A Study of Poetry Part 11

RHYME, STANZA AND FREE VERSE

"Subtle rhymes, with ruin rife, Murmur in the house of life."

EMERSON

"When this verse was first dictated to me I consider'd a Monotonous Cadence like that used by Milton & Shakspeare, & all writers of English Blank Verse, derived from the modern bondage of Rhyming, to be a necessary and indispensible part of the verse. But I soon found that in the mouth of a true Orator, such monotony was not only awkward, but as much a bondage as rhyme itself. I therefore have produced a variety in every line, both of cadences & number of syllables. Every word and every letter is studied and put into its fit place: the terrific numbers are reserved for the terrific parts, the mild & gentle for the mild & gentle parts, and the prosaic for inferior parts: all are necessary to each other. Poetry Fetter'd Fetters the Human Race!"

WILLIAM BLAKE

_1. Battles Long Ago_

As we pa.s.s from the general consideration of Rhythm and Metre to some of the special questions involved in Rhyme, Stanza and Free Verse, it may be well to revert to the old distinction between what we called for convenience the "outside" and the "inside" of a work of art. In the field of music we saw that this distinction is almost, if not quite, meaningless, and in poetry it ought not to be pushed too far. Yet it is useful in explaining the differences among men as they regard, now the external form of verse, and now its inner spirit, and as they ask themselves how these two elements are related. Professor Butcher, in his _Aristotle's Theory of Poetry and Fine Art_, [Footnote: Page 147.]

describes the natural tendencies of two sorts of men, who are quite as persistent to-day as ever they were in Greece in looking at one side only of the question:

"We need not agree with a certain modern school who would empty all poetry of poetical thought and etherealize it till it melts into a strain of music; who sing to us we hardly know of what, but in such a way that the echoes of the real world, its men and women, its actual stir and conflict, are faint and hardly to be discerned. The poetry, we are told, resides not in the ideas conveyed, not in the blending of soul and sense, but in the sound itself, in the cadence of the verse. Yet, false as this view may be, it is not perhaps more false than that other which wholly ignores the effect of musical sound and looks only to the thought that is conveyed. Aristotle comes perilously near this doctrine."

But it is not Aristotle only who permits himself at times to undervalue the formal element in verse. It is also Sir Philip Sidney, with his famous "verse being but an ornament and no cause to poetry" and "it is not riming and versing that maketh a poet." It is Sh.e.l.ley with his "The distinction between poets and prose writers in a vulgar error.... Plato was essentially a poet--the truth and splendor of his imagery, and the melody of his language, are the most intense that it is possible to conceive....

Lord Bacon was a poet." It is Coleridge with his "The writings of Plato, and Bishop Taylor, and the _Theoria Sacra_ of Burnet, furnish undeniable proofs that poetry of the highest kind may be written without metre."

In such pa.s.sages as these, how generous are Sidney, Sh.e.l.ley, and Coleridge to the prose-men! And yet these same poet-critics, in dozens of other pa.s.sages, have explained the fundamental justification of metre, rhyme and stanza as elements in the harmony of verse. Harmony may be attained, it is true, by rhythms too complicated to be easily scanned in metrical feet, and by measures which disregard rhyme and stanza; and poets, as well as critics, by giving exclusive attention to a single element in harmony, are able to persuade themselves for the moment that all other elements are relatively negligible. Milton, in his zeal for blank verse, attacked rhyme, in which he had already proved himself a master, quite as fiercely as any of our contemporary champions of free verse. Campion, a trained musician, argued for a quant.i.tative system of English prosody during the very period when he was composing, in the accentual system, some of the most exquisite songs in the language. Daniel, whose _Defense of Rhyme_ (1603) was a triumphant reply to Campion's theory, gave courteous praise to his opponent's practice. Dryden, most flexible-minded of critics, argues now for, and now against the use of rhymed heroic couplets in the drama, fitting his theories to the changing currents of contemporary taste as well as to the varying, self-determined technique of his own plays. "Never wholly out of the way, nor in it," was Dryden's happy phrase to describe the artist's freedom, a freedom always conscious of underlying law.

_2. Rhyme as a Form of Rhythm_

However theory and practice may happen to coincide or to drift apart, the fundamental law which justifies rhyme and stanza seems to be this: if rhythm is a primary fact in poetry, and metre is, as Aristotle called it, sections of rhythm, any device of repeating identical or nearly identical sounds at measured intervals is an aid to rhythmical effect. Rhyme is thus a form, an "externalizing" of rhythm. It is structural as well as decorative, or rather, it is _one way_ of securing structure, of building verse. There are other devices, of course, for attaining symmetrical patterns, for conveying an impression of unity in variety. The "parallel"

structure of Hebrew poetry, where one idea and phrase is balanced against another,

