his
rate effects are an education in themselves. 1 We
trace his influence peculiarly in some of the modern
poets. In the revival of artistic feeling, which began in
the latter end of the eighteenth century, and culminated
in the noble music of the early part of the nineteenth,
the Spenserian stanza came greatly into favour.
Professor Corson points out its " signal adaptedness to
elaborate pictorial effect; " and therefore it offers a good
medium to the objective poet, especially the objective
poet of exotic imagination. It requires a preeminent
1 " No man contributed so much to the transformation of style as
Spenser. By the charm of his diction, the harmonies of his verse, his ideal
method of treatment, and the splendour of his fancy, he made the new man-
ner popular and fruitful." LOWELL : Essay on Spenser, " Among my
Books," vol. ii.
160 THE MUSICAL BASIS OF VERSE
feeling for colour as well as an immense mastery of
rhyme-effects; and these qualities the Georgian poets to
Followers an unusual degree possessed. I was enticed,"
of Spenser savs Shelley, ' ' by the brilliancy and magnificence
of sound which a mind that has been nourished upon
musical thoughts can produce by a just and harmonious
arrangement of the pauses of this measure." Thomson,
Shenstone, Beattie, Burns, Campbell, Scott, Wordsworth,
Shelley, Keats, and Byron have all used this measure
with more or less splendour. It seems rather strange that
Tennyson and Browning, with their abounding vocabu-
laries, and great mastery of metric and tonal effects, have
not affected the Spenserian stanza. The five opening
stanzas of the " Lotos Eaters " move in it, but the theme
quickly melts into a looser and more fluid movement.
The student who desires to sound the heights and depths
of this verse-form will find it treated at great length and
with superlative luminousness in Professor Corson's
" Primer of English Verse," chapters vii. and viii.
I append a few modern examples. Keats's verse will
be seen to be the closest in sensuous melody to that of
the master; Byron's, full of a fire and vigour of which the
master never dreamed; Shelley's, touched with that
ethereal, almost disembodied quality which it was his
privilege alone among poets to infuse into verse.
" Then by the bedside, where the faded moon
Made a dim, silver twilight, soft he set
A table, and, half-anguish'd, threw thereon
A cloth of woven crimson, gold, and jet :
O for some drowsy Morphean amulet !
The boisterous, midnight, festive clarion,
The kettledrum, and far-heard clarionet,
Affray his ears, though but in dying tone :
The hall door shuts again, and all the noise is gone.
METRIC FORMS l
" And still she slept an azure-lidded sleep,
In blanched linen, smooth and lavender' d,
While he forth from the closet brought a heap
Of candied apple, quince, and plum, and gourd ;
With jellies smoother than the creamy curd,
And lucent syrops, tinct with cinnamon;
Manna and dates, in argosy transferr'd
From Fez ; and spiced dainties, every one
From silken Samarcand to cedar'd Lebanon."
KEATS : " The Eve of St. Agnes."
" There was a sound of revelry by night,
And Belgium's capital had gather' d then
Her Beauty and her Chivalry, and bright
The lamps shone o'er fair women and brave men;
A thousand hearts beat happily ; and when
Music arose with its voluptuous swell,
Soft eyes look'd love to eyes which spoke again
And all went merry as a marriage bell ;
But hush ! hark ! a deep sound strikes like a rising knell !
" Did ye not hear it ? No; 'twas but the wind
Or the car rattling o'er the stony street;
On with the dance ! Let joy be unconfined;
No sleep till morn, when Youth and Pleasure meet
To chase the glowing Hours with flying feet
But hark ! that heavy sound breaks in once more,
As if the clouds its echo would repeat;
And nearer, cleajer, deadlier than before !
Arm ! Arm ! it is it is the cannon's opening roar ! "
BYRON: " Childe Harold," iii.
" Peace, peace ! he is not dead, he doth not sleep !
He hath awakened from the dream of life.
'Tis we who, lost in stormy visions, keep
With phantoms an unprofitable strife,
ii
1 62 THE MUSICAL BASIS OF VERSE
And in mad trance strike with our spirit's knife
Invulnerable nothings. We decay
Like corpses in a charnel ; fear and grief
Convulse us and consume us day by day,
And cold hopes swarm like worms within our living clay.
" He has out-soar' d the shadow of our night.
Envy and calumny and hate and pain,
And that unrest which men miscall delight
Can touch him not and torture not again.
From the contagion of the world's slow stain
He is secure ; and now can never mourn
A heart grown cold, a head grown grey, in vain
Nor, when the spirit's self has ceasM to burn,
With sparkless ashes load an unlamented urn.
" He lives, he wakes 'tis Death is dead, not he;
Mourn not for Adonai's. Thou young Dawn,
Turn all thy dew to splendour, for from thee
The spirit thou lamentest is not gone !
Ye caverns and ye forests, cease to moan !
Cease, ye faint flowers and fountains ! and, thou Air,
Which like a mourning veil thy scarf hadst thrown
O'er the abandoned Earth, now leave it bare
Even to the joyous stars which smile on its despair !
" He is made one with Nature. There is heard
His voice in all her music, from the moan
Of thunder to the song of night's sweet bird.
He is a presence to be felt and known
In darkness and in light, from herb and stone;
Spreading itself where'er that Power may move
Which has withdrawn his being to its own,
Which wields the world with never-wearied love,
Sustains it from beneath, and kindles it above."
SHELLEY : " Adonai's."
METRIC FORMS 163
" The blasts of autumn drive the winged seeds
Over the earth, next come the snows, and rain,
And frosts, and storms, which dreary Winter leads
Out of his Scythian cave, a savage train ;
Behold ! Spring sweeps over the world again,
Shedding soft dews from her ethereal wings ;
Flowers on the mountains, fruits over the plain,
And music on the waves and woods she flings,
And love on all that lives, and calm on lifeless things.
" O Spring ! of hope and love and youth and gladness
Wind-winged emblem ! brightest, best, and fairest !
Whence comest thou, when with dark Winter's sadness
The tears that fade in sunny smiles thou sharest ?
Sister of joy ! thou art the child who wearest
Thy mother's dying smile, tender and sweet;
Thy mother Autumn, for whose grave thou bearest
Fresh flowers, and beams like flowers, with gentle feet
Disturbing not the leaves which are her winding sheet." *
SHELLEY : " Revolt of Islam," ix.
It is Professor Corson's opinion that the resources of
the Spenserian stanza are far from exhausted. Perhaps
future poets will come to it, and, with that concentrated
spiritual power which ever-advancing thought brings to
the soul of genius, touch this rich and responsive instru-
ment into a music still undreamed.
The EHza- I place the Elizabethan sonnet often called
bethanor the Shakespearean sonnet here, rather than
Shake- . .
spearean after its great Italian congener, because it is
sonnet su j g ener i s specifically English, and has a
beauty all its own. It consists indeed of a lyric of four-
1 The feminine endings in this stanza simply double the melody ; and,
with the fine instinct of the great artist, Shelley does not persist in them to
the end, which would make weakness of the stanzaic climax, but comes
back in the finish-rhyme to the masculine ending.
164 THE MUSICAL BASIS OF VERSE
teen lines of heroic verse, but there the relation ends ; for
it conforms neither to the structural canons of the legiti-
mate sonnet nor to its organic sequence.
Surrey is generally conceded to have brought the son-
net to England, and both he and Wyat made early essays
in this form, 1 but its technicalities appear to have made
small impression upon the teeming Elizabethan genius,
fecund enough for all its own needs. The Elizabethan
poets adopted the outline only, and filled out the details
to suit themselves.
The Elizabethan sonnet is really an aggregation of
three quatrains capped by a couplet. There is generally
no tonal connection between the quatrains, although
occasionally we find one in which the finish-rhyme of the
first quatrain is made the off-rhyme of the second; and in
Spenser's M Amoretti " this scheme extends even into the
third quatrain. Drummond uses two alternating rhymes
through the first two quatrains. There appears to have
been no fixed model, but each singer followed his own
feeling for tone. The couplet is again distinct tonally,
and, quite contrary to the spirit of the Italian sonnet,
enfolds the subjective climax.
This loosely-hung framework was admirably adapted
to the independent genius of the age, which for the most
part preferred evolving its own art-forms to imitating
those already formulated. Most of the contemporary
poets seem to have tried their hands at sonnet writing,
prominent names being those of Shakespeare, Spenser,
Sidney, Daniel, Drummond, Drayton, Donne, Chapman,
etc.. Among these, Shakespeare is easily first.
1 There are other Elizabethan sonnets which follow the Italian model as
far as the octave is concerned, but become loose in the sestet. Of such. is
Sidney's famous and beautiful " With how wan steps, O Moon," which ends
with the characteristic Elizabethan and non-Italian couplet.
METRIC FORMS 165
" Shall I compare thee to a summer's day ?
Thou art more lovely and more temperate :
Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,
And summer's lease hath all too short a date :
Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines,
And often is his gold complexion dimm'd;
And every fair from fair sometime declines,
By chance or nature's changing course untrimm'd;
But thy eternal summer shall not fade,
Nor lose possession of that fair thou owest,
Nor shall death brag thou wander' st in his shade,
When in eternal lines to time thou grow'st;
So long as men can breathe, or eyes can see,
So long lives this, and this gives life to thee."
SHAKESPEARE : XVIII.
" When to the sessions of sweet silent thought
I summon up remembrance of things past,
I sigh the lack of many a thing I sought,
And with old woes new wail my dear time's waste :
Then can I drown an eye, unused to flow,
For precious friends hid in death's dateless night,
And weep afresh love's long since cancell'd woe,
And moan the expense of many a vanish'd sight :
Then can I grieve at grievances foregone,
And heavily from woe to woe tell o'er
The sad account of fore-bemoaned moan,
Which I new pay as if not paid before.
But if the while I think on thee, dear friend,
All losses are restored, and sorrows end."
SHAKESPEARE : XXX.
" Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments. Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove :
1 66 THE MUSICAL BASIS OF VERSE
O no ! it is an ever- fixed mark
That looks on tempests and is never shaken ;
It is the star to every wandering bark,
Whose worth's unknown, although his height be taken.
Love's not Time's fool, though rosy lips and cheeks
Within his bending sickle's compass come ;
Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,
But bears it out even to the edge of doom.
If this be error, and upon me proved,
I never writ, nor no man ever loved."
SHAKESPEARE : CXVL
Like as a ship that through the ocean wide
By conduct of some star doth make her way,
Whenas a storm hath dimm'd her trusty guide,
Out of her course doth wander far astray,
So I, whose star, that wont with her bright ray
Me to direct, with clouds is over-cast,
Do wander now in darkness and dismay,
Through hidden perils round about me plac'd :
Yet hope I well that when this storm is past,
My Helice, the lodestar of my life,
Will shine again and look on me at last,
With lovely light to clear my cloudy grief.
Till then I wander careful, comfortless,
In secret sorrow and sad pensiveness."
SPENSER : XXXIV.
Dear, why should you command me to my rest,
When now the night doth summon all to sleep ?
Methinks this time becometh lovers best :
Night was ordain'd together friends to keep.
How happy are all other living. things,
Which though the day disjoin by several flight,
METRIC FORMS 167
The quiet Evening yet together brings,
And each returns unto his love at night !
O thou that art so courteous unto all,
Why shouldst thou, Night, abuse me only thus,
That every creature to his kind dost call,
And yet 'tis thou dost only sever us ?
Well could I wish it would be ever day,
If, when night comes, you bid me go away."
MICHAEL DRAYTON.
" Dear quirister, who from those shadows sends,
Ere that the blushing dawn dare show her light,
Such sad lamenting strains, that night attends
(Become all ear), stars stay to hear thy plight;
If one whose grief even reach of thought transcends,
Who ne'er (not in a dream) did taste delight,
May thee importune who like case pretends ;
And seems to joy in woe, in woe's despite;
Tell me (so may thou fortune milder try,
And long, long sing) for what thou thus complains,
Sith, winter gone, the sun in dappled sky
Now smiles on meadows, mountains, woods and plains ?
The bird, as if my questions did her move,
With trembling wings sobb'd forth, I love, I love ! "
WILLIAM DRUMMOND.
Alien metric We now pass to the consideration of alien
forms metric forms.
The Italian, or legitimate sonnet, is the greatest of ex-
istent fixed metric forms. It has endured in
I he Italian
or legitimate undimmed lustre for five centuries, has pen-
etrated to many lands, and been adopted into
many literatures. It appears to be of Provengal origin, 1
1 " The sonnet passed through many changes, in the length of the verses,
the order of the rhymes, the addition of tails or rondellos ; but there is no
doubt that the regular sonnet of fourteen lines, with the rhymes as in Type
1 68 THE MUSICAL BASIS OF VERSE
and to have passed through a moulding process in vari-
ous hands until, in Dante's, it became the perfectly
attuned instrument.
Petrarch, in his famous cycles to Laura, gave it its final
polish, and made it universally popular. Even to his
time this and kindred forms seem to have been always
allied with music, and to have been not recited but sung. 1
Mr. Tomlinson tells us that " Petrarch sang his verses
to the sound of his lute, which he bequeathed in his will
to a friend, and we are told that his voice was sweet and
flexible, and of considerable compass; it is also said that
such was the magic of his song that the gravest persons
were accustomed to go away repeating or humming the
words. ' ' Other great sonnet writers were Tasso, Ariosto,
and, later, Michael Angelo and Vittoria Colonna.
The sonnet is a lyric of fourteen lines of heroic verse
in special tonal arrangement. There must be one lead-
ing or governing idea or sentiment. Metrically it is
divided into two sections, the octave and the sestet. In
the octave the motive or theme is developed, finding its
climax there. The sestet becomes a sort of commentary
III, was in use as early as 1321, such a sonnet being written by Guglielmo
degli Amalricchi in honour of Robert, King of Naples. In Italy, the son-
net, in the hands of Fra Guittone d'Arezzo, Dante, Cino, and, lastly,
Petrarch, was perfected ; and it seems probable that these great masters re-
ceived from the Provenfal poets the form of the sonnet as well a that of
the canzone, the sestina, the ballata, etc." CHARLES TOMLINSON " The
Sonnet ; its Origin, Structure, and Place in Poetry," part i., p. 16
J " As the words sonetto and canzone imply (from picol suono, a small
sound or composition, and dal canto), they were sung with a musical ac-
companiment, in common with all lyric poetry, and had reference to the
composer's own feelings. As the Horatian lyrics merged into the rhyming
verses of the monks, and scansion gave way to accent, these probably gave
rise to the poems of the troubadours (trovatori ; i.e., inventors) of the early
part of the eleventh century." CHARLES TOMLINSON : " The Sonnet," part
i., p. 9.
METRIC FORMS 169
or reflection the moral as it were upon the octave,
declining in stress of feeling so that the poem ends tran-
quilly. 1 One might characterise the octave as a crescendo
passage, and the sestet as a diminuendo.
Mr. Theodore Watts has thus beautifully symbolised
the spirit of the sonnet.
" Yon silvery billows breaking on the beach
Fall back in foam beneath the star-shine clear,
The while my rhymes are murmuring in your ear
A restless lore like that the billows teach;
For on these sonnet-waves my soul would reach
From its own depths, and rest within you, dear,
As through the silvery billows yearning here
Great Nature strives to find a human speech.
" A sonnet is a wave of melody :
From heaving waters of the impassioned soul
A billow of tidal music one and whole
Flows in the ' octave ' ; then, returning free,
Its ebbing surges in the ' sestet ' roll
Back to the deeps of Life's tumultuous sea."
THEODORE WATTS : " The Sonnet's Voice."
The severest idea of the sonnet makes a subdivision of
the octave and also of the sestet, halving the former into
two quatrains (Basi or bases), and the latter into two
tercets (Volte or turnings), all of which divisions are
periodically distinct from each other. But it is notice-
able that the animus of the sonnet in English is against
subdivision and toward entire unity of movement, thus
differentiating somewhat from its model. Octave flows
1 " In short, the quatrains should contain the proposition and proof, the
tercets, its confirmation and conclusion." CHARLES TOMLINSON : "The
Sonnet," part i., p. 28.
170 THE MUSICAL BASIS OF VERSE
into sestet in one continuous thought-wave. And I may
state here that all Italian forms in assuming English
dress substitute the typical English masculine ending for
the typical Italian feminine ending.
The rhyme-scheme of the sonnet is a strict one, the
octave admitting of two rhymes only; the sestet, of either
two or three. The arrangement of rhymes in
Formula of
theiegiti- the octave is always the same, only those in
mate sonnet ^ sestet permitting variation. Furthermore,
the colours of the rhymes in octave and sestet should be
as far as possible contrasted. Mr. Tomlinson, in his
study of the Petrarchan sonnet, classes these in three
typic groups. 1 Thus:
TYPE I. TYPE II. TYPE III.
Octave 1221, 1221, 1221, 1221, 1221, 1221,
Sestet 345, 345, 343* 434, 345, 435-
Of these the first type is regarded as the purest. Pro-
fessor Corson, in Chapter X. of the " Primer of English
Verse," gives a detailed and careful analysis of a great
number of sonnets upon these lines.
It is not until Milton that we find the Italian sonnet
reproduced in its purity in England. Milton's visit to
Milton's Italy (1638), his intimate reception there, and
sonnets fa{ s predilection for the literature of the land
would naturally saturate him with a feeling for its pre-
dominant form, while the severe type of the lyric, with
its measured cadences, would appeal to his classically-
trained intellect. The Miltonic sonnets were thrown out
from time to time between the stress of other work and
as occasion prompted. We find Milton's sonnets ele-
1 Twenty-seven others are outside of these formulas and classed as ir-
regular.
METRIC FORMS i? 1
vated, stately, and resonant; full of " a mighty sweep
of music," as Mr. Hall Caine hath it.
The next name identified with the sonnet is that of
Wordsworth. There is a certain order of mind and a
Words- certain quality of subject to which the sonnet
worth's form presents itself as a specially fitting instru-
ment. This order of mind and this quality of
subject were Wordsworth's to a superlative degree; and
his exercise of them places him at the head of English
sonnet writers. Wordsworth's sonnets are looser in form
than Milton's, but wider in sympathy, and strike a higher
spiritual note. He moved serenely and easily in that
upper stratum of air where many suffer from shortness
of breath metrically as well as metaphorically and
where others still never find their way at all.
We have also noble sonnets from the hands of Keats,
Shelley, and Byron ; since which time a mighty inunda-
tion has loosed itself upon the world.
Among Victorian sonneteers, Dante Gabriel Rossetti
is by many considered preeminent. Mrs. Browning's
Modern " Sonnets from the Portuguese," though some-
sonnets what loose in form, take high rank for their
power, passion, and purity.
