17
RHYTHM AND METRE
   . . . when it approaches with a divine hopping.
            The Joyful Wisdom

Rhythm and its specialized form, metre, depend upon repetition, and expectancy. Equally where what is expected recurs and where it fails, all rhythmical and metrical effects spring from anticipation. As a rule this anticipation is unconscious. Sequences of syllables both as sounds and as images of speech-movements leave the mind ready for certain further sequences rather than for others. Our momentary organization is adapted to one range of possible stimuli rather than to another. Just as the eye reading print unconsciously expects the spelling to be as usual, and the fount of type to remain the same, so the mind after reading a line or two of verse, or half a sentence of prose, prepares itself ahead for any one of a number of possible sequences, at the same time negatively incapacitating itself for others. The effect produced by what actually follows depends very closely upon this unconscious preparation and consists largely of the further twist which it
gives to expectancy. It is in terms of the variation in these twists that rhythm is to be described. Both prose and verse vary immensely in the extent to which they excite this ‘getting ready’ process, and in the narrowness of the anticipation which is formed. Prose on the whole, with the rare exceptions of a Landor, a De Quincey, or a Ruskin, is accompanied by a very much vaguer and more indeterminate expectancy than verse. In such prose as this page, for example, little more than a preparedness for further words not all exactly alike in sound and with abstract polysyllables preponderating is all that arises. In short, the sensory or formal effect of words has very little play in the literature of analysis and exposition. But as soon as prose becomes more emotive than scientific, the formal side becomes prominent.

Let us take Landor’s description(1) of a lioness suckling her young—-

    On perceiving the countryman, she drew up her feet gently, and squared her mouth, and rounded her eyes, slumberous with content; and they looked, he said, like sea-grottoes, obscurely green, interminably deep, at once awakening fear and stilling and suppressing it.

After ‘obscurely green’ would it be possible (quite apart from sense) to have ‘deeply dark’ or ‘impenetrably gloomy’? Why, apart from sense, can so few of the syllables be changed in vowel sound, in emphasis, in duration or otherwise, without disaster to the total effect? As with all such questions about sensory form and its effects, only an incomplete answer can be given. The expectancy caused by what has gone before, a thing which must be thought of as a very complex tide of neural settings, lowering the threshold for some kinds of stimuli and raising it for others, and the character of the stimulus which does actually come, both play their part.

Even the most highly organized lyrical or ‘polyphonic’ prose raises as it advances only a very ambiguous expectation. Until the final words of the passage, there are always a great number of different sequences which would equally well fit in, which would satisfy the expectancy so far as that is merely due to habit, to the routine of sensory stimulation. What is expected in fact is not this sound or that sound, not even this kind of sound or that kind of sound, but some one of a certain thousand kinds of sounds. It is much more a negative thing than a positive. As in the case of many social conventions it is easier to say what disqualifies than to say what is required.

Into this very indeterminate expectancy the new element comes with its own range of possible effects. There is, of course, no such thing as the effect of a word or a sound. There is no one effect which belongs to it. Words have no intrinsic literary characters. None are either ugly or beautiful, intrinsically displeasing or delightful. Every word has instead a range of possible effects, varying with the conditions into which it is received. All that we can say as to the sorting out of words, whether into the ‘combed’ and ‘slippery’, the ‘shaggy’ and ‘rumpled’ as with Dante, or in any other manner, is that some, through long use, have narrower ranges than others and require more extraordinary conditions if they are to change their ‘character’. What effect the word has is a compromise between some one of its possible effects and the special conditions into which it comes. Thus in Shakespeare hardly any word ever looks odd until we consider it; whereas even in Keats the ‘cold mushrooms’ in the Satyrs’ Song give the mind a shock of astonishment, an astonishment which is full of delight, but none the less is a shock.

But with this example we have broken down the limitation to the mere sound, to the strictly formal or sensory aspect of word sequences, and in fact the limitation is useless. For the effect of a word as sound cannot be separated from its contemporaneous other effects. They become inextricably mingled at once.

