Three axe-strokes—rhythmed and matched in rhyme.
Again: it is not poetical pedantry on Scott’s part when, in his elegiac monody On the Death of Claude Debussy, he rhapsodizes the forms, content, properties, color, and musical structure—‘the mood pictures’—of Debussy’s opera Pellèas et Mélisande, his orchestral prelude L’Après-midi d’un Faune, and his orchestral sketches La Mer. No musical journalist or critic, writing in prose, has done this so summarily and with such vividness and veracity as Scott has accomplished it in twenty-five lines of trimeter and tetrameter unrhymed iambics and trochaics. It is for the sake of illumination and the substance of true poetry that Scott thus finely incorporates his knowledge of music into the text of his poetry. And, as Browning made compelling use of the technical language and meanings of musical structure, notably in his Abt Vogler, so, in the Debussy monody, Scott twice finely affects the spirit and illuminates the substance of his poem with such recondite musical technology as:—
And under all, the pedal-point
Of the deep-bas(s)ed ocean,
Hidden under the mists,
Chanting, infinitely remote,
At the foot of enchanted cliffs.
Then with a turn of illumination,
An enharmonic change of vision,
Death and Debussy