" Lady, that in the prime of earliest youth
Wisely hast shunn'd the broad way and the green,
And with those few art eminently seen,
That labour up the hill of heavenly truth,
The better part with Mary and with Ruth
Chosen thou hast ; and they that overwean,
And at thy growing virtues fret their spleen,
No anger find in thee, but pity and ruth.
Thy care is fix'd, and zealously attends
To fill thy odorous lamp with deeds of light,
hope that reaps not shame. Therefore be sure
172 THE MUSICAL BASIS OF VERSE
Thou, when the bridegroom with his feastful friends
Passes to bliss at the mid hour of night,
Hast gain'd thy entrance, virgin wise and pure."
MILTON : " To a Virtuous Young Lady."
" Avenge, O Lord, tfry slaughter' d saints, whose bones
Lie scatter'd on the Alpine Mountains cold;
Even them who kept thy truth so pure of old,
When all our fathers worshipp'd stocks and stones,
Forget not : in thy book record their groans
Who were thy sheep, and in their ancient fold
Slain by the bloody Piedmontese that rolPd
Mother with infant down the rocks. Their moans
The vales redoubled to the hills, and they
To heaven. Their martyr' d blood and ashes sow
O'er all the Italian fields, where still doth sway
The triple tyrant ; that from these may grow
A hundred fold, who, having learn'd thy way,
Early may fly the Babylonian woe."
MILTON : " On the Late Massacre in Piedmont."
" The world is too much with us ; late and soon,
Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers :
Little we see in Nature that is ours ;
We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon !
This sea that bares her bosom to the moon ;
The winds that will be howling at all hours
And are up-gather'd now like sleeping flowers;
For this, for everything we are out of tune ;
It moves us not. Great God ! I'd rather be
A pagan suckled in a creed outworn ;
So might I, standing on this pleasant lea,
Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn,
Have sight of Proteus coming from the sea,
Or hear old Triton blow his. wreathed horn."
WORDSWORTH.
METRIC FORMS 1 73
" Milton ! thou shouldst be living at this hour;
England hath need of thee : she is a fen
Of stagnant waters : altar, sword, and pen,
Fireside, the heroic wealth of hall and bower,
Have forfeited their ancient English dower
Of inward happiness. We are selfish men :
Oh ! raise us up, return to us again ;
And give us manners, virtue, freedom, power.
Thy soul was like a star, and dwelt apart :
Thou hadst a voice whose sound was like the sea ;
Pure as the naked heavens, majestic, free;
So didst thou travel on life's common way,
In cheerful godliness; and yet thy heart
The lowliest duties on itself did lay."
WORDSWORTH.
" And wilt thou have me fashion into speech
The love I bear thee, finding words enough,
And hold the torch out, while the winds are rough,
Between our faces to cast light on each?
I drop it at thy feet. I cannot teach
My hand to hold my spirit so far off
From myself me that I should bring thee proof
In words, of love hid in me out of reach.
Nay, let the silence of my womanhood
Commend my woman-love to thy belief,
Seeing that I stand unwon, however wooed,
And rend the garment of my life, in brief,
By a most dauntless, voiceless fortitude,
Lest one touch of this heart convey its grief."
ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING : XIII.
" When our two souls stand up erect and strong,
Face to face, silent, drawing nigh and nigher,
Until the lengthening wings break into fire
At either curved point, what bitter wrong
174 THE MUSICAL BASIS OF VERSE
Can the earth do to us, that we should not long
Be here contented ? Think. In mounting higher,
The angels would press on us, and aspire
To drop some golden orb of perfect song
Into our deep, dear silence. Let us stay
Rather on earth, Beloved, where the unfit
Contrarious moods of men recoil away
And isolate pure spirits, and permit
A place to stand and love in for a day,
With darkness and the death-hour rounding it."
ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING : XXI I.
" O Lord of all compassionate control,
O Love ! let this my lady's picture glow
Under my hand to praise her name, and show
Even of her inner self the perfect whole :
That he who seeks her beauty's furthest goal,
Beyond the light that the sweet glances throw
And refluent wave of the sweet smile, may know
The very sky and sea-line of her soul.
" Lo ! it is done. Above the long lithe throat
The mouth's mould testifies of voice and kiss,
The shadowed eyes remember and foresee.
Her face is made her shrine. Let all men note
That in all years (O Love, thy gift is this !)
They that would look on her must come to me."
DANTE GABRIEL ROSSETTI : " The Portrait."
" Dusk-haired and gold-robed o'er the golden wine
She stoops, wherein, distilled of death and shame,
Sink the black drops; while, lit with fragrant flame,
Round her spread board the golden sunflowers shine.
Doth Helios here with Hecate combine
(O Circe, thou their votaress !) to proclaim
For these thy guests all rapture in Love's name,
Till pitiless Night give Day the countersign ?
METRIC FORMS 175
" Lords of their hour, they come. And by her knee
Those cowering beasts, their equals heretofore,
Wait; who with them in new equality
To-night shall echo back the unchanging roar
Which sounds forever from the tide-strown shore
Where the dishevelled seaweed hates the sea."
DANTE GABRIEL ROSSETTI : " The Wine of Circe."
The sonnet has very little motion, and Wordsworth
to the contrary notwithstanding it is not " a trumpet."
Rather is it a silver flute through which the adept may
breathe an esoteric music, and the adepts are fewer
than is commonly supposed. For, while it is compara-
tively easy to write to the formal metric requirements, it
is another thing to strike real music therefrom. Person-
ally I am somewhat inclined to side with Ben Jonson,
who has likened the sonnet to the bed of Procrustes.
This is not to defame the truly great sonnets which en-
rich our literature, but merely to suggest that the aver-
age singer will be likely to sing more notably if he clothe
the average idea in a few short stanzas of looser and more
mobile construction.
Sonnet writing is valuable metric drill, and it is well
for the student to master the form ; but the sonnet habit
is a bad one to acquire, as it tends to impede growth to
larger flights.
The ottava rima has already been noticed as occupying
the attention of the Elizabethans. It is the measure of
The ottava Tasso and of Ariosto, and consists, as its name
rima indicates, of an octave, or stanza of eight lines
these lines being of heroic verse. The rhyme-scheme
is two alternating rhymes in the first six lines, the final
two being a rhymed couplet : thus ; # , 3, a, b, a, b, c, c.
It has nothing like the dignity and melodious flow of
the Spenserian stanza, and the iterated rhymes of the
1 76 THE MUSICAL BASIS OF VERSE
first six lines are inclined to cloy the English ear, attuned
to more virile tone-contrasts; but its facility as a form
naturally invites experiment, and it is a measure often
employed by our own poets. In 1600 Fairfax published
a stanza-for-stanza translation of Tasso's " Gerusalemme
Liberata," which still holds high rank in our literature.
Fairfax's muse was much influenced by the " Faerie
Queene," published a few years earlier. Milton drops
into ottava rima in the epilogue to " Lycidas," although,
not being stanzaically separated, this is not very patent to
the eye. Byron employs it in " Don Juan," " Beppo,"
'J Morgante Maggiore," and " The Vision of Judgment."
Keats uses it for " Isabella and the Pot of Basil;" and
Shelley, in " The Witch of Atlas." Keats and Shelley
have wrung the most music from it ; but to Byron it
seems to have stood for the medium of satire and
mockery.
" The purple morning left her crimson bed,
And donned her robes of pure vermilion hue,
Her amber locks she crowned with roses red,
In Eden's flowery gardens gathered new.
When through the camp a murmur shrill was spread,
Arm, arm, they cried ; arm, arm, the trumpets blew,
Their merry noise prevents the joyful blast,
So hum small bees, before their swarms they cast.
" Their captain rules their courage, guides their heat,
Their forwardness he stayed with gentle rein;
And yet more easy, haply, were the feat
To stop the current near Charybdis main,
Or calm the blustering winds on mountains great,
Than fierce desires of warlike hearts restrain;
He rules them yet, and ranks them in their haste,
For well he knows disordered speed makes waste.
METRIC FORMS 1 77
" Feathered their thoughts, their feet in wings were dight,
Swiftly they marched, yet were not tired thereby,
For willing minds make heaviest burdens light.
But when the gliding sun was mounted high,
Jerusalem, behold, appeared in sight,
Jerusalem they view, they see, they spy,
Jerusalem with merry noise they greet,
With joyful shouts and acclamations sweet."
EDWARD FAIRFAX: " Jerusalem Delivered," book Hi. 1
" And tall and strong and swift of foot were they,
Beyond the dwarfing city's pale abortions,
Because their thoughts had never been the prey
Of care or gain : the green woods were their portions.
No sinking spirits told them they grew grey;
No fashion made them apes of her distortions ;
Simple they were, not savage ; and their rifles
Though very true, were not yet used for trifles.
" Motion was in their days, rest in their slumbers,
And cheerfulness the handmaid of their toil ;
Nor yet too many nor too few their numbers ;
Corruption could not make their hearts her soil ;
The lust which stings, the splendour which encumbers
With the free foresters divide no spoil ;
Serene, not sullen, were the solitudes
Of this unsighing people of the woods."
BYRON: " Don Juan," viii., 66, 67.
" All day the wizard lady sat aloof;
Spelling out scrolls of dread antiquity
Under the cavern's fountain-lighted roof;
Or broidering the pictured poesy
1 These stanzas are taken from Morley's 1890 edition, "The Carisbrooke
Library."
12
178 THE MUSICAL BASIS OF VERSE
Of some high tale upon her growing woof,
Which the sweet splendour of her smiles could dye
In hues outshining heaven and ever she
Added some grace to the wrought poesy :
" While on her hearth lay blazing many a piece
Of sandal wood, rare gums, and cinnamon.
Men scarcely know how beautiful fire is ;
Each flame of it is as a precious stone
Dissolved in ever-moving light, and this
Belongs to each and all who gaze thereon.
The witch beheld it not, for in her hand
She held a woof that dimmed the burning brand.
" This lady never slept, but lay in trance
All night within the fountain as in sleep.
Its emerald crags glowed in her beauty's glance :
Through the green splendour of the waters deep
She saw the constellations reel and dance
Like fireflies and withal did ever keep
The tenour of her contemplations calm,
With open eyes, closed feet, and folded palm."
SHELLEY : " The Witch of Atlas."
A third prominent Italian form is the terza rima, the
verse-form of Dante's " Divina Commedia." It is really
The terza a much greater form than the ottava rima, but
rima } ias been less imitated in English, owing to its
technical difficulties. The successive interlaced triplets
of rhyme are so taxing that it requires power of a high
order to maintain a sostenuto movement which shall never
either descend into the trivial nor hack out into the
mechanical. The terza rima (literally third rhyme) is an
unending succession of interlaced tercets, the rhyme-
scheme being a b a, b c b, c d c, d e d, etc., ad infini-
tum. Thus the first line and the third of each tercet
METRIC FORMS 179
rhyme, while between them is constantly introduced a
new tone which is to serve in turn as the binding rhyme
of the next tercet. 1 We are told that Dante chose this
verse-form because its interlaced triplets symbolised the
trinity three in one.
The verse of terza rima is usually written solidly, like
our blank verse, but in English we sometimes see the
tercets separated into little stanzas. There is an old
poem of Surrey's in this measure. In modern times
Byron has used it for his" Prophecy of Dante," Shelley
for his " Ode to the West Wind," and Browning in
" The Statue and the Bust; " the last two poems show-
ing special modifications.
" The spirit of jthe fei^ent days^of old, --
When words were things that came to pass, and thought
Flash'd o'er the future, bidding men behold c-
Their children's children's doom already brought *""*
Forth from the abyss of time which is to be, c--
The chaos of events, where lie half -wrought -^-
Shapes that must undergo mortality ;
What the great Seers of Israel wore within,
That spirit was on them, and is on me;
And if, Cassandra-like, amidst the din
Of conflict none will hear, or hearing heed
This voice from out the Wilderness, the sin
Be theirs, and my own feelings be my meed,"
BYRON : " The Prophecy of Dante," canto ii.
Shelley has divided his poem into stanzas by inter-
polating at the end of every twelve lines a rhymed coup-
let. It makes a very noble stanza.
1 " There were also serventesi, a kind of satirical poetry, in various metres
and orders of rhyme, so incatenated that a rhyme of the preceding tercet or
quatrain is brought into the succeeding one. In this way arose the ordinary
terza rima" CHARLES TOMLINSON : " The Sonnet," p. 16.
I So THE MUSICAL BASIS OF VERSE
11 Make me thy lyre, even as the forest is :
What if my leaves are falling like its own ?
The tumult of thy mighty harmonies
Will take from both a deep autumnal tone,
Sweet though in sadness. Be thou, Spirit fierce,
My spirit ! Be thou me, impetuous one !
Drive my dead thoughts over the universe,
Like withered leaves, to quicken a new birth ;
And by the incantation of this verse
Scatter, as from an unextinguished hearth
Ashes and sparks, my words among mankind !
Be through my lips to unawakened earth
The trumpet of a prophecy ! O Wind,
If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind ? "
SHELLEY : " Ode to the West Wind."
Browning departs from the rhythmic and metric canons
the typical verse being heroic and uses a triple meas-
ure with excellent musical effect.
" There's a palace in Florence the world knows well,
And a statue watches it from the square,
And this story of both do our townsmen tell.
" Ages ago, a lady there,
At the farthest window facing the east,
Asked, ' Who rides by with the royal air ? '
" The bridesmaids' prattle around her ceased;
She leaned forth, one on either hand :
They saw how the blush of the bride increased
" They felt by its beats her heart expand
As one at each ear and both in a breath
Whispered, ' The Great Duke Ferdinand.'
METRIC FORMS 181
" That selfsame instant, underneath,
The Duke rode past in his idle way,
Empty and fine, like a swordless sheath.
" Gay he rode, with a friend as gay,
Till he threw his head back ' Who is she ? '
' A bride the Riccardi brings home to-day.' '
BROWNING : " The Statue and the Bust."
Ever since the new learning in the early Renaissance
days reached England, many efforts have been made by
many scholars and poets to domesticate the Homeric
dactylic hexameter. These efforts cannot be said to
have been crowned by signal success.
Classically defined, the dactylic hexameter is a verse
of six feet; the first four of which may be either a dactyl
. or its metrical equivalent, the spondee; the
The Homeric
dactylic fifth must be a dactyl, and the sixth a spon-
hexameter ^ e ^ y^ caesura i p ause comes after the
thesis, or in the arsis, of the third foot. According to
our accentual mensuration, the dactylic hexameter may
be defined as a line of six bars of 3-beat rhythm, with
the direct attack and the feminine ending. Like all
long lines, it tends to divide itself in the middle, giving
a natural pause or caesura there. Coleridge exemplified
it thus:
" Strongly it bears us along in swelling and limitless billows,
Nothing before and nothing behind but the sky and the ocean."
The reason assigned by many metrists for the un-
adaptability of the hexameter to English verse is the
1 For the definitions of dactyl and spondee, I must refer the reader to
the classical prosodies, as it is quite without the scope of this work to enter
into these details.
1 82 THE MUSICAL BASIS OF VERSE
scarcity of true spondees in the English language ; but
the cause undoubtedly lies deeper. In becoming an
English measure it ceases to be quantitative and becomes
accentual, and thus its organic character is destroyed.
Volume of sound takes the place of measures of quan-
tity, and this is not easy to preserve in purity of classic
values for any prolonged period ; so that, though we
have plenty of short flights of noble character in this
measure, nothing of large moment exists in it. Its in-
herent feebleness, as an English medium, for sustained
action is well illustrated in Longfellow's " Evangeline,"
whose pathetic theme covers a multitude of metrical
deficiencies. The British ear is, however, more closely
trained to classic values than the American. Following
is a spirited passage from Kingsley.
" As when an osprey aloft, dark-eyebrowed, royally crested,
Flags on by creek and by cove, and in scorn of the anger of
Nereus
Ranges, the king of the shore; if he see on a glittering shal-
low,
Chasing the bass and the mullet, the fin of a wallowing dol-
phin,
Halting, he wheels round slowly, in doubt at the weight of
his quarry,
Whether to clutch it alive, or to fall on the wretch like a
plummet,
Stunning with terrible talon the life of the brain in the hind-
head :
Then rushes up with a scream, and stooping the wrath of his
eyebrows,
Falls from the sky like a star, while the wind rattles hoarse in
his pinions.
Over him closes the foam for a moment ; then from the sand-
bed
METRIC FORMS 183
Rolls up the great fish, dead, and his side gleams white in the
sunshine.
Thus fell the boy on the beast, unveiling the face of the Gor-
gon."
CHARLES KINGSLEY : "Andromeda."
Another classical form frequently imitated in English
is the Ovidian elegiac distich. This consists of a dactylic
Theovidian nexameter followed by a dactylic pentameter,
elegiac dis- Allen and Greenough define the pentameter
as the same as the hexameter, omitting the
last half of the third and sixth feet. " The pentameter
verse is thus to be scanned as two half-verses, of which
the latter always consists of two dactyls followed by a
single syllable."
Coleridge gives us this English exemplar of the Ovid-
ian elegiac distich.
i mipppimi r D iwifr D r I
" In the hex-am-e-ter rises the fountain's silvery column :
IP PDID PDI r *imi mi r *
In the pen-tam-e-ter aye falling in melody back."
I have given the notation of this to demonstrate that,
measured by accents, the second line has also six bars,
and not five. Half a bar in the middle of a moving
phrase is a rhythmic impossibility; all the time is there
even if filled by a rest or silence. Here is a melodious
bit in this measure.
" Grant, O regal in bounty, a subtle anr 1 delicate largess;
Grant an ethereal alms, out of the wealth of thy soul :
Suffer a tarrying minstrel, who finds, not fashions his numbers.
Who, from the commune of air, cages the volatile song,
1 84 THE MUSICAL BASIS OF VERSE
Here to capture and prison some fugitive breath of thy descant,
Thine and his own as thy roar lisped on the lips of a shell,
Now while the vernal impulsion makes lyrical all that hath
language,
While through the veins of the Earth, riots the ichor of Spring,
While, with throes, with raptures, with loosing of bonds, with
unsealings,
Arrowy pangs of delight, piercing the core of the world,
Tremors and coy unfoldings, reluctances, sweet agitations,
Youth, irrepressibly fair, wakes like a wondering rose."
WILLIAM WATSON : " Hymn to the Sea."
