English Verse: Specimens Illustrating its Principles and History

by Raymond MacDonald Alden

always a favorite specimen for metrists to dissect, is of like character. Mr. Robertson, in the essay already cited, makes considerable use of this verse as showing the vanity of the usual method of dividing verses into equal feet. He quotes approvingly Professor Shairp's account of the way in which Clough analyzed the line: "The two feet 'first disobe-' took up the time of four syllables, two iambic feet: the voice rested awhile on the word 'first'; then passed swiftly over 'diso-,' then rested again on 'be-' so as to recover the previous hurry." Now this seems to be merely a description of the way in which the words would be uttered in prose, and to neglect the rhythm of the poem in which they stand. In the second foot one can and should give the syllable dis- full syllabic time, instead of hurrying over it as in prose speech,—a rendering made easy by the fact that it frequently has a marked secondary accent. Conversely, one can give first somewhat less time than it would occupy in prose, without thereby diminishing its accent. The word and, in the fourth foot, would in prose utterance be allowed almost no time-value; and it may be treated in the same way in the verse, by permitting the pause at the comma to fill up the normal time of the foot. It would seem to be better, however, to give and a fairly distinct utterance for metrical purposes (without, of course, adding any stress), and thus to approach more closely to the scheme of time-intervals. It is highly improbable that any one would read this verse—or almost any other verse of Paradise Lost—with such exact observance of the equal time-intervals as would appear in regular lyrical poetry. We have already seen that blank verse departs more constantly from the typical scheme of the measure than any other of our verse-forms. Nevertheless, the reader with a well-trained ear listens always for the flow of the typical metre underneath the surface irregularities, and, by a delicate adjustment of syllable-lengths, can bring the poet's words into far more rhythmical utterance than they would find in prose.

There is one other method of varying the time-elements in verse which has already been suggested by what was said of the pause at the comma in the line of Paradise Lost. It will be seen very generally that light syllables, such as one wishes to utter in brief periods of time, are found on either side of the phrase-pauses in our verse.

"The first in valor, as the first in place"

is a typical line in this respect. The natural pause, indicated by the comma, takes up part of the time of the third foot, which there are no syllables fitted wholly to fill. It might almost be said that, in ordinary five-stress verse, such verses are quite as numerous as those with five complete feet. The pause satisfies the ear, so far as the time-intervals are concerned, quite as well as a long syllable.

Pauses not only fill up the incomplete time of a foot containing only short syllables, but they also fill the time of wholly missing syllables. In the verse

"Come from the dying moon, and blow"

we start out with trisyllabic rhythm, but have only two syllables in the second and in the third foot. It does not seem certain whether the missing syllable after dying is to have its place filled by a pause or by a prolongation of either or both of the syllables dy-ing—perhaps by all three means combined. In the same way the missing syllable after moon may have its place filled either by the prolongation of the oo, or by the pause indicated by the comma, or by both. But in other cases the pause occupies the entire syllable-moment; for examples, see under Pauses in pages 20-22 above. The whole matter was well summed up in Lanier's saying that "rhythm may be dependent on silences" as well as on sounds.

Let us now try to gather what we have been considering into the form of definite statements regarding the place of the time-element in our verse.

1. In the normal verse, accents appear at equal time-intervals. This, of course, does not preclude all manner of variations; the unit of measure is not the distance between the accents as they are found in each verse, but between the points where they belong in the typical metre.