So far, rhythm in verse has been discussed as though it were a matter of stress. Another element that can be important, however, is quantity. Vowels, for example, can be of different length. There are both short and long vowels: a short o and a long o, for instance. The short o of ‘loss’ is made shorter by the fact that the word in which it occurs is stopped by a consonant at the end. This is usually what happens with respect to the short o: thus, ‘boss’, ‘moss’, ‘toss’. The longer vowel of ‘rose’ is longer in itself because the long o seems to take more time to sound than the short o of ‘loss’. This longer vowel need not necessarily be stopped by a consonant, but that consonantal stopping is one factor in ‘rose’ being shorter than ‘woe’.
The vowel in the word ‘loss’ is short. The vowel in the word ‘rose’ is perceptibly longer. The vowel in the word ‘woe’ is the longest of the three. The respective lengths can be expressed in notation, thus:
Length can be extended by the position in the line of verse of the syllable on which the word is placed. A word at the end of the line tends to acquire additional length:
—
Brought death into the world, and all our woe,
With loss of Eden.
It is also a question of syntax. The sentence does not finish with the end of the line. When the final word is heavily stressed, as here, this can leave it resonating, rather like a gong without an interceptor to make the resonance cease.
The words instanced will each be found in the first ten lines of Milton’s Paradise Lost:
Milton has few rivals in the craft of manipulating quantity with respect to stress. For, great scholar of Greek and Latin that he was, he recognized that stress is the prime element in English rhythm, and that an English verse line is formed by its pattern of heavy stresses. Thus, quantity in Milton’s hands is a way of counter-pointing rhythm:
The greater length in quantity of the vowel in ‘woe’ helps to secure a considerable extent of emphasis on that word when combined with other factors. ‘Woe’ carries a heavy stress and it is placed at the end of the line.
The craft that weights a line down can also lighten it. The Archfiend of Hell begins his eager journey to bring about the destruction of Mankind. Satan
There are two heavy stresses: ‘hell’ and ‘flight’. But the e of ‘hell’ is a short vowel, and the i of flight is a medium one—a potentially long syllable stopped by a consonant. This prevents the words in question, despite the heavy stresses placed upon them, taking their full possible emphasis. Thus, stress is played against quantity.
The longer vowels, such as the long a sound of ‘gates’ and the or sound of’explores’, do not occur on heavy stresses but on medium-heavy stresses. This, again, prevents the words in question being emphasized as much as is theoretically possible. Thus, quantity is played against stress. The effect is to keep the line—which is about flying swiftly—moving at a pace.
One of the fastest-moving passages in Macbeth is:
There are no heavy stresses here. The medium stresses either occur on short vowels—‘if’, ‘tram-’, ‘-cess’—or on a vowel that is prevented from being unduly long by dint of being stopped by a consonant—‘-cease’. In this passage, pattern of stress and pattern of quantity are at one. Each serves to propel the line quickly.
With Wordsworth, the interplay between stress and quantity serves to bring about a hushed effect:
Here, the heavy stresses fall on words with longer vowels that are consonantally stopped: ‘mute’, ‘lies’. Most of the stresses, however, are medium, and fall on the shorter vowels: ‘full’, ‘stood’, and on a consonantally stopped longer vowel, ‘grave’. Of course, as with the action of syntax, the action of word association plays its part here. The subdued effect is aided not only by the avoidance of heavy stresses and the choice of shorter vowels but by the vocabulary: ‘stood’, ‘mute’, ‘grave’, ‘lies’.
It should be understood from all this that quantity in English cannot function as an entity even to the extent that stress can. Quantity is very much dependent upon other elements. If we try to write verse with regard to quantity, seeking to ignore stress in the process, it tends to come out like this:
They wer’amid the shadows by night in loneliness obscure
Walking forth i’the void and vasty dominyon of Ades.
This is an attempt by Robert Bridges (1844–1930) to translate the sixth book of Virgil’s Aeneid, using the Latin metre in which it was written. Latin metres are supposed to have been entirely quantitative, composed of long and short syllables, and deriving from ancient Greek.
It is hard, however, to imagine any rhythm without stress. Certainly, such readings as have been produced by such scholars as C.M.Bowra and K.J.Dover are remarkable for what would be recognized as rhythmic emphasis resembling that of English verse.
The Latin hexameter basically ran:
where ´ represented a long syllable and ù represented a short syllable. There were variations, chiefly by way of substituting ´´ for ´ ùùin any of the first five feet.