In the last quarter century a good deal of attention has
been paid to old French forms, Austin Dobson, Edmund
ow French Gosse, and others having made essays in these
verse-forms fanciful and graceful verse-forms. Of these,
Mr. Dobson's are undoubtedly the most finished and have
the most "go." It is now not uncommon in our cur-
rent literature to run across a Ballade, a Rondeau, or a
Triolet ; but these forms cannot yet be regarded as incor-
porate in our literature, and therefore I do not give them
place here. The reader will find them all Rondeau,
Rondel, Triolet, Villanelle, Ballade, Huitain, Dixain, and
the splendid Chant Royale in Austin Dobson's " Vi-
gnettes in Rhyme." They are one and all conditioned
by intricate rhyme-schemes, and upon repetitions and
refrains, each stanza carrying exactly the same melodic
tones as every other. They are fascinating to write, and
are very exacting metric drill the man who is quite
master of the Chant Royale need never baulk at any metric
form but it is evident that such close tone-schemes
must be constrictive, and, while being a good field for
the play of what is known in the poetic art as " con-
ceits," offer none at all for the development of real
thought or passion.
METRIC FORMS 185
The student should experiment in, and gain mastery
of, all forms, but permit himself to become enslaved by
none. Thus will the spirit, playing freely in every key,
always find for the special inspiration the special ex-
pression.
Setting aside blank verse which is a genus of itself,
and will be treated separately in the next chapter un-
withre ard rnvme d verse in English has not, as a rule,
tounrhymed proved very successful. This is because, if we
discard the great fusing and unifying element
of rhyme, we have left only rhythm to guide us to the
verse-form primary rhythm, or motion within the bar,
and the larger rhythm of metrical division. Without the
first we could not have even the pretence of verse ; but
the second seems of equal importance, for upon the nice
adjustment and balance of the caesural effects and the
natural metric pauses or end-stops is conditioned the
musical swing, not only of the whole line, but of the whole
stanza. Therefore upon this factor it depends whether
the ear shall receive an impression of verse at all or
merely of dislocated prose periods. I give herewith
three examples of unrhymed verse which have this pro-
nounced musical swing, and which therefore seem en-
tirely satisfying to the ear.
" Thus they see you, praise you, think they know you !
There, in turn I stand with them and praise you
Out of my own self, I dare to phrase it,
But the best is when I glide from out them,
Cross a step or two of dubious twilight,
Come out on the other side, the novel
Silent silver lights and darks undreamed of,
Where I hush and bless myself with silence.
" Oh, their Rafael of the dear Madonnas,
Oh, their Dante of the dread Inferno,
1 86 THE MUSICAL BASIS OF VERSE
Wrote one song and in my brain I sing it,
Drew one angel borne, see, on my bosom ! ' '
BROWNING : " One Word More."
" And the evening sun descending
Set the clouds on fire with redness,
Burned the broad sky, like a prairie,
Left upon the level water
One long track and trail of splendour,
Down whose stream, as down a river,
Westward, westward Hiawatha
Sailed into the fiery sunset,
Sailed into the purple vapours,
Sailed into the dusk of evening."
LONGFELLOW: " Hiawatha's Departure."
" Lo, with the ancient
Roots of man's nature
Twines the eternal
Passion of song.
" Ever Love fans it,
Ever Life feeds it ;
Time cannot age it,
Death cannot slay.
" Deep in the world-heart
Stand its foundations,
Tangled with all things,
Twin-made with all.
" Nay, what is Nature's
Self, but an endless
Strife toward music,
Euphony, rhyme ?
1 The measure of Hiawatha is said to be imitated from the Finnish
Kalevala.
METRIC FORMS 187
" Trees in their blooming,
Tides in their flowing,
Stars in their circling,
Tremble with song.
" God on His throne is
Eldest of poets :
Unto His measures
Moveth the Whole."
WILLIAM WATSON: " England, My Mother."
These extracts were selected at random, without any
regard to their correlation, and merely because they pre-
sent harmonious and proportioned movement; yet, if we
study them, we shall find that they possess three ele-
ments in common :
1. They are metrically symmetrical; that is, every line
is the length of every other line. This impresses upon
the ear at the outset the harmonious movement of the
larger rhythms.
2. They all have the direct attack, which we have
already noted (page 47) as a potent factor of verse-
motion.
3. They all have the feminine ending, which also we
have observed to be a concomitant of motion as well as
of melody. 1 Thus we perceive that the writers of these
poems, though they have dispensed with melodic
cadence-correspondence, have, consciously or uncon-
sciously, availed themselves of every other element which
could unify their verse. And in unrhymed verse, with-
out this metrical symmetry and exactness, this melodious
systole and diastole, it seems to me we cannot have verse
1 The third extract may be considered equi-metric notwithstanding the
masculine ending of every fourth line. This merely points off the groups or
stanzas. This poem has the added movement of triple rhythm.
1 88 THE MUSICAL BASIS OF VERSE
at all. For, in a rhymed poem which is metrically irregu-
lar, the rhyme gives tonal correspondence and cohesion ;
but an unrhymed poem, which is metrically irregular, runs
much risk of being metrical chaos.
In these latter days strange things find their way into
print under the classification of poetry; some writers,
who value sensation above art, rushing into the bizarre
and amorphous. But it is always well to bear in mind
that no idea, however beautiful, or however true and
vital, unless it conform to those organic laws which
govern and condition the musical motion of verse, can of
itself and by itself constitute a poem.
Forms are not fetters, but opportunities.
CHAPTER VI
HEROICS
THE dividing line between the larger forms of poetic
art and the smaller is the personal one. By this they
objective are made to fall naturally into groups of the
subjective objective or subjective order, according as they
poetry are either the record of observer or observed.
In lyric verse the singer is himself the protagonist, and
it is his personal emotions and experiences to which he
is giving voice. The peculiarity of lyric poets, says Pro-
fessor Masson, is " that their poems are vehicles for certain
fixed ideas in the minds of the authors, outbursts of their
personal character, impersonations, under shifting guises,
of their wishes, feelings, beliefs." On the other hand,
in the epic and drama, the central figure is sought for
outside of self; and, although the poet so flings himself
into the personality of his creations that he may be said
to feel and act in them, and for the nonce to be one or
another of them, in the larger sense he remains forever
outside of them, an impersonal observer of characters
and events. Personality melts into imagination. To
quote again from Masson, the objective poets " fashion
their creations by a kind of inventive craft, working amid
materials supplied by sense, memory and reading, with-
out any distinct infusion of personal feeling."
Thus it comes about that the suitable media for ex-
pression also differentiate themselves ; those which most
fittingly express the personal emotion are not suited to
190 THE MUSICAL BASIS OF VERSE
the impersonal; and vice-versa. In brief, lyric verse is
song, pure and simple, and demands singable and motive
forms ; while the epic and the drama are recitatives and
demand a verse-form fitted to the long-sustained chords
of action.
The lyric, though probably not so old as the epic
because the impulse of savage man to celebrate his heroes
would fore-run his self-conscious impulse to
The lyric , , . ,-,-, .
express himself is very ancient. We have
noted (page 3) how " lyrical poetry, like all art in Greece,
took its origin in connection with nature worship;" and
from " the Jiolian lyrists, with Sappho at their head, and
the so-called Dorian lyrists, who culminate in Pindar," to
our own day, it has remained the favourite form for man's
intimate expression.
Lyric poetry has practically no metrical limitations,
and may employ any and all poetic forms. Objective
Forms poetry is obviously limited to the very few
objective forms which are large enough to embody its
poetry prolonged action without wearying the ear.
Such forms are the Greek dactylic hexameter, the mod-
ern heroic blank verse, or, very occasionally, the same
stately iambic employed in a full, rhymed stanza, as in
the " Faerie Queene."
The foregoing chapters have been mainly concerned
with lyric forms; in this chapter we shall consider the
larger medium of objective verse.
Objective art groups itself naturally into two general
divisions; viz. : (i) the epic, 1 with its cognate miniatures,
Divisions of * n which the story of the personages concerned
objective is told or narrated; and (2) the drama, with its
cognate miniatures, in which the story tells
//^//"through the speech and action of the personages
1 Greek : Epikos, from epos, word.
HEROICS IQI
concerned. Aristotle's definition of drama is imitated
action.
The smaller forms of the epic are:
1. The Metrical Romance, such as most of Scott's and
many of Byron's poems, Keats's " Eve of St. Agnes"
and" Lamia," Browning's" Ivan Ivanovitch,"
" Donald," etc. The Metrical Romance, by
far the largest class in imaginative poetry, was intro-
duced into English literature by Chaucer with his " Can-
terbury Tales."
2. The Idyll. * The Idyll is epical in character, in that it
is large and simple, but, as its name indicates, it should
be tranquil, and be less a matter of action than of situa-
tion and sentiment. Under this head we may consider
Arnold's" Balder Dead;" Wordsworth's " Laodamia;"
Tennyson's 'Ulysses" and "^Enone;" Landor's
' Dryope," " Cupid and Pan," " Chrysaor," etc. Such
poems as Burns's " Cotter's Saturday Night" are also
classed as Idylls, though they are strictly speaking
merely Pastorals. The Pastoral Poem might be called
a small Idyll. Tennyson's " Idylls of the King " are not
really Idylls, as they deal with action and approach too
near the true epic.
3. The Ballad. The Ballad has already been treated
in the preceding chapter. It partakes of the nature of
the lyric, in that, though objective in substance, it is
lyrical in external character.
The epic takes its dawn beyond the horizon of civilisa-
tion. Barbaric peoples, desirous of celebrating the ex-
originof ploits of their heroes, or the attributes of their
the epic deities, or both mythically interwoven, would
naturally break into rude song, more or less vocal, and
rendered rhythmic by the length of a suspiration, or the
rough steps of an accompanying dance. Such celebra-
192 THE MUSICAL BASIS OF VERSE
tions we may observe to-day in the song-dances of our
own North American Indian tribes. These songs would
be at first largely ejaculatory, but, as the scope of human
speech widened, they would become rhetorically fuller
and more rounded. By and by as man became more
civilised and settled, we can see that these recitals would
cease to be chanted by the whole people, and would be
relegated to specialists, whose trained memories could
retain the prodigious 'chronicles, and whose function it
would be to polish and reduce them to an artistic
natively artistic homogeneity. Hence the minstrel, or
poet-singer. The next step in development would be
the reduction of these recitatives to writing, by which
they would take on fixity of form and become literature.
From the first self^consciousnessof literature on, we have
plenty of epics ; they, however, are no longer endogenous,
The literary but exogenous; not an internal, but an external,
epic growth. The material is no longer organic,
evolved with the development of the people, but is
selected and arranged and expressed by a single mind.
The literary epic may therefore be called a composition.
An early example of a composition is Virgil's" yEneid,"
which, though attempting to follow the great Greek
models, cannot attain to their heroic spontaneity.
The earliest as well as the noblest epics which have
come down to us are the " Iliad " and the " Odyssey,"
Earliest attributed to Homer. We have other exam-
epics p| es j n t | ie g rea t Norse " Sagas," 1 and in the
early Anglo-Saxon (heathen) poem of " Beowulf."
With the Christian era a new element is introduced
Christian into epic poetry, viz.: the spiritual. It is no
epics longer brute force which is to be celebrated and
extolled, but that something in man, larger and finer,
1 Saga something said.
HEROICS 193
which impels him to shed the material and to press for-
ward to ever higher and higher ideals. In his " Divina
Commedia " Dante opened the new literary era with the
grandest music to which the world has ever listened.
The " Divina Commedia" is also called a Didactic Alle-
gory. One may ask, since its motive is profoundly sub-
jective, why this poem takes the rank of the epic. It
takes rank as an epic because of its construction, because
of the largeness of its scope, and because, notwith-
standing the underlying subjectivity, its expression is
objective, unrolling before us a panorama of vivid con-
crete pictures.
James Russell Lowell says of Dante, " He would not
have been the great poet he was if he had not felt in-
tensely and humanly, but he could never have won the
cosmopolitan place he holds had he not known how to
generalise his special experience."
English literature is rich in epics. To name only
a few: Layamon's "Brut" (eleventh century); Lang-
English land's " Vision of Piers the Plowman" (four-
epics teenth century); Spenser's " Faerie Queene "
(also Allegories); Milton's "Paradise Lost;" Keats's
splendid fragment, " Hyperion;" and, in our own day,
Tennyson's " Idylls of the King," now called " The
Arthuriad." While, taken separately, the " Idylls" are
not individually large enough to stand as epics, together,
and as a whole, they make a most noble epic setting of
these immortal Celtic legends.
There is a large class of poems which, though epical in
scope and treatment, are wanting in the action and move-
Pastorai ment of the true epic. Of such are Words-
epics worth's " Excursion," Goldsmith's " Travel-
ler " and "Deserted Village," Thomson's "Seasons,"
etc. These are known as Pastoral Epics.
13
194 THE MUSICAL BASIS OF VERSE
The union of largeness of conception with simplicity
in execution is the distinguishing characteristic of the
character of epic. There is usually a central figure round
the epic which the general movement groups itself.
Such are Achilles in the " Iliad," Ulysses in the " Odys-
sey," Fridthjof in the "Fridthjof Saga," Sigurd in the
" Volsung " legends, Beowulf in "Beowulf," etc. In the
Christian epics, Dante himself is the heroic figure of
the " Divina Commedia;" Satan, of " Paradise Lost;"
Arthur, of the " Idylls of the King."
The epic is discursive, and abounds with episodes, or
interpolated narratives of events not closely related to
the main theme. Dialogue is a great feature of the epic,
and gives life to the canvas, but its dialogue is discursive
and expansive, and not the concentrated utterance of the
drama. It is not so much the action or character of
special personages as the impression of the whole which
is of importance in the epic.
The epic is sculptured upon heroic lines large, simple,
severe like a colossal statue which is designed to pro-
duce its effect by massiveness of outline rather than by
delicacy of detail. In its largeness of form and tonic
austerity of movement, it may be likened to the symphony
in music, each representing in its own department of art
the loftiest sustained effort of which the composer is
capable; for the epic poet is the " poet of life, sublimity,
action."
The one feature which modern drama has in common
with ancient is that both had their origin in religious
Origin of the ceremonial. Such mimetic art as India and
Egypt possessed was centred about the mys-
teries of their worship. In Greece, as we have already
noted (page 3), " the Bacchic songs of alternating mirth
HEROICS 195
and sadness gave birth through the dithyramb to trag-
edy, and through the Comus-hymn to comedy." " In
the religious life of Egyptians, Indians, Chinese, and
Greeks, the deepest conceptions of death in life and life
in death veiled themselves under dramatic forms which
were at once jealously guarded from contact with the
multitude, and remained to it objects of unutterable rev-
erence. Wherever in religious rites a dramatic element
asserted itself as in the worship of Osiris, of Buddha,
of Dionysus, it sprang from an endeavour to symbolise
in mysterious forms conflict and solution, passion and
expiatory action." 1
Christian dramatic art also had its beginning in the
church, and primarily strove to present to the vulgar an
Earl idea of the divine mysteries for which the sym-
christian bolised worship stood. But in form nothing
could be farther from the classical standards.
Greek art severe, one might even say sculpturesque, and
single in idea did not serve as model for the mediaeval
Mysteries or Miracle-plays, which, like the lyric poetry of
the same epoch, developed waywardly, in consonance
with the racial feeling of the new civilisations.
The first distinct dramatic representations of the Chris-
tian world are to be found in the Mysteries and Miracle-
plays, common in the middle ages, which consisted of
portions of scripture, or sacred legends, loosely hung
together and often strangely assorted. At first exclu-
sively an ecclesiastical prerogative, these came afterwards
into the hands of purely secular performers. A rare
instance of the survival of this mediaeval form is found in
the famous " Passion Play" of Oberammergau, in the
Tyrol, performed at intervals down to our own time.
1 A. W. WARD: " History of English Dramatic Literature," Intro-
duction.
196 THE MUSICAL BASIS OF VERSE
But there were certain connecting links with ancient
art. Classical traditions and classical volumes lingered
Previousto in odd monastic corners, and were browsed
Congest*" u P on ^7 occasional inquiring minds. There
impulse exist crude essays in dramatic form and with
forma? Latin text, always of a theological character,
drama and probably never seen outside the walls of
the cloisters. Conspicuous among such were the works
of Hroswitha, the Benedictine nun of Gandersheim, who
modelled herself in form upon Terence, endeavouring to
adapt this to the requirements of Christian theology. In
England the development of dramatic entertainments,
though not beginning until the Norman conquest, was
cognate and coeval with that of the continent. Previous
to the conquest there seems to have been no impulse
towards dramatic form; 1 this came in, with other con-
tinental culture, with the Normans. ' French ecclesias-
tics, who filled the English monasteries, brought with
them the literary tendency of the times. Thus it would
be in accordance with probability that Latin religious
dramas, treating of the legends of the saints, should'
have been performed in the English monasteries in the
latter part of the eleventh century, as they had been per-
formed at Quedlinburg, and perhaps at Gandersheim.
And as these performances would be in the first instance
treated as part of the education of the children com-
mitted to the care of the religious foundations, the
legends of the patron-saints of boys and girls, St. Nich-
olas and St. Catharine, would be expected to have been
treated with especial predilection." 2
1 Because, as Professor Ward has well pointed out, mere dialogue, with-
out implied action, has none of the elements of drama. If it had, Isaac
Walton's " Compleat Angler" could be regarded as a drama.
2 WARD : " History of English Dramatic Literature," chap. i.
HEROICS 197
The elementary stages of English dramatic art are not
difficult to trace. It seems to have been early the cus-
Eariy torn to add to the ceremonial of church func-
church tions on special occasions tableaux represent-
mimetic r
ceremonials ing biblical subjects. Some mimetic elements
would next creep in, then the vernacular would be sub-
stituted for the Latin texts ; and we are well on the way
towards elementary drama. The joining together of a
number of Mysteries into a collective Mystery is another
long step in the line of dramatic construction.
" ' The Ludus de S. Katherina,' the earliest religious
play of which we have nominal mention, and which the
Norman Geoffrey (afterwards Abbot of St. Albans) caused
to be represented about the year 1 1 10, is usually sup-
posed to have been written in French. The supposition,
however, is not proved." 1
There appear to have been Miracle-plays 2 in London
in 1170-1182, but it is not known in what language they
First miracle- were written; probably Latin. Professional
P Ifl y 8 players are heard of in 1258. From this time
on the Miracle-plays multiplied and came eventually
to be performed in great numbers in centres like
Chester, Coventry, York, Newcastle-on-Tyne, Leeds,
Lancaster, Preston, Kendal, Wymondham, Dublin, and
London.
Three series of English Collective Mysteries have come
down to us : the Towneley, the Chester, and the Coven-
try collections. The Coventry plays have more literary
form than the others, for which reason it is supposed
that they were written by the clergy, while the Chester
1 WARD : " History of English Dramatic Literature," chap. i.
2 Strictly speaking, the Mystery deals with purely scriptural subjects,
and the Miracle-plays with legends of the saints ; but the two were a good
deal mixed, and in England the term Mystery (a. corruption of ministeriuni)
seems never to have been used at all.
198 THE MUSICAL BASIS OF VERSE
plays, being more popular in style, probably came from
secular sources.