The sound gets its character by compromise with what is going on already. The preceding agitation of the mind selects from a range of possible characters which the word might present, that one which best suits with what is happening. There are no gloomy and no gay vowels or syllables, and the army of critics who have attempted to analyse the effects of passages into vowel and consonantal collocations have, in fact, been merely amusing themselves. The way in which the sound of a word is taken varies with the emotion already in being. But, further, it varies with the sense. For the anticipation of the sound due to habit, to the routine of sensation, is merely a part of the general expectancy. Grammatical regularities, the necessity for completing the thought, the reader’s state of conjecture as to what is being said, his apprehension in dramatic literature of the action, of the intention, situation, state of mind generally, of the speaker, all these and many other things intervene. The way the sound is taken is much less determined by the sound itself than by the conditions into which it enters. All these anticipations form a very closely woven network and the word which can satisfy them all simultaneously may well seem triumphant. But we should not attribute to the sound alone virtues which involve so many other factors. To say this is not in the least to belittle the importance of the sound; in most cases it is the key to the effects of poetry.

This texture of expectations, satisfactions, disappointments, surprisals, which the sequence of syllables brings about, is rhythm. And the sound of word comes to its full power only through rhythm. Evidently there can be no surprise and no disappointments unless there is expectation and most rhythms perhaps are made up as much of disappointments and postponements and surprises and betrayals as of simple, straight- forward satisfactions. Hence the rapidity with which too simple rhythms, those which are too easily ‘seen through’, grow cloying or insipid unless hypnoidal states intervene, as with much primitive music and dancing and often with metre.

The same definition of rhythm may be extended to the plastic arts and to architecture. Temporal sequence is not strictly necessary for rhythm, though in the vast majority of cases it is involved. The attention usually passes successfully from one complex to another, the expectations, the readiness to perceive this rather than that, aroused by the one being either satisfied or surprised by the other. Surprise plays an equally important part here; and the difference in detail between a surprising and delightful variation and one which merely irritates and breaks down the rhythm, as we say, is here, as elsewhere, a matter of the combination and resolution of impulses too subtle for our present means of investigation. All depends upon whether what comes can be an ingredient in the further response, or whether the mind must, as it were, start anew; in more ordinary language, upon whether there is any ‘connection’ between the parts of the whole.

But the rhythmic elements in a picture or a building may be not successive but simultaneous. A quick reader who sees a word as a whole commonly overlooks misprints because the general form of the word is such that he is only able at that instant to perceive one particular letter in a particular place and so over- looks what is discrepant. The parts of a visual field exert what amounts to a simultaneous influence over one another. More strictly what is discrepant does not get through to more central regions. Similarly, with those far more intricate wholes, made up of all kinds of imagery and incipient action of which works of art consist. The parts of a growing response mutually modify one another and this is all that is required for rhythm to be possible.

***

We may turn now to that more complex and more specialized form of temporal rhythmic sequence which is known as metre.

This is the means by which words may be made to influence one another to the greatest possible extent. In metrical reading the narrowness and definiteness of expectancy, as much unconscious as ever in most cases, is very greatly increased, reaching in some cases, if rime also is used, almost exact precision. Furthermore, what is anticipated becomes through the regularity of the time intervals in metre virtually dated. This is no mere matter of more or less perfect correspondence with the beating of some internal metronome. The whole conception of metre as ‘uniformity in variety’, a kind of mental drill in which words, those erratic and varied things, do their best to behave as though they were all the same, with certain concessions, licences and equivalences allowed, should nowadays be obsolete. It is a survivor which is still able to do a great deal of harm to the uninitiated, however, and although it has been knocked on the head vigorously enough by Professor Saintsbury and others, it is as difficult to kill as Punch. Most treatises on the subject, with their talk of feet and of stresses, unfortunately tend to encourage it, however little this may be the aim of the authors.

As with rhythm with metre, we must not think of it as in the words themselves or in the thumping of the drum. It is not in the stimulation, it is in our response. Metre adds to all the variously fated expectancies which make up rhythm a definite temporal pattern and its effect is not due to our perceiving a pattern in something outside us, but to our becoming patterned ourselves. With every beat of the metre a tide of anticipation in us turns and swings, setting up as it does so extraordinarily extensive sympathetic reverberations. We shall never understand metre so long as we ask, ‘Why does temporal pattern so excite us’? and fail to realize that the pattern itself is a vast cyclic agitation spreading all over the body, a tide of excitement pouring through the channels of the mind.

