CHAPTER V

TONE-COLOR

We must not only choose our words for elegance, but for sound, — to perform which a mastery in the language is required; the poet must have a magazine of words, and have the art to manage his few vowels to the best advantage, that they may go the farther. He must also know the nature of the vowels — which are more sonorous, and which more soft and sweet—and so dispose them as his present occasions require. — DRYDEN : Discourse on Epic Poetry.

THE province of rime is twofold; its primary pur-
pose is to emphasize the architecture of the poem, to
indicate the ends of the lines, and to bind up the
couplet, the quatrain or the longer stanza into a har-
monious unit; and it has the secondary duty of pleas-
ing the ear by its own sound. The ear finds unending
delight in the melody which is the result of the adroit
commingling of rhythm and rime so as not merely
to carry the meaning of the poet, but also to intensify
this meaning by the choice and by the contrast of the
sounds which convey it. As Pope asserted in his
"Essay on Criticism”:

True ease in writing comes from art, not chance,
As those move easiest who have learned to dance.
'Tis not enough no harshness gives offence,
The sound must seem an echo to the sense.

Soft is the strain when zephyr gently blows,
And the smooth stream in smoother numbers flows;
But when loud surges lash the sounding shore,
The hoarse rough verse should like the torrent roar;
When Ajax strives some rock's vast might to throw,
The line, too, labors, and the words move slow.

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Not so, when swift Camilla scours the plain,

Flies o'er the unbending corn, and skims along the main.

Here Pope artfully conformed his practice to his preaching. This adjustment of the sound to the sense can be accomplished by a variety of devices; and it is now generally known as tone-color. It will be noted that Pope was careful in the selection of his rimes, ever the most salient words. Roar and shore, throw and slow, at the ends of two of his couplets are exactly the right words to convey the desired impression.

But it is not enough that the rimes shall be well chosen; they ought to be varied one from the other. A quatrain or a stanza has a weak, thin effect upon the ear if the vowel-sounds in the several rimes are either identical or too clearly akin. For example, sight and light, glide and abide would not be satisfactory rimes in the same quatrain, since the ear would have to strain to distinguish sharply between the two pairs of words. "The result," as Lanier declared, "is like two contiguous shades of pink in a dress; one of the rimes will seem faded.” This is a defect which we can discover even in Swinburne, who is a master metrist, commanding sounds at will to work his magic:

Where shall we find her, how shall we sing to her,
Fold our hands round her knees and cling?

O that man's heart were as fire and could spring to her,
Fire, or the strength of the streams that spring.

Here, in fact, there is not only identity of rime, but identity of the actual riming word in the third and fourth lines, spring to her and spring.

Set this with its monotony beside another chorus from the same dramatic poem, " Atalanta in Calydon,"

and observe how much force is gained by the opposition of the vowel-sounds in the rimes:

Before the beginning of the years,
There came to the making of man
Time, with a gift of tears;

Grief, with a glass that ran.

Sometimes the tone-color is aided by shortening one of the two successive riming lines so that the echo of the sound is more immediate. Here is an example in single rime taken from Browning's "Love among the Ruins":

Where the quiet-colored end of evening smiles
Miles and miles

On the solitary pastures where our sheep

Half asleep

Tinkle homeward through the twilight, stray or stop
As they crop. C

And here is another example in double rime by Austin Dobson, written really in anapestic tetrameter, but so divided that it falls on our ears as alternating trimeter and monometer riming together, and gaining much of its buoyancy from the dexterity of its double rimes:

In our hearts is the Great One of Avon

Engraven,

And we climb the cold summits once built on

By Milton.

But at times not the air that is rarest

Is fairest ;

And we long in the valley to follow

Apollo.

Then we drop from the heights atmospheric
To Herrick,

Or we pour the Greek honey, grown blander,
Of Landor;

Or our coziest nook in the shade is

Where Praed is,

Or we toss the light bells of the mocker
With Locker.

Oh, the song where not one of the Graces
Tight-laces,-

Where we woo the sweet Muses not starchly,
But archly,-

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Where the verse, like a piper a-Maying,
Comes playing-

And the rime is as gay as a dancer
In answer,-

It will last till men weary of pleasure
In measure!

It will last till men weary of laughter.
And after !

In Browning's "Love among the Ruins," the rimes were all single, and in Austin Dobson's "Jocosa Lyra," the rimes were all double; and in both cases this decision was justified by the result. Often, however, an admirable effect is attained by alternating single and double rimes, with due regard to the rich contrast of the vowel-sounds that are interlinked, as in this stanza of Swinburne's:

-:

The songs of dead seasons, that wander (

On wings of articulate words;

Lost leaves that the shore-wind may squander,
Light flocks of untamable birds;

r

Some sang to me dreaming in class time

And truant in hand as in tongue; d
For the youngest were born of boy's pastime,

The eldest are young.

In this there is an added felicity in the unexpected shortening of the final line of the stanza. Sometimes however a poet gains an effect by ending his stanza with a full line terminating in a bold single rime, preceded by shorter lines with double rimes. Here is an illustration from Longfellow's "Seaweed" which exemplifies the superb mating of sound and sense:

Often there is advantage in not having the rim. ing words too closely alike; light and slight, for example, are perfectly proper rimes; but there would