These subtle changes in Indian lyrics can scarcely be said to follow metrical laws, yet cannot be thought accidental. The shifting influence of pause is negligible. There is slight use of quantity except in vocalic and consonantal interplay, and that is most elusive. Subtleties of mood and thought in the line may turn swiftly from the flowing movement to the staccato with corresponding shift in measure. A distinct influence appears in the cluster-rhythms of holophrastic compounds. This element becomes especially noticeable when the singer pauses to dictate the words of his song. The crest words or syllables in a line, particularly in the recessional movement and in descending pitch, may also shift the metrical emphasis. In the Zuñi song Lover’s Wooing, the crest words are most distinct: blanket, maiden, awaiting, alone, walk, come. The rhythm bends to them.
To one who has listened to countless Indian songs, there remains another logical influence over the exquisite variations of these lyrics—mimesis of elements of the natural world. The rhythms of nature float through the rhythms of Indian verse. The winds are imitated in the oral rendition of many poems: the minor key, the little rushes of wind, the full swell of sound, the gradual dying away. Curiously enough, the Plains tribes call their songs in recollection of the absent “wind songs,” in true appreciation of their minor key.
The steady patter or downfall of rain sings a welcome rhythm to the Indian of the plains and of the southwest. There is an insistence in the rhythm of many rain-songs that is mimetic, not only in the total effect of rain but distinctly so in the character of metrical units. “I like those songs,” an old man once said to me quite simply, his face quickened with a smile. His songs had just measured the summer rain, then dropped away through gliding syllables to a whispering echo—the wind and the rain!
It is the natural, joyous response of the Red Man to his surroundings that catches up these free rhythms of the out-door world and shapes his gesture and thought in measure with them in his improvisations. In the subtlety of its rhythms, Indian lyric poetry cannot detach itself from these external influences; for no race of the modern world lives more intimately with nature, sensing its most delicate expressions, its most exquisite sounds and movements.
These natural rhythms, though constantly recurring, may appear largely incidental; yet there are elemental laws at work determining lyric rhythms, laws we must seek behind the poetic impulse. One law is that poetic art, as all other arts, shall be rooted fast in the physical surroundings which temper the race. Any effort to wrest an art from that traditional environment breaks it off at the tap root.
NOTES
[21.] Burton, Frederick. American Primitive Music. Part II, p. 1. An interpretation. Moffat, Yard. N. Y. 1909. (Now published by Dodd, Mead, N. Y.)
[22.] Ibid., Part II, pp. 29-30. An interpretation. The Princess Tsianina includes this song in her repertory.