‘It is,’ wrote Richard Wagner in his book, on Beethoven, ‘a matter of experience that, by the side of the world which presents itself as visible in waking as well as in dreaming, we are conscious of yet another world which manifests itself by sound … a true world of sound by the side of a world of light, of which it may be said that it bears the same relation to the latter as dreaming to waking.’
It is with this world of sound that many of the notes in this book deal.
Histories of English prosody have occupied themselves mainly with the effect on rhythm of variety and changes of accent, and the effect of alliteration; but, as far as I know, although Mr. Robert Graves has written a highly interesting chapter on Texture itself (‘Techniques of Modern Poetry’) — as I said in my book on Alexander Pope, the effect of texture upon rhythm and upon speed have not been considered. The truth is, that the texture of a poem has been regarded as merely a matter of fatness or leanness — has been acknowledged only as producing richness, or sweetness, or harshness in the poem; but the fact that texture is largely responsible for rhythm, and for variations in the speed of the poem, have not been acknowledged. The particular part played by the varying uses of consonants, vowels, labials, and sibilants, has been insufficiently considered.—E. S.
With regard to the relationship of consonants and vowels, it might, perhaps, be said that the vowels are the spirit, the consonants and labials the physical identity, with all the variations of harshness, hairiness, coldness, roughness, smoothness, etc.1 (E. S.), ‘the garment of the spirit, “thus distinguished, marked off and announced … to the outer world,” (as) “the animal by the skin, the tree by its bark “’.—WAGNER, ‘Opera and Drama’, Part II, Prose Works. Trans. W. A. Ellis.
‘We have called’ (Wagner explains in ‘The Theatre’, Prose Works, Part III., trans. W. A. Ellis) ‘the consonants, the garments of the vowel, or, more precisely, the physiognomic exterior…. Just as it hedges the vowel from without, so does it also bound the vowel within … i.e. it determines the specific nature of the latter’s manifestment, through the roughness or smoothness of the inward contact therewith … or, to elaborate the matter further, these enclosing consonants are playing the part of the fleshly covering of the human body, organically ingrown with the interior; we shall thus gain a faithful image of the essence both of consonant and vowel, as well as of the organic relations to one another. Take the vowel for the whole inner organism of man’s living body, which prescribes from out itself the shaping of its outward show, as offered to the eye of the beholder.’2
Cézanne declared that ‘when colour has its richness, form has its plenitude’.3 This is applicable to the effect that vowels have upon consonants.—E. S.
‘Bodies serve light, which would not shine unless it could break against them; similarly it may be said that without rhythm music would not be perceptible.’—WAGNER, Beethoven. Trans. E. Dannreuther.
This is the service rendered by the consonants to the spiritual force of the vowels.
Consonants have each, when in contact with the vowel, their own specific gravity, mobility, or want of elasticity, their power of refracting light, their behaviour as magnetic or diagmagnetic.
Consonants shape; they do not affect time as do vowels: roughly speaking the realm of consonants is in Space: the realm of vowels in Time — although vowels, too, have their place, position, depth, and height, they do not give body.
Sibilants slow the line.—E. S.
‘… the feature in Beethoven’s musical productions which is so particularly momentous for the history of art is this: that here, every technical detail, by means of which for clearness’ sake the artist places himself in a conventional relation to the external world, is raised to the highest significance of a spontaneous effusion.’—WAGNER, Beethoven. Trans. E. Dannreuther.
This should be true of all technique.—E. S.
‘Mechanical excellence is the only vehicle of genius.’—BLAKE, Marginalia: Reynolds’ Discourses.
‘Without innate Neatness of Execution, the Sublime cannot exist.’—Ibid.
‘The fruition of beauty is no chance of hit or miss — it is inevitable as life — it is exact and plumb as gravitation. From the eyesight proceeds another eyesight, and from the hearing proceeds another hearing … eternally curious of the harmony of things with man. To these respond perfections.’—WHITMAN, Preface to Leaves of Grass.
‘His’ (Plato’s) ‘strength is like the momentum of a falling planet; and his discretion, the return of its due and perfect curve — so excellent is his Greek love of boundary, and his skill in definition.’—EMERSON (‘Plato, or the Philosopher’), Representative Men.