Each separate play was called a pageant and began
upon a Sunday at six o'clock in the morning. Rogers
(about the end of the sixteenth century) says of the
Chester plays, " Every company had his pageant, which
pageants were a high scaffold with two rooms, a higher
and a lower, upon four wheels. In the lower they appar-
elled themselves, and in the higher room they played,
being all open on the top that all beholders might see
and hear them. The places where they played them was
in every street. They began first at the Abbey gates,
and when the first pageant was played, it was wheeled
to the high cross before the Mayor, and so to every
street."
But the public temper demanding a more humanised
element in its mimetic art something nearer to every-
Evoiutionof day life there was developed the Morality,
the morality w herein merely ethical subjects supersede the
sacred. Human virtues, vices, attributes of all sorts,
are herein personified, and act out their artificial, often
grotesque, parts; yet from the nature of it the Morality
was more dramatically coherent than anything which
preceded it. In the Morality also we trace the rudi-
ments of character drawing.
With the increase of learning and the consequently
heightened literary taste, the Morality, as well as the
into the Miracle-play, ceased to satisfy; and the next
interlude dramatic evolution is into the Interlude The
Interlude was light in character and, as its name indi-
cates, served to fill the intervals at feasts and other en-
tertainments. It was the progenitor of comedy proper.
The most notable early Interludes are by John Hey-
wood. Good examples of the Interlude may be seen
HEROICS 199
in " Midsummer-Night's Dream," " Love's Labour's
Lost," and the "Tempest," though the latter might
better come under the head of the Mask. The more
elaborate Interludes were called Masks, and were popu-
lar throughout the reign of Elizabeth, having been intro-
duced from Italy, where they were known as " masked
dramas." They were usually pastoral in character and
interspersed with dancing. Ben Jonson wrote many
elaborate Masks, the most famous of them being "Cyn-
thia's Revels." The greatest English Mask is, however,
Milton's " Comus."
The Miracle-play, the Morality the Morality sur-
vived till the end of the sixteenth c.entury and the In-
terlude continued in a manner side by side
Differentia- .. ., 1111-.
tionof until all were superseded by legitimate drama.
tragedyand i t was during the reign of Henry VIII. that
tragedy and comedy, 1 which had heretofore
been strangely jumbled, became, through the influence of
classical study and of Italian dramatic models, differenti-
ated into their respective fields and forms, comedy seem-
ing to have taken shape before tragedy. The earliest
original English comedy is "Ralph Roister Doister "
(1551 or earlier); and "Gammer Gurton's Needle"
(printed in 1575) is generally regarded as chronologically
the next.
1 Greek Komodia, from Komos, revel + ode. Tragedy is derived from the
Greek Tragodia, this word having its origin in Tragos, a goat, from the
fact that originally tragic singers were dressed in goat-skins to represent
Satyrs.
" According to Aristotle, that which distinguishes tragedy as a dramatic
species is the importance and magnitude of its subject, the adequate eleva-
tion of its literary form, and the power of the emotions pity or terror
by means of which it produces its effects. Comedy, on the other hand,
imitates actions of inferior interest (' neither painful nor destructive '), and
carried on by characters whose vices are of a ridiculous kind." WARD :
" History of English Dramatic Literature," chap, ii.
200 THE MUSICAL BASIS OF VERSE
Comedy has tended to prose, therefore it is generally
in the great tragedies that we must look for the highest
achievements of dramatic verse.
The first English tragedy proper of which we have rec-
ord is " Gorboduc " also called " Ferrex and Porrex "
from the hands of Thomas Sackville, Lord
The first
English Buckhurst (I56/). 1 This play, although the
first legitimate English drama, " moves with-
out ease or variation," and is full of " moral reflections
of excessive length." It is the first drama in blank
verse, Surrey's "^Eneid" having preceded it by fifteen
years.
But it was the fiery genius of Marlowe which, with its
' Tamburlaine the Great," ushered in the splendid drama
of the golden age of Elizabeth ; and, though he did not
reach the stature of Shakespeare, nor the technical finish
even of a number of others, he must be reckoned as the
first of the Titans of English dramatic literature.
A mighty decadence follows the great Elizabethan
music. Inspiration faded and artifice took its place;
until at last all art became obscured in the
Decadence
Puritan twilight. And we find the revived
drama of the Restoration meretricious both in matter
and manner.
In the nineteenth century, literature and the stage
would seem to have become entirely divorced ; but there
are hopeful signs to-day of a change in this respect. 2
The two axes upon which the spirit of drama moves
are action and character; character prompting action,
and action organically elucidating character. The great-
1 The first three acts are said to have been written by Thomas Norton,
the last two by Sackville.
2 The reader will bear in mind that this book concerns itself exclusively
with English drama. In France the literary drama has always obtained ;
as, largely, in other countries of Europe.
HEROICS 201
ness of Shakespeare is in nothing more demonstrated
than in his power of drawing a character and making
it act itself. Furthermore true drama is po-
principles
of the tentially human, stirring the chords of laughter
or tears, love, pity, or terror, to which men's
passions vibrate the world over; and only in proportion
as it is human can it be intrinsic or great. It is of no
consequence to us that Rosalind is assumedly a French-
woman, Portia a Venetian, Hamlet a Dane, Othello
a Moor, etc., because these, in their large delineations,
are not particular types but cosmopolitan types, play-
ing out universal life-dramas upon a universal stage.
Characterisation is a development of modern drama, and
is one of the salient features which distinguish it from
ancient art.
In the ancient drama simple, direct, austere the
persons seem to be rather the sport of an inexorable
comparison destiny, and the action moves upon inevitable
with^rdem lines - In the modern drama the dramatis per-
drama soucs mould their own d,estinies, and give us
many surprises. ' The motive of ancient drama," says
Lowell, " is generally outside of it, while in the modern
it is within."
Underplots, which only crept into classic literature in
its decadence, form the very woof of modern drama. The
latter borrowed from the Romans the system of dividing
a play into five sections, or acts, but has beautifully dis-
regarded the traditions of the Greek unities of time,
place, and action, moving upon lines of its own.
Modern drama is far more complex than the ancient,
and introduces not only more personages but more
motives. Naturally this admits of much subjectivity;
but the objective side of the art must ever dominate,
else will the art as art suffer deterioration. We call
202 THE MUSICAL BASIS OF VERSE
" Hamlet " a subjective drama, and so are all of Ibsen's
plays subjective dramas; but, with all their power, no
one could think of comparing the latter with the great
Shakespearean play, for the simple reason that, in " Ham-
let," the perfect objective dominance, the high artistic
poise which was indeed in the very air the Eliza-
bethans breathed lifts it far above the atmospheric
stratum in which modern realism moves.
Drama has its miniatures in the one-act play; in
poetic literature, in the scena and gran scena, for which
Dramatic Aldrich's lovely "Pauline Paulovna " and
miniatures Browning's "In a Balcony" may stand as
types. Certain other poems, semi-dramatic in form but
lyrical in movement such as Arnold's " Empedocles
on ^Etna " and Browning's " In a Gondola" we may
class as dramatic lyrics. Shelley's " Prometheus Un-
bound " is called a lyrical drama; and there are other
works which defy classification, such as Browning's
" Pippa Passes " and " Paracelsus," the latter being de-
fined by Miss Scudder as " drama moving toward mono-
logue."
There was a form of Dramatic Idyll, imitated from the
Italian, 1 and called Pastoral Drama, which had vogue in
Elizabeth's time, but which has long gone by. Fletcher's
" Faithful Shepherdess" and Ben Jonson's " Sad Shep-
herd " are examples. Spenser's " Shepherd's Calendar "
is slighter and belongs rather to the department of the
Eclogue.
Imitations of pure Greek drama are found in Swin-
burne's " Atalanta in Caledon " and " Erechtheus," and
1 The Pastoral Drama, which was, in other words, the bucolic idyll in
dramatic form, and freely lent itself to the introduction both of mythological
and allegorical elements, flourished in Italy at the close of the fifteenth cen-
tury. Its origin was purely literary.
HEROICS 203
in Milton's " Samson Agonistes," the latter a master-
piece well comparable to its models.
With this necessarily brief survey of the field of objec-
tive art we shall have to pause and transfer our attention
to the medium employed for its expression.
It is obvious that any long-sustained theme, such as
we find in objective art, would demand for its expression
some medium whose motion could be indefi-
Ine
five-foot nitely prolonged, and whose periods could be
indefinitely varied, so as to charm and not
weary the ear. Such a medium was early found in Euro-
pean verse in the so-called five-foot iambic. Stanzaic
verse of any kind is unsuited to long-sustained themes
because the exigencies of the rhyme and 'the greater
metric uniformity and exactness make prolonged stanzaic
movements cloying or wearisome to the ear. There have
been a few successful exceptions, such as Chapman's
Homer, whose strong, rugged numbers catch Homeric
echoes; and Spenser's" Faerie Queene," which endures,
not because it is best adapted to epic art, but by
virtue of its wonderful music. We have only to place
beside the latter " Paradise Lost" to recognise the im-
mensely greater power and virility of blank verse. It is
indeed not a little due to the selection of blank verse as
a medium a process of natural selection, since it was
not easily adopted, and only made its way as its superior
fitness manifested itself that English poetic art has
established its preeminence.
The iambic measure seems to have been evolved by
the Greeks quite as early as the dactylic, but it was not
considered by them of sufficient dignity for a heroic
medium, and was relegated to the expression of satire.
The Latins used it imitatively; but, with all elements of
204 THE MUSICAL BASIS OF VERSE
classic culture, it became obscured in the mists of mediae -
valism. When it emerges again to view in the literature
of the early Italian Renaissance, it is seen to be a very
different medium from the classic form. Quantity no
longer dictates. It is dominated solely by the nascent
musical ear of the new culture, and measures its numbers
by the recurrent and interconsistent accent. In the pol-
ished verse of Dante and Petrarch it becomes a wonder-
fully elastic medium is indeed often so loosely hung as
almost to seem dithyrambic; yet are the musical unities
ever preserved. For so fluent is the limpid Tuscan
tongue, with such a superabundance of warm vowel tones
and the ever-inherent tendency of the southern larynx
to soften consonants, that it permits marvellous elisional
effects, the measures seeming to melt one over the other,
as it were, in waves of harmoniously modulated sound.
Of the modern five-foot iambic, Professor Mayor, quot-
ing Zarncke, says: " We have no ground for tracing the
metre back either to the Greek five-foot iambic
Modern
five-foot or five-foot trochaic with anacrusis, nor to the
Latin hendecasyllabic, which is quite opposed
to it in rhythm. We can say no more of it than that
it was in all probability the ordinary metre of the
Romance epic 1 and spread from France into other coun-
tries. . . . This will give an idea:
" ' Enfants en dies forn om fel!6
Qu'el era corns molt onraz e rix
Nos jove omne quandiiis que nos estam
Donz fo Bo6cis corps ag bo e pro.' 2
1 Whence did the Romance poets evolve it ? It is more likely that they
had an idea of the classic form enfeebled by the attrition of the Middle-Age
ignorance, but uttered it in their own way with the dawn of a new music in
their souls. See page 21.
2 The reason for omitting the scansion ttiarks in the originals of these
quotations will be obvious.
HEROICS 205
" In the ' Alexius ' and* Song of Roland/ dating from
the eleventh century, we meet with examples of fem-
inine ending, as
""* Faites la guerre cum vos Pavez emprise,'
. . . ' From about the middle of the twelfth cen-
tury the five-foot verse gave place to the four-foot and
the six-foot (Alexandrine), but was still retained for
lyric poetry, undergoing however two changes: (i) the
caesura, which occurs regularly after the fourth syllable,
was treated simply as a metrical, not a logical pause;
(2) the preceding accent was often thrown back or in-
verted, making the second foot a trochee, as :
" ' Bona domna per cui plane e sospir '
Later on all the accents except the last
became liable to inversion, as :
" ' Bel ha domna valham vostra va!6rs,'
. . . "From 1500 the feminine caesura disappears
altogether, owing to the growing weakness of the final e.
The more regular form of the five-foot iambic became
known as vers commun, and was employed by Ronsard
for epic and by Jodelle for tragedy. By the end of the
sixteenth century, however, there was a reaction in favor
of the Alexandrine, the stiff monotony of the rhyming
five-foot, with its fixed pauses after the fourth and tenth
syllables, being felt to be unsuitable for the more ani-
mated styles of poetry.
' The Italian hendecasyllabic metre had been devel-
oped out of the Provencal lyric poetry long before it was
made famous by Dante. It differs from the French
(a) in the constant feminine ending; (&) the freedom of
206 THE MUSICAL BASIS OF VERSE
the caesura, which may be either masculine or feminine,
and either after the second or third foot ; (c) the use of
enjambement, i.e. the absence of a final pause, so as to
allow one verse to run on into another; (d) the trans-
position of the accent in any foot except the last, but
especially the fourth foot, as:
" ' Le Donne i Cavalier Parme gli amore,'
" This freedom of rhythm is accompanied by greater
freedom in the rhyme, so as to connect together not
merely two consecutive lines but whole stanzas." 1
Thus we perceive that the medium was perfected long
before England had use for it.
The five-foot iambic is generally considered to have
been introduced into England by Chaucer, although, as
English we have seen, echoes of it had been wafted
iambicor across the Channel even earlier; but Chaucer's
heroic verse was the first artist hand upon it. He used it
in rhymed couplets, very free, and delicately balanced.
From his time until we approach the golden age of Eliza-
beth, there is nothing notable; yet it was undoubtedly
a period of metric as well as literary gestation. The
concentrated hour never arrives by accident. Even if
the earthquake seem sudden and unprepared, we may be
sure that the seismic forces have long been gathering.
The first use we find made of blank verse, or the un-
rhymed five-foot iambic, is in the translation of the
second and fourth books of the "^Eneid" by Henry
Howard, Earl of Surrey (about 1540). Surrey brought
blank verse from Italy, where it had recently been intro-
duced by Trissino ; but, although his introduction of it
into English literature marks an epoch in the history of
English metre, the versification of the " ^Eneid " is so
JOSEPH B. MAYOR: " English Metre : Postscript."
HEROICS 207
harsh and crude that it cannot take high rank as a work
of art.
The first work of real genius in blank verse is Mar-
lowe's " Tamburlaine the Great " (printed 1590), in which
First reat ^ le nan ^^ es n ^ s medium with a masterliness
work in which stamped it as the preeminent one for
blank verse dramL Marlowe has not wholly sloughed the
empiric roughness, yet such virile music does he give us
that we may easily pardon a few barbaric echoes.
And from Marlowe's moribund hands the lyre fell into
those of the master musician the Protean Shakespeare,
as he has been felicitously called. Beneath his consum-
mate touch the five-foot iambic suddenly expands into
a mighty instrument ; and so does he play upon it and
manipulate it, so toss it back and forth like a shuttle-
cock, so combine and break and re-combine, so invent
and diversify, so riddle it with mysterious sweet har-
monics, that he has wrung from it a music at which,
in three centuries, the world has never ceased won-
dering.
Shakespeare and Milton are the acknowledged masters
of English blank verse, Milton in the field of the epic,
Shakespeare Shakespeare in that of-the drama. Milton ex-
and Miiton ce ] s " m the large sonority of his verse "the
of blank long-breathed periods of Milton," Lowell calls
verse them, and Shakespeare by his melodious,
forceful, and apt diversity. Milton's verse is full of the
echo of mighty organ tones; Shakespeare has a whole
orchestra beneath his fingers.
And we observe that the objective poets who have fol-
lowed these two, though they have left us noble and
resonant blank verse, have never quite touched the same
artistic heights.
After Beaumont and Fletcher the writing of blank
208 THE MUSICAL BASIS OF VERSE
verse declines, being to a great extent replaced by the
rhymed couplet. Dryden in his later dramas reverts to
blank verse ; but his work is tinctured by the false taste
of the age, and is not of the first order.
In our own century Wordsworth, Keats, Shelley, the
two latter with an auroral promise which deepens the
Modern tragedy of their early deaths, and later,
blank verse Browning, Swinburne, and Tennyson have
given us noble heroic verse. Not every one will agree
with Professor Corson that Browning was " one of the
greatest masters of language-shaping." The radical de-
fect of Browning is that he has regarded too little the
unity of his verse, and so indulges a propensity to break
up his periods as to give much of his verse a jolting
effect. 1 Yet when he pleases he can give us such mag-
nificent bursts of organic verse-music as to make us re-
gret that he could not have held in more importance the
purely aesthetic side of his art.
Tennyson must be considered the modern master of
the technique of blank verse as well as of the lyric forms;
for, if he somewhat lack the virile force of his great con-
temporary, he is so rich in diction, so fertile in every
metric resource, so fluid and melodious in movement, so
faultless in his management of caesural effects, such a
master, in short, in the unity of verse, as to place him,
1 " Browning inclines to a strong masculine realism, apparently careless
of sound, and only too happy to startle and shock and puzzle his readers.
. . . The extreme harshness of many of his lines is almost a match for
anything in Surrey, only what in Surrey is helplessness seems the perversity
of strength in Browning. ... I hardly know whether it is fancy or
not, but to me there is no poetry which has such an instantaneously solem-
nising power as Browning's. We seem to be in company with some rough
rollicking Silenus, and all of a sudden the spirit descends upon him, the
tone of his voice changes, and he pours out strains of the sublimest
prophecy." JOSEPH B. MAYOR : " English Metre," chap. xii.
HEROICS 209
for purposes of metrical study, next to Shakespeare and
Milton.
The typical five-foot iambic is
f rir rir fir nr
The absolutely simple form of it is found in such a line
as this:
" And swims, or sinks, or wades, or creeps, or flies ; "
because not only is every bar normal in notation, but
each bar, as well as the line, is syllabically complete.
Yet more than a line or two in monosyllables
Construction
of blank is obviously harsh, and artistically impossible;
therefore art makes use of a judicious mixture of
monosyllables, dissyllables, and polysyllables. (See chap,
vii. for remarks upon the ponderable values of words.)
A very pure example of normal five-foot iambic may
be studied in the quatrain from Gray's " Elegy," on page
34. We find here every syllable, down to the anacrusis,
exactly in place and of the right weight; every line end-
stopped; 1 and the stanza itself rounded to its finish.
This absolute metrical exactness a survival of the arbi-
trary dictum of Dryden's day, which decreed that every-
thing, from a love-lay to a satire, should be cast in the
end-stopped heroic rhymed couplet is not unsuited to
a certain formal quality inherent in elegy; but long-
prolonged it would become tiresome. Successive end-
stopped lines obviously make versification .stiff and
mechanical. Blank verse was so written by those who
1 Verse is called end-stopped when there comes a natural or rhetorical
pause at the end of the line, marking off every five bars uniformly. When
this terminal pause is absent, and one has to carry the meaning on into the
next line, the verse is called run-on. Overflow is another name for the
latter ; and we also use the French word enjambement,
14
210 THE MUSICAL BASIS OF VERSE
used it first, and in Shakespeare's earlier work we find
a great predominance of end-stopped lines; but by his
middle period the period of the great tragedies we
see his use of the run-on line in full force.
