The regulating poet must of course make sure at the beginning of the poem that there is no possible wrong turning for the reader to take. Recently, and since writing the above, an elder poet, who asks to remain anonymous, has given me an amusing account of how he mis-read Swinburne’s “Hertha,” the opening lines of which are:—
I am that which began;
Out of me the years roll;
Out of me, God and man;
I am equal and whole;
God changes, and man, and the form of them bodily. I am the soul.
My informant read the short lines as having four beats each:—
I´ am thát || whích begán;
Oút of mé || the yeárs róll;
Oút of mé || Gód and mán;
I´ am équal || ánd whóle
and thought this very noble and imposing, though the “équal ánd whóle” was perhaps a trifle forced. The next stanza told him that something was amiss and he discovered that it was only a two-beat line after all. “It was Swinburne’s impudence in putting the Almighty’s name in an unaccented place of the line, and accenting the name of Man, that put me on the wrong track,” he said. Swinburne’s fault here, for such as agree with the accusation, was surely in his wrong sense of material; he was making muslin do the work of camel’s hair cloth. He was imposing a metre on his emotions, whereas the emotions should determine the metre—and even then constantly modify it. Apropos of the vers libre-ists, my friend also denied that there was such a thing as vers libre possible, arguing beyond refutation that if it was vers it couldn’t be truly libre and if it was truly libre it couldn’t possibly come under the category of vers.
Perhaps the most damaging criticism (if true) of the vers libre school of today is that the standard which most of its professors set themselves is not a very high one; with rhythmic freedom so dearly bought, one expects a more intricate system of interlacing implications than in closer bound poetry. Natural rhythms need no hunting; there is some sort of rhythm in every phrase you write, if you break it up small enough and make sufficient allowances for metric resolutions. There is often a queer, wayward broken-kneed rhythm running through whole sentences of standard prose. The following news item has not had a word changed since I found it in The Daily Mirror.
Jóhn Fráin
Of Bállyghaderéen
Was indícted at Roscómmon for the múrder of his fáther;
He báttered his fáther, an óld man, to deáth with a poúnder;
The júry foúnd him unáble to pléad
And hé was commítted
Tó an as´ylum.
One doesn’t “listen” when reading prose, but in poetry or anything offered under that heading a submerged metre is definitely expected. Very few readers of Mr. Kipling’s “Old Man Kangaroo” which is printed as prose, realize that it is written in strict verse all through and that he is, as it were, pulling a long nose at us. The canny vers librist gets help from his printer to call your attention to what he calls “cadence” and “rhythmic relations” (not easy to follow) which might have escaped you if printed as prose; this sentence, you’ll find, has its thumb to its nose.