Don John laughing in the brave beard curled,
Spurning of his stirrups like the thrones of all the world,
Holding his head up for a flag of all the free.

Love-light of Spain-hurrah!

Death-light of Africa!
Don John of Austria
Is riding to the sea."

In strong contrast with the martial clangor and speed of this rhythm is the swaying and restful movement of Max Eastman's "Coming To Port," a rhythm with all the enchanting languor of movement that is in the great steamer slowing down to anchor beside a dock. One does not need to be a sapient critic to feel the oneness of this rhythm with the theme and emotion of the poem. It is wistful and quiet in sound and meaning, a slow and sensuous reverie.

"Our motion on the soft, still, misty river
Is like rest; and like the hours of doom
That rise and follow one another ever
Ghosts of sleeping battle cruisers loom

And languish quickly in the liquid gloom."

Very often in rhymed and regularly stressed poetry, as in the free verse which we have already discussed, we can trace the origin of good rhythm by taking a clue from the opening line or lines, which seem to be like natural speech. In Walter de la Mare's charmingly melodic poem, "The Listeners," it seems possible that the rhythm of the whole may have been determined by the cadence of the first line.

"Is there anybody there?' said the Traveller,
Knocking on the moonlit door;

And his horse in the silence champed the grasses
On the forest's ferny floor:

And a bird flew up out of the turret,

Above the Traveller's head:

And he smote upon the door again a second time;

'Is there anybody there?' he said."

If this poem had been as well begun by a man without genius, it would certainly have been spoiled in the third line. It would have faltered, flattened out and become monotonous. We should have had a third line something like this-"His horse would champ the grasses." And the rest of the poem, which is a masterpiece of its kind, would have been made to go by jerks. The sense and style would have been sacrificed to regularity and a very beautiful and original rhythm would never have been heard. Let us be thankful that Mr. de la Mare wrote his poem-all of it! Similarly Rudyard Kipling, whose rhythms are exceedingly modern in quality, although he began writing before most of our contemporary poets who are famous to-day, seems to take a cadence of speech as the rhythmical beginning of many of his poems. And it is a well known fact that his rhythms are largely responsible for the great popularity of his poetry. In that jolly "Road Song of the Bandar Log" we find the following lines:

"Here we go in a flung festoon
Half way up to the jealous moon!
Don't you envy our pranceful bands?
Don't you wish you had extra hands?
Wouldn't you like if your tail were so-
Curved in the shape of a Cupid's bow?
Now you're angry, but-never mind,
Brother, thy tail hangs down behind!"

It may very well be that Mr. Kipling, visualizing in his own mind that "branchy row" of monkeys, began his rhythm quite spontaneously, and, in the reader's mind, irresistibly, with that natural bit of speech "Here we go." If this be true, he had only to add the good imagery of "in a flung festoon" to have a fine rhythmical tune for his poem.

Another poem, an excellent lyric which may have been made in much the same way, is Margaret Widdemer's "Remembrance: Greek Folk Song." The rhythm of the whole poem seems to have grown naturally from the first cadence. "Not unto the forest, O my lover!"

More than any poet who uses regularly stressed rhythms, Robert Frost is influenced by the tunes of human conversation, and he is the greatest living master of the poetry that talks. Although he has written a few good lyrics, song is not his gift. But in all of his poems we find something of the warmth and depth and richness, the sudden humor, the droll whimsy, the characteristic innuendo and flexible intimacy of conversation. To read them is to share profound mirth, amazing tragedy, delicious irony made out of talk and of one substance with it. But Mr. Frost's poems are always more than speech. They are always poetry. They never become mere oratory. And most of them keep very close to blank verse as a basic rhythm, the old racial rhythm of our language. Perhaps it would be true to say that Mr. Frost uses a relaxed form of blank verse, a blank verse greatly modified by the cadences of speech.

"Something there is that doesn't love a wall," says Mr. Frost. A Post-Victorian imitator of the great Victorians would never have written such a line. He might have said something like this

“A wall, I think, is quite superfluous!"

thereby sacrificing nature and imagination-poetry-to a school-book rule of accent. The poem would have lacked what all poems must have life. Consider the homely life in this passage taken from the same poem, “Mending Wall.”

"He only says, 'Good fences make good neighbors.'
Spring is the mischief in me, and I wonder

If I could put a notion in his head?

Why do they make good neighbors? Isn't it

Where there are cows? But here there are no cows.

Before I built a wall I'd ask to know

What I was walling in or walling out,

And to whom I was like to give offence.

Something there is that doesn't love a wall,

That wants it down. I could say 'Elves' to him,
But it's not elves exactly, and I'd rather

He said it for himself."