However it may have been in Latin, any attempt to reproduce this metre in English is going to run against the fact that quantity is a far more delicate element in the make-up of the rhythmic line than stress. There is, indeed, no way of avoiding stress’s primacy. For all the distortions of language perpetrated by Bridges in an effort to achieve a quantitative hexameter, what he has here sounds like an awkward seven-stress line. Since no such line is stable in English, the effect is something like that of a four-stress alternating with a three-stress:
This is ugly in its expression. Certainly, so far as one can judge such matters, it was not what Bridges intended. He was a good poet on his day; see his lyric describing evil in the world, ‘Low Barometer’. But that fine poem is unmistakably written in rhythms based on stress patterns.
The theories of verse propounded by Robert Bridges were far removed from speech, unlike those of his friend Hopkins, and correspondingly academic. Yet he was right in surmising that the utilization of syllables—quantitative verse in English—might reveal ‘delicate and expressive rhythms hitherto unknown in our poetry’.
Bridges, however, was not the poet to bring this about. The attempt was made more imaginatively by his daughter, Elizabeth Daryush (1887–1977). She seems to have heard syllables as a delicate tracery of sound counterpointing the normal stress pattern. Her form is to construct a line in terms of the syllables counted; rather than, that is to say, the stresses. For this to work, however, the stresses have to be held in check. It helps, too, if the subject is relatively subdued!
Daryush tends to be cautious in her approach, and stays close to the line of ten syllables. A good deal of her craft is expended in preventing this metre from falling into obvious blank verse. The approach seems to work in a poem called ‘Still-Life’. Under the pretence of describing a perfect morning in the life of a favoured young mortal, Daryush succeeds in creating an atmosphere of Ahnung, full of brooding presentiment:
Through the open French window the warm sun
lights up the polished breakfast-table, laid
round a bowl of crimson roses, for one—
a service of Worcester porcelain, arrayed
near it a melon, peaches, figs, small hot
rolls in a napkin, fairy rack of toast,
butter in ice, high silver coffee-pot,
and, heaped on a salver, the morning’s post.
She comes over the lawn, the young heiress,
from her early walk in her garden-wood
feeling that life’s a table set to bless
her delicate desires with all that’s good,
that even the unopened future lies
like a love-letter, full of sweet surprise.
One cannot help feeling that something very unpleasant indeed is waiting in the mail. It is partly the fact that the setting is all too pretty. Partly, also, it is the reiterated image of communication—‘the morning’s post’, ‘the unopened future’. But it is, as well, the peculiar rhythm of Daryush’s syllables. She has shown a degree of skill in avoiding the lure of iambic pentameters. If she does not avoid stress patterns, at least she subdues them to the extent that they counterpoint the quantitative measure of her vowels:
There is a sense of overrunning the line—not only a matter of enjambment here—which is highly characteristic of syllables. The stress metre, which is inevitable however quantitatively the poet hears her verse, is subverted. The foot-divisions do not tend to coincide with the way in which the words themselves divide up as separate entities:
Behind it all, the longer vowels are few, such as the o in ‘open’, and when they occur they do not coincide with the heavier stresses. But, then, heavier stresses also are few. When they occur, they tend not to coincide with the longer vowels. ‘Sun’ and ‘one’ in the poem are heavy stresses at the end of their respective lines, yet their vowels are among the shorter ones.
This all makes for an underlying sense of uncertainty that effectively tinctures the ostensible optimism, even complacency, of the poem. With a sure touch, Daryush has opened up a remarkable area in twentieth-century poetry, curiously suited to an age of doubt. There were earlier attempts at syllables—that is to say, counting syllables rather than hearing stresses—as far back as the Elizabethan period. But they do not sound at all like their counterparts in modern times.
Perhaps the poet most committed to this curious rhythm, and certainly its most remarkable practitioner, was Marianne Moore (1887–1972). Her superiority over Daryush can be located—though that is not the whole story—in her handling of rhyme. If there is a defect in ‘Still-Life’, it is that the poem still clings to tradition, to the tyranny of rhymes that are full: ‘sun’/‘one’; ‘laid’/‘arrayed’. This rather goes against the grain of syllables, which is to be a chord rather than full harmony, an echo rather than counter-melody.
