Principles of literary criticism

by I. A. Richards

As with rhythm so with metre, we must not think of it as in the words themselves or in the thumping of the drum. It is not in the stimulation, it is in our response. Metre adds to all the variously fated expectancies which make up rhythm a definite temporal pattern and its effect is not due to our perceiving a pattern in something outside us, but to our becoming patterned ourselves. With every beat of the metre a tide of anticipation in us turns and swings, setting up as it does so extraordinarily extensive sympathetic reverberations. We shall never understand metre so long as we ask, ‘Why does: temporal pattern so excite us’? and fail to realise that the pattern itself is a vast cyclic agitation spreading all over the body, a tide of excitement pouring through the channels of the mind.

The notion that there is any virtue in regularity or in variety, or in any other formal feature, apart from its effects upon us, must be discarded before any metrical problem can be understood. The regularity to which metre tends acts through the definiteness of the anticipations which are thereby aroused. It is through these that it gets such a hold upon the mind. Once again, here too, the failure of our expectations is often more important than success. Verse in which we constantly get exactly what we are ready for and no more, instead of something which we can and must take up and incorporate as another stage in a total developing response is merely toilsome and tedious. In prose, the influence of past words extends only a little way ahead. In verse, especially when stanza-form and rime co-operate to give a larger unit than the line, it may extend far ahead. It is this knitting together of the parts of the poem which explains the mnemonic power of verse, the first of the suggestions as to the origin of metre to be found in the Fourteenth Chapter of Biographia Literaria, that lumber-room of neglected wisdom which contains more hints towards a theory of poetry than all the rest ever written upon the subject.

We do great violence to the facts if we suppose the expectations excited as we read verse to be concerned only with the stress, emphasis, length, foot structure and so forth of the syllables which follow. Even in this respect the custom of marking syllables in two degrees only, long and short, light and full, etc., is inadequate, although doubtless forced upon metrists by practical considerations. The mind in the poetic experience responds to subtler niceties than these. When not in that experience but coldly considering their several qualities as sounds by the ear alone, it may well find two degrees all that are necessary. In Chapter XIII we saw an analogous situation arising in the case of the discrimination of colours. The obvious comparison with the difference between what even musical notation can record in music and the player’s interpretation can usefully be made here.

A more serious omission is the neglect by the majority of metrists of the pitch relations of syllables. The reading of poetry is of course not a monotonous and subdued form of singing. There is no question of definite pitches at which the syllables must be taken, nor perhaps of definite harmonic relations between different sounds. But that a rise and fall of pitch is involved in metre and is as much part of the poet’s technique as any other feature of verse, as much under his control also, is indisputable. Anyone who is not clear upon this point may compare as a striking instance Milton’s Hymn on the Morning of Christ’s Nativity with Collins’ Ode to Simplicity and both with the second Chorus of Hellas discussed in Chapter XXVIII. Due allowances made for the natural peculiarities of different readers, the scheme of pitch relations, in their contexts, of

That on the bitter cross
Must redeem our loss;

and of

But com’st a decent maid,
In Attic robe array’ɖ,

are clearly different. There is nothing arbitrary or out of the poet’s control in this, as there is nothing arbitrary or out of his control in the way in which an adequate reader will stress particular syllables. He brings both about by the same means, the modification of the reader’s impulses by what has gone before. It is true that some words resist emphasis far more than perhaps any resist change of pitch, yet this difference is merely one of degree. It is as natural to lower the pitch in reading the word ‘loss’ as it is to emphasise it as compared with ‘our’ in the same context.

Here again we see how impossible it is to consider rhythm or metre as though it were purely an affair of the sensory aspect of syllables and could be dissociated from their sense and from the emotional effects which come about through their sense. One principle may, however, be hazarded. As in the case of painting the more direct means are preferable to the less direct (see Chapter XVIII), so in poetry. What can be done by sound should not be done otherwise or in violation of the natural effects of sound. Violations of the natural emphases and tones of speech brought about for the sake of the further effects due to thought and feeling are perilous, though, on occasion, they may be valuable devices. The use of italics in Cain to straighten out the blank verse is as glaring an instance as any. But more liberties are justified in dramatic writing than elsewhere, and poetry is full of exceptions to such principles.[*] We must not forget that Milton did not disdain to use special spelling, ‘mee’, for example, in place of ‘me’, in order to suggest additional emphasis when he feared that the reader might be careless.

So far we have been concerned with metre only as a specialised form of rhythm, giving an increased interconnection between words through an increased control of anticipation. But it has other, in some cases even more important powers. Its use as an hypnotic agent is probably very ancient. Coleridge once again drops his incidental remark, just beside yet extremely close to the point. “It tends to increase the vivacity and susceptibility both of the general feelings and of the attention. This effect it produces by the continued excitement of surprise, and by the quick reciprocations of curiosity still gratified and still re-excited, which are too slight indeed to be at any moment objects of distinct consciousness, yet become considerable in their aggregate influence. As a medicated atmosphere, or as wine during animated conversation, they act powerfully, though themselves unnoticed.” (Biographia Literaria, Chap. XVIII.) Mr Yeats, when he speaks of the function of metre being to “lull the mind into a waking trance” is describing the same effect, however strange his conception of this trance may be.