"I have slain a man to my wounding-- And a young man to my hurt--"

or the "envelope" structure of many of the Psalms, where the initial phrase or idea is repeated at the close, after the insertion of ill.u.s.trative matter, thus securing a pattern by the "return" of the main idea--the closing of the "curve"--may serve to ill.u.s.trate the universality of the principle of balance and contrast and repet.i.tion in the architecture of verse. For Hebrew poetry, like the poetry of many primitive peoples, utilized the natural pleasure which the ear takes in listening for and perceiving again an already uttered sound. Rhyme is a gratification of expectation, like the repet.i.tion of a chord in music [Footnote: "Most musical compositions are written in quite obvious rhymes; and the array of familiar and cla.s.sical works that have not only rhymes but distinct stanzaic arrangements exactly like those of poetry is worth remembering. Mendelssohn's 'Spring Song' and Rubinstein's 'Romance in E Flat' will occur at once as examples in which the stanzas are unmistakable." C. E. Russell, "Swinburne and Music," _North American Review_, November, 1907.]

or of colors in a rug. It a.s.sists the mind in grasping the sense-rhythm,-- the design of the piece as a whole. It a.s.sists the emotions through the stimulus to the attention, through the reinforcement which it gives to the pulsations of the psycho-physical organism.

"And _sweep_ through the _deep_ While the stormy tempests blow, While the battle rages long and loud And the stormy tempests blow."

The pulses cannot help quickening as the rhymes quicken.

But in order to perform this structural, rhythmical purpose it is not necessary that rhyme be of any single recognized type. As long as the ear receives the pleasure afforded by accordant sound, any of the various historical forms of rhyme may serve. It may be Alliteration, the letter-rhyme or "beginning-rhyme" of Old English poetry:

"_H_im be _h_ealfe stod _h_yse unweaxen, _C_niht on ge_c_ampe, se full _c_aflice."

Tennyson imitates it in his "Battle of Brunanburh":

"Mighty the Mercian, Hard was his hand-play, Sparing not any of Those that with Anlaf, Warriors over the Weltering waters Borne in the bark's-bosom, Drew to this island-- Doomed to the death."

This repet.i.tion of initial letters survives in phrases of prose like "dead and done with," "to have and to hold," and it is utilized in modern verse to give further emphasis to accentual syllables. But masters of alliterative effects, like Keats, Tennyson and Verlaine, constantly employ alliteration in unaccented syllables so as to color the tone-quality of a line without a too obvious a.s.sault upon the ear. The unrhymed songs of _The Princess_ are full of these delicate modulations of sound.

In Common rhyme, or "end-rhyme" (found--abound), the accented vowel and all succeeding sounds are repeated, while the consonants preceding the accented vowel vary. a.s.sonance, in its stricter sense, means the repet.i.tion of an accented vowel (blackness--dances), while the succeeding sounds vary, but the terms "a.s.sonance" and "consonance" are often employed loosely to signify harmonious effects of tone-color within a line or group of lines. Complete or "identical" rhymes (fair--affair), which were legitimate in Chaucer's time, are not now considered admissible in English. "Masculine" rhymes are end-rhymes of one syllable; "feminine"

rhymes are end-rhymes of two syllables (uncertain--curtain); internal or "middle-rhymes" are produced by the repet.i.tion at the end of a line of a rhyme-sound already employed within the line.

"We were the _first_ that ever _burst_ Into that silent sea."

In general, the more frequent the repet.i.tions of rhyme, the quicker is the rhythmic movement of the poem, and conversely. Thus, the _In Memoriam_ stanza attains its peculiar effect of r.e.t.a.r.dation by rhyming the first line with the fourth, so that the ear is compelled to wait for the expected recurrence of the first rhyme sound.

"Beside the river's wooded reach, The fortress and the mountain ridge, The cataract flas.h.i.+ng from the bridge, The breaker breaking on the beach."

This gives a movement markedly different from that secured by rearranging the same lines in alternate rhymes:

"Beside the river's wooded reach, The fortress and the mountain ridge, The breaker breaking on the beach, The cataract flas.h.i.+ng from the bridge."

If all the various forms of rhyme are only different ways of emphasizing rhythm through the repet.i.tion of accordant sounds, it follows that the varying rhythmical impulses of poets and of readers will demand now a greater and now a less dependence upon this particular mode of rhythmical satisfaction. Chaucer complained of the scarcity of rhymes in English as compared with their affluence in Old French, and it is true that rhyming is harder in our tongue than in the Romance languages. We have had magicians of rhyme, like Swinburne, whose very profusion of rhyme-sounds ends by cloying the taste of many a reader, and sending him back to blank verse or on to free verse. The Spenserian stanza, which calls for one fourfold set of rhymes, one threefold, and one double, all cunningly interlaced, is as complicated a piece of rhyme-harmony as the ear of the average lover of poetry can carry. It is needless to say that there are born rhymers, who think in rhyme and whose fecundity of imagery is multiplied by the excitement of matching sound with sound. They are often careless in their prodigality, inexact in their swift catching at any rhyme-word that will serve. At the other extreme are the self-conscious artists in verse who abhor imperfect concordances, and polish their rhymes until the life and freshness disappear. For sheer improvising cleverness of rhyme Byron is still unmatched, but he often contents himself with approximate rhymes that are nearly as bad as some of Mrs. Browning's and Whittier's. Very different is the deliberate artifice of the following lines, where the monotony of the rhyme-sound fits the "solemn ennui"

of the trailing peac.o.c.ks;

I "From out the temple's pillared portico, Thence to the gardens where blue poppies blow The gold and emerald peac.o.c.ks saunter slow, Trailing their solemn ennui as they go, Trailing their melancholy and their woe.

