"A little door she opened straight,
All in the middle of the gate,
The gate that was ironed within and without,
Where an army in battle array had marched out."
Here the rhythm of the last verse is brought into the four-beat measure of the first verse, by passing lightly and rapidly over all syllables save the four that mark the metre. In prose, the word marched would be stressed quite as much as the word out, but there is no difficulty in reducing the stress in reading the verse.[54] It cannot be said, however, that there is no difficulty in reducing its length, for the final consonant combination -cht takes up considerable time, and the whole word follows a syllable (had) which has been closed and so lengthened by the d + m. Sensitive readers would probably agree, therefore, that the quantity in this verse is too much for the smoothness of the rhythm. On the other hand, the long syllable ironed helps us to fill the place of the light syllable which is missing after it, and we find the rhythm easier than it would be in this form:
"The gate that was ironed both within and without."
Once more, for the sake of convenience, let us attempt to put our conclusions into the form of a summary. An English syllable may be said to be long, not absolutely but relatively, from:
[1. The naturally long character of its vowel-sound, due either
to open quality or diphthongization.]
2. The presence of two or more consonants which require a
perceptible time for utterance.
3. Prolongation by the speaker
(a) because of the importance of the syllable, or
(b) because of the time which it ought to occupy in
the scheme of the verse.
The artificial lengthening and shortening of syllables, then, is constantly and naturally practised in the reading of verse which has a strong lyrical swing such as guides the reader into a sense of its structure. In verse more subtle and less lyrical in character the time-intervals are not so strongly marked, and by the ear not trained to listen for rhythm they are not so easily observed. The five-stress iambic line, especially when unrimed, has developed far more freedom and subtlety in English poetry than any other measure, and it is to this that one finds these writers invariably turning who wish to prove that our verse is not based on regular time-intervals. A verse like this:
"The lone couch of his everlasting sleep,"
if read as an ordinary prose phrase, has no obvious metrical character. The second foot ("couch of") inverts the normal order of accent and no-accent, and in common speech the second and third syllables would be long and followed by a phrase-pause, while the fourth and fifth syllables would be made very short and jointed closely to what follows. There is no rhythm in such a group of words. But when we know that they are part of a poem in five-stress verse, we can readjust them so as to approach more closely to the rhythmical scheme in our minds. We cannot accent either of or his, without destroying the sense; nor can we deprive either lone or couch of its accent; but we can lengthen the words of his beyond their natural time in speech, pronouncing them more deliberately, and we can also, perhaps, diminish the phrase-pause after couch. This would tend to equalize the five time-intervals to which the verse, as a verse, should fit itself. It would be too much to say that this is what the ordinary reader would do, because the ordinary reader is likely to have his mind fixed on expressing the sense, neglecting the rhythm which is equally an element of the poetry; but it is what the careful reader could do without difficulty.
The first line of Paradise Lost,
"Of man's first disobedience, and the fruit,"