Miss Amy Lowell's paper on "The Rhythms of Free Verse" is particularly important for the attention it calls to the concept of a time unit in certain types of verse as distinct from the metric unit determined by syllabic structure alone or by syllabic structure dominated by stress. To quote Miss Lowell: "For years I had been searching the unit of vers libre, the ultimate particle to which the rhythm of this form could be reduced. As the 'foot' is the unit of 'regular verse,' so there must be a unit in vers libre. I thought I had found it. The unit was a measurement of time. The syllables were unimportant, in the sense that there might be many or few to the time interval." This passage was all the more pleasing to me in that I found confirmation in it of a feeling that had gradually and strongly come to be borne in on me in the reading of certain types of free verse, the feeling that in some of the more artistic products of the imagist school, for instance, there was present a tendency to a rhythm of time pulses that operated independently, more or less, of the number of syllables. A line of verse, for instance, that had considerable length to the eye might quite readily, I conceived, be looked upon as the exact prosodic equivalent of a line of perhaps but half of its length, if the rates of articulation of the two lines differed sufficiently to make their total timespans identical or approximately so. Hence the metrical "irregularity" of one type of free verse might be and, in at least some cases, as I felt convinced, was consciously or unconsciously meant to be, interpreted as a merely optical but not fundamentally auditory irregularity. This, in musical terminology, would be no more than saying that two equivalent measures (metric units) may, and frequently are, of utterly different constitution both as regards the number of tones (syllables) in the melodic line (flow of words) and the distribution of stresses. What is true, as regards prosodic equivalence, of lines of unequal length may, of course, also be true of syllabically unequal portions of lines. A very crude, but striking, exemplification of the unitary value of such time pulses is afforded by a series of orders de'The Dial, Jan. 17, 1918. yiri sergeant at intervals, we will say, of exactly regular bit of "verse" involving in its four humble lines no ess add three metric patterns. Of course, the truth of the ter is something like: a euectly humdrum and regular type of rhythmic movement. The metric unit of the drill-sergeant's "poem" is not properly or, but a two second time-span. To lend vaey to the contour of the discourse, he might, quite in the manner of some of the more realistic free verse of the day, subtute a rapid nine-syllabled oath for a military order without 5.eaking the time-metrical framework of the whole. Such an ah might be analyzed, let us say, as: but it would be the precise time-metrical equivalent of the "March!" of the first line. that in much free verse relatively long lines or sections are meant (sometimes, perhaps, only subconsciously) to have the same time value as short lines or sections of the same stanza seems very likely to me. The first stanza of Richard Aldington's beautiful little poem "Amalfi" reads: We will come down to you, O very deep sea, And drift upon your pale green waves Like scattered petals. may be a correct or approximately correct stress-analysis of the stanza, but it does not, if my own feeling in the matter is to be taken as a guide, bring out the really significant form units. If the four lines are read at the same speed, an effect but little removed from that of rhythmical prose is produced. If the speeds are so manipulated as to make the lines all of equal, or approximately equal, length, a beautiful quasi-musical effect is produced, the retarded hovering movement of the second and fourth lines contrasting in a very striking manner with the more rapid movement of the first and third. I should go so far as to suggest that the time-units in this particular stanza are more important metrical determinants than the distribution of stresses. The last five lines of the poem are clearly intended to move along at a markedly slow rate: We will come down, O Thalassa, And drift upon Your pale green waves The repetition of the earlier as And drift upon your pale green waves And drift upon Your pale green waves is no doubt an attempt to express to the eye the difference in speed intuitively felt by the poet. The splitting of the line in two must not be dismissed as a vagary. Whether the current methods of printing poetry are capable of doing justice to the subtler intentions of free-verse writers is doubtful. I shall revert to this point later on. It would be manifestly incorrect to say that all writers of free verse feel with equal intensity, or feel at all, the unitary value of time pulses. Not all that looks alike to the eye is psychologi livered by a drill sergeant at intervals, two seconds: March! The ordinary prosodic analysis re an irregular bit of "verse": less than three metric pa** matter is something like: a perfectly humdrum a.. The metric unit of but it wor "March!" the stress unit veil. The prounits, however, fect. To avoid erations of speed the verse greater ...ing the coincidence unification by means vapings of free verse. Son's and Miss Lowell's sturbed metrical verse at two unit streams of by no means a foregone erse, ordinarily accepted - "regular" in all cases and epends on the sensitiveness ...eption of time pulses. use that the feeling for time seif only in connection with the of feet. The time unit is by the metric unit or sequence of felt more or less independently extreme cases, so blur this flow as er. Thus, a heavy syllable, with out as the time equivalent of the me line, though metrically of only a An interesting example of such a inciples seems to me to be the lines: ae looking glass, ,s in the streetܘܝܵܠܗ ܡܒ That in mucis "The Barber's," one of the delightful meant (sometime." The metrical structure of the poem, same time vahe immediately preceding seems very lik ton's beautifu Straight above the clear eyes, Rounded round the ears, Ship-snap and snick-a-snick, Clash the barber's shears. ble to the formula: The strict application, however, of this formula to the two lines first quoted results in a lifeless interpretation of their movement and in a meaningless emphasis of the "in" in each case. The reading is intolerable. It seems clear that "us" (one foot) is the time equivalent, or approximately so, of "in the looking glass" (three feet), "footstep" (one foot) of "in the street" (two feet). In the first line, "us" and the first syllable of "looking" are strongly stressed, "glass" weakly, "in" not at all; in the second, the first syllable of "footsteps" and "street" are strongly accented, "in" weakly, if at all. In other words, the proper four-foot and threefoot structure is resolved, under the influence of a conflicting time analysis, into, a primarily two-pulse movement: 2 8 which may be interpreted,"in prosodic symbols, as: ~(~)~~2~2 the () representing a silent or syncopated secondary stress. To speak of a "caesura" does not help much unless a reference to time units is explicitly connoted by the term. Needless to くく say, the sequence () ("us, in the") differs completely, to an alert ear, from the true dactyl ~~. These lines of De la Mare's are a good example of the cross-rhythmic effect sometimes produced in English verse by the clash of stress units and time units. They differ psychologically from true "unitary verse" in that the metrical pattern established for the ear by the rest of the poem peeps silently through, as it were. This silent metrical base is an important point to bear in mind in the analysis of much English verse. The various types of dimly, but none the less effectively, felt rhythmic conflicts that result have not a little to do with the more baffling subtleties of verse movement. Meanwhile it is highly instructive to note here a formal transition between normal verse and "free verse." The line of demarcation between the two is, indeed, a purely illusory one. |