The masters of blank verse have found means to escape
from the monotony of the typic scheme, and to give flexi-
Waysof bility and expressiveness to their verse in two
normal* ways, viz.: by varying the bar-notation, and
scheme by varying the caesural effects. The bar-nota-
tion may be varied (l) by dropping the anacrusis, (2) by
doubling a note, (3) by an occasional suspended syllable,
(or the prolonging of a single syllable through a bar),
(4) by the use of the feminine ending. These features
accelerate or retard the movement of the verse so as to
allow a free play for feeling.
The caesural effects are varied by the use of enjambe-
ment overflow which carries the sense into the line
beyond, putting a pause or caesura there.
The caesura plays a most important part in blank verse,
since upon its nice adjustment depends the cadence of
Part played the verse, those larger rhythms of single
by caesura phrases, and the great rhythmic swing of whole
periods. Unless the poet fully understands caesural
effects he will not be able to write organic and harmoni-
ous blank verse. 1
1 It is interesting here to compare Gascoigne's rule of metre, as given
forth in his " Instruction Concerning the Making of Verse in English,"
published in 1575. " There are certain pauses or rests in a verse, which
may be called caesures, whereof I should be loth to stand long, since it is
at the discretion of the writer, and they have been first devised, as should
seem by the musicians ; but yet thus much I will adventure to write that in
mine opinion, in a verse of eight syllables the pause will stand best in the
midst, in a verse of ten it will be best placed at the end of the first four
syllables." And again: "nowadays in English rimes we use none other
order but a foot of two syllables, whereof- the first is depressed or made
short and the second elevate or made long:."
HEROICS 2ii
Classical canons fixed the caesural pause in the third
foot (bar), though it might be in the fourth ; but modern
poets follow no rule, and place it variously, according to
the exigencies of the verse. An examination of " Para-
dise Lost" shows us that Milton generally uses the
caesura normally, in the third or fourth bars thereby
preserving the balance of the prolonged enjambement of
many of his periods; but we also find plenty of instances
of caesura in any other bar. A favourite pause with Shake-
speare is before the last accented syllable of a verse.
Tennyson much affects a pause after the first accented
syllable.
The so-called feminine caesura is the pause after an
unaccented syllable. Thus:
" Then fearing rust or soilure, fashioned for it "
Surrey and Sackville made almost no use of the in-
ternal pause, and Marlowe not nearly so much as the
masters who followed him ; but in all blank verse we find
plenty of lines without an internal pause, while many
others carry more than one.
Modern art tends to make the caesura a rhetorical,
rather than a merely metrical pause, or more correctly to
make them coincide.
In all cases where variation is made from the normal
verse-scheme, we shall find that the metrical balance is
Metrical restored by some other device, a doubling of
balance notes, or a peculiarly heavy syllable, in the
bar preceding or following the irregular one. 1 Thus the
verse is made interconsistent, and the volume of sound
1 This license in the arrangement of syllables in a bar is not admissible
in stanzaic forms, because the very nature of the stanza demands a uniform
flow, and to break it would destroy the proportioned rhythmic effect neces-
sary to song.
212 THE MUSICAL BASIS OF VERSE
preserved. This is peculiarly true of Shakespeare, whose
variants are especially daring.
Many metrists speak of these variants as " the shift-
ing of the accent," which is misleading. The rhythmic
accent is never shifted, for it is what marks the measure-
ments of the bar; nor in good blank verse is the rhetori-
cal accent shifted, for we do not now admit wrenched
accents; but the number of syllables to a bar is shifted,
throwing occasionally a heavier burden than the normal
in one, or a lighter burden than the normal in another.
Discarding now classical nomenclatures, we will state
that English blank verse is composed of a succession of
Basic verses, or lines, in free 2/5 verse, in each of
formula of which lines the pause maybe either final, in-
ternal, or both final and internal, or in some
cases altogether absent. But the typical scheme must
reappear with sufficient persistence to dominate the verse
and give it the organic stamp, thus preserving its unity.
" All metrical effects are to a great extent relative " says
Professor Corson, " and relativity of effect depends, of
course, upon having a standard in the mind or the feel-
ings. In other words, there can be no variation of any
kind without something to vary from. Now the more
closely the poet adheres to his standard, to the even
tenor (modulus) of his verse, so long as there is no logi-
cal nor (esthetic motive for departing from it, the more
effective do his departures become when they are suffi-
ciently motived. All non-significant departures weaken
the significant ones. In other words, all non-significant
departures weaken or obscure the standard to the mind
and the feelings. . . . But a great poet is presumed to
have metrical skill; and where ripples occur in the stream
of his verse, they will generally be found to justify them-
selves as organic; i.e. they are a part of the expression."
HEROICS 213
' The secret of complex and melodious blank verse,"
says John Addington Symonds, " lies in preserving the
balance and proportion of syllables while varying their
accent and their relative weight and volume, so that each
line in a period shall carry its proper burden of sound,
but the burden shall be differently distributed in the suc-
cessive verses."
In brief, heroic blank verse is a five-stringed instru-
ment, to which the poet brings the sole gauge of an
attuned and experienced ear, and upon which he may
make music according to the inspiration of his particular
genius.
Following are a number of examples of blank verse
notations ranging from Marlowe to Tennyson. In those
from Shakespeare, Milton, and Tennyson, I have en-
deavoured to give groups illustrative (i) of simple doubled
notes, (2) of direct attack, and (3) of suspended syllables,
i.e. a single syllable to a bar, effects not really separable,
since the presence of either the second or third generally
involves the first, adding to those from Shakespeare
three longer periods taken from his early, his mature,
and his latest works, as evidencing distinct modifications
in technique. The two extracts from Browning are
selected to show extremes of style. Note in the last line
of the quotation from Keats a remarkable circumstance.
Here we have the anacrusis omitted, but there are no
balancing doubled notes. The ear of the poet did not,
however, betray him ; for the feminine ending would of
itself balance the line; but besides this, the fact of its
being an invocation throws a peculiar emphasis upon the
first three words, which are all of light syllables, thus
increasing the general volume of sound.
In all the examples please notice how the use of the
direct attack gives a certain dynamic force to the verse ;
214 THE MUSICAL BASIS OF VERSE
also how a suspended syllable stimulates emotion and
intensifies the animus of the moment. The imagination
hangs as it were breathless, awaiting the next word.
MARLOWE
nr rir nr fir nr
Now clear the tri - pie re - gion of the air,
rir n r n r n r n r
And let the Ma - jes - ty of Heav'n be - hold
nr n r n r n r n r
Their scourge and ter - ror tread on em - per - ours.
rir rir rir rir rir
Smile, stars, that reign'd at my na - tiv - i - ty,
nr rir rir rir rir
And dim the bright - ness of your neigh-bour lamps !
nr fir rir rir fir
Dis - dain to bor - row light of Cyn - thi - a !
fif fir rir rir nr
For I, the chief - est lamp of all the earth,
r r rir rir n r nr
First ns - mg in the East with mild as - pe'ct, 1
1 A wrenched accent, common in Elizabethan times, but not now
admitted.
HEROICS 215
ri r n
But fix - ed now in the Me-ri-dian line
nr nr nr nr nr
Will send up fire 1 to your turn - ing spheres,
fir nr nr ri r ri r
And cause the sun to bor - row light of you.
nr nr nr ri r ri r
My sword struck fire from his coat of steel
irppir rir nr nr ->i
Ev'n in Bith - yn - ia, when I took this Turk.
" Tamburlaine the Great," iv., 2.
SHAKESPEARE 2
ri; fir
For mine's a suit
nr r r nr nwir r
That touches Cae - sar nearer. Read it, great Cae - sar.
"Julius Caesar," iii., i.
ri yr i r ri r r i r rir
Le - gitimate Ed - gar, I must have your land.
" Lear," i., 2.
1 Fire is treated here and below as two syllables, which, strictly speak-
ing, it is not.
2 The Rolfe edition has been used in these extracts.
216 THE MUSICAL BASIS OF VERSE
nr n r n r n r ri r
And now and then an am - pie tear trilPd down
riLrrir .
Her delicate cheek. " Lear," iv., 3.
nr nr ric/nr nr
De - liv - er this with modesty to the queen.
" Henry VIII.," ii., 2.
rw r n r rir MLM
Two of the fairest stars in all the heaven,
rjriLrnr r r nr j\
Having some business, do en - treat her eyes
rir rir nr nr nr
To twinkle in their spheres till they re - turn.
" Romeo and Juliet," ii., 2.
i wir rir rif rir vi
Give me thy hand. I had a thing to say,
rir n r n r n r n r
But I will fit it with some bet - ter time.
" King John," iii., 3.
HEROICS 217
nr n p n r
And when I love thee not,
iLrrif rir
Chaos is come a - gain.
Othello," iii., 3.
i tin r n r nr nrv
Curses, not loud, but deep, mouth-honour, breath,
IPP n r nr nr nr n
Which the poor heart would fain de - ny, and dare not.
" Macbeth," v., 3.
n r n r nr
I spurn thee like a cur out of my way.
"Julius Caesar," iii., i.
rir rir ir^ir nr
See, how my sword weeps for the poor king's death !
Third part of " Henry VI.," v., 6.
n r ri r
The burn - ing crest
P v\? if rif rir nr
Of the old, fee - ble, and day - wearied sun,
" King John," v., 4.
2l8 THE MUSICAL BASIS OF VERSE
lunr vir rir rir
Horrible sight ! Now I see 'tis true ;
"Macbeth," iv., i.
rir rir rir rir rir
It was the lark, the her - aid of the morn,
rir fir rif rir rir
No nightin - gale ; look, love, what envious streaks
rir rirjrir rir rir
Do lace the severing clouds in yonder east.
ri r n r n r ri r r r
Night's candles are burnt out, and jocund day
ri r ri r ri r ri r rir
Stands tip - toe on the misty mountain tops.
" Romeo and Juliet," iii., 5.
rir r r rir AW r r
To be, or not to be, that is the question :
Lffir rir rir rir r
Whether 'tis no - bier in the mind to suffer
rir ri r n r n r n r r
The slings and arrows of out - ra-geous fortune,
HEROICS 219
rir nr rir r
Or to take arms a - gainst a sea of troubles,
nr rir ri^nr rir
And by op - pos - ing end them ? To die, to sleep,
rir rir rir rir n r
No more; and by a sleep to say we end
nr rif rir riLrrir
The heart-ache and the thousand natural shocks
rir nr rir rir rir r
That flesh is heir to, 'tis a con - sum - ma - tion
rir rir rir
De - voutly to be wish'd.
"Hamlet," iii., i.
rir rir r
"Ad-mir'd Mi - ran - da !
r i r rir rir fir rir
In - deed the top of ad - mi - ra - tion ; worth
n r n r n r n i/ri r r
What's dearest to the world ! Full many a la - dy
Nr ri r rir ML/ rir
I have eyed with best re - gard, and many a time
220 THE MUSICAL BASIS OF VERSE
rifjrir nr nr nr r
Th' harmony of their tongues hath in - to bondage
rif riL/nr riLrr r r
Brought my too diligent ear. For several virtues
nr rit/rir nr nr r
Have I lik'd several women : never any
n r n r n r nr nr
With so full soul, but some de - feet in her
n r n r n r n r nr
Did quarrel with the noblest grace she owed,
n r nr nr
And put it to the foil:"
" Tempest," iii., i.
MILTON
if rir
That sea - beast
n r n r nr nr fir
Le - vi - a - than, which God of all his works
nr rifjfir nr nr
Cre - at - ed hugest that swim the o - cean stream.
" Paradise Lost," i.
HEROICS
221
rir
And roll'd
n r rir
r r r
In bil - lows, leave in the midst a hor - rid vale.
" Paradise Lost/' i.
rir rir r r
For bliss - ful Par - a - disc
rir rir rir n rw r
Of God the gar - den was, by him in the east
rir rir n
Of E - den plant - ed.
" Paradise Lost," iv.
r r rir
Con - cern - ing which
rir rirjrir rir rir
I charg'd thee, saying : Thou shalt not eat there - of,
" Paradise Lost," x.
r rir rir ri rvi
Torn from Pe - lor - us, or the shat - ter'd side
nrjr r n
Of thundering JEt - na,
" Paradise Lost," i.
222 THE MUSICAL BASIS OF VERSE
rir rir
Part, huge of bulk,
icirwrwr n r rir
Wallowing un-wieldy, e - nor - mous in their gait,
icjnr n
Tempest the o - cean :
" Paradise Lost," vii.
icjvir n r n r nr^i
Laden with fruit of fair - est col - ours mix'd,
iLrr r
Ruddy and gold.
" Paradise Lost," ix.
WIT
And the fresh field
fir n r nr
Calls us ; we lose the prime, to mark how spring
rir rir
Our tended plants,
" Paradise Lost," v.
i Lrrir t\f ir^i r
Millions of flam - ing swords, drawn from the thighs
HEROICS
223
r r fir nr
Of might - y cher - u - bim :
" Paradise Lost," i.
nr
Hail, holy Light ! offspring of Heav'n first - bom,
nr r r r r rir r r
Or of th' E - ter - nal co - e - ter - nal beam,
" Paradise Lost," iii.
rirLfir rir rir r r
The chariot of Pa - ter - nal De - i - ty,
ic/nr rrjir rir-'i
Flashing thick flames, wheel within wheel in - drawn,
" Paradise Lost," vi.
rir nr nryicjrir
O vi - sions ill fore - seen ! better had I
ri r nr rir n
Liv'd ig - nor - ant of fu - ture,
" Paradise Lost," xi.
ir fir nr
High in front ad-vanc'd,
224 THE MUSICAL BASIS OF VERSE
r r n r nr nr r r
The brandish' d sword of God be - fore them blaz'd,
r nr n r n r
Fierce as a com - et ; which, with tor - rid heat,
fir n r . n r n r n r
And va - pour as the Libyan air a - dust,
ri r n r n LTM r n r
Be - gan to parch that temperate clime ; where-at
nr nr nunr nr
In either hand the hastening an - gel caught
riL/rir rirppir r r
Our lingering par - ents, and to the east - ern gate
irwr nr nr nr
Led them di-rect, and down the cliff as fast
.r nr nr nr
To the sub-ject - ed plain ; then dis - ap-peared.
"Paradise Lost," xii.
WORDSWORTH
r.r nr
For I have learn'd
HEROICS 225
nr n r n.r n r n r
To look on Nature, not as in the hour
r r r r r. r r r r i r
Of thoughtless youth ; but hear - ing of - ten - times
r I r r i r r i r r I r r i r
The still, sad mus - ic of hu - man - i - ty,
nr nr rir n r n r
Not harsh nor grat-ing, though of am - pie power
fir nr nr rir nr
lo chasten and sub -due. And I have felt
nr n r nr n r n r
A presence that dis-turbs me with the joy
rir ri r nr r r rir
Of el - e - vat - ed thoughts; a sense sub-lime
n r n r n r rir rir
Of something far more deep - ly in - ter - fus'd,
ri r n r n r n r ri r
Whose dwelling is the light of set - ting suns,
i mi r n r ri r ri r
And the round o - cean, and the liv - ing air,
226 THE MUSICAL BASIS OF VERSE
r n r n r n
And the blue sky, and in the mind of man :
r r rif rir rir nr
A mo - tion and a spir - it, that im - pels
nr nr nr rir rir
All thinking things, all ob - jects of all thought,
fir rir n
And rolls through all things.
"Tinturn Abbey."
SHELLEY
rir n r nr n r n r r
From all the blasts of heav'n thou hast de - scend - ed :
r r n r r r nr rir
Yes, like a spir - it, like a thought, which makes
rir n r \tn\ r rir
Un - wont - ed tears throng to the horn -y eyes,
rir rir r r rir rir
And beat-ings haunt the des - o - lat - ed heart,
r r rir rir rir r r r
Which should have learnt repose : thou hast de - scend - ed,
HEROICS 227
irjri r nr r r n r vi
Cradled in tempests; thou dost wake, O Spring!
n r n r n r nr PI r
O child of many winds ! As sudden - ly
nr nr riLfrir r r
Thou com-est as the memory of a dream,
PIP rir rif nr nr
Which now is sad be-cause it hath been sweet ;
PIT PIP rir PIP DP
Like gen-ius, or like joy which ris-eth up
n r n r ,/iLrnr rir
As from the earth, clothing with gold - en clouds
rir rir rir
The desart of our life.
" Prometheus Unbound," ii., i.
KEATS
nr rir rir
Search, Thea, search ! and tell me if thou seest
rir PI r n r n r PI r
A cer - tain shape or shadow, making way
228 THE MUSICAL BASIS OF VERSE
nr rirjrir nr nr
With wings or char-i-ot fierce to re - poss -
r i u r i r r i r fir fir
A heaven he lost ere - while : it must it must
nr nr M
Be of ripe progress Sat -urn must be king.
nr nr n r nr nr
Yes, there must be a gold - en vie - to - ry ;
fir nr ri r nr nr
There must be gods thrown down, and trumpets blown
n r ri r nr nr nr
Of tri - umph calm, and hymns of f es - ti - val
r r nr nr r r nr
Up - on the gold clouds met - ro - pol - i - tan,
i Lf r i r r i r r i r r i r
Voices of soft pro - claim, and sil - ver stir
nf rir fir nr nr
Of strings in hoi - low shells ; and there shall be
iLffir nr yirppir y
Beautiful things made new, for the sur - prise
HEROICS 229
r nr rir nr vi
Of the sky - children ; I will give command :
ir n r nr nr rir n
The - a ! The - a ! The - a ! where is Saturn?
" Hyperion," i.
BROWNING
I
rir
I haste
r r rir rir nr nr
To contem - plate un - daz - zled some one truth,
r r nr r r r r r r
Its bearings and ef - fects a - lone at once
nr rir rir vic_rrir
What was a speck ex-pands into a star,
i u r i r rir n r r i r
Asking a life to pass ex - plor - ing thus,
rir rir rir rir rir
Till I near craze. I go to prove my soul !
230 THE MUSICAL BASIS OF VERSE
fir nr nr fir nr
I see my way as birds their track - less way
ri r n r n r n r ri r
I shall ar - rive ! what time, what cir - cuit first,
r r n r ri r nr rir
I ask not: but un - less God send his hail
nr ri r n r ri r ri r
Or blinding fire - balls, sleet, or stifling snow,
ri r r r r r nr nr
In some time his good time I shall ar - rive :
rip ifppi r rir nr
He guides me and the bird. In his good time !
