dinary prose. The reading of polyphonic prose gives a sense of rapid movement that level, unrhymed prose lacks. The quality of Miss Lowell's polyphonic prose rhythms is essentially dramatic. These lines from a superb narrative poem, "The Bronze Horses," show what polyphonic prose can be at its best:

"What is the sound? The marble city shivers to the treading of feet. Cæsar's legions marching, foot-foot-hundreds, thousands of feet. They beat the ground, rounding each step double. Coming— coming-cohort after cohort, with brazen trumpets marking the time. One-two-one-two-laurel-crowned each one of you, cactus-fibred, harsh as sand grinding the rocks of a treeless land, rough and salt as Dead Sea wind, only the fallen are left behind. Blood-red plumes, jarring to the footfalls; they have passed through the gate, they are in the walls of the mother city, of marble Rome. Back to Rome with a victor's spoils, with a victor's wreath on every head, and Judah broken is dead, dead! 'Io triumphe!' The shout knocks and breaks upon the spears of the legionaries."

Our illustrations might be multiplied without giving an adequate sense of the pleasure to be had from reading a whole poem in polphonic prose aloud. For that is the only way to test the value of it. Free verse and polphonic prose have received more superficial attention than honest consideration; and that is unfortunate, for superficial attention is only advertisement; honest consideration may find a recipe or a cure. But if many persons would read these poems aloud and if we might have a consensus of their opinions, we might find a way of estimating the value of such rhythms. Before the value of kind of poetry can be determined it must be set free from the print on the pages of a book.

any

Before we go on to a consideration of organic rhythms of a kind more regularly stressed and in more symmetrical designs, it is well to note that William Morrison Patterson of Columbia University has written a book which should go into the hands of young poetry craftsmen in company with Sidney Lanier's Science of English Verse." It is called "The Rhythm of Prose," and in it Professor Patterson describes his tests of

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the time-values of rhythm. The book is written in a scientific rather than an inspirational vein, but is the more valuable for that reason. Poets can usually find inspiration. But their knowledge of rhythm can be increased by a careful presentation of facts discovered through experiment. This is a book for all who wish to make a thorough and careful study of the subject of rhythm.

The poets who have written in free verse are not the only poets who have rediscovered the ancient law of all good poetry, which is that rhythm must rise out of the emotion felt. All of the poets who have recently won the attention of critics and the interest of the most intelligent and imaginative public are poets who have shown a reverence for this law.

One of the masterpieces of modern rhythm is Gilbert K. Chesterton's "Lepanto," a superb martial ballad about the Battle of Lepanto fought between the Turks and Don John of Austria in 1571. From end to end of the poem the rhythm is a delight. Words, phrases, images flash and sparkle, riding lightly on the surface of the tune. But the rhythm stirs the very depths of the spirit, for it is very swift and strong, very large and ample, yet never monotonous, for it includes a great variety of minor cadences. Just when the length of the long lines with their powerful stresses can hardly be sustained any longer by heart and voice, the lines ebb into shorter lines with sharper rhythmical curves and with accents like arrows newly fallen and quivering with shock. These lines illustrate the power of the rhythm of the poem as well as any other lines that might be taken from it to stand alone:

"In that enormous silence, tiny and unafraid,

Comes up along a winding road the noise of the Crusade.

Strong gongs groaning as the guns boom far,

Don John of Austria is going to the war,
Stiff-flags straining in the night-blasts cold

In the gloom black-purple, in the glint old-gold,

Torchlight crimson on the copper kettle-drums,

Then the tuckets, then the trumpets, then the cannon, and he comes.

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!"