Raymond MacDonald Alden

“ Swinburne says: "It is hard to realize and hopeless to reproduce the musical force of classic metres so recondite and exquisite as the choral parts of a Greek play. Even Milton could not; though with his godlike instinct and his godlike might of hand he made a kind of strange and enormous harmony by intermixture of assonance and rhyme with irregular blank verse, as in that last Titanic chorus of Samson which utters over the fallen Philistines the trumpet-blast and thunder of its triumphs." ”

“ If, therefore, we begin to leave the mere "imitation of ordinary converse," we should go on consistently to "the last perfection of Art. It was only custom which cozened us so long; we thought, because Shakespeare and Fletcher went no farther, that there the pillars of poetry were to be erected; that, because they excellently described passion without rhyme, therefore rhyme was not capable of describing it. But time has now convinced most men of that error." ”

“ Every poet, then, is a versifier; every fine poet an excellent one; and he is the best whose verse exhibits the greatest amount of strength, sweetness, straightforwardness, unsuperfluousness, variety, and oneness;—oneness, that is to say, consistency in the general impression, metrical and moral; and variety, or every pertinent diversity of tone and rhythm, in the process.... It is thus that versification itself becomes part of the sentiment of a poem, and vindicates the pains that have been taken to show its importance. I know of no very fine versification unaccompanied with fine poetry ”

“ In rhythm, in sounds of the human voice, timed to movements of the human body, mankind first discovered that social consent which brought the great joys and the great pains of life into a common utterance.... The mere fact of utterance is social; however solitary his thought, a poet's utterance must voice this consent of man with man, and his emotion must fall into rhythm, the one and eternal expression of consent. This, then, is why rhythm will not be banished from poetry so long as poetry shall remain emotional utterance ”

“ Let any one attempt to follow a symphony with a metronome in his hand, and he will soon discover that if the metronome represents the æsthetically perfect rhythm, the orchestra represents a more pleasurable imperfection. Its accelerations and retardations carry on a continual conflict with the typical time of the music, yet that typical time is not only printed on every sheet, but is in the mind of every player. It is precisely so with verse.
It is true, of course, that the variations from regularity of rhythm are more numerous and conspicuous in verse than in music. ”

“ The jerks, the breaks, the inequalities and harshnesses of prose are fatal to the flow of a poetical imagination, as a jolting road or a stumbling horse disturbs the reverie of an absent man. But poetry "makes these odds all even." It is the music of language, answering to the music of the mind, untying, as it were, "the secret soul of harmony." ”

“ Rhythm is obscured or hidden by declamation only in times when the eye has usurped the functions of the ear, and when a highly developed prose makes the accented rhythm of poetry seem either old-fashioned or a sign of childhood. Not that one wishes to restore a sing-song reading, but rather a recognition of metrical structure, of those subtle effects in rhythm which mean so much in the poet's art; verse, in a word, particularly lyric verse, must not be read as if it were prose. ”

“ To approach ideal perfection, nothing less than implicit obedience to all the rules is the first element of success; but the task is by no means finished there. Every quality that poetry demands, whether clearness of thought, elegance of expression, harmonious sound, or faultless rhythm, is needed as much in these shapes as in unfettered verse.... It may be said, without fear of exaggeration, that all the qualities required to form a perfect lyric in poetry are equally needful here, plus a great many special ones the forms themselves demand. ”

“ Besides, one word so as it were begetting another, as be it in rime or measured verse, by the former a man shall have a near guess to the follower.... So that, verse being in itself sweet and orderly, and being best for memory, the only handle of knowledge, it must be in jest that any man can speak against it.
(Sir Philip Sidney: An Apologie for Poetrie.)
Versification, or the art of modulating his numbers, is indispensably necessary to a poet. Every other power by which the understanding is enlightened, or the imagination enchanted, may be exercised in prose. ”

“ Why do we so often find men in these days, either using metre ... where they ought to have expressed themselves in prose, or expressing themselves in verse in a style so far remote from the standard of diction established in society that they fail to touch the heart? I think the explanation of this curious phenomenon is that, though metre can only properly be used for the expression of universal ideas, there is in modern society an eccentric or monastic principle at work, which leads men to pervert metre into a luxurious instrument for the expression of merely private ideas. ”

“ In music we feel that the fact of chief importance is that the measures shall be equal in time, while the recurring accent seems a mere means of marking this equality; but in verse we feel that the chief fact is that the accents shall recur, the equality of time-intervals being in a sense a secondary source of pleasure. In music, therefore, as we have seen, we treat departures from regularity of time-intervals as somewhat more exceptional than in verse. But the rhythm would suffer, would even disappear, were either element wholly removed. ”

