A STUDY OF VERSIFICATION

CHAPTER I

THE STUDY OF VERSE

As logic does not supply you with arguments, but only defines the mode in which they are to be expressed or used, so versification does not teach you how to write poetry, but how to construct verse. It may be a means to the end, but it does not pretend to assure its attainment. Versification and logic are to poetry and reason what a parapet is to a bridge: they do not convey you across, but prevent you from falling Over. TOM HOOD: The Rules of Rhyme.

THIS is not a handbook of poetics; and its aim is not to consider the several departments of poetry,- epic and lyric and dramatic. It does not deal with simile and metaphor, nor does it seek to open the mind of the student to the nobler beauties of poetry. It is intended to be an introduction to the study of versification, of the metrical mechanism which sustains poetry, and which differentiates poetry from prose.

It is devoted solely to the technic of the art of verse. It is an examination of the tools of the poet's trade. Although poets are said to be born and not made, there is no doubt that they have to be made after they are born. It is not a fact that the born poet warbles native wood-notes wild; he has to serve an apprenticeship to his craft; he has to acquire the art of verse; he has to master its technic and to spy out its secrets. The poet is like the painter, who, as Sir

Joshua Reynolds declared, "is a painter only as he can put in practice what he knows, and communicate those ideas by visible representation."

In his ignorance, the layman may be led to despise technic; but this is a blunder of which the true artist is never guilty. Indeed, the true artist cherishes technic; he is forever thinking about it and enlarging his knowledge of it. He delights in discussing its problems; and when he is moved to talk about his art, technic is ever the theme of his discourse. The treatises on painting, for example, written by painters, by Reynolds or by La Farge, are full of technical criticism; and so are the essays on poetry, written by the poets themselves. The processes of their art are considered with unfailing zest by Pope and Wordsworth, by Coleridge and Poe. In fact, the artists are all aware that technic is almost the only aspect of their art which can be discussed profitably; and every layman can see that it is the only aspect which the artists often care to talk about. The other part, no doubt the loftier part, the poet's message to humanity, this is too ethereal, perhaps too personal, too intimate, too sacred, to bear debate.

Every work of art can be considered from two points of view. It has its content and it has its form. We may prefer to pay attention to what the artist has to say, or we may examine rather how he says it. The content of his work, what he has to say to us, is the more important, of course, but this must depend on his native gift, on his endowment; and it is more or less beyond his control. He utters what he must utter; and he voices what he is inspired to deliver. But the form in which he clothes this message, how he says