Ist in gebundenen Worten ein ungebundener Geist.
(What proves itself eternal in every place and time
Is an unfettered spirit, free in the chains of rhyme.)
True, very true. You may get that now and then, but in our modern languages it is but seldom that thought soars up quite free on the wings of rhyme. Many and many a thought sinks down because of the weight of the rhyme, many and many a thought remains altogether unspoken because it will not submit to the strait jacket of the rhyme; many and many a poor thought is due entirely to an irrepressible rhyme; and if some brilliant thoughts have really been suggested by the rhyme, would it not be better if they had been suggested by something else, whether you call it mind or soul? The greatest masters of rhyme, such as Browning in English or Rückert in German, and even H. Heine, often fall victims to their own mastery. They spoil their poems in order to show that they can find a rhyme for anything and everything, however grotesque the rhyme may be. I remember once being bold enough to ask Tennyson what was the use or excuse of rhyme. He was not offended, but was quite ready with his answer: “Rhyme helps the memory,” he said—and that answer was as honest as it was true. But what is useful for one purpose, for the purpose of recollecting, may be anything but useful for other purposes, it may be even hurtful, and in our case it has certainly proved hurtful again and again to the natural flow and expression of thought and feeling.
Nor should I venture to say a word against Platen’s gebundene Worte. It was only the very necessity of finding a word to answer to time which led me to speak of chains of rhyme. Gebundene Worte are not necessarily rhymed words, they are measured words, and these are no doubt quite natural and quite right for poetry. Metre is measure, and metrical utterance, in that sense, was not only more natural for the expression of the highest thoughts, but was probably everywhere more ancient also than prose. In every literature, as far as we know, poetry came first, prose second. Inspired utterance requires, nay produces, rhythmic movements not only of the voice (song and prosodia), but of the body also (dance). In Greek, chorus means dance, measured movement, and the Greek choruses were originally dances; nay, it can be proved that these dancing movements formed really the first metres of true poetry. Hence, it was quite natural that David should have danced before the Lord with all his might. Language itself bears witness to the fact that the oldest metres were the steps and movements of dancers. As the old dances consisted of steps, the ancient metres consisted of feet. Even we ourselves still speak of feet, not because we understand what it means, but simply because the Greeks and Romans spoke of feet, and they said so because originally the feet really marked the metre.
The ancient poets of the Veda also speak of feet, and they seem to have been quite aware why they spoke of metrical feet, for in the names of some of their metres we still find clear traces of the steps of the dances which accompanied their poems. Trishtubh, one of their ancient metres, meant three-step; Anushtubh, the later Sloka, meant by-step[[1]] or Reigen. The last syllables or steps of each line were called the Vritta, or the turn, originally the turn of the dancers, who seem to have been allowed to move more freely till they came to the end of one movement. Then, before they turned, or while they turned, they marked the steps more sharply and audibly, either as iambic or as trochaic, and afterwards marched back again with greater freedom. Hence in ancient Sanskrit the end or turn of each line was under stricter rules as to long and short steps, or long and short syllables, whereas greater freedom was allowed for the rest of a line. Thus Sanskrit Vritta, the turn, came to mean the metre of the whole line, just as in Latin we have the same word versus, literally the turn, then verse, and this turn became the name for verse, and remained so to the present day. There is no break in our history, and language is the chain that holds it together. A strophe also was originally a turning, to be followed by the antistrophe or the return, all ideas derived from dancing. The ancient Sanskrit name for metre and metrical or measured speed was Khandas. The verb Khand would correspond phonetically to Latin scandere, in the sense of marching, as in a-scendere, to march upward, to mount, and de-scendere, to march downward, all expressing the same idea of measured movement, but not of rhyme or jingle. These movements were free and natural in the beginning; they became artificial when they became traditional, and we find in such works as the Sanskrit Vritta-ratnâkara, “the treasury of verse,” every kind of monstrosity which was perpetrated by Hindu poets of the Renaissance period, and perpetrated, it must be confessed, with wonderful adroitness.
But I must not tire my friends with these metrical mysteries. What I want them to know is that in the most ancient Aryan poetry which we possess there is no trace of rhyme, except here and there by accident, and that everywhere in the history of the poetry of the Âryas, rhyme, as essential to poetry, is a very late invention. It is the same in Semitic languages, though in Semitic as well as in Aryan speech, in fact, wherever grammatical forms are expressed chiefly by means of terminations, rhyme even in prose is almost inevitable. And this was no doubt the origin of rhyme. In languages where terminations of declension and conjugation and most derivative suffixes have retained a full-bodied and sonorous form, it was difficult to avoid the jingle of rhyme. In Latin, which abounds in such constantly recurring endings as orum, arum, ibus, amus, atis, amini, tatem, tatibus, inibus, etc., good prose writers had actually to be warned against allowing their sentences to rhyme, while poets found it very easy to add these ornamental tails to their measured lines.
There can be little doubt that it was the rhymed Latin poetry, as used in the services of the Roman Catholic Church, which suggested to the German converts the idea of rhymed verses. The pagan poetry of the Teutonic races had no rhymes. It was what is called alliterative. In the German dialects the accent remained mostly on the radical syllable of words, and thus served to shorten the terminations. Hence we find fewer full-bodied terminations in Gothic than in Latin, while in later Teutonic dialects, in English as well as in German, these terminations dwindled away more and more. Thus, we say Di’ chter when the Romans would have Dicta’ tor, Pre’ diger for prœdica’ tor, cha’ ncel for cance’ lla. In order to bind their poetical lines together the German poets had recourse to initial letters, which had to be the same in certain places of each verse, and which, if pronounced with strong stress or strain, left the impression of the words being knitted together and belonging together. Here is a specimen which will show that the rules of alliteration were very strictly observed by the old German poets, far more strictly than by their modern imitators. The old rule was that in a line of eight arses there should be two words in the first and one in the second half beginning with the same letter, consonant or vowel, and always in syllables that had the accent. Here is a line from the old “Song of Hildebrand,” dating from the eighth century:—
| Hiltibraht joh Hadhubrant | Hiltibraht and Hadhubrant |
| Untar harjum tuâm, etc. | Between hosts twain, etc. |
Rückert has imitated this alliterating poetry in his poem of “Roland”:—