CHAPTER VI
METRE AND RHYTHM IN GREEK TRAGEDY
§ I. Introduction
Poetry is illuminating utterance consisting of words the successive sounds of which are arranged according to a recurrent pattern. The soul of poetry is this illumination, its body this recurrent pattern of sounds; and it is with the body that we are now to deal. At the outset we must distinguish carefully between rhythm and metre. Rhythm is the recurrence just mentioned—the structure; metre is the gathering together of sounds into masses upon which rhythm shall do its work. Metre, so to put it, makes the bricks, while rhythm makes the arch.
Greek metre is based, not upon stress-accent,[858] but upon quantity—the length of time needed for the pronunciation of a syllable. In English the line
My bosom’s lord sits lightly in his throne
is “scanned” (that is to say, marked off into “feet”—the metrical units) as a series of five iambi; the iambus being a foot which consists of an unaccented, followed by an accented, syllable. The word “bosoms” can stand where it does because the stress of the voice naturally falls upon the first syllable of “bosom”; to begin a line with “my seréne bosom” would clearly be wrong. The length of the syllables has no effect on the scansion. That “sits” needs as long a time for its utterance as the first syllable of “lightly” does not alter the fact that “sits light-” is an accentual iambus.
Greek words, on the other hand, as metrical material, are considered only from the quantitative point of view, not the accentual. The voice-stress in the word λόγους rests upon the first syllable, but the word is an iambus, a “short” followed by a “long” (marked respectively thus ⏑–). Whereas an English blank verse consists of five accentual iambi, e.g.
To ént|ertaín | divíne | Zenócr|até,
the corresponding verse of all the Greek dramatists is composed of six feet each of which is theoretically a quantitative iambus, and most of which actually are such. Thus Andromache, v. 241 is to be scanned
⏑ – ⏑ – ⏑ – ⏑ – ⏑ – ⏑ –
τι δ ου | γυναιξ|ι ταυτ|α πρωτ|α παντ|αχου.