“ Professor Corson remarks: "Probably no English poet who has used the Spenserian stanza, first assimilated so fully the spirit of Spenser, ... as did Keats; and to this fact may be partly attributed his effective use of it as an organ for his imagination in its 'lingering, loving, particularizing mood.'" (Primer of English Verse, p. 124.)
[Pg 106]
The splendors of the firmament of time
May be eclips'd, but are extinguish'd not;
Like stars to their appointed height they climb,
And death is a low mist which cannot blot
The brightness it may veil. ”

“ When, as in verse, the sounds are pointedly addressed both to the ear and to the understanding, the rarity of the combination of aspects contributes a strain of feeling partly akin to that with which we follow an exhibition of skill, and partly to that with which we receive an unexpected gratuity....
Nor is this all. Rhythm perpetually not only transfigures the poetical expression of an idea, but makes the existence of that expression possible. ”

“ Poetry, in its complete sympathy with beauty, must of necessity leave no sense of the beautiful, and no power over its forms, unmanifested; and verse flows as inevitably from this condition of its integrity as other laws of proportion do from any other kind of embodiment of beauty.... ”

“ Fitness and unfitness for song, or metrical excitement, just make all the difference between a poetical and prosaical subject; and the reason why verse is necessary to the form of poetry is that the perfection of poetical spirit demands it—that the circle of its enthusiasm, beauty, and power is incomplete without it. I do not mean that a poet can never show himself a poet in prose; but that being one, his desire and necessity will be to write in verse ”

“ In the following specimen, assonance seems in some measure to take the place of rime.
Haply, the river of Time—
As it grows, as the towns on its marge
Fling their wavering lights
On a wider, statelier stream—
May acquire, if not the calm
Of its early mountainous shore,
Yet a solemn peace of its own. ”

“ Dryden was of course quite right in objecting to the claim that imaginative poetry ought to seek the form closest to the language of real life. The real question is whether rimed verse is a more imaginative and highly poetic form than blank verse; modern opinion would unanimously answer in the negative.
It strikes a modern reader as curious that Dryden and his contemporaries should have advocated the use of rime in tragedy rather than in comedy; but we have the clew to their feeling in the saying that "serious plays ought not to imitate conversation too nearly." ”

“ While prose requires intellectual life and emotional life, poetry seems to require not only intellectual life and emotional life but rhythmic life.... Unless the rhythm of any metrical passage is so vigorous, so natural, and so free that it seems as though it could live, if need were, by its rhythm alone, has that passage any right to exist? ”

“ Wherever any object takes such a hold of the mind as to make us dwell upon it, and brood over it, melting the heart in tenderness, or kindling it to a sentiment of enthusiasm; wherever a movement of imagination or passion is impressed on the mind, by which it seeks to prolong and repeat the emotion, to bring all other objects into accord with it, and to give the same movement of harmony, sustained and continuous, or gradually varied, according to the occasion, to the sounds that express it—this is poetry. The musical in sound is the sustained and continuous ”

“ Our new empiricism, following where intuition leads the way, comprehends the function of vibrations: it perceives that every movement of matter, seized upon by universal force, is vibratory; that vibrations, and nothing else, convey through the body the look and voice of nature to the soul; that thus alone can one incarnate individuality address its fellow; that, to use old Bunyan's imagery, these vibrations knock at the ear-gate, and are visible to the eye-gate, and are sentient at the gates of touch of the living temple. ”

“ I have said that poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings; it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquillity; the emotion is contemplated till, by a species of reaction, the tranquillity gradually disappears, and an emotion, kindred to that which was before the subject of contemplation, is gradually produced, and does itself actually exist in the mind. ”

“ The present system does, in fact, represent a characteristic feature of modern English as distinguished from early English verse; namely, that our metres strive after a regular alternation of stress and no-stress, and that the ear imagines this alternation even where (if it were a matter of prose utterance) it can scarcely be said to exist.
It would be absurd to strive with any warmth for the classical system of terminology in English prosody. It is undoubtedly not an ideal system, nor such a one as we should adopt if we were naming everything anew ”

“ Wild Spirit, which art moving everywhere;
Destroyer and Preserver; hear, oh hear!
(Shelley: Ode to the West Wind. 1819.)
In this case the tercets are united in groups of three to form a strophe of fourteen lines together with a final couplet riming with the middle line of the preceding tercet.
The true has no value beyond the sham:
As well the counter as coin, I submit,
When your table's a hat, and your prize a dram.
Stake your counter as boldly every whit,
Venture as warily, use the same skill,
Do your best, whether winning or losing it,
If you choose to play!—is my principle. ”