The notion that there is any virtue in regularity or in variety, or in any other formal feature, apart from its effects upon us, must be discarded before any metrical problem can be understood. The regularity to which metre tends acts through the definiteness of the anticipations which are thereby aroused. It is through these that it gets such a hold upon the mind. Once again, here too, the failure of our expectations is often more important than success. Verse in which we constantly get exactly what we are ready for and no more, instead of something which we can and must take up and incorporate as another stage in a total developing response is merely toilsome and tedious. In prose, the influence of past words extends only a little way ahead. In verse, especially when stanza-form and rime co- operate to give a larger unit than the line, it may extend far ahead. It is this knitting together of the parts of the poem which explains the mnemonic power of verse, the first of the suggestions as to the origin of metre to be found in the Fourteenth Chapter of Biographia Literaria, that lumber-room of neglected wisdom which contains more hints towards a theory of poetry than all the rest ever written upon the subject.

We do great violence to the facts if we suppose the expectations excited as we read verse to be concerned only with the stress, emphasis, length, foot structure and so forth of the syllables which follow. Even in this respect the custom of marking syllables in two degrees only, long and short, light and full, etc., is inadequate, although doubtless forced upon metrists by practical considerations. The mind in the poetic experience responds to subtler niceties than these. When not in that experience but coldly considering their several qualities as sounds by the ear alone, it may well find two degrees all that are necessary. In Chapter Thirteen we saw an analogous situation arising in the case of the discrimination of colours. The obvious comparison with the difference between what even musical notation can record in music and the player’s interpretation can usefully be made here.

A more serious omission is the neglect by the majority of metrists of the pitch relations of syllables. The reading of poetry is of course not a monotonous and subdued form of singing. There is no question of definite pitches at which the syllables must be taken, nor perhaps of definite harmonic relations between different sounds. But that a rise and fall of pitch is involved in metre and is as much part of the poet’s technique as any other feature of verse, as much under his control also, is indisputable. Anyone who is not clear upon this point may com- pare as a striking instance Milton’s Hymn on the Morning of Christ’s Nativity with Collins’ Ode to Simplicity and both with the second Chorus of Hellas discussed in Chapter Eighteen. Due allowances made for the natural peculiarities of different readers, the scheme of pitch relations, in their contexts, of

   That on the bitter cross
   Must redeem our loss;

and of

   But com’st a decent maid,
   In Attic robe array’d,

are clearly different. There is nothing arbitrary or out of the poet’s control in this, as there is nothing arbitrary or out of his control in the way in which an adequate reader will stress particular syllables. He brings both about by the same means, the modification of the reader’s impulses by what has gone before. It is true that some words resist emphasis far more than perhaps any resist change of pitch, yet this difference is merely one of degree. It is as natural to lower the pitch in reading the word ‘loss’ as it is to emphasize it as compared with ‘our’ in the same context.

Here again we see how impossible it is to consider rhythm or
metre as though it were purely an affair of the sensory aspect of syllables and could be dissociated from their sense and from the emotional effects which come about through their sense. One principle may, however, be hazarded. As in the case of painting the more direct means are preferable to the less direct (see Chapter Eighteen), so in poetry. What can be done by sound should not be done otherwise or in violation of the natural effects of sound. Violations of the natural emphases and tones of speech brought about for the sake of the further effects due to thought and feeling are perilous, though, on occasion, they may be valuable devices. The use of italics in Cain to straighten out the blank verse is as glaring an instance as any. But more liberties are justified in dramatic writing than elsewhere, and poetry is full of exceptions to such principles.(2) We must not forget that Milton did not disdain to use special spelling, ‘mee’, for example, in place of ‘me’, in order to suggest additional emphasis when he feared that the reader might be careless.