This should be true of all technique.—E. S.
‘The great and golden rule of Art as well as of Life, is that the more distinct, [and] sharp … the bounding line, the more perfect the work of art; and the less keen and sharp, the greater is the evidence of weak imitation, plagiarism, and bungling…. What is it that distinguishes honesty from knavery, but the hard … line of rectitude and certainty, in the actions and intentions? Leave out this line, and you leave out life itself; all is chaos again, and the line of the Almighty must be drawn out upon it, before man or beast can exist.’—BLAKE, Descriptive Catalogue.
This refers to drawing, but is equally applicable to poetry. It should be learned by heart by the woolly imitators of that great poet, Wordsworth.—E. S.
‘Energy is the only life, and is from the Body; and Reason is the bound or outward circumference of Energy.’—BLAKE, Marriage of Heaven and Hell.
All technical achievement is, as it were, the Etheric Body of the poet.—E. S.
SOCRATES: . . Is there not an essence of colour and sound as of anything else which may be said to be an essence…. And if anyone could imitate the essence of each thing in letters and syllables, would he not express the nature of each thing?’
SOCRATES: ‘That objects should be imitated in letters and syllables and so find expression may appear ridiculous, Hermogenes, but it cannot be avoided.’—(‘Cratylus’) The Dialogues of Plato.
‘Imitate’: should not the word be ‘reproduce’? If we imitate an essence, it is false.—E. S.
‘The angels, from the sound of the voice, know a man’s love; from the articulation of the sound, his wisdom; and from the sense of his words, his science.’—SWEDENBORG, quoted by Emerson (‘Swedenborg the Mystic’), Representative Men.
‘Sounds as well as thoughts have relation both between each other and towards that which they represent, and a perception of the order of those relations has always been found connected with a perception of the order of the relations of thoughts. Hence the language of poets has ever affected a certain uniform and harmonious recurrence of sound, without which it were not poetry, and which is scarcely less indispensable to the communication of its influence, than the words themselves, without reference to that peculiar order. Hence the vanity of translation; it were as wise to cast a violet into a crucible that you might discover the formal principle of its colour and odour, as seek to transfuse from one language into another the creations of a poet. The plant must spring again from its seed, or it will bear no flower — and this is the burthen of the curse of Babel.’—SHELLEY, A Defence of Poetry.
This is true of translations in nearly all cases. But there are wonderful exceptions. The translations by Arthur Waley from the Japanese and Chinese are works of a transcendental beauty — the pure essence of beauty itself, as indefinable as the scent of a flower. I know nothing more lovely than these truly miraculous works.—E. S.
‘Like the metamorphosis of things into higher forms, is their change into melodies. Over every thing stands its dæmon or soul, and as the form of the thing is reflected by the eye, so the soul of the thing is reflected by a melody. The sea, the mountain-ridge, Niagara, and every flower-bed, pre-exist, or super-exist, in pre-cantations, which sail like odours in the air, and when any man goes by with an ear sufficiently fine, he overhears them, and endeavours to write down the notes, without diluting or depraving them, and herein is the legitimation of criticism in the mind’s faith, that the poems are a corrupt version of some text in nature, with which they ought to be made to tally.’—EMERSON (‘The Poet’), Essays.
‘Melody,’ said Beethoven,’ is the sensual life of poetry. Do not the spiritual contents of a poem become sensual feeling through melody?’—Quoted by G. H. LEWES, Inner Life of Art.
Rhythm has been defined as ‘melody stripped of its pitch’. This should be remembered.—E. S.
Wagner wrote: ‘Rhythm is the mind of dance and the skeleton of tone.’ ‘Tone is the heart of man through which dance and poetry are brought to mutual understanding.’ ‘This organic being is clothed upon with the flesh of the world.’—Quoted by ARTHUR SYMONS, Studies in Seven Arts.
For the word ‘Tone’ substitute ‘texture’, which is to poetry what tone is to music, — and for Wagner’s use of the word ‘poetry’ substitute ‘the spirit’. — The flesh of the world is made, for poetry, of the varying and shaping consonants. Vowels are the heart of tone.—E. S. (See Notes on Texture, pages 18 and 19).
