Poetic Rhythms in Prose

ONE of the things that critics often speak of is prose rhythm, but if you look in the books to find out what prose rhythm is you will gain but small comfort. It appears to be something that a man of taste will recognize and feel and like (if it be good), but no one has yet said anything very definite about it; so if you do not see it for yourself, you must get on as well as you can without.

Different authors have been said to have a good rhythm, or not to have one. Thus of Cardinal Newman it is written¹ that he “ understood perfectly the symbolic value of rhythm, and the possibility of imposing upon a series of simple words, by delicately sensitive adjustment, a power over the feelings like that of an incantation.” Whereas of Mr. Pater I read ² that his work “ is often far more like a piece of mosaic than a passage in music, and seems, here and there, to lack the true rhythmical life of words, and the fine freedom and richness of effect that such rhythmical life produces.” I like to think that I understand such passages when I turn to the authors themselves, but, with my painful academic habit of mind, I sometimes ask myself: “ What is this rhythm in prose ? Is it a thing definable ? Will any good come from trying to observe it, to abstract it, to note its qualities and effects ? Can we formulate it in such particular terms that one who has no previous inkling of it shall recognize it, and feel that thereby good prose has something for him that it never had before? ” So far, however, I must confess that I have by no means satisfied myself in the matter.

There is something attractive in the subject, all the same, something alluring ; I suspect that it rather fascinates one. The conception of this undercurrent of living power, making itself felt, though unobserved in its processes and its modes of action; this formative resolvent; this indefinable pulsing, which thaws out the rigidity of prose, as it were, which brings it into harmony, like the unseen forces of the earth in springtime, brings it into harmony with nature herself as she goes heaving along from all time-was to eternity, with unceasing rhythm and life, — it takes a hold on one’s imagination. And after all, the imagination is one way toward truth ; it is by his imagination that one knows the scholar.

Rather easier than to tell what is good prose rhythm is to tell what it is not: and nowadays, when the expression “ poetic prose “ has a certain vogue, it is good to clear one’s mind on the subject; to understand, namely, that good prose does not easily adopt the especial garment of poetry. Even so far back as Aristotle, that man who was the first to understand so many things now simple, the matter was observed. Certain rather flashy writers, it would seem, had misled public taste into feeling that prose was at its best when it was drifting into poetry. Aristotle, however, as though conscious of the responsibility resting on him of laying down the law for all coming critics, remarks that it is the opinion of most uneducated people that a poetical style in prose is the finest, but adds that “the idea is erroneous, the styles of prose and of poetry being distinct.”³ And all the way down from Aristotle the idea has been dimly present in the critical mind that distinctly poetic rhythms in prose were a blemish rather than a beauty. One hears of unconscious hexameters in Livy, of the couplets (lacking only rhyme) in Rousseau, of “ many a scanning line ” in Dryden.

All this sounds well, and there is good sense in it. Just as the different arts really have different powers and different methods, and do not successfully poach on one another’s preserves, so one thing can be done best by good poetry, and another by good prose ; nor is it very clear that anything can be done best by a mixture of the two. Still, one is sometimes led to think the critics on the way toward pedantry ; to think a poetic rhythm in prose not necessarily very offensive even to a cultivated ear ; in other words, to fancy that the matter may be pushed rather too far. Looking earnestly for the real fact without much regard to theory, I believe that one might well agree with Wordsworth, who says that “lines and passages of metre so naturally occur in prose that it would be scarcely possible to avoid them, even were it desirable.” ⁴

Poetic rhythm may certainly be found here and there without much hunting.⁵

is the remark of a rough character, not in a ballad by Rudyard Kipling, but in a prose tale by Gilbert Parker. In a less romantic place, namely, the Editor’s Study of Harper’s, I once read : —

But the little gem was quaintly pretending to be prose, and probably will not be found in the collected poems of its gifted author.

Even in the great lords of creation we may find something of the sort. Thus, although Mr. Gates says of Newman that there is not “any of the sing-song of pseudo-poetic prose ” in his cadences, one of the passages to which he afterwards refers makes one feel doubtful. “ To consider the world in its length and breadth,” writes Newman at the beginning of the passage in question ; and if he had only gone on, “ is an excellent thing to do,” the metrical effect would probably have been more easily noticed. So also Mr. Pater, who thinks that Dryden’s prose is “ vitiated ” by those scanning lines, allows himself certain lapses not only in Marius, but elsewhere. “ Perhaps,” he says, in writing of Botticelli,

While of Marius he says that

Such matters, however, passed unnoticed, quite clearly, with Mr. Pater and Cardinal Newman, and it would seem rather like pedantry to insist that because you can, if you try hard enough, scan a dozen words or so, they should not have their place in a bit of prose. Often, indeed, the words scan only when pulled out of their connection ; in their place, as they were written, there is little hint of metrical effect. In the celebrated description of St. Mark’s, Mr. Ruskin has so artfully mingled metre with his prose that in some cases it will pass quite unnoticed until one’s attention is called to it. “ The figures,” he writes, “ indistinct among the gleaming of the golden ground through the leaves beside them, interrupted and dim, like the morning light as it faded hack among the branches of Eden when first its gates were angelguarded long ago.” Here we have at the end six iambic feet, to use the classical name, but it seems harsh to separate off the alexandrine : —

Metrically, it can be read as a six-foot iambic, but it was hardly meant to be read with just such an accentuation, and obviously we gain no pleasure from forcing a metrical swing upon prose which was meant to be read in a manner quite different.

