The alternating rhythm offers the Indian poet some æsthetic relief. It creates a graceful lilt in his verse and often accompanies the quicker movements. This is a universal pattern; but some Katzina Songs of the Hopi and songs of the Zuñi and Pima Indians have markedly achieved this freedom of movement. The elasticity of this form provides an infinite variety of uses, from carrying a pleasant refrain to providing a choric response for the support of a dancing soloist. It has a place in the vocational songs, as well as in the ritual songs of a tribe. There are many variants which employ alternating patterns of thought at the opening and close of a stanza, or with dramatic pose and gesture, as in the Zuñi Invocation to the Sun-God, in singing which the Indian mother appeals to the sun, moon, and stars to guide her sleeping infant. Mr. Troyer marks the values of pitch as heightening the rhythmic movements of this song.
Balanced forms of thought, that is, forms in parallel structure, do not appear commonly. Perhaps it is more exact to recall that pure iteration and alternation of thought approximate the effects which parallelism may contribute, especially when the repetition is sung in a different pitch from that of the key thought. The infrequent occurrence of sharp contrasts of imagery, or antitheses of thought, may explain the rare use of parallelism. The ancient lament of the Onondagas, preserved in The Iroquois Book of Rites, remains one of the most beautifully wrought poems of this type brought down to our time.
The interlacing design of thought is one of the most graceful as well as one of the most difficult. This pattern shows skill and delicacy in poetic construction, as the interlacing repetitions frequently carry from one stanza to another, as from first to third and second to fourth, found in The Morning Star and the New Born Dawn, from The Hako. This device carries the thought forward. It is, therefore, definitely related in purpose to the form which is universally the vehicle of the ballad—incremental repetition. The Indian poet uses this form both for narrative and for descriptive purposes. The Navaho Song of the Horse shows a studied picture, framing each detail with repetitions; while the same incremental use of repetition carries forward the narrative in the Navaho Rain Chant.
There is a further structural use of these forms. If we can point to a single prototype of the lyric stanza, we must find it in the unit of thought-rhythm. As it assumed different aspects, enlarging itself with repetitions, there appeared the first conscious step, the stanzaic germ with varying possibilities of structure. This æsthetic origin of the stanza appeared before the intellectual recognition of unity of thought. In this song recorded by Miss Fletcher, there is a stanzaic germ of typically primitive quality. It is lengthened, possibly, for singing. The composer shaped three words into the form of a stanza by the use of repetitions and the addition of vocables.
Noⁿ-we shka-dse, noⁿ-we shka-dse;
Ha-ha! e he tha, Ha-ha! we
Ha-ha! e he tha.
Ha-ha! e he tha tha. Ho-ga!
Noⁿ-we shka-dse, noⁿ-we shka-dse;
Ha-ha! e he tha.