CHAPTER VI
I have not attempted in this chapter to give elaborate illustrations of the varieties of rhyme and stanza in English poetry. Full illustrations will be found in Alden's English Verse. A clear statement of the fundamental principles involved is given in W. H. Carruth's Verse Writing.
Free verse is suggestively discussed by Lowes, Convention and Revolt, chapters 6 and 7, and by Andrews, Writing and Reading of Verse, chapters 5 and 19. Miss Amy Lowell has written fully about it in the Prefaces to Sword Blades and Poppy Seed and Can Grande's Castle, in the final chapter of Tendencies in Modern American Poetry, in the Prefaces to Some Imagist Poets, and in the North American Review for January, 1917. Mr. Braithwaite's annual Anthologies of American Verse give a full bibliography of special articles upon this topic.
An interesting classroom test of the difference between prose rhythm and verse rhythm with strongly marked metre and rhyme may be found in comparing Emerson's original prose draft of his "Two Rivers," as found in volume 9 of his Journal, with three of the stanzas of the finished poem:
"Thy voice is sweet, Musketaquid, and repeats the music of the ram, but sweeter is the silent stream which flows even through thee, as thou through the land.
"Thou art shut in thy banks, but the stream I love flows in thy water, and flows through rocks and through the air and through rays of light as well, and through darkness, and through men and women.
"I hear and see the inundation and the eternal spending of the stream in winter and in summer, in men and animals, in passion and thought. Happy are they who can hear it."
"Thy summer voice, Musketaquit,
Repeats the music of the rain;
But sweeter rivers pulsing flit
Through thee, as thou through Concord plain.
"Thou in thy narrow banks are pent;
The stream I love unbounded goes
Through flood and sea and firmament;
Through light, through life, it forward flows.
"I see the inundation sweet,
I hear the spending of the stream
Through years, through men, through nature fleet,
Through love and thought, through power and dream."
I also suggest for classroom discussion the following brief passages from recent verse, printed without the authors' names:
1. "The milkman never argues; he works alone and no one speaks to him; the city is asleep when he is on his job; he puts a bottle on six hundred porches and calls it a day's work; he climbs two hundred wooden stairways; two horses are company for him; he never argues."
2. "Sometimes I have nervous moments— there is a girl who looks at me strangely as much as to say, You are a young man, and I am a young woman, and what are you going to do about it? And I look at her as much as to say, I am going to keep the teacher's desk between us, my dear, as long as I can."
3. "I hold her hands and press her to my breast.
"I try to fill my arms with her loveliness, to plunder her sweet smile with kisses, to drink her dark glances with my eyes.
"Ah, but where is it? Who can strain the blue from the sky?
"I try to grasp the beauty; it eludes me, leaving only the body in my hands.
"Baffled and weary, I came back. How can the body touch the flower which only the spirit may touch?"
4. "Child, I smelt the flowers,
The golden flowers … hiding in crowds like fairies at my feet,
And as I smelt them the endless smile of the infinite broke over me,
and I knew that they and you and I were one.
They and you and I, the cowherds and the cows, the jewels and the
potter's wheel, the mothers and the light in baby's eyes.
For the sempstress when she takes one stitch may make nine unnecessary;
And the smooth and shining stone that rolls and rolls like the great
river may gain no moss,
And it is extraordinary what a lot you can do with a platitude when you
dress it up in Blank Prose.
Child, I smelt the flowers."