There are times, however, when the metrical effect is hard to avoid, and times, moreover, when the temptation to metre is powerful, but ruinous. Here, for instance, are two passages from The Teacher of a Violin, by Mr. Shorthouse :

“ News of a world beyond the thought of those Who merely haunt the palaces of earth.”

In this passage, coming as it does at the very end of a paragraph, there will be in the minds of some a certain self-justification. But the next extract ends very unhappily : —

In this case, the reader’s ear becomes used, for good or ill, to the iambic movement, broken a little now and then by an anapest as in blank verse, having an alexandrine which offers no real bar to the metre, and so passes on and on, until at the very end comes that “ sufficient and adequate voice ” which at the moment seems so very insufficient and inadequate. This is really annoying: it is not merely the academic question, if you choose to call it so, whether scanning lines are to be allowed in prose or not ; it is a positive jar upon the ear ; it is harsh, painful. It is only imperfect poetry ; it has as bad an effect as an assonance in blank verse.

Sometimes the case is not precisely the same. It is not that we have anything that is really metrical, but we have something that comes pretty near it, — something so nearly metrical that, our ear finds the metre out, and is constantly tantalized by being so near it, and yet never attaining it in any completeness. I notice this more than elsewhere in prose written by poets. William Morris once wrote The Story of the Glittering Plain, in a curious sort of diction which, although probably never used by any living man except the author, had a kind of old-fashioned effect. Here is a passage which I believe is rather representative : —

“ So he opened the locker again, and drew out thence a great horn of some huge neat of the outlands, which was girthed and stopped with silver, and also a golden cup, and gave it into Hallblithe’s hand, and said, ‘ Drink, O black-fledged nestling ! But call a health over the cup if thou wilt.’ So Hallblithe raised the cup aloft, and cried, ‘ Health to the House of the Raven and to them that love it! An ill day to its foemen ! ’ Then he set his lips to the cup and drank ; and that wine seemed to him better and stronger than any he had ever tasted.”

Now, whatever excellence that prose has in the way of rhythm, it is not the excellence of prose rhythm, for by a few changes one can turn it into a sort of hexameter (with apologies to the eminent author) as follows : —

In this case the prose is so near to verse that one is constantly slipping over the edge. If one feels no jar at such diction, if one feels rather a certain pleasure at it, that pleasure would seem to be of the kind given by poetry, and rather poor poetry at that.

Much the same thing is a fault of one of the less known stories of Edgar Allan Poe, in which his right hand had lost its cunning. The only reason for dragging it out is that it really is such an instructive example. It is named Eleanora. The first paragraph has a good prose rhythm, and the second is not so bad ; the third is as follows : —

“ She whom I loved in youth, and of whom I now pen calmly and distinctly these remembrances, was the sole daughter of the only sister of my mother, long departed. Eleanora was the name of my cousin. We had always lived together, beneath a tropical sun, in the Valley of the Many-Colored Grass. No unguided footstep ever came upon that vale ; for it lay far away up among a range of giant hills that hung beetling round about it, shutting out the sunlight from its sweetest recesses. No path was trodden in the vicinity; and to reach our happy home, there was need of putting back with force the foliage of many thousands of forest trees, and of crushing to death the glories of many millions of fragrant flowers. Thus it was that we lived alone, knowing nothing of the world without the valley, — I and my cousin and her mother.”

Just near enough to be annoying is this to

For it lay Far away, etc.

There is a good deal more of the same sort in the tale ; the next paragraph to the last, for instance, begins, “ I wedded, nor dreaded the curse I had invoked ; ” and throughout the story one feels that there is poetical movement somewhere close at hand, if only one could get hold of it.

Thus far of the facts in the case: it seems as if there could be no doubt that certain approaches to metre in prose are distinctly harsh ; or perhaps a better word is “ annoying.” Aside from the question, What constitutes good prose rhythm ? we may feel assured that the introduction of poor poetical rhythm has an effect rather irritating than otherwise, and that even with good poetical rhythm the transition from metre to prose is apt to be trying.