" Paracelsus."
II
ir rir rir
Do you tell me four ?
p pir rir i r rir rir
Then the dead are scarce qui - et where they lie,
rir firc/ir rir rir
Old Pie - tro, old Vio - Ian - te, side by side
HEROICS 231
> PIT rif nr nr nr
At the church Lo - ren - zo, oh, they know it well !
ir nrwr nr nrvi
So do I. But my wife is still a - live,
nr nr nr nr nr
Has breath e - nough to tell her sto - ry yet,
rir ri r n r nr nr
Her way, which is not mine, no doubt at all.
nr rifirr rif rir
And Ca - pon - sac - chi, you have summoned him,
ri r n r ri r ri r ri r
Was he so far to send for ? Not at hand ?
nr ri rwr rir nr
I thought some few o' the stabs were in his heart,
rir rir rir ri r rir
Or had not been so lav - ish : less had served.
n r rir rir rir rir
Well, he too tells his sto - ry, flor - id prose
rir nr rir nr rir
As smooth as mine is rough. You see, my lords,
232 THE MUSICAL BASIS OF VERSE
p> PIT riL/nr nr nr
There will be a lying in - tox - i - cat - ing smoke
rw r iif fir rirv
Born of the blood, con - f us - ion pro - ba - bly,
rif fir nr nr r r
For lies breed lies but all that rests with you !
riLfrir nr nr nr
The trial is no con - cern of mine ; with me
nrwr nr nr nr
The main of the care is o - ver : I at least
ic/rif nr nr nr
Recognize who took that huge burden off,
r n r
Let me be-gin to live a - gain.
" The Ring and the Book. Count Guido Franceschini."
TENNYSON
fir r i r
And while I look'd
rif nr rirmcjrir
And listen - ed, the full-flowing river of speech
HEROICS 233
nr n r n r
Came down up - on my heart.
" OEnone."
nr nr
The riv - er sloped
nr n LrriLrnr nr
To plunge in cataract, shattering on black blocks,
n r r ( r r i
A breadth of thunder.
" The Princess."
nr
And thrice
nr rirjrir nr nr
They clash'd to - gether and thrice they brake their spears.
" Enid."
i r ri
The great brand
nr nr nr nr nr
Made lightnings in the splendour of the moon,
n r nr nr nr
And flashing round and round, and whirl' d in an arch,
234 THE MUSICAL BASIS OF VERSE
nr rif nr r r nr
Shot like a streamer of the northern morn,
" The Passing of Arthur."
iLrrir n r n r n r s\
Oaring one arm, and bearing in my left
r i r r i r r i r r i r r i r
The weight of all the hopes of half the world
ir riLrrir nr
Strove to buffet to land in vain.
"The Princess."
nr
"How he went down," said Gareth, "as a false knight
fir r i r r i r fir r i r
Or e - vil king be - fore my lance, if lance
n r nr
Were mine to use "
" Gareth and Lynette."
n r n r n r n r nr
The voice of E - nid, Yniol's daughter, rang
HEROICS 235
nr nr nr^i
Clear thro' the o - pen casement of the hall,
ILf
singing ;
" Enid."
r r r nr nrvi
Stabb'd thro' the heart's af - fee - tions to the heart !
rirvi
Seeth'dlike the kid in its own mother's milk!
Kill' d with a word worse than a life of blows!
"Vivien.
nr TILT
As if the flower
n r n r n r n r fir
That blows a globe of af - ter ar - row - lets,
n r nr nr
Ten thousand - fold had grown, flash'd the fierce shield,
nr
All sun ;
" Gareth and Lynette."
236 THE MUSICAL BASIS OF VERSE
n r n r nr
And then did ei - ther side,
nr n r n r n r n r
They that as- sail' d, and they that held the lists,
nr n r nr yicjrir
Set lance in rest, strike spur, suddenly move,
" Elaine."
nr
The pang
r r nr iwir nr
That makes a man, in the sweet face of her
nr rifv wirt/ir
Whom he loves most, lonely and mis - era - ble.
"Enid."
r r i r r i r
I that heard her whine
fir ft r n r n r n r
And sniv - el, be - ing eunuch - hearted too,
r nr r r nivi
Sware by the scorpion-worm that twists in hell,
HEROICS 237
nr fir n r n r n r
And stings it - self to ev - er - lasting death,
rir fir nr fir nr
To hang what - ev - er knight of thine I fought
nr nr
And tumbled. Art thou king ? Look to thy life !
" The Last Tournament."
From the foregoing tables which the student may in-
definitely multiply for himself it will be apparent that
all true or organic blank verse is easily divided and
analysed by the system of musical notation.
There have not been wanting, from Dryden's day to
ours, plenty of critics to cry out against, and declare
AH blank " ^fcgftimate/! a great deal of the verse of
verse Shakespeare and Milton; though it remains
bjntiie 1 a P ara -dox why verse which is illegitimate
foregoing should have become world-classic. But, an-
alysed by bar and note, we find rhythmic diffi-
culties melt into thin air. Those age-long bugaboos of
the conventional metrist, extra syllables, are perceived to
be not extra syllables at all, but variants of free verse ;
and we see that " looked at musically," and their longi-
tude reckoned by the accents and not by the arbitrary
foot-divisions, they settle themselves into place as har-
moniously as the passing notes of a musical composition.
It is no longer necessary to slur syllables in order to
scramble them into a fixed metrical space (indeed the
genius of the English language does not really permit
of such things as slurring or eliding), nor to chop
238 THE MUSICAL BASIS OF VERSE
them in two in order to drag them to the conventional
limits.
Shakespeare, writing for the boards and not for the lit-
erary critic, adjusts the music of his verse to appeal to
the ear rather than to the eye; and we must remember
too one great fact, viz. : that Shakespeare and Milton
(indeed to an extent all the great poets) rhythmise, not
only single verses, but whole passages, and that, for im-
partial criticism, whole passages and not fragments of
them must therefore be taken into consideration.
In Shakespeare a steady growth is observable in the
mastery of his instrument. The later work not only
shake- shows more metric daring, but also greater
of feminine* fl uencv more use of enjambemeut, and an in-
endings creased tendency to the use of the feminine
ending. The limits of the latter he never oversteps, as
does Fletcher, 1 and it adds richness to the cadence of
his verse without ever impairing its virility. Thus a
table of Mr. Fleay's gives an average of feminine endings
in " Love's Labour's Lost" of one to sixty-four and
one-third lines; in " Cymbeline," of one to three and
one-half lines.
Coincident with his adoption of enjambement, and for
the same reason freedom Shakespeare drops rhyme.
Rhyme not only hampers drama tonally, but to a great
extent it involves the end-stop. The Dryden and Pope
rhymed couplets are carefully and uniformly end-stopped,
giving to the verse a trip-hammer effect. But there are
plenty of narrative poems in rhymed couplets with con-
1 " By the use of the feminine ending the poet endeavours to reproduce
the easy tone of ordinary life ; and this no doubt explains its frequency in
Fletcher, the poet of society. There is felt to be something formal,
stilted, high-flown, poetic, in the regular iambic metre." JOSEPH B.
MAYOR : " English Metre," chap. xi.
HEROICS 239
siderable use of enjambement, which are most graceful
and charming. (See preceding chapter.)
The period of Shakespeare's breaking loose from tradi-
tion is further characterised by his free adoption of light
shake- an d weak endings, i.e. the ending of a line upon
speare'suse an insignificant syllable. Thus such words as
of weak
and light am, are, be, do, has, I, they, etc. , are called light
endings endings, while still less significant words, such
as and, for, in, if, or, etc., are called weak endings. The
latter are more " fugitive in character," and both so tend
to precipitate the reader forward that there is no possible
chance to pause after it, but the ear must hurry on into
the next line to find a caesura to rest upon. Such lines
as the following are typical :
" ' It sounds no more ; and sure it waits upon
Some god o' the Island," " Tempest," i., 2.
" A most majestic vision, and
Harmonious charmingly." " Tempest," iv., i.
The weak ending is very liable to abuse, and we ob-
serve that later poets employ it much more sparingly
than Shakespeare. 1
1 " It should be noted that commonly a pause occurs before the weak
final monosyllable, after which the verse, as it were, leaps forward. This
structure, as has been said, gives to the verse something of the bounding
life which Ulysses describes Diomed as showing in the manner of his gait:
' He rises on the toe ; that spirit of his
In aspiration lifts him from the earth.'
It conduces to liveliness and variety, and so is hardly appropriate to trag-
edy of the deeper sort ; but it is admirably adapted to the romantic drama
of Shakspere's latest stage, and here alone it appears in a conspicuous
degree." EDWARD DOWDEN : " Shakspere " (Literature Primer), chap,
iv., 30.
240 THE MUSICAL BASIS OF VERSE
Blank verse offers the best medium for long-sustained
themes because of its nearness to prose, and because it
Blank verse does not cloy the ear as long poems in rhymed
the best couplets or in stanzas are apt to do. Further-
medium for . ...
objective more, the stricter pause exactions of the stanza
poetry interrupt the action and the flow of dialogue,
which blank verse favours.
Lanier indeed claims that the use of blank verse is " an
attempt to escape from metre." Not so. For if a writer
desire to escape from metre, he has nothing to do but to
write plainly in prose; whereas the very selection of
blank verse betrays that his fundamental thought is
rhythmic. Blank verse is not an escape from metre, but
the use of the largest, most elastic, and most universal
metric form we have.
We observe in Shakespeare that, when the tone of the
drama is lowered as by the introduction of a comic, or
a colloquial element the movement drops into periods
of prose, resuming verse with the deepening of the artis-
tic emotion. The demarcation is as sharp as if cut with
a knife; there is never a syllable's confusion.
" For " (says Mr. A. J. Ellis), " as Dionysius and Cicero
well put it, verse is in rhythm, and prose is merely
rhythmical ; that is, verse follows a conscious and mainly
enunciable law in the juxtaposition of syllables of differ-
ent kinds, and prose follows a subjective, and mainly
non-enunciable feeling."
I know of no better way for the student of verse to
obtain a mastery of blank verse technique than by mem-
orising a great number of notable passages, and saturat-
ing himself, as it were, with the cadences, so that they
become a part of him. For objective art is an esoteric
art, an art of the chosen few, only to be learned by long
apprenticeship and the finest of perception.
HEROICS 241
Carlyle defines poetry as " the heroic of speech." This
is certainly a true definition of blank verse; for, if heroic
subjects demand a heroic medium, so does the heroic
medium demand a heroic subject. It is not suited to
lyric expression and should never be used for it. A
short chop of blank verse does not constitute a poem.
To comprehend the scope of its modulations we require
to get it in the mass; exactly as the effect of a great
orchestral composition could not be obtained by hearing
fragments from two or three instruments, but only from
the rounded volume of the full orchestra.
Objective art demands of the poet, not only metrical
skill of the highest order, but also a great shaping or
Objective art constructive faculty, as well as a consummate
demands of se nse of proportion. He must bring to his
the poet the
architectonic work, not only the finest conception of art,
faculty | Dut an universal perception of men and things,
and of their eternal relations. For it is only when a man
becomes merged in the universal, and creates outside of
himself steps from the leading-strings of the personal
into the illimitability of the impersonal that the canvas
of life truly unrolls beneath his hands; and only then,
when he has power to create action wedded to propor-
tion, is in fact an intrinsic artist. This is the quality
which Matthew Arnold, borrowing the term from the
Germans, designates as the architectonic faculty ; and by
the canons of the architectonic Time ruthlessly sits in
judgment upon all art. Only as it is structurally great
shall it endure.
16
CHAPTER VII
BEAUTY AND POWER
THERE seems at the present day to be a largely preva-
lent idea to the effect that originality and development
what is in art all forms of art consist in the despis-
form? j n g^ often the outraging, of form. But what
is form ? Is it not expression per se ; the reduction of
the abstract to the concrete ? Can anything tangible
exist without form ?
The progress of human thought has been a unifying
process. Investigation on all sides proves to us not so
. much that there are laws as that there is law.
The unity of
fundamental The scientist to-day postulates life in all its
manifestations as molecular motion; the meta-
physician postulates thought as molecular motion. Mo-
lecular motion is, in another word, vibration, and vibra-
tion we have seen to be the basis of the two highest
expressions of human thought poetry and music. Sci-
ence teaches us further that the forces of nature can
interchange. Colours turn to sound ; sound again to
form. If we attach a delicate pencil to the wires of
a pianoforte, place the point in contact with a prepared
paper, and then strike major chords upon the keyboard,
we shall find the vibrations of the harmonies transferred
to the paper in loveliest geometric and decorative de-
signs. This ratiocination brings us round in a circle,
and demonstrates that between science and art there is
BEAUTY AND POWER 243
no real base of conflict; because they are in fact only
different projections of one central cause.
When we turn to nature for hints we find the inevit-
able procession of law and order, whether we consider
the orbits of the planets, the sequence of day and night,
the changes of the sidereal year, or contemplate the mar-
vellously packed crystals of a geode, or the delicately
balanced petals and sepals of a flower. There is no hap-
hazard about it all. Crystals fall always into the same
geometric patterns. Plants produce bud and bloom, and
perfect their seed, each after its kind, always in the same
way. There is unity throughout creation; everywhere
we find the order and balance without which nothing, not
even the universe, could exist at all.
" In the beginning God created the heaven and the
earth. And the earth was without form and void ; and
darkness was upon the face of the deep : and the spirit
of God moved upon the face of the waters."
Over the inconceivableness of chaos moved the in-
spiration of divine thought, evolving therefrom the con-
Form the ceivable organisation, measure, proportion,
law of symmetry, coordination ; in another word
expression ^^
Form, then, is merely the law of expression.
What we find true of nature is equally so of art ; for
nature and art are basically alike in that they are form
infused with life. What we call nature is the direct cre-
ation of Deity; what we call art is the indirect creation
of Deity nature sifted through the consciousness of
man. Nature is creation upon the lines of, and in har-
mony with, great fundamental laws. Art too must be
upon the lines of, and in harmony with, great fundamen-
tal laws, or it will not be true art; for the laws them-
selves are an integral part of the creation.
244 THE MUSICAL BASIS OF VERSE
Form being the law of expression, we cannot then, if
we are to express ourselves at all, escape the use of form ;
Form an we can only choose between a good form and
palToTthe a ^ a< ^ f rm > a l wer f rm anci a higher form,
creation a beautiful form and an ugly form, an adapted
form and an uncouth or incongruous form. Great art is
achieved, not by disobedience to and outraging of law,
but by inflection and variation within the lines of the
law. With the masters of poetic art this use of form
becomes in a manner self-selective ; for of course the true
artist does not primarily take cognisance of his mechan-
ism as he works. He is already master of his tools
a skilled craftsman ; but it is exactly by reason of, and
in proportion to, this mastery so fixed in the subcon-
sciousness that it has become an instinctive factor of ex-
pression that he may in a sense ignore detail. It is the
lesser craftsman who is ever conscious of his tools, and
must be forever at his measuring and grinding.
" Form," says Eckermann (" Beitrage zur Poesie " *),
" is the result of the efforts, through thousands of years,
of the most excellent masters, which everyone cannot too
soon appropriate to himself. It were a most insane de-
lusion of misconceived originality if each one were to go
about on his own account fumbling for that which is
already on hand in great perfection. Form is handed
down, learned, imitated; otherwise progress in art would
be out of the question, everyone would have to begin
anew." As a corollary to the above we may quote the
words of Robert Schumann, a critic of great acumen not
only of his own art, but of its sister art. ' The history
of all arts and artists has proven that mastery of form
leads talent to continually increasing freedom."
" The writer of verse is afraid of having too much
1 See " Theory and Practice of Musical Form," by J. H. Cornell.
BEAUTY AND POWER 245
form, of having too much technic ; he dreads it will inter-
fere with his spontaneity. No more decisive confession
of weakness can be made. It is only cleverness and
small talent which is afraid of its spontaneity; the genius,
the great artist, is forever ravenous after new forms, after
technic; he will follow you to the ends of the earth if
you will enlarge his artistic science." 1
Elizabeth Barrett Browning has epitomised the fore-
going ideas in a notable passage of " Aurora Leigh ":
" Without the spiritual, observe,
The natural's impossible; no form,
No motion ! Without sensuous, spiritual
Is inappreciable : no beauty or power !
And in this twofold sphere the twofold man
(And still the artist is intensely a man)
Holds firmly by the natural, to reach
The spiritual beyond it, fixes still
The type with mortal vision, to pierce through,
With eyes immortal, to the antetype
Some call the ideal, "
Every age has had its generic art-form ; that by which
its individual thought and aspiration can best be ex-
Everyage pressed and made concrete. These reflect not
gen e h Hcart= onl y contemporary manners, but reveal the
form spiritual development of their epoch. They
are organic forms of genius ; and the high achievements
of one age or race cannot be consummated by another
age or race. Thus the distinctive art-form of Greece
was sculpture. The fervid religious thought of the Mid-
dle Ages found its expression in the Scripture of Stone
architecture; an architecture the most soaring and
ideal, which we endeavour to-day to imitate but whose
1 SIDNEY LANIER : " The English Novel," chap. ii.
246 THE MUSICAL BASIS OF VERSE
informing spirit we cannot catch. The Art-form of the
Renaissance was painting; and the restless, inquiring,
aspiring modern world pours its soul out in music.
But close along with the other arts, shoulder to shoul-
der, moves also and always literature, the perennial and
Literature universal art-form. Thus, beside Phidias and
theuniver- Praxiteles, we find ^Eschylus, Sophocles, Eu-
sai art-form < j n ^g Renaissance, with her great
painters, Italy had her Dante, her Petrarch, her Ariosto,
her Tasso ; and in the great world of modern music, we
have a Goethe, a Victor Hugo, a Pushkin, a Robert
Browning.
In an interesting work by Wilhelm August Ambros
(translated by J. H. Cornell), called " The Boundaries of
Comparison Music and Poetry, " there is a synthetic com-
ofart-forms p ar i SO n of the different arts, graduated by the
relative resistance to the idea of the medium employed.
