If men should pass above "Be still, I am content, Take back your poor compassion! Joy was a flame in me Too steady to destroy. Lithe as a bending reed Loving the storm that sways her I found more joy in sorrow Than you could find in joy." Sara Teasdale WHAT DIM ARCADIAN PASTURES What dim Arcadian pastures Have I known That suddenly, out of nothing, A wind is blown, Lifting a veil and a darkness, Showing a purple sea And under your hair the faun's eyes Look out on me? Alice Corbin ORGANIC RHYTHM Nor many years ago, when we of this generation attended school, the word "rhythm" had an occult and mysterious sound. We heard very little about it. But we heard of "meter" quite frequently. "Meter" meant tiresome exercises in "scansion." "Meter" meant memorizing formidable definitions of words like "anapæst" and "amphibrach." How we hated it! "Meter" and "scansion" were good for us because they provided "mental drill," and poetry was the disastrous result of the invention of "anapaest" and "amphibrach." How we hated the poets! We resolved that when we had left school and could choose freely we would have nothing to do with poetry! Unfortunately many of us kept the resolution. On the other hand, when we became men and women, many of us realized that such words as "anapaest" and "amphibrach" were made and defined by grammarians and critics, not by poets. We realized that this technical language could be made useful and satisfactory in its own way. Very likely the ability to analyze and dissect the metrical structure of a poem has a real importance for the well-educated man or woman. But many of us learned too late what might have brought us nearer to the joy of poetry if we had learned it sooner, that this ability to analyze and dissect metrical structures according to the rules of teachers and critics is of small importance in comparison with the ability to feel a beautiful rhythm and enjoy a fine poem. Who ever gave us a clue to the meaning of rhythm in poetry? Who shared with us a sense of the joy and beauty in the rhythms of English verse? Did anyone ever tell us, for our comfort, that many a maker of beautiful lyrics has made them with no knowledge at all of the school-book definitions of "anapæst" and "amphibrach"? Therefore it may be a very fortunate thing that we use that prosaic little word "meter" less nowadays, and that we have more to say about rhythm. For even when poets can not define "anapæst" and "amphibrach," they are much concerned with the use of them and with their effect and meaning. "Rhythm" is a larger, kinder, and more poetic word than "meter." It comes from a good old Greek root that means "to flow." We may think of rhythm, therefore, as we think of waves or ripples. It is the wave-like flowing of sequences of sound in poetry. And, in thinking of it in this way, we shall be thinking of something more fundamentally important than the rules of prosody as given in our rhetorics. We shall be thinking of the force that is behind and beyond those rules. We shall be returning to the source whence came the thing about which rules have been made. In English poetry nearly always, and in almost all other poetry, rhythm has been more powerfully felt than any other element. So powerfully does a strong rhythm work upon us that many persons like to think that rhythm, in and of itself, is poetry. This is not true, of course, for any jargon can be set to the tune of a strong rhythm. And many rhythms actually have been misused in this way, stupidly by imitators, cleverly by parodists. Nevertheless, poems that have rhythmical vitality, poems that sway like wind-driven trees, leap like great geysers, roll sonorous monotones in upon consciousness at regular intervals, like the sea, or dance gaily like little white fountains, such poems will be heard and remembered when many brilliant pictures and proverbs, solemn saws and pretty sentiments, have been forgotten. This is inevitable and natural, for we live and have our being in rhythm. A flaw in the rhythm of the breath may mean a disease of the lungs. A flaw in the rhythm of the blood may mean a disease of the heart. A break in the rhythm may mean death. And all emotions change the rhythms of the body, quickening or retarding, accentuating or interrupting. In these facts we find the reasons for the value of rhythm in poetry. In these facts, also, we find the reason for the emotional effects of the several kinds of rhythm. The cadence or sound which is the true result of personal emotion will produce in the reader an effect of the same or similar emotion. Or, when a poet is more than personal, when he shares the ebb and flow of racial or national feeling and puts this into a poem, there will be something more than mere personal emotion in the effect of his rhythm upon his reader. Doubtless the great and typical rhythms that distinguish the poetry of the great races-English blank verse, for example, or the heroic hexameter of the Greek, are the result of the racial way of feeling things and putting them into speech. The epic measure of the Iliad gives again to all sensitive listeners a share in the emotions of the men of Homer's nation. The Irish dirges used in keening give a sense of sorrow and death to any person in any land whose sense of rhythmical values has not been destroyed by bad training; and they give also what we may call an Irish sense of sorrow and death. The poets of the Celtic revival in the United States, poets whose work is imitative and written à la mode, with an enthusiasm for the Celtic revival as an inspiring influence, have never been able to get into their work any of this unforgettable racial quality of rhythm. A triolet, on the other hand, is simply a rhythmical echo of pretty, whimsical, personal emotion. When we hear a good triolet read, even in a language that we do not know, we feel that touch of pretty, whimsical, personal emotion in the rhythm. We are stroked by the wings of a butterfly, chastised by thistledown; we are not shaken by thunder, whipped by the wind. Therefore it would seem reasonable to suppose that, when a rhythm is chosen arbitrarily, selected from a chapter on prosody in a rhetoric, and forced into unwilling wedlock with a mood or meaning which might have been fruitfully happy with its own congenial cadence, the result is fundamental disharmony, bad poetry. Moreover, in the minds of great lyric singers it usually happens that emotion suggests the idea of the poem and the rhythm of it simultaneously, and that sense and sound grow together as it is made. The mood and the rhythm, growing together in the mind, have that organic unity which is likely to stir the emotion of the reader as the poet's emotion is stirred; and this is what the contemporary poet means when he speaks of "organic rhythm." It is rhythm of one kind with the mood and meaning of the poem. Many of the best conscious craftsmen of our time are studying these matters of the emotional causes of rhythm and its emotional effect. They are trying many experiments. Most of the experiments fail, but the new endeavor to create new beauty may lead to a new kind of skill and to the production of new rhythmical masterpieces. And tolerant persons will welcome experiments even when they do not like the immediate results. What is sometimes called "the vers libre movement" seems to have been valuable chiefly because it has been a way of making experiments with rhythm. Few poets have used the free rhythms creditably, not to say beautifully. And unfortunately, numerous poetasters undisciplined in the artistic use of rhythm, and ignorant of the ancient, symmetrical designs of English verse, persons who could not write a couplet or a quatrain correctly, seized the opportunity afforded by the vogue of free verse to place themselves before the public in the guise of poets. It was never anything more than a mask. They wrote in what they supposed was free verse for no better reason than that given by the lazy housewife who had beans instead of potatoes for dinner. "It's less bother. You don't have to peel 'em." Such poetasters simply cut up long lines of level prose rhythms into random lengths, and set them down on pages that would have been better off clean. Such chopped up prose lines had no poetic cadence because no poetic lift of emotion produced them, or produced a rhythm for them. Therefore they had no power to produce an emotion in the reader. At best they put before us a more or less trivial mental picture or stimulated us intellectually and superficially by their specious imaginative cleverness. At worst they were simply banal, or else they aroused in the reader . |