Open Water

by Arthur Stringer

A FOREWORD

To even the casual reader of poetry who may chance to turn to the following pages it will be evident that the lyrics contained therein have been written without what is commonly known as end-rhyme. It may also be claimed by this reader that the lyrics before him are without rhythm. As such, it may at first seem that they mark an effort in revolt against two of the primary assets of modern versification.

All art, of course, has its ancestry. While it is the duty of poetry both to remember and to honour its inherited grandeurs, the paradoxical fact remains that even this most convention-ridden medium of emotional expression is a sort of warfare between the embattled soul of the artist, seeking articulation, and the immuring traditions with which time and the prosodian have surrounded him.

In painting and in music, as in sculpture and the drama, there has been a movement of late to achieve what may be called formal emancipation, a struggle to break away from the restraints and the technical obligations imposed upon the worker by his artistic predecessors. In one case this movement may be called Futurism, and in another it may be termed Romanticism, but the tendency is the same. The spirit of man is seen in rebellion against a form that has become too intricate or too fixed to allow him freedom of utterance.

Poetry alone, during the last century, seems to have remained stable, in the matter of structure. Few new forms have been invented, and with one or two rare exceptions success has been achieved through ingeniously elaborating on an already established formula and through meticulously re-echoing what has already been said. This has resulted, on the one hand, in a technical dexterity which often enough resembles the strained postures of acrobatism, and, on the other, in that constantly reiterated complaint as to the hollowness and aloofness of modern poetry. Yet this poetry is remote and insincere, not because the modern spirit is incapable of feeling, but because what the singer of to-day has felt has not been directly and openly expressed. His apparel has remained mediæval. He must still don mail to face Mausers, and wear chain-armour against machine-guns. He must scout through the shadowy hinterlands of consciousness in attire that may be historic, yet at the same time is distressingly conspicuous. And when he begins his assault on those favouring moments or inspirational moods which lurk in the deeper valleys and by-ways of sensibility, he must begin it as a marked man, pathetically resplendent in that rigid steel which is an anachronism and no longer an armour.

Rhyme, from the first, has been imposed upon him. His only escape from rhyme has been the larger utterance of blank verse. Yet the iambic pentameter of his native tongue, perfected in the sweeping sonority of the later Shakespearean tragedies and left even more intimidatingly austere in the organ-like roll of Milton, has been found by the later singer to be ill-fitted for the utterance of those more intimate moods and those subjective experiences which may be described as characteristically modern. Verse, in the nature of things, has become less epic and racial, and more and more lyric and personal. The poet, consequently, has been forced back into the narrower domain so formally and so rigidly fenced in by rhyme. And before touching on the limitations resulting from this incarceration, it may be worth while to venture a brief glance back over the history of what Milton himself denominated as "the jingling sounds of like endings" and Goldsmith characterized as "a vile monotony" and even Howells has spoken of as "the artificial trammels of verse."

It has been claimed that those early poets of Palestine who affected the custom of beginning a number of lines or stanzas with the same letter of the alphabet unconsciously prepared the way for that latter-day ornamental fringe known as end-rhyme. Others have claimed that this insistence of a consonance of terminals is a relique of the communal force of the chant, where the clapping of hands, the stamping of feet, or the twanging of bow-strings marked the period-ends of prehistoric recitative. The bow-string of course, later evolved into the musical instrument, and when poetry became a written as well as a spoken language the consonantal drone of rhyming end-words took the place of the discarded instrument which had served to mark a secondary and wider rhythm in the progress of impassioned recitative.

It must be admitted, however, even in the face of this ingenious pleading, that rhyme is a much more modern invention than it seems. That it is not rudimentary in the race is evidenced by the fact that many languages, such as the Celtic, the Teutonic, and the Scandinavian, are quite without it. The Greeks, even in their melic poetry, saw no need for it. The same may be said of the Romans, though with them it will occasionally be found that the semi-feet of the pentameter constitute what may be called accidental rhyme. Rhyming Latin verse, indeed, does not come into existence until the end of the fourth century, and it is not until the time of the Conquest that end-rhyme becomes in any way general in English song. Layman, in translating Wace's Le Brut d'Angleterre, found the original work written in rhymed lines, and in following that early model produced what is probably the first rhymed poem written in England.

