“Really the meter of some of the modern poems I have read,” said Coleridge, “bears about the same relation to meter, properly understood, that dumb-bells do to music; both are for exercise, and pretty severe too, I think.” A master of meter Browning proved himself again and again, very inventive in the new rhythms he introduced, and almost unfailingly felicitous; and yet there are poems of his in which the rimes impose on the reader a steady muscular exercise. In the ‘Glove,’ for example, there not only abound manufactured rimes, each of which in turn arrests the attention, and each of which demands a most conscientious articulation before the ear can apprehend it, but with a persistent perversity the poet puts the abnormal combination first, and puts last the normal word with which it is to be united in wedlock. Thus aghast I’m precedes pastime, and well swear comes before elsewhere. This is like presenting us with the answer before propounding the riddle.
In comic verse, of course, difficulty gaily vanquished may be a part of the joke, and an adroit and unexpected rime may be a witticism in itself. But in the ‘Ingoldsby Legends’ and in the ‘Fable for Critics’ it is generally the common word that comes before the uncommon combination the alert rimester devises to accompany it. When a line of Barham’s ends with Mephistopheles we wonder how he is going to solve the difficulty, and our expectation is swiftly gratified with coffee lees; and when Lowell informs us that Poe
... talks like a book of iambs and pentameters,
we bristle our ears while he adds:
In a way to make people of common sense damn meters.
But the ‘Glove’ is not comic in intent; the core of it is tragic, and the shell is at least romantic. Perhaps a hard and brilliant playfulness of treatment might not be out of keeping with the psychologic subtlety of its catastrophe; but not a few readers resentfully reject the misplaced ingenuity of the wilfully artificial double rimes. The incongruity between the matter of the poem and the manner of it attracts attention to the form, and leaves us the less for the fact.
It would be interesting to know just why Browning chose to do what he did in the ‘Glove’ and in more than one other poem. He had his reasons, doubtless, for he was no unconscious warbler of unpremeditated lays. If he refused to be loyal to the principle of Economy of Attention, he knew what he was doing. It was not from any heedlessness—like that of Emerson when he recklessly rimed woodpecker with bear; or like that of Lowell when he boldly insisted on riming the same woodpecker with hear. Emerson and Lowell—and Whittier also—it may be noted, were none of them enamoured of technic; and when a couplet or a quatrain or a stanza of theirs happened to attain perfection, as not infrequently they do, we cannot but feel it to be only a fortunate accident. They were not untiring students of versification, forever seeking to spy out its mysteries and to master its secrets, as Milton was, and Tennyson and Poe.
And yet no critic has more satisfactorily explained the essential necessity of avoiding discords than did Lowell when he affirmed that “not only meter but even rime itself is not without suggestion in outward nature. Look at the pine, how its branches, balancing each other, ray out from the tapering stem in stanza after stanza, how spray answers to spray, strophe and antistrophe, till the perfect tree stands an embodied ode, Nature’s triumphant vindication of proportion, number, and harmony. Who can doubt the innate charm of rime who has seen the blue river repeat the blue o’erhead; who has been ravished by the visible consonance of the tree growing at once toward an upward and a downward heaven on the edge of the twilight cove; or who has watched how, as the kingfisher flitted from shore to shore, his visible echo flies under him, and completes the fleeting couplet in the visionary vault below?... You must not only expect, but you must expect in the right way; you must be magnetized beforehand in every fiber by your own sensibility in order that you may feel what and how you ought.”
Here Lowell is in full agreement with Poe, who declared that “what, in rime, first and principally pleases, may be referred to the human sense or appreciation of equality.” But there is no equality in the sound of valleys and palace, and so the human sense is robbed of its pleasure; and there is no consonance, visible or audible, between woodpecker and hear, and so we are suddenly demagnetized by our own sensibility, and cannot feel what and how we ought.
So long as the poet gives us rimes exact to the ear and completely satisfactory to the sense to which they appeal, he has solid ground beneath his feet; but if once he leaves this, then is chaos come again. Admit given and heaven, and it is hard to deny chamber and remember. Having relinquished the principle of uniformity of sound, you land yourself logically in the wildest anarchy. Allow shadow and meadow to be legitimate, and how can you put the bar sinister on hear and woodpecker? Indeed, we fail to see how you can help feeling that John Phœnix was unduly harsh when he rejected the poem of a Young Astronomer beginning, “O would I had a telescope with fourteen slides!” on account of the atrocious attempt in the second line to rime Pleiades with slides.