Thus, of the fine arts, architecture stands at the bottom
of the scale, because in it there is the greatest resistance
of crude material, and also because it is the art least in-
dividually expressive of the conceiving artist. A Greek
temple is a Greek temple, a Gothic cathedral a Gothic
cathedral. The monument survives its creator, sur-
vives as a type and not as an individuation. Sculpture
resembles architecture in the element of crude material
to be overcome, but greatly transcends it in the power
of the artist for individual expression. Yet here also he
is necessarily limited by material conditions; and while
of ancient masterpieces a few have reached us labelled,
a thousand others have nothing individually distinguish-
able, and may be only uncertainly classed with special
art-epochs. When we come to painting, we find the
artist greatly freed of his crude material, and able to ex-
press the personal ideal to a very great degree. Thus
BEAUTY AND POWER 247
the works of Cimabue, Fra Angelico, Raphael, Michael
Angelo, Titian, Correggio, etc., are so distinct from each
other, and so instinct with the personal bias of the cre-
ative artist, that it would not be possible for the trained
observer ever to mistake one for the other. In poetry
the resistance of crude material is virtually nil. It, of all
the arts, permits the closest and most direct following of
the abstract concept by its concrete expression. There-
fore is poetry the freest and most disembodied, as well
as the most personal, of all the arts.
And how shall we define Hie larger of the Arts of
Sound, the at once most intangible yet most scientific of
Music as an the arts, music ? Upon its concrete or sci-
?a^ks rm entific side the art of music is superlatively
definiteness complex. Constructively it resembles archi-
tecture, 1 being composed of related strata of sound (if
I may use so material a term), each conditioned to, and
built into, others, in accordance with complex physical
laws. Therefore, of all the arts, it is next to architecture
and the most architectonic. Yet, essentially, upon its
psychic side, music is the very freest medium of which
we have cognisance. It is spiritualised sound and mo-
tion. It transcends speech. It flies upon the wings of
the morning; it throbs in the abysses of night. It links
heart to heart, and sphere to sphere, and the heights and
depths of man's being awaken and respond. Yet, finally,
music lacks definiteness. Something more we have to
express to each other for which articulate speech alone
serves; nay, music must turn to articulate speech to
define its very own inwardness; for music, by what Mr.
Huneker defines as an " immediate appeal to the nerve-
1 The famous apothegm "Architecture is frozen music" Schlegel's,
I believe, though frequently attributed to Mme. de Stael will readily
recur to the memory.
248 THE MUSICAL BASIS OF VERSE
centres/' awakens feelings rather than ideas. This is
because sound plays upon human emotion without regu-
lating it. It is the thought of the listener which regu-
lates; and, for the definite thought of one mind to be
conveyed to another (i.e. performer and listener), words
must intervene. Words must formulate the ideas which
music desires to promulgate; for music, with all its
wings, is not capable of producing before the mind a
definite and fixed image. In all programme-music
which deals ostensibly with definite imagery the idea
Words which the music is to express is explained by
finally words ; either by definitions of the separate
parts as in Beethoven's " Pastoral Sym-
phony," Spohr's symphony, ' The Consecration of
Sound," 1 and kindred works; or, in the freer forms now
in vogue, the poem from which the composer drew his
inspirational thought is prefixed to the score, and usually
printed in the concert programme. Such are Raff's
" Lenore," Cesar Franck's " Les Bolides," Richard
Strauss's " Thus Spake Zarathustra," etc.
In short,
" Music is Love in search of a Word,"
only for love read spirit.
Theassocia- There is an immense associative power in
tive power words ; and herein lies the virtue of the trope.
Words do not stand isolated in the mental
chambers, but are so much a part of special trains of
' ' Die Weihe der Tone ' has generally been accounted Spohr's most
successful symphony. The sub-title of the score is ' A Characteristic
Tone-Painting in the Form of a Symphony, after a poem by Carl Pfeiffer.'
On a fly-leaf of the score is printed a ' Pre-reminder by the Composer,' to
the effect that he wishes the poem to be printed on concert-programs and
distributed among the audience." WILLIAM F. APTHORP : "Symphony
Notes," 1900.
BEAUTY AND POWER 249
thought that the use of a word, or a group of words, will
call up, not only the direct image which it stands for,
but a dozen associated images which the mind ever holds,
as it were, in solution.
When we consider what language is, that it is not an
invention but an organic growth, and that every word is
a sound-vibration closely related to its thought-vibration,
we shall realise that, instead of being accidental or arbi-
trary figures, words are living forces; the more dynamic,
the more closely they are correlated to their thought;
for words are energised by thought. This is why words
of conventional meaning, used by the artificial manufac-
turers of so-called literature, never move us; there is no
living force behind them.
Figures and tropes play a great part in all literary ex-
pression, but they are the very sinew of poetry. One
could not in fact conceive of poetry without
The trope . ,
the trope; it would be but metric dry bones;
for the trope is thought idealised. We can hardly use
every-day speech without an infusion of imagery, for
adjectives are in themselves a simple form of trope.
We should indeed not get a definite image of the object
named by the substantive without the qualifying sugges-
tiveness of the adjective. The more unusual, or un-
usually apt and descriptive the adjective, the more vivid
the image which it calls up. Mr. Kipling's adjectives,
for instance, are often simply dynamic, and put before
one a whole picture, as it were, by a lightning flash. It
is, however, very easy, working upon these lines, to slip
over the borders of true art into the slough of mere
impressionism.
The trope 1 is the figurative use of a word, or of words,
in some meaning other than the normal one. It is lit-
1 Greek : trofios, from trepo, turn.
250 THE MUSICAL BASIS OF VERSE
erally a turning out of the direct course of language in
order to express the thought in some more vivid manner.
The poet makes by this means a more swift and definite
impression upon the mind than can be achieved by direct
description. Thus Wordsworth says :
" The good die first,
And they whose hearts are dry as summer's dust
Burn to the socket. ' '
And we have a more vivid picture than if he had said :
' The good die first, and those who have no emotions or
sympathies live to a good old age."
So when the guilty and excited Macbeth cries out:
" Methought I heard a voice cry, ' Sleep no more !
Macbeth does murther sleep ! ' "
we get an infinitely deeper sense of the horror of the
situation than if he had said:
" Macbeth has slain his guest in sleep, therefore he
himself shall never again find rest."
And when Gloster exclaims:
" See how my sword weeps for the poor king's death ! "
what a picture is painted for us by a single word !
The trope belongs to the domain of rhetoric, and does
not in any way affect metrical laws ; therefore this is no
Meta hor P^ ace to enter in detail into its qualities and
functions. But I will state briefly that tropes
are of two general classes: the direct compared image,
or metaphor, and the indirect compared image, or simile.
In the metaphor one thing is -directly called another.
Thus:
BEAUTY AND POWER 251
" When I will wear a garment all of blood
And stain my favour in a bloody mask,
Which, wash'd away, shall scour my shame with it."
SHAKESPEARE : First part of " Henry IV.," iii., 2.
" Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines,
And often is his gold complexion dimm'd;
And every fair from fair sometimes declines,
By chance or nature's changing course untrimm'd ;
But thy eternal summer shall not fade."
SHAKESPEARE : Sonnet XVIII.
" Elegies
And quoted odes, and jewels five-words-long
That on the stretched forefinger of all Time
Sparkle forever."
TENNYSON : " The Princess."
" Out went the taper as she hurried in;
Its little smoke in pallid moonshine died."
KEATS : " The Eve of St. Agnes."
simile one thing is compared with
another, both being presented or sometimes
one being only implied. Thus:
" The barge
Whereon the lily maid of Astolat
Lay smiling, like a star in blackest night."
TENNYSON : " Elaine."
" I saw young Harry, with his beaver on,
His cuisses on his thighs, gallantly armed,
Rise from the ground like feather' d Mercury,
And vaulted with such ease into his seat,
As if an angel dropp'd down from the clouds,
To turn and wind a fiery Pegasus
And witch the world with noble horsemanship."
SHAKESPEARE : First part of " Henry IV.," iv., i.
252 THE MUSICAL BASIS OF VERSE
" As when far off at sea a fleet descried
Hangs in the clouds, by equinoctial winds
Close sailing from Bengala, or the isles
Of Ternate and Tidore, whence merchants bring
Their spicy drugs : they on the trading flood
Through the wide Ethiopian to the Cape
Ply, stemming nightly toward the pole : so seem'd
Far off the flying fiend."
MILTON: " Paradise Lost," book ii.
" O Spartan dog,
More fell than anguish, hunger, or the sea ! "
SHAKESPEARE: " Othello," v., 2.
Metaphors and similes will often be found intermingled
in the same passage; as in the quotation from Henry IV.
just above, " I saw young Harry," etc.
The metaphor being the more concentrated image is
the more swift and dynamic. The simile is a more dif-
fuse image, and carries its point of comparison by weight,
rather than by swiftness, of evidence. The simile is of
oriental, the metaphor of occidental, origin.
. A beautiful and forceful form of metaphor
1 he personi=
ficationof is found in the personification of nature or of
natural and impersonal phenomena. Thus :
" Now morn, her rosy steps in the eastern clime
Advancing, sowed the earth with orient pearl."
MILTON : " Paradise Lost," book v.
" Oh, good gigantic smile o' the brown old earth,
This autumn morning ! How he sets his bones
To bask i' the sun, and thrusts out knees and feet
For the ripple to run over in its mirth ; "
BROWNING : " James Lee's Wife."
This form expanded becomes Allegory.
BEAUTY AND POWER 253
Both metaphor and simile permit of many variants and
have suffered technically much subdivision, each division
being named after its kind. They may be studied in the
standard treatises on rhetoric.
The abuse or overloading of diction with tropes is
perilously easy. One needs but to compare the lovely
and living imagery of Shakespeare with the overdrawn,
artificial, and cloying conceits which prevailed after-
wards.
But there is connotative potency in the direct use of
language as well as in the figurative. What we might
The onder- ca ^ t ^ ie P on ^rable quality of words greatly in-
abie value fluences their suggestive value. Thus mono-
syllables are terse, incisive, dynamic, and are
used by the masters of verse where vigor and virility, or
sometimes where mere brute power, are to be conveyed.
The following line from Milton, by the succession of
heavy, almost crude, monosyllables, presents a more
forceful image of naked dreariness than could possibly
be obtained by any interspersion of longer words. This
is a noticeable point in Milton, who was prone to sono-
rous diction, and evidences surely how, with the masters
of verse, the choice of words is no accident but an abso-
lute instinct for fitness.
" Rocks, caves, lakes, fens, bogs, dens, and shades of death,"
The foregoing remarks are equally applicable to the
suggestive force of this line from " Hamlet." The suc-
cession of short, weighted words are the direct embodi-
ment of the heavy thought.
" Thoughts black, hands apt, drugs fit, and time agreeing,"
And what could better delineate the sharp, mad agony
of Lear than these sharp, hard monosyllables ?
254 THE MUSICAL BASIS OF VERSE
" Howl, howl, howl, howl ! O, you are men of stone !
Had I your tongues and eyes I'd use them so
That heaven's vault should crack."
Monosyllables have a staccato effect, and, long per-
sisted in, leave upon the ear a strong impression of
harshness and roughness.
The general characteristic of the dissyllable with fem-
inine cadence 1 (i.e. with accent on the first syllable) is
suavity. It links together rougher strokes, and blends
the line into melodious flow. Its use is conspicuous in
those poets whose predominant characteristic is melody.
I give two illustrative lines from Keats, and two from
Tennyson.
" The carved angels, ever eager-eyed,"
" Thea, Thea, Thea, where is Saturn ? "
" Lightlier move
The minutes fledged with music : "
" And freedom slowly broadens down."
Polysyllables impart to verse sonority, stateliness, dig-
nity, elevation. Witness the abundant use of them by
poets in whom a sense of these qualities predominates.
I give two examples from Milton and two from Words-
worth.
" Thick as autumnal leaves that strew the brooks
In Vallambrosa, where the Etrurian shades
High over-arch'd imbower."
1 Because the general effect of dissyllables with masculine cadence is
practically identical with that of monosyllables.
BEAUTY AND POWER 255
" The Stygian Council thus dissolved, and forth
In order came the grand infernal peers ;
Midst came their mighty paramount, and seem'd
Alone the antagonist of heaven, nor less
Than Hell's dread emperour,"
" Hail, Twilight, sovereign of one peaceful hour !
Not dull art thou as undiscerning Night;
But studious only to remove from sight
Day's mutable distinctions."
" Near
The solid mountain shone, bright as the cloud,
Grain-tinctured, drenched in empyrean light."
Not a little in the nice distribution of words of dif-
ferent ponderable values each absolutely placed and
adapted, each conveying the definite impression intended
is the great art of the great artist evidenced.
It is this marshalling of the forces of words differently
marshalled by different hands which constitutes what
Apropos we designate as style. Individuality of style is
of style a subtle quality not easy to define, but very
conclusively apprehended. Thus Shakespeare's style,
Milton's style, Keats's style, Browning's style, etc., are
as organically native, as unconfusable, and as uncom-
municable as possible.
While poetry deals much more with hyperbole than
prose, and employs many syntactical inversions not per-
Professor missible in prose, the fundamental elements of
Wendell's good writing are the same in both literary
fundamental forms. Professor Barrett Wendell, in his mas-
groups terly little book on English Composition,
places these elements very succinctly before us in three
groups; viz. : the intellectual, or quality of clearness ; the
256 THE MUSICAL BASIS OF VERSE
emotional, or quality of force ; and the aesthetic, or qual-
ity of elegance beauty.
The secret of clearness lies in denotation, or the direct
statement. The writer must have a definite conception
The secret of that which he wishes to say, and express it
of clearness j n suc \ l language that others shall as definitely
perceive it. Vagueness and obscurity of expression are
to be avoided. True art is deep as a well and clear as
crystal. Occasional ridicule has been excited by the
homeliness of Wordsworth's diction, and some of his
poems are indeed suggestive of the schoolboy's com-
position ; but this is due to the poet's fixed theory that
one should compose whether the fountain of inspiration
be playing or not, and the pieces in question certainly
took shape upon the dry days. In his times of elevation
and inspiration, the directness and simplicity of Words-
worth's diction become a powerful instrument of expres-
sion. We are sometimes tempted to wish that some of
Browning's work could receive an infusion of the same
clarifying element.
The emotional element of style is force, and in all
forms of literature this is the quality which holds the
The secret attention. It is of course the power to put the
of force sense or image of the thing or things treated
vividly before the mind of the reader; and it is in conno-
tation, or that which is implied or suggested rather than
definitely stated, that the secret of force lies. This is
because the suggested idea fires trains of thought in the
imagination and permits it to construct a cosmos out
of a granule. It becomes evident that this division is
the field of the trope.
Yet should the ultimate power be kept in reserve, and
only exerted at focal moments, lest the impression pro-
duced be of the exhaustion of resource.
BEAUTY AND POWER 257
" In the very torrent, tempest, and, as I may say, the
whirlwind of passion, you must acquire and beget a tem-
perance that may give it smoothness," Hamlet exhorts
the players.
Clearness should of course always underlie force.
In adaptation lies the secret of beauty. This is only
another way of defining that which we have more than
The secret once stated in these pages; viz. : that the lit-
of beauty erary form must be such as to express most
concretely the thought of the creating artist. Says Pro-
fessor Wendell:
" The more exquisitely style is adapted to the thought
it symbolises, the better we can make our works and
compositions denote and connote in other human minds
the meaning they denote and connote in ours, the greater
charm style will have, merely as a work of art." *
The study of great works of art shows them to be fin-
ished and proportioned, but full of underlying strength.
Power is not attained either by brutality or by extrava-
gance of diction, but by an art which is masterly, because
technically finished and proportioned. To the student
of poetry I would say: study intelligently; write copi-
ously; prune drastically; and above all be not in haste
to rush into print, for this evidences rather a desire for
cheap notoriety than a strong art feeling. True art is
always characterised by restraint.
" I hung my verses in the wind,
Time and tide their faults may find ;
All were winnowed through and through,
Five lines lasted sound and true."
A poem should always be measured to the dimensions
of its informing idea. If it be longer than its idea it will
1 " English Composition," chap. viii. "EMERSON : " The Test."
17
258 THE MUSICAL BASIS OF VERSE
descend into mere verbiage; but neither should it be so
contracted as to leave room for no ideas. Although the
voice of the day seems to be for it, an epigram is not
a poem.
But when all is said and done about the manner of the
verse, it is of course the genius of the poet, the creative
The creative soul, which infuses the form with life and ren-
soui ders i t not an agglomeration of words and sen-
tences, but a potentiality. Back of the archetype must
be the informing idea, the essential element which gives
it being the burning, palpitating, eternal current which
links all causes with all expression. Genius touches the
every-day, the familiar, the common, and lifts it into the
realm of the ideal, so that it takes on for us a new sig-
nificance and a new beauty. What genius is no man
rightly knows. Probably the possessor of it would sub-
scribe to Emerson's postulate that it is a " greater infu-
sion of deity; " for he knows that that which he creates
is not of himself but flows through him from some deeper
reservoir. ' We do not take possession of our ideas, but
are possessed by them," says Heine. The most compre-
hensive definition of genius which I know is one given
by Miss Sheppard in " Counterparts." " Genius is that
essence which alone assimilates with the unseen ; which
passes into the arcana of knowledge as a part of itself,
and that without preparation, education or experience."
A great deal passes for genius which is nothing higher
than well-trained talent tricks of mere cleverness. But
literature, like water, will rise to its own level, and no
higher. Genius is a compulsive force, no more to be
restrained than is the mountain torrent. We are obliged
to say with Owen Meredith :
" Genius is master of man ;
Genius does what it must, talent uoes what it can."
BEAUTY AND POWER 259
Within the hand of genius lies that talisman of fire
which makes thought candent at the core and casts it into
inevitable shapes of passion and power.
Beauty and power are the keys to art.
It is not possible, as some have tried to do, to define
power as the subjective element, or soul, and beauty as
Beauty and the objective element, or body, of art, because
tnrkeylto both qualities are attributes of the informing
art spirit as well as of its expression. Power,
shorn of beauty, is but elemental force; beauty, shorn
of power, is mere sensuousness. True art therefore is
a synthetic union of the concrete with the abstract.
In a way beauty is of itself a power; one of the strongest
which can sway us. It is by virtue of his beauty his
glowing workmanship, his rich and transporting melody,
his superlative imagery and not by the ethical value of
his long-drawn allegory that Spenser endures to-day. It
is by the same virtue that Keats lives, and will live as long
as appreciation for literary perfection survives. And the
secret of Shelley's ethereal charm lies in his passionate
love of the beautiful, and his equally burning desire to
transmute all life and all experience into beauty.
Beauty is the alpha and omega of art by beauty
meaning that art which is intrinsically and extrinsically
proportioned and without beauty there could be no art.
Ugliness is untrue to art. All distortion is ugliness
untruth and therefore not art. Amorphousness is not
art, cacophony is not art, naked realism unillumined by
the fires of the imagination is not art, nor yet is extrava-
gance, nor anything which depends upon sensational
effects. Art is that sublime union of the concrete with
the abstract which makes always for the elevation of the
soul of man ; otherwise must it be meretricious work and
not true art. The sense of beauty may be for a season
260 THE MUSICAL BASIS OF VERSE
obscured, even as vapours cloud the face of the sun, but
it is inalienable and imperishable. The desire for it
for that beauty which tranquillises, which enlarges, which
uplifts is at the core of existence. Consciously or un-
consciously the soul of man is always reaching forward
to more and more sublimated experience; and that age
which feeds upon beauty will inevitably rise above its
fellows both in the conception of ideals and in the exter-
nalisation of their inspiration.