So far we have been concerned with metre only as a specialized form of rhythm, giving an increased interconnection between words through an increased control of anticipation. But it has other, in some cases even more important powers. Its use as an hypnotic agent is probably very ancient. Coleridge once again drops his incidental remark, just beside yet extremely close to the point. ‘It tends to increase the vivacity and susceptibility both of the general feelings and of the attention. This effect it produces by the continued excitement of surprise, and by the quick reciprocations of curiosity still gratified and still re- excited, which are too slight indeed to be at any moment objects of distinct consciousness, yet become considerable in their aggregate influence. As a medicated atmosphere, or as wine during animated conversation, they act powerfully, though themselves unnoticed.’ (Biographia Literaria, Chapter Eighteen.) Mr Yeats, when he speaks of the function of metre being to ‘lull the mind into a waking trance’ is describing the same effect, however strange his conception of this trance may be.

That certain metres, or rather that a certain handling of metre should produce in a slight degree a hypnoidal state is not surprising. But it does so not as Coleridge suggests, through the surprise element in metrical effects, but through the absence of surprise, through the lulling effects more than through the awakening. Many of the most characteristic symptoms of incipient hypnosis are present in a slight degree. Among these susceptibility and vivacity of emotion, suggestibility, limitations of the field of attention, marked differences in the incidence of belief-feelings closely analogous to those which alcohol and nitrous oxide can induce, and some degree of hyperaesthesia (increased power of discriminating sensations) may be noted. We need not boggle at the word ‘hypnosis’. It is sufficient to say, borrowing a phrase from M. Jules Romains, that there is a change in the régime of consciousness, which is directly due to the metre, and that to this régime the above-mentioned characteristics attach. As regards the hyperaesthesia, there may be several ways of interpreting what can be observed. All that matters here is that syllables, which in prose or in vers libres sound thin, tinny and flat, often gain an astonishing sonority and fullness even in verse which seems to possess no very subtle metrical structure.

Metre has another mode of action not hitherto mentioned. There can be little doubt that historically it has been closely associated with dancing, and that the connections of the two still hold. This is true at least of some ‘measures’. Either motor images, images of the sensations of dancing, or, more probably, imaginal and incipient movements follow the syllables and make up their ‘movement’. A place for these accompaniments should be found in the diagram in Chapter Sixteen. Once the metre has begun to ‘catch on’ they are almost as closely bound up with the sequence of the words as the tied ‘verbal’ images themselves.

The extension of this ‘movement’ of the verse from dance forms to more general movements is natural and inevitable. That there is a very close connection between the sense and the metrical movement of

   And now the numerous tramplings quiver lightly
   Along a huge cloud’s ridge; and now with sprightly
   Wheel downward come they into fresher skies,

cannot be doubted whatever we may think of the rime.

It is not less clear in

   Where beyond the extreme sea wall, and between the
         remote sea gates,
   Waste water washes, and tall ships founder, and deep
         death waits,

or in
   Ran on embattell’d Armies clad in Iron,

than it is in

   We sweetly curtsied each to each
   And deftly danced a saraband.

Nor is it always the case that the movement takes its cue from the sense. It is often a commentary on the sense and sometimes may qualify it, as when the resistless strength of Coriolanus in battle
is given an appearance of dreadful ease by the leisureliness of the description,

   Death, that dark spirit, in’s nervy arm doth lie
   Which being advanc’d declines, and then men die,

Movement in poetry deserves at least as much study as onomatopoeia.

This account, of course, by no means covers all the ways by which metre takes effect in poetry. The fact that we appropriately use such words as ‘lulling’, ‘stirring’, ‘solemn’, ‘pensive’, ‘gay’ in describing metres is an indication of their power more directly to control emotion. But the more general effects are more- important. Through its very appearance of artificiality metre produces in the highest degree the ‘frame’ effect, isolating the poetic experience from the accidents and irrelevancies of every- day existence. We have seen in Chapter Ten how necessary this isolation is and how easily it may be mistaken for a difference in kind. Much which in prose would be too personal or too insistent, which might awaken irrelevant conjectures or might ‘overstep itself ’ is managed without disaster in verse. There are, it is true, equivalent resources in prose – irony, for example, very frequently has this effect – but their scope is far more limited. Metre for the most difficult and most delicate utterances is the all but inevitable means.

(1) Works, II, 171.
(2) It is worth remarking that any application of critical principles must be indirect. They are not any the less useful because this is so. Misunderstanding on this point has often led artists to accuse critics of wishing to make art a matter of rules, and their objection to any such attempt is entirely justified.