‘Rhythm is in time what symmetry is in space.’—SCHOPENHAUER, The World as Will and Idea. Trans. T. B. Haldane and J. Kemp.
‘Time is primarily the form of inner sense.’—SCHOPENHAUER (‘Of Knowledge à Priori’), The World as Will and Idea.
Rhythm, then, is the form of inner sense when it has attained full consciousness and has become executive. Rhythm is the executive Sense or Soul.—E. S.
‘… the Musician, moulding and shaping, stretches his hand, as it were, towards the waking world of phenomena, by the rhythmical succession of time in his productions, much as the allegorical stream connects with the habitual ideas of the individual, so that the waking consciousness, which is turned towards the external world, is able firmly to retain it.’—WAGNER, Beethoven. Trans. E. Dannreuther.
(Rhythm, therefore, is one of the principal translators between dream and reality.—E. S.)
‘Thus,’ Wagner continues, ‘by means of the rhythmical arrangement of tones, the musician touches upon the perceptible plastic world.’
This is also true of the poet.
Rhythm might be described as, in the world of sound, what light is in the visible world. It shapes, and it gives new meaning.—E. S.
‘Beethoven contemplates life, and appears to contemplate how he is to play a dance for life itself.’—WAGNER, Beethoven.
‘It is a weakness not to comprehend the beauty of a machine. The fault lies in depicting machines instead of taking from them a lesson in rhythm, in stripping away the superfluous.’—COCTEAU (‘Carte Blanche’ Le Rappel à l’Ordre.
‘To describe a dreadnought is no more new than to describe a galley. What is new is that one should feel in the poem the rhythm of a dreadnought, as Racine evokes the pomp of a galley. Onomatopea relegates us to the rank of a parrot — (even that which Marinetti calls ‘abstract onomatopea’). A spectacle, a sound, which enters through the eye and the ear, should be subjected, before it reissues by the hand, to profound metamorphoses.’—Ibid.
‘In each era of poetry, outward structure must inevitably undergo a change. In the Augustan age, the outward structure of poetry was the result of logic alone, while variations of speed, the feeling of heat and of cold, the variations of the different depths and heights, were produced by means of texture and were the result of sensibility and of instinct in this matter. Poetry was therefore, in that age, as far as outward structure was concerned, the sister of architecture. With the Romantics and their more poignant vowel-sense, resulting in a different kind of melodic line, poetry became the sister of music. Now she appears like the sister of horticulture — each poem growing according to the laws of its own nature, but in a line which is more often the irregular though entirely natural shape of a tree, — bearing leaves, bearing fruit, — than a sharp melodic line, springing like a fountain.’— E. S., Aspects of Modern Poetry.
‘The true … mistake lies in the confounding mechanical regularity with organic form. The form is mechanic, when on any given material we impress a predetermined form, not necessarily arising out of the properties of the material; as when to a mass of wet clay we give whatever shape we wish it to retain when hardened. The organic form, on the other hand, is innate; it shapes as it develops, itself from within, and the fullness of its development is one and the same with … its outward form.’—COLERIDGE, Lectures (1818).
‘For of the soul the body form doth take;
For soul is form, and doth the body make.’
SPENSER, ‘Hymn in Honour of Beauty’
‘To speak … with the perfect rectitude and insouciance of the movements of animals, and the unimpeachableness of the sentiment of trees in the woods and grass by the roadside, is the flawless triumph of art. If you have looked on him who has achieved it, you have looked on one of the greatest masters of all nations and times. You shall not contemplate the flight of the grey gull across the bay, or the mettlesome action of the blood-horse, or the tall leaning of sunflowers on their stalk, or the appearance of the sun journeying through heaven, or the appearance of the moon afterward, with any more satisfaction than you shall contemplate him.’—WHITMAN, Preface to Leaves of Grass.
‘No work of true genius dares want its appropriate form, neither indeed is there any danger of this. As it must not, so genius cannot, be lawless; for it is ever this that constitutes its genius — the power of acting creatively under laws of its own origination.’—COLERIDGE, Lectures (1818).
‘The world is made by symmetry and proportion, and is in that respect compared to music, and music to poetry … what music can there be where there is no proportion observed.’—T. CAMPION, Observations on the Art of English Poesie.