With the introduction of end-rhymes came the discovery that a decoration so formal could convert verse into something approaching the architectural. It gave design to the lyric. With this new definiteness of outline, of course, came a newer rigidity of medium. Form was acknowledged as the visible presentation of this particular art. Formal variations became a matter of studious attention. Efforts were made to leave language in itself instrumental, and in these efforts sound frequently comes perilously near triumphing over sense. The exotic formal growths of other languages were imported into England. No verbal tour de force of troubadour or trouvère or jongleur or Ronsardist was too fantastic for imitation and adoption. The one-time primitive directness of English was overrun by such forms as the ballade, the chant royal, the rondel, the kyrielle, the rondeau and the rondeau redoublé, the virelai and the pantoum, the sestina, the villanelle, and last, yet by no means least, the sonnet. But through the immense tangle of our intricate lyric growths it can now be seen that mere mechanics do not always make poetry. While rhyme has, indeed, served its limited purposes, it must be remembered that the highest English verse has been written without rhyme. This verbal embroidery, while it presents to the workman in words a pleasingly decorative form, at the same time imposes on him both an adventitious restraint and an increased self-consciousness. The twentieth century poet, singing with his scrupulously polished vocalisation, usually finds himself content to re-echo what has been said before. He is unable to "travel light"; pioneering with so heavy a burden is out of the question. Rhyme and meter have compelled him to sacrifice content for form. It has left him incapable of what may be called abandonment. And the consciousness of his technical impedimenta has limited the roads along which he may adventure. His preoccupation with formal exactions has implanted in him an instinctive abhorrence for anything beyond the control of what he calls common-sense. Dominated by this emotional and intellectual timidity, he has attributed to end-rhyme and accentual rhythm the self-sufficiency of mystic rites, in the face of the fact that the fewer the obstacles between feeling and expression the richer the literary product must be, and forgetting, too, that poetry represents the extreme vanguard of consciousness both adventuring and pioneering along the path of future progress.

For the poet to turn his back on rhythm, as at times he has been able to do with rhyme, is an impossibility. For the rhythmising instinct is innate and persistent in man, standing for a law which permeates every manifestation of energy. The great heart of Nature itself beats with a regular systole and diastole. But, rhythmically, the modern versifier has been a Cubist without quite comprehending it. He has been viewing the world mathematically. He has been crowding his soul into a geometrically designed mould. He has bowed to a rule-of-thumb order of speech, arbitrarily imposed on him by an ancestry which wrung its ingenuous pleasure out of an ingenuous regularity of stress and accent. To succeed under that law he must practise an adroit form of self-deception, solemnly pretending to fit his lines to a mould which he actually over-runs and occasionally ignores. He has not been satisfied with the rhythm of Nature, whose heart-beats in their manifold expressions are omnipresent but never confined to any single sustained pulse or any one limited movement. It is not argued that he should ignore rhythm altogether. To do so, as has already been said, would be impossible, since life itself is sustained by the rise and fall of mortal breasts and the beat and throb of mortal hearts. Rhythm is in man's blood. The ear of the world instinctively searches for cadences. The poet's efforts towards symphonic phrasing have long since become habitual and imperative. But that he should confine himself to certain man-made laws of meter, that he should be shackled by the prosodian of the past, is quite another matter. His predecessors have fashioned many rhythms that are pretty, many accentual forms that are cunningly intricate, but at a time when his manner of singing has lost its vital swing it is well for man to forget these formal prettinesses and equally well to remember that poetry is not an intellectual exercise but the immortal soul of perplexed mortality seeking expression.