The educational value of poetry cannot be overesti-
mated. All forms of art are " mediators between the
Theeduca- sou ^ an< ^ ^ e I n ^ n ^ te 5 " but music and poetry,
tionai value from their character, playing as they do upon
the emotional nature, are the most powerful.
Poetry is really less esoteric than music. It is nearer
the universal sympathy and more essentially compre-
hensible by the general mind. Lines of beautiful poetry
will live in the memory like haunting strains of music,
wiping out the common and the sordid, and at all times
uplifting, purifying, tranquillising, and inspiring. Poetry
has its objective side which appeals to the intellect, and
its subjective, which appeals directly to the spirit. This
latter is a psychic process, and is brought about, exactly
as in music, by virtue of the vibration. A thought cast
in rhythmic form will appeal to the spirit as the same
thought in dry prose will not. It becomes a spear of
palpitating flame, piercing the crust of the understanding
at a blow, and penetrating straight to the heart of things.
The study of poetry has fallen too much into des-
uetude; has been left to be a recreation for a cultured
The love of . few, when in fact it ought to be made mental
should be ^ oo< ^ ^ or t ^ le m ^^ on - O ne cannot but mark
cultivated with regret the conspicuous ignorance our
undergraduates and our graduates! show with regard
BEAUTY AND POWER 261
to the noblest masterpieces of our literature; but there
is opportunity for reform. Some of the time now spent
in the acquisition of material knowledge would be well
devoted to developing a taste and appreciation for great
literature. We should familiarise our little ones with
choice selections of simple verse, and train our young
men and women to live lovingly in the society of the
great poets. One of the faculties which awake earliest
in the child is a feeling for rhythmic motion dancing,
marching, calisthenics, etc. When taught them, they
greatly enjoy simple and melodious verses; and such,
becoming fixed in the memory at this plastic age, never
wholly lose their power. I know of a school whose prin-
cipal is a lover of Shakespeare, where little ones of six
and seven take the greatest delight in memorising and
reciting little songs from the dramas of Shakespeare
" O come unto these yellow sands," ' Where the bee
sucks," etc. Can one doubt that this is the preparation
for the more mature and understanding love ? And
I know of several boys' clubs in the slums of different
cities, clubs in which a love of noble literature has been
carefully inculcated, where stultified lads of fourteen to
twenty (hoodlums is our common name for them) have
spent whole winters in studying and performing such
plays as Shakespeare's " Julius Caesar " and " Merchant
of Venice," Banim's " Damon and Pythias," etc. Sta-
tistics in these wards show a great falling off in juvenile
crime. A few facts like these speak for themselves.
Teachers of the future will realise that more important
than the study of physical sciences is the study of life;
and life is epitomised in the great literatures of. the world.
History shows us that those ages which have been domi-
nated by great art-ideals have also been the ages of the
greatest and noblest material achievement. Emerson
262 THE MUSICAL BASIS OF VERSE
affirms that " sooner or later that which is now life shall
be poetry, and every fair and manly trait shall add a
richer strain to the song." To this we might append
Shelley's immortal words: " Poetry is indeed something
divine. It is at once the centre and circumference of
knowledge; it is that which comprehends all science and
that to which all science must be referred. It is at the
same time the root and blossom of all other systems of
thought ; it is that from which all spring, and that which
adorns all, and that which, if blighted, denies the fruit
and the seed, and withholds from the barren world the
nourishment and succession of the scions of the tree of
life."
This generation is wandering through the barren
reaches of aesthetic decadence, the natural reaction from
nearly a century of wonderful production. In
Decadence
the general lowering of the ideal atmosphere
we seem to have lost the sense of proportion. Little
men loom before the public eye like giants. A meretri-
cious impressionism has taken the place of inspiration.
We endeavour to sting ourselves into fresh sensation.
" Poverty of inventive power," says Nauman, " ever
seeks to gloze over its shortcomings by novel and start-
ling effects." One might say that the art of to-day,
from the symphonic poem to the poster, has become
largely unresolved dissonances. But this will not always
be so. The world of art, like the physical cosmos, must
have its fallow seasons, while the creative spirit slum-
bers, and the new forces slowly gather for fresh fruition.
This is the natural and necessary alternation ; the systole
and diastole of the universe.
The ideal can never perish. It is the noumenon or
core of existence, the axis upon. which life ever moves to
higher and higher expression. Ideals have varied from
BEAUTY AND POWER 263
age to age, but the general trend has ever been upward.
Mephitic vapours of materialism or formalism have at
times obscured it. but this is only the dark-
Renascence
ness before the dawn, the obscuration which
leads into the glory of renascence. The night is to
usher in the day. Spring leaps up like a diviner phoenix
from the frozen ashes of the winter. Then shall arise
the new poets, with clarified perceptions and more puis-
sant song. They shall stand upon the Mount of Vision
and look backward through the aeons and forward into
the dazzle of eternal verity. They shall hear all har-
monies, from the stupendous choiring of the planets to
the mystic palpitation of the aether; they shall unravel
real from unreal, true from false; they shall read more
clearly yet the meanings of love, beauty, life; and so,
with eyes turned toward the sunrise, shall
" Catch
Upon the burning lava of a song,
The full-veined, heaving, double-breasted Age."
INDEX*
ABBOTT, Dr., 22
ACHILLES, 3
^ENEID, 192
AESCHYLUS, 246
ALDRICH, T. B., 202
ALEXANDRINE, 67, 151, 152, 157, 205
ALLEN and GREENOUGH, 28, 183
ALLITERATION, 8, 101, 109, 115-
117, 120, 122, 137
AMBROS, Wilhelm August, 246
ANACRUSIS, 29
ANGLO-SAXON, 6, 7, 8 ; verse, 78,
135, 136
ANGLO-SAXONS, 9, 117
APTHORP, W. F., 24, 248
ARIOSTO, 168, 175, 246
ARISTOTLE, 191
ARNOLD, Matthew, 66, 71, 99, 191,
202, 241 ; extracts from poems of,
33, 67, 69, 92
ARNOLD, Sir Edwin, 126
ARTS of sound, 16
BACON, 9, 99
BALLAD, the, 10, 138, 141, 191 ;
metre, 139, 140
BALLADS, ancient, 142-146 ; modern,
146-150
BANIM, 261
BAYNE, Peter, 75
BEATTIE, 160
BEAUMONT and FLETCHER, 13, 120,
207
BEAUTY and power, 242
BEETHOVEN, 248
BEOWULF, 192, 194
BLANK verse, 9, 12, 66 ; defini-
tion of, 209, 213, 237, 239, 240,
241 ; Marlowe's, 207 ; Milton's,
208 ; modern, 208 ; notations,
214-237; Shakespeare's, 208 ; Sur-
rey's, 206
BOCCACCIO, 8
BROWN, Abbie Farwell, 131
BROWNING, Elizabeth Barrett, 108,
i?i, 173, 174, 245
BROWNING, Robert, 18, 47, 55, 66,
86, 96, 97, 108, 114, 160, 179, 191,
202, 208, 246, 256. Blank verse,
229, 230, 252. Extracts from
lyrical poetry, 35, 36, 50, 54, 61,
89, 90, 93, 102, 123, 125, 180,
185. Rhymed couplets, 156
BRUT, 193
BURNS, 160, 191
BURROUGHS, John, 120
BYRD, 9, 10
BYRON, 70, 71, 83, 151, 160, 171,
176, 191 ; extracts from poems
of, 65, 84, 85, 161, 177, 179
CADENCE correspondence, 104
CADENCE, imperfect, 106 ; perfect
authentic, 102
CAESURA, 55, 56, 57, 210, 211
CAINE, Hall, 171
* All extracts from poems will be found under the names of their authors.
Subject classifications not made in Index will be found in the marginal notes.
266
INDEX
CAMPBELL, 47, 83, 160
CAMPION, 13
CAREVV, 13
CARLYLE, 240
CAXTON, g
CHAPMAN, 56, 140, 141, 164, 203
CHAPPELL, n
CHAUCER, 8, 9, 10, 19, 117, 135, 152,
191, 206 ; extracts from poems
of, 118, 150, 153, 157
CHRISTABEL, vii
CIMABUE, 247
CLEVELAND, 80, 81, 82
COLERIDGE, vii, 48, 52, 66, 71, 99,
no, 146 ; extracts from poems of,
26, 42,69, 112, 147, 181, 183
COLONNA, Vittoria, 168
COMMON chord, 102
COMPOSERS, old, 10
CONSONANT groups, 116
CORNELL, J. H., 27, 28, 244, 246
CORREGGIO, 247
CORSON, Hiram, 23, 65, 75, 99, 100,
101, 112, 157-160, 163, 170, 208,
212
COWPER, 84
DANIEL, Samuel, 119, 164
DANTE, 8, 20, 168, 178, 179, 193,
194, 204
DECADENCE, 13, 200, 262
DENHAM, Sir John, 154, 155
DICKINSON, Emily, 107
DIFFERENTIATED motion, 60
DlVINA COMMEDIA, 2O, 193
DOBSON, Austin, 68, 184
DONNE, 164
DOWDEN, Edward, 240
DRAMA, early Christian, 195 ; origin
of, 194 ; pastoral, 202
DRAYTON, Michael, 79, 118, 151,
164, 167
DRUMMOND, William, 164, 167
DRYDEN, 13, 19, 20, 95, 99, 154,
208, 238 ; extract from poem of,
155
ECKERMANN, 244
ELIOT, George, 14
ELIZABETHAN age, 10, n, 77
ELLIS, A. J., 22, 240
EMERSON, 15, 16, 66, 71, 100, 258,
262 ; extracts from poems of, 69,
104, 257
ENGLISH language, the, 6 ; litera-
ture, 8
EPIC, the, 190-193, 194 ; pastoral,
193
ERASMUS, 10
EURIPIDES, 246
EVERETT, J. D., 16
FAIRFAX, Edward, 176, 177
FEMININE ending, 49, 64, 65, 107,
139, 163, 187, 205, 238
FERGUSSON, Samuel, 141
FIELDS, Mrs. James T., 57
FLEAY, 238
FLETCHER, 202, 238
FRA ANGELICO, 247
FRANCK, Cesar, 248
FRIDTHJOF SAGA, 194
GALILEO, 23
GASCOIGNE, George, 120, 210
GEORGIAN poets, 86, 160
GOETHE, 246
GOLDSMITH, 193
GOSSE, Edmund, 20, 77, 80, 82, 83
GOTHIC, 20
GRAY, 34, 106, 115, 209
GREEK poets, quotations from, 2
GREGORIAN chaunt, 21
GREVILLE, Fulke, 77
INDEX
267
GUEST, Dr., 22
GUMMERE, Francis B., 23, 140
HARMONY, 132
HARVEY, Gabriel, 77
HAWEIS, H. R., 9, 21
HAWTHORNE, 15
HEINE, 258
HELLENES, 6
HEROIC rhymed couplet, 152-156
HEROICS, 189
HERRICK, 13
HOGG, James, 51
HOMER, 3
HOMERIC dactylic hexameter, 181
HOOD, Thomas, 39, 108
HROSWITHA, 196
HUGO, Victor, 246
IAMBIC verse, 203
IBSEN, 202
IDYL, the, 191
ILIAD, the, 192, 194
INGELOW, Jean, 42
INTERLUDE, the, 198, 199
JODELLE, 205
JONSON, Ben, 13, 119, 175, 199,
KEATS, 67, 106, 109, no, 155, 171,
178, 191, 193, 208, 213, 255, 259 ;
extracts from poems of, 60, 112,
160, 227, 251, 254
KINGSLEY, Charles, 16, 36, 40, 130,
182, 183
KIPLING, Rudyard, 115, 121, 249
LANGLAND, William, 135, 136,
LANDOR, 191
LANIER, Sidney, viii, 8, 57, 58, 78,
94, 110, 131, 136, 137, 240, 245 ;
extracts from poems of, 130,
248
LAYAMON, 193
LEIGH HUNT, 99
LELY, 9
LINUS, 3
LONGFELLOW, 48, 65, 182, 186
LOVELACE, 13
LOWELL, 9, 57, 96, 151, 156, 157,
I 59> T 93> 2OI > 2O 7
LYRICAL poetry, 4, 190
MACAULAY, 56, 149, 150
MADRIGALS, 10
MAHAFFY, 5, 23
MALLORY, 9
MANNYNG, Robert, 151
MARLOWE, 9, 119, 152, 200, 207,
2ii ; extract from " Tambur-
laine," 214
MASSON, David, 97, 98, 189
MAYOR, Joseph B., 21, 22, 204, 206,
208, 238
MELODY, 99
MEREDITH, Owen, 258
METAPHOR, 250
METRICAL romance, 191
METRIC forms, 189
MICHAEL ANGELO, 168, 247
MILLET, 60
MILTON, 170, 176, 193, 199, 203,
207, 209, 211, 238, 253. Blank
verse, 220-224, 252, 254. Son-
nets, 171, 172
MINSTRELS, 10
MIRACLE-PLAYS, 195, 197-199
MITCHELL, S. Weir, 70
MOORE, 65, 83, 84
MORALITY, the, 198, 199
MOZART, theme from, 103
MULLER, Max, no, 117, 121
268
INDEX
MUSICAL instruments, 9
MYSTERY, 195, 197
NAUMAN, Emil, 2, 262
NEWTON, 23
NIEBUHR, Carsten, 2
NORMAN influence, 7 ; invasion, 7
NORTON, Thomas, 200
OCCLEVE, 9
ODYSSEY, 192, 194
ONOMATOPOEIA, 101, 120, 121
OTTAVA rima, 175, 176
OVIDIAN elegiac distich, 183
PATMORE, Coventry, 81
PEABODY, Josephine Preston, 70
PERCY, Thomas, 10, 138, 142
PETRARCH, 8, 20, 168, 204, 246
PHAER, 81
PHIDIAS, 246
PHONETIC consonance, 101, 114
PIERS the Plowman, 135, 193
PINDAR, 190
POE, 127, 128
POETRY of motion, 66 ; of reflec-
tion, 66
POPE, 154, 155, 238
POULTER'S measure, 152
PRAXITELES, 246
PROCESSIONAL hymns, 4
PUSHKIN, 246
PUTTENHAM, 66
RAFF, 248
RAPHAEL, 247
RENAISSANCE, 21, 77, 134, 204;
music of, u
REPETITIONS and refrains, 101, 128,
132
RHYME, 101 ; end, 8 ; head, 8
RHYTHM, primary, 27, 32, 64
RlGVEDA, 2
RITCHIE, 19
RlTTER, 10
ROGERS, 198
ROMANCE poets, 134
RONSARD, 205
ROSSETTI, Dante Gabriel, 171, 174,
175
SACKVILLE, 9, 200, 211
SAGAS, 192
SAINTSBURY, 20
SCALDS, 10
SCHLEGEL, 247
SCHUMANN, Robert, 244
SCIENCE of English verse, viii, 8
SCOTT, 47, 70, 71, 83, 151, 160,
191
SCUDDER, Vida D., 136, 202
SEPTENARY, Latin, 139
SHAKESPEARE, 9, 13, 201, 209, 237,
255, 261. Blank verse, 99, in,
120, 152, 215-220, 251, 252.
Metrical effects of, 12, 48, 52, 8r,
96, 114, 164, 207, 210, 238, 253.
Rhymed couplets, 124, 153, 154.
Songs, 12, 43-46, 79, 80. Sonnets,
165, 251
SHELLEY, 19, 67, 95, 99, 106, 160,
171, 176, 179, 202, 208, 259, 262.
Blank verse, 226. Extracts from
lyrical poetry, 26, 8s x 180. Ottava
rima, 177. Spenserian stanza,
161, 163
SMENSTONE, William, 83, 160
SHEPPARD, Miss, 258
SHORT couplet, 70, 150
SHORT quatrain, 67
SIDNEY, 9, 77, 164
SIMILE, 250
SKEAT, 66, 153
INDEX
269
SONNET, Elizabethan, 163, 164 ;
legitimate, 169, 170-172
SOPHOCLES, 4, 246
SPENSER, 9, 23, 77, 117, 156, 164,
193, 202, 203, 259. Extracts from
"Faerie Queene," in, 118, 158,
159. Sonnets, 166
SPENSERIAN stanza, 67, 109, 156-
160, 163, 175
SPOHR, 248
STRATTON, Henry W., 17
STRAUSS, Richard, 248
SUCKLING, 13, 132
SURREY, 9, 152, 164, 181, 200, 206,
211
SYLVESTER, J. J., 22
SYMONDS, John Addington, 2, 19,
22, 213 .'
SWINBURNE, 54, 115, 202, 208
TASSO, 168, 175, 176
TENNYSON, 18, 19, 47, 55, 71, 75,
86, 94, 95, 106, 122, 160, 191, 193,
208. Blank verse, 62, 112, 115,
232-237, 251, 254. Extracts from
lyrical poetry, 33, 40, 41, 56, 57,
63, 68, 69, 72-74, 76, 88, 91, 123,
126, 128
TERZA rima, 178, 179
THACKERAY, 93
THAYER, William R., 13
THOMSON, 160, 193
TIME, basic principle of music and
verse, 27
TITIAN, 247
TOMLINSON, Charles, 168, 169, 170,
179
TONE-COLOUR, 101, 109
TONIC, the, 101
TRAGEDY, 5, 200
TROPE, the, 249
VERSE, analysis of, 47, 48 ; heroic,
49, 67, 152 ; motion of, 61, 68, 76,
77 ; notation of, 31, 32, 33-46,
139, 183, 214-237 ; objective, 25,
189, 190 ; relation between music
and, I ; subjective, 25, 189, 190;
unrhymed, 185
VERSE-FORMS, old French, 184
VIBRATION, 17, 24, 26, 27, 59,
95, 242, 249, 260
VICTORIAN poets, 83, 86
VOLSUNG legends, 194
WAGNER, 15, 125
WALLER, 13, 80, 81, 82, 154
WARD, A. W., 195, 196, 199
WATSON, William, 184, 187
WATTS, Theodore, 169
WENDELL, Barrett, 255, 257
WILLIAM the conqueror, 7
WITHER, 13
WORDSWORTH, 53, 57, 64, 66, 70,
71, 97, 99, 106, no, 151, 160, 171,
175, 191, 193, 208, 254, 256.
Blank verse, 25, 224, 250, 255.
Extracts from lyrical poetry, 25,
68, 69, 115, 172, 173
WYATT, 9, 164
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