‘Harmony itself is a thing of thought.’—WAGNER, Prose Works, Chapter IV, Part III.
In other words, there must be no division between the thought and the clothing flesh, the harmony.—E. S.
‘Harmony and Proportion are Qualities and not Things. The Harmony and Proportion of a Horse are not the same with those of a Bull. Every Thing has its own Harmony and Proportion, Two Inferior Qualities in it. For its Reality is its Imaginative Form.’—BLAKE, annotations to Berkeley’s Siris.
Consider this saying of Blake’s, young men. All spiritual Imagination is not fitted for the Harmony and Proportion of a Sonnet.
The swiftness of the Horse is not to be found in the Harmony and Proportion of a Sonnet.—E. S.
‘His’ (Wordsworth’s) ‘remark was by far the weightiest thing we ever heard on the subject of style; and it was this: that it is in the highest degree unphilosophic to call language the dress of thoughts…. He would call it the ‘incarnation of thoughts’. Never in one word was so profound a truth conveyed…. And the truth is apparent on consideration: for if language were merely a dress, then you could separate the two; you could lay the thoughts on the left hand, the language on the right. But, generally speaking, you can no more deal thus with poetic thoughts than you can with soul and body. The union is too subtle, the intertexture too ineffable.’—DE QUINCEY, Style.
‘… Descartes has only ideas, and no visible style. His thought has a skin which clings to the flesh — not a flowered dress. This is equally true of Pascal. Their style is naked, sometimes sweating with fever, yellow from fasting, or suddenly red from the blood that has fled from the heart, leaving it turned to ice. It is naked as a soul.’—DE GOURMONT, Le Problème du Style.
‘The living language of dream, the dead language of awakening. We need an interpreter, a translator.’—COCTEAU, Opium. Trans. Ernest Boyd.
‘… every great poet must inevitably innovate upon the example of his predecessors in the exact structure of his peculiar versification.’—SHELLEY, A Defence of Poetry.
Many and varied are the experimental enquiries made by modern poets into the effect on rhythm, and on speed, of the use of rhymes, assonances, and dissonances, placed outwardly, at different places in the line, in most elaborate patterns; and the effect on speed of equivalent syllables, that system which produces almost more variation than any other device.
The rhythm and speed of a skilful unrhymed poem differ from the rhythm and speed of a rhymed poem containing the same number of feet, — and both the rhymed and the unrhymed poems differ slightly in rhythm and speed from a poem ending with assonances or dissonances, but containing the same number of feet. Again, assonances and dissonances put at different places within the lines and intermingled with equally skilfully placed internal rhymes, have an immense effect upon rhythm and speed; and their effect on rhythm, and sometimes, but not always, upon speed, is different from that of lines containing elaborately schemed internal rhymes without assonances or dissonances.—E. S.
How slight, how subtle, are the changes in speed or of depth in English poetry, due to the fact that the English, in their cunning over the matter of poetry, have adopted the system of equivalence. For is it really to be supposed that two words of one syllable each, equal in speed one word of two syllables? The two-syllabled words, if unweighted by heavy consonants, move far more quickly. The system, therefore, of equivalent syllables gives variation.—E. S., Alexander Pope.
Sometimes, in the actual texture, subtle variations of thickness and thinness (and consequently of darkness or faint shadow) are brought about in assonances and rhymes by the changing of a consonant or labial, from word to word.
(On this subject, see page 136, note on Iachimo’s speech.)
This change from thickness to thinness can actually affect, very faintly and subtly, rhythm and speed.
I have made innumerable experiments of each of the above kinds. Indeed, my verses Façade and certain other poems are, in a very great many cases, experiments of these orders.—E. S.
It must not be thought, however, that all matters of form derived from texture are superimposed, — are planned or deliberated by the poet: they are the result of instinct, and arise from the necessities of the material.—E. S.
Schopenhauer, in The World as Will and Idea, wrote: ‘(Nature) accomplishes that which appears so designed and planned, without reflection and without conception of an end…. The six equal radii of a snowflake, separating at equal angles, are measured beforehand by no knowledge; but it is the simple tendency of the original Will, which exhibits itself to knowledge when knowledge appears.’