All this becomes plainer if we compare it with what little we really know of rhythm from the standpoint of the psychologist. Although the matter is not wholly clear to me, it would seem that to some extent rhythm is subjective, that it is imposed by the mind upon this or that. Any one can try the experiment readily enough by listening to the puffs of a locomotive engine, or to the noise made by the car-wheels going over the ends of the railroad tracks. You will find generally that you can make them go in one rhythm or another, to suit yourself. People are rather different about it, but almost every one can make a watch or a clock tick, one, two — one, two — and so on ; or one, two, three — one, two, three; a good many people can go much farther. So it is with a great number of recurrent sounds ; they may not actually differ in stress, but the mind imposes a sort of rhythm, so that we hear a stick dragged along the paling, a drop of rain falling in a particular place, or anything of the sort, in a kind of “ pattern,” as I used to call it when a boy. Now in poetry this “ pattern ” is suggested to us by the look of the poem, if we are experienced ; sometimes the metre is not apparent, however, and we have to make one or two trials before we get rightly started. But the idea once established, the mind continues to impose the rhythm upon everything that comes along; thus in the beginning of Elaine, for instance : —

Here the first two lines are so regular that we get at once the notion of the iambic rhythm, so that the variations in the third and fourth lines are noticeable, though not offensive, being slight. The words “high” and “guarded” are accented, a thing out of the usual recurrence ; but this serves to give them an emphasis which is not out of place. The words “tower to the east” must be pronounced rapidly, which gives perhaps a feeling in harmony with the airy height of the tower. Then, as the poem goes on, there are enough verses perfectly regular to keep the rhythm well in mind, so that the variations from it may serve the purposes of the poet. All this is repeated many times in the experience of any reader of poetry. The mind gets the idea of the rhythm, and imposes this idea on all that comes before it; when it cannot impose the rhythm without doing real violence to ordinary usage, then, if the interruption be slight there is a concentration of attention, and if the reason be clear we go cheerfully on. But in such passages as those quoted the interruption is not slight; take the second quoted from Mr. Shorthouse, or let us take another example from the same book : —

“ A world of human suffering and doubt and terror, of love unrequited, of righteousness unrecognized, of toil and sorrow and despair unrelieved, until, in the thronged theatres and market-places, where life stands waiting its abiding doom, the times and seasons of the world’s harvest being fully ripe, the riddle of righteousness and wrong is answered, and in the sad gray dawn of the eternal day the dividing sickle is put in.”

Here the first words may give us the effect of rhythm. If they do not, we go on with no such idea until we come to the next set of italicized words, and then no sooner do we catch the rhythm than we are landed in prose again; in a minute or two we have rhythm once more, then once more it vanishes.

All this makes what we may really call harshness ; it is like coasting into a stretch of sand at the bottom of a hill, or like a train running off the track. And this difficulty will always attend the change from metre to prose; for one of the characteristics of metrical prose is that you never know when the metre is coming or when it is going to stop. In the other extracts the case is somewhat different. There it would seem that the mind gets a sort of inkling of the way things should go, but do not, and that we have a painful disappointment in expecting a recurrence that does not recur. Such disappointments are recognized by the students of scientific æsthetic in many directions; they are called, I believe, “ repressive pains.” In ordinary language I should call them disappointments ; but whatever he their best name, the reader of metrical prose stands in danger of them.

So much for metrical snatches in prose; where they are only dimly apprehended they may not trouble us, but as soon as we appreciate them they offend. They do not make good prose rhythm: they are, as has always been said, faults, blemishes in good prose.

The difference between the rhythm of poetry arid the rhythm of prose is the difference in form between conventionalized designs and the freer representations of nature. In point of time, poetry always comes first so far as art is concerned, just as the first drawing and painting is always in some degree conventional. We gain a certain pleasure from poetic rhythm as such, just as we gain a certain pleasure from conventionalized design as such. It is true that in painting and drawing the most effective expressions are the more natural, which is hardly the case in poetry and prose. I suppose the difference is that in the graphic arts the forms go for so much more ; we have no way of getting at the meaning except by the forms (which is not the case in poetry and prose) ; we notice so much more readily the incongruity between the unnatural form and the nature of the subject. Be this as it may, the comparison may at least serve as a simile : in poetical rhythm we have the conventionalized roll of the wave border ; in prose rhythm we have the irregularity of the waves themselves, in which, however, any one may perceive sufficient regularity for its own kind of pleasure. Or, to change the figure a little, in prose rhythm we have the lingering, hurrying, eddying course of the current of some little river. And this figure is rather better than the other, for prose proceeds in very much the way such a lazy little river does. It seems to be caused by successive periods of alternate hasting over considerable lengths of slightly accented words, and eddying around groups of accents more thickly put together than is possible in poetry.

But I see that I am allowing myself to be tempted into writing of what I do not understand ; I must remain content with the comparisons. It may be remarked, however, that in the matter of form only are the comparisons suggestive ; we prefer the breakers on the beach and the river in the meadow-land for many reasons beside their abstract form ; color, light and shade, and all the current of ideas brought along by association are far more important. So do we prefer poetry to prose often enough for many other reasons than their mere metrical effect; indeed, rather a small number of persons even apprehend the metrical effect of either. They read poetry as if it were prose, and prose as if it were anything you please. To abstract the rhythmical effect is not so very easy, any more than it is easy to abstract the sensations of pure form from the other sensations and perceptions that we gain from ocean or river. But those who do abstract these qualities find, when they drop analysis and proceed with the simple synthetic appreciation needful to art, that they have gained a something which gives to prose as well as to poetry a quality which they could ill afford to spare.

Edward E. Hale, Jr.