Moore, however, rhymes so discreetly that the unwary reader might take her exquisitely formal structures to be a kind of free verse. ‘The Steeple-Jack’ tells of a small town whose simple processes disguise the danger beneath the placid surface. It is an allegory of life. The reference with which the poem begins is to Albrecht Dürer (1471–1528), a German artist whose woodcuts included a visual representation of the Apocalypse, that book of the Bible which foretells the end of the world:
Dürer would have seen a reason for living
in a town like this, with eight stranded whales
to look at; with the sweet sea air coming into your house
on a fine day, from water etched
with waves as formal as the scales
on a fish.
One by one, in two’s, in three’s, the seagulls keep
flying back and forth over the town clock,
or sailing round the lighthouse without moving their wings—
rising steadily with a slight
quiver of the body—or flock
a sea the purple of the peacock’s neck is
paled to greenish azure as Dürer changed
the pine tree of the Tyrol to peacock blue and guinea
grey. You can see a twenty-five-
pound lobster and fish-nets arranged
to dry. The
whirlwind fife-and-drum of the storm bends the salt
marsh grass, disturbs stars in the sky and the
star on the steeple; it is a privilege to see so
much confusion.
We hear more of that ‘star on the steeple’ later in the poem.
The quotation breaks off here because there is a breaking-off in the text. Moore in the original version of ‘The Steeple-Jack’ disrupted her stanza-form at this point, leaving a four-line stanza in discontinuity with the six-line stanza she had established. Later, she was to revise this poem, which is in her most recent Collected Poems a set of thirteen stanzas, each with six lines. What has happened is that two and a half lines have been added to complete the stanza, followed by five new stanzas, and then a half-line to start off the stanzas from the original draft that now complete this new version of the poem.
These new stanzas bring in a great deal of detail, relevant to the poem but not essential to it. The earlier version, then, is preferable. But there is no getting round the fact that the basic form in that original version has been broken as early as the fourth stanza.
The basic six-line stanza of the poem consists of lines whose syllable-count is as follows: 11, 10, 14, 8, 8, 3. This particular rhythm is probably as near quantitative verse as English will allow. There is also a subdued rhyme scheme, consisting mainly of blanks: a b c d b e. The second and fifth lines of each of the regular stanzas recall one’s attention, helped by the fact that they are indented, to the form beneath the apparently conversational utterance.
But you cannot get away from stress in English verse. There is, in addition to the syllabic count that determines the form, a more or less random pattern of stresses. They tend to the lighter end of the Trager—Smith scale, so as not to swamp the delicate play of the quantities:
Notice that the quantities are predominantly medium and short. That corresponds to the stresses, which, as already indicated, are relatively unobtrusive, being mostly medium to light. The result is a line that would be spoken fairly rapidly and unemphatically.
This effect, as of talking in a relaxed fashion, is enhanced by what has already been pointed out as a characteristic of modern syllables. That is the extensive degree of enjambment: ‘living/in a’; ‘whales/to look at’; ‘house/on a fine day’; ‘water etched/with’; ‘as the scales/on a’. Every line in that stanza, except the last, flows over into the next. That is practically the case with each stanza in the poem.
The enjambment is not at all afraid to split up the syntax between lines. It will even sometimes leave the end of the line on an unimportant or unemphatic word: ‘where’; ‘is’; ‘the’; ‘so’; ‘a’. When this happens, and the word in question is lightly stressed, it often has the effect of putting a stress on to the first syllable of the next line. This is also a noticeable characteristic of the first line, where there is no preliminary word to serve as enjambment. The word ‘Dürer’ acts as a propellant, to start the poem off with one of its relatively few heavy stresses.
The craft of Marianne Moore is preferable to that of Elizabeth Daryush. ‘Still-Life’ does not, as has been indicated, sufficiently safeguard itself against the careless reader. In an inadequate performance, the careful syllables of Daryush could fall into a sort of iambic pentameter. This is unlikely to happen with Moore. The unlikelihood arises from the irregularity of Moore’s stresses, together with the fact that they are, on the whole, lightly touched. As nearly as possible, they form a counterpoint with the quantities. It is a counterpoint in which the quantities are not altogether the junior partner.
Further, her exiguity of rhyme gives a sense of form without drawing too much attention to it. This is, given the exigencies of syllables, preferable to the full rhyme of Daryush. We may infer from this that the creation of a rhythmic pattern by counting syllables is rather a restricted form of verse. But syllables may be especially suited to certain kinds of meditative poetry, particularly that which dwells on the uncertainties of life. Moore ends her poem, ironically:
It scarcely could be dangerous to be living
in a town like this, of simple people
who have a steeple-jack placing danger-signs by the church
when he is gilding the solid-
pointed star, which on a steeple
stands for hope.