The poet accomplishes his design instinctively, but at the same time with knowledge. In him, knowledge has become instinct, and during the conception of the poem, knowledge works in him as if it were nature alone.
When the work is almost completed, when the inspiration has pronounced its will, then, and only then, does the knowledge become conscious knowledge once again.
The difference between the poet and the person who is not a poet, although he may (and no doubt does) write reams of verse, lies partly in the fact that the poet has this instinctive knowledge.—E. S.
Orlando Gibbons, the composer, in a dedicatory address to Sir Christopher Hatton the younger, wrote, ‘It is Proportion that beautifies everything’.
This should be remembered.—E. S.
Rhythm has been defined as ‘Melody stripped of its pitch’.
This should be remembered.—E. S.
‘The Impressionist school substitutes sunshine for light, and sonority for rhythm.’—COCTEAU (‘Le Coq et l’Arlequin’), Le Rappel à l’Ordre.
Free Verse does not substitute sunshine for light, but it does, to a certain degree, substitute sonority for rhythm. —E. S.
Wagner wrote of Palestrina (Beethoven), ‘Here rhythm is only perceptible through changes in the harmonic succession of chords, while apart from these it does not exist at all as a symmetrical division of time. Here the successions in time (Zeitfolge) are so immediately connected with the essential nature of harmony, which is itself connected with time and space, that the laws of time cannot aid us to understand such music. The sole succession of time in music of this description is hardly otherwise apparent than in exceedingly delicate changes of the same fundamental colour, which changes retain their connection through the most, varied transitions, without our being able to trace any direct drawing of lines.’
Is not this applicable to some of the verse of our time, — verse in which the shaping is not architectural, but is the result of the inward movement brought about by the texture, and particularly by the vowels … i.e. the ‘exceedingly delicate changes of some fundamental colour’?—E. S.
Swinburne, writing of Rossetti (Essays and Studies), said that his line was ‘as sinuous as water or as light, flexible and penetrative, delicate and rapid; it works on its way without halt, or jolt or collapse’.
Should this not be true of the line in Free Verse?—E. S.
Free Verse should have ‘an astonishing sense of linear rhythm, a rhythm which is … extremely elastic, that is to say it is capable of extraordinary variations from the norm without loss of continuity…. Imagine the rhythm rendered the least bit tight and mechanical in its regularity, and the whole system … would break down.’—ROGER FRY, Matisse.
Young men, beware. Whitman described himself as ‘apparently lawless; but on closer examination a certain regularity appears, like the recurrence of lesser and larger waves on the sea-shore, rolling without intermission, and fitfully rising and falling’.—WHITMAN, Notebooks.
I would like a strong and lovely movement — a movement belonging to the morning, the rush onward of
‘Horses, young horses, and the waves of the sea.’
I do not know who wrote that wonderful phrase, nor where I found it.—E. S.
‘The profit of Rhyme is that it drops seeds of a sweeter and more luxuriant rhyme; and of uniformity, that it conveys itself into its own roots in the ground out of sight. The rhyme and uniformity of perfect poems show the free growth of metrical laws, and bud from them as unerringly and loosely as lilacs or roses on a bush, and take shapes as compact as the shapes of chestnuts and oranges and melons and pears, and shed the perfume impalpable to form.’—WHITMAN, Preface to Leaves of Grass.
‘… the accident of a rhyme calls forth a system from the shadow.’—H. POINCARÉ, quoted by Cocteau (‘Le Secret Professionnel’), Le Rappel à l’Ordre.
And a whole planetary system.—E. S.
‘The irregular in the regular, the lack of correspondence in symmetry — what could be more illogical or more thwarting? Every infraction of the rule disturbs us like a false or doubtful note in music. The Sonnet is a sort of poetic fugue of which the theme should pass and repass until it is resolved according to its determined form. We must, therefore, submit ourselves absolutely to the laws of the Sonnet, or else, if we find those laws superannuated, pedantic, and restricting, abandon the writing of Sonnets.’— THÉOPHILE GAUTIER, ‘Charles Baudelaire’ — attached as a Preface to Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du Mal.
‘False or doubtful note?’ Gautier was not decrying strangeness, or the use of the unexpected sound by a musician. He was speaking of the false note played by the amateur in music.—E. S.