II "Trailing their melancholy and their woe, Trailing their solemn ennui as they go The gold and emerald peac.o.c.ks saunter slow From out the gardens where blue poppies blow Thence to the temple's pillared portico."

[Footnote: Frederic Adrian Lopere, "World Wisdom," The International, September, 1915.]

Rhyme, then, is not merely a "jingle," it is rather, as Samuel Johnson said of all versification, a "joining music with reason." Its blending of decorative with structural purpose is in truth "a dictate of nature," or, to quote E. C. Stedman, "In real, that is, spontaneous minstrelsy, the fittest a.s.sonance, consonance, time, even rime,... _come of themselves with imaginative thought_."

_3. Stanza_

There are some lovers of poetry, however, who will grant this theoretical justification of rhyme as an element in the harmony of verse, without admitting that the actual rhyming stanzas of English verse show "spontaneous minstrelsy." The word "stanza" or "strophe" means literally "a resting-place," a halt or turn, that is to say, after a uniform group of rhymed lines. Alden defines it in his _English Verse_ as "the largest unit of verse-measure ordinarily recognized. It is based not so much on rhythmical divisions as on periods either rhetorical or melodic; that is, a short stanza will roughly correspond to the period of a sentence, and a long one to that of a paragraph, while in lyrical verse the original idea was to conform the stanza to the melody for which it was written."

"Normally, then," Alden adds in his _Introduction to Poetry_, "all the stanzas of a poem are identical in the number, the length, the metre, and the rime-scheme of the corresponding verses." The question arises, therefore, whether those units which we call "stanzas" are arbitrary or vital. Have the lines been fused into their rhymed grouping by pa.s.sionate feeling, or is their unity a mere mechanical conformation to a pattern? In Theodore Watts-Dunton's well-known article on "Poetry" in the _Encyclopaedia Brittanica_ [Footnote: Now reprinted, with many expansions, in his _Poetry and the Renascence of Wonder_. E. P. Dutton, New York.]

the phrases "stanzaic law" and "emotional law" are used to represent the two principles at issue:

"In modern prosody the arrangement of the rhymes and the length of the lines in any rhymed metrical pa.s.sage may be determined either by a fixed stanzaic law, or by a law infinitely deeper--by the law which impels the soul, in a state of poetic exultation, to seize hold of every kind of metrical aid, such as rhyme, caesura, etc., for the purpose of accentuating and marking off each shade of emotion as it arises, regardless of any demands of stanza.... If a metrical pa.s.sage does not gain immensely by being written independently of stanzaic law, it loses immensely; and for this reason, perhaps, that the great charm of the music of all verse, as distinguished from the music of prose, is inevitableness of cadence. In regular metres we enjoy the pleasure of feeling that the rhymes will inevitably fall under a recognized law of couplet or stanza. But if the pa.s.sage flows independently of these, it must still flow inevitably--it must, in short, show that it is governed by another and a yet deeper force, the inevitableness of emotional expression."

This distinction between "stanzaic law" and "emotional law" is highly suggestive and not merely in its application to the metres of the famous regular and irregular odes of English verse. It applies also to the infinite variety of stanza-patterns which English poetry has taken over from Latin and French sources and developed through centuries ofexperimentation, and it affords a key, as we shall see in a moment, to some of the vexed questions involved in free verse.

Take first the more familiar of the stanza forms of English verse. They are conveniently indicated by using letters of the alphabet to correspond with each rhyme-sound, whenever repeated.

Thus the rhymed couplet

"Around their prows the ocean roars, And chafes beneath their thousand oars"

may be marked as "four-stress iambic," rhyming _aa_; the heroic couplet

"The zeal of fools offends at any time, But most of all the zeal of fools in rhyme"

as five-stress iambic, rhyming _aa_. The familiar measure of English ballad poetry,

"The King has written a braid letter, And signed it wi' his hand, And sent it to Sir Patrick Spence, Was walking on the sand"

is alternating four-stress and three-stress iambic, rhyming _ab cb_. The _In Memoriam_ stanza,

"Now rings the woodland loud and long, The distance takes a lovelier hue, And drown'd in yonder living blue The lark becomes a sightless song"

is four-stress iambic, rhyming _ab ba_.