In a similar vein, Moore points out in ‘To a Snail’ the positive aspects of what might be seen as negative characteristics. This is really a poem about style, whose successes reside in economy, and in a reticence that does not render its means of achievement too explicit:
If ‘compression is the first grace of style’,
you have it. Contractility is a virtue
as modesty is a virtue.
It is not the acquisition of any one thing
that is able to adorn,
or the incidental quality that occurs
as a concomitant of something well said,
that we value in style,
but the principle that is hid:
in the absence of feet, ‘a method of conclusions’;
‘a knowledge of principles’,
in the curious phenomenon of your occipital horn.
An ‘occipital’ horn is one that emerges from the back of the head—a reticent characteristic. The poem is both in concept and in rhythm based on an aphorism of the literary theorist known as ‘Demetrius’ (c. 50 BC), as translated from the Greek by Hamilton Fyfe: ‘The very first grace of style is that which comes from compression.’ It probably represents Moore’s own view of her work. Consider the punning reference to the absence of feet. While one can certainly insert feet as a way of notating Moore’s stress pattern, there can be no doubt that the feet are irregular. The prime method of ordering the verse is by stress. However, adjunctive to stress are the number of syllables per line, the pattern of quantity and also the rhyme scheme.
For example, here the shortest line (seven syllables) takes a heavy stress on its last syllable and is end-stopped; no enjambment. The line therefore acts as a kind of pivot in the poem. This is enhanced by the circumstance that the shortest line, line 5 of a twelve-line poem, carries the only rhyme. This line 5 accords with the final line, which is also the longest. But that accordance, though helping to shape the poem, does not call excessive attention to itself.
The interplay between stress and quantity gives the poem its peculiar tone, since the ‘style’ establishes itself through a number of factors that in other hands might turn out to be counter-productive. After all, it may not seem to be an advantage to live in a shell, as a snail does, but that could prove a protection against being amorphous.
Marianne Moore has, in her quiet way, been influential upon a number of younger poets. Thorn Gunn (b. 1929) has no very settled personality or style in his writing but is adept at realizing the traits of other poets. He is not a snail, perhaps, so much as a hermit crab. It is the snail, however, that he considers in what is at once an imitation of Moore and a convincing demonstration of syllables at play. ‘Considering the Snail’:
The snail pushes through a green
night, for the grass is heavy
with water and meets over
the bright path he makes, where rain
has darkened the earth’s dark. He
moves in a wood of desire,
pale antlers barely stirring
as he hunts. I cannot tell
what power is at work, drenched there
with purpose, knowing nothing.
What is a snail’s fury? All
I think is that if later
I parted the blades above
the tunnel and saw the thin
trail of broken white across
litter, I would never have
imagined the slow passion
to that deliberate progress.
The suppressed fact is that the snail has the characteristics of both genders. Though suppressed as regards explicit utterance, this ability to switch sexual roles is a factor in the poem. Further: although the snail may seem slow-moving, it is intent on activity. After all, it succeeds in propagating itself. Indeed, the snail is a successful animal.
Such phrases as ‘a wood of desire’, ‘drenched there/with purpose’ and ‘slow passion’ suggest that the purpose of the snails deliberate progress is copulation. The pale antlers—another emblem of this slow chase—are ‘barely stirring’. That ‘barely’ refers at once to the vulnerable quality of the snail’s horns and to their almost undetectable movement. Again, this last quality—undetectable movement—is what attaches itself to the whole motion of the snail. That is why the rhythm of syllables is appropriate here.
Each line contains seven syllables. As is the case with Moore, the line-endings are blurred by enjambment. There is no hesitation about breaking the syntactic flow. There is none, either, about ending the line on unimportant words. All this serves to enhance the faint music of the quantities. This music, as has been said, echoes the stealthy but determined movement of the snail.
The attempt to measure the line by quantity is especially effective with poems that are elliptical in subject. This is particularly the case in the work of George MacBeth, a poem of whose was discussed in Chapter 2. Though blank verse is often his chosen medium, he is equally at home in syllables. His poem ‘The Killing’ is a comment on Milton’s line ‘brought death into the world’. It narrates a group of men taking out to sea a poisoned ash with the capability of destroying the world. This appears to be an attempt at disposal that goes disastrously wrong. The reader, however, is only gradually let into the secret:
In a wooden room, surrounded by lights and
Faces, the place where death had
Come to its sharpest point was exposed. In a
Clear shell they examined the
Needle of death. How many
Million deaths were concentrated in
A single centre! The compass of death was
Lifted, detached and broken,
Taken and burned. The seed of death lay in the
Hold. Without disturbance or
Ceremony they sealed it
In foil. The ship stirred at the quay. The
Pilot was ready. A long shadow slanted
On the harbour water. The
Fin bearing the ignorant crew on their brief
Journey cut through the air. Three
Furlongs out at sea the
Strike of the engine fell. The screws turned…
The syllabic count of the lines in each six-line stanza is as follows: 11, 7, 11, 7, 7, 9. There is no rhyming. The subjugation of stress in favour of quantity is partly brought about by the short sentences, the extent of enjambment, and the way in which that enjambment overruns syntactical patterning. No stanza is self-contained. The first stanza has no syntactical end, hardly even pausing at ‘concentrated in’. In the last stanza quoted, the screws turn on, into the next stanza.
The syllabic rhythm here has a quiet insistence; almost a nagging quality. It is redeemed from monotony by the way in which the author plays the syllabic pattern against the stress pattern:
Notice there are few syllables that one could call really long. When there is a long vowel, it is usually subordinated by being given to an unimportant word placed on a lightly stressed syllable, such as ‘by’. Similarly, one finds on heavily stressed syllables such short vowels as those in ‘wood(en)’, ‘death’, ‘come’. This latter effect is not universal, but it is certainly noticeable. Such words as these, falling on heavy stresses, are, though short in quantity, important in syntax and meaning. So one gets an effect of counterpoint: one mode of rhythm played against another; quantity against stress. This adds to the complexity, and consequently to the extent of attention one has to give the poem when reading it aloud.
If the quantity of the vowels went along with the stresses and the meanings, we would have something almost approaching a succession of dactylic feet: ´ ùù | ´ ùù | ´ ùù |. One hears the tendency in such a phrase as ‘(sur)rounded by lights and/Faces’. But dactyls would prove too decisive for this particular theme.
The metre, therefore, is prevented from becoming simply dactylic by the methods the poet adopts to keep quantity to the forefront, and it is most certainly not a pattern of quantity that lends itself to any dactylic pattern. The vowels are too short and the syntax too broken to permit any such rhythm to take over. Therefore this form of syllables, almost certainly learned from Moore, is appropriate to the unheroic subject of death entering the world, like a science with good intentions, and finishing it off altogether.
The subdued, the elliptic, the quietly insistent—all these are tones best conveyed in syllables. The rhythm has to the more usual modes of writing something of the relation of the precursors of the piano to the resonant modern instrument.
Because of this, it may seem relevant for the present author to end this chapter with a poem in lines of seven syllables each that he wrote concerned with one such predecessor: the clavichord. This is a small keyboard instrument, with metal tangents that push against rather than strike the strings. It may seem limited, as indeed syllabics may, but some master musicians wrote for it.
The clavichord is uniquely suitable for performing at home rather than on a platform. In that regard, it resembles poetry itself. Here is ‘The Clavichord Speaks’:
When you feel rather than hear
Music, that is my voice. No
Wresting of your heart’s strings but
Chords sounding in sympathy.
Come then, poor time-torn man, leave
The crowded traffic of the
Pestering city, and sit
Down at my keys, open your
Sad heart—I, the Clavichord,
Speak to you. Bach knew how these
Small sounds, near-inanition,
Expressed, not gestured, called for
No virtuoso, needed
No hall or audience, but
Just one’s wife, a friend perhaps,
One’s room, sector in chaos,
Or just an ear, your own. So
Poetry emerges out of
The quiet voice, until you
Sense no barrier between
You and the verse—voice subsumed
In content. And this voice here
Does not play Bach but is Bach
Himself speaking not to you
But within you, sounding the
Chords common to both, to all
Men, so rarely touched these swift
Days when only the shout is
ened sense, roar of the city.
Days when only the rude shove
Tells, all grace and kindness spent.
Sad that I, an antique, so
Long survive my time, as the
Voice of the past masters not
Yet wholly discredited
Survives in my strings alone,
Elsewhere coarsened past knowledge,
Beyond belief. So sit then,
Friend, rest on these keys, only
Here to find recompense for
Your labours, only here to
Find men that were men, barriers
Melted away, speak to you.