Mr. Torrence's Metrical Art

THE CONTRIBUTORS’ CLUB

For the sake of the making of English verse in America, attention should be asked to that which an American poet has lately accomplished in a rich and, in America, seldom exploited field. Mr. Ridgely Torrence’s Threnody at the Hunting Season in the September Atlantic is, to write only of its technique, a technical triumph in which every one who is interested in the future of poetry and who knows how to examine and delight in its methods and potencies must share.

To the charge that for the majority of even the responsive and appreciative the demesne of blank verse is closed, there is, unfortunately, no denial; but indeed too few “lovers of poetry” read any verse with “the satisfaction of the rounded comprehension.” Certain inventions in workmanship — harmony, the conquest and subtleties of words, melody, felicity of imagery — are open to these perceptive ones, but the medium of these, namely, the mechanism which lies deeper than the poem’s form, is unregarded, and thus the “thrill within the thrill” is lost. This mechanism is not more attended to than, by the opera devotee absorbed in vocal feats, is the intricate Wagnerian orchestration. There is even a popular belief that blank verse and irregularly rhymed forms are easy matters, in craftsmanship not comparable to the chant royal and the double ballade. And what may be expected from the layman, when a distinguished and, in other respects, cultivated American critic and poet has of late openly declared that “blank verse is laziness ? ”

Briefly to expound the direction which taste must take to make the complexities of all verse its own is not easy, but, unlike the love of poetry, a fuller appreciation of poetry may be taught. And the principle which can hardly be too frequently enunciated is that verse is not constructed upon a basis of syllables, but of stress. To feel this alone is to suffer revolution, but to proceed with its application is to “open innumerable doors.”

Such perception is able to greet the poet’s reason in rushing his reader breathless down a colonnade of unaccented syllables to some splendid throne at the end, as Swinburne’s

The savour and odour of old-world pine forests; or, to turn to Mr. Torrence’s Threnody, in touching out stroke after stroke upon just the magic number of successively accented syllables, as in his

or

Of love’s long utmost heavenward endeavor; or in his line which it is physically impossible not to read as if each of its first four syllables were a full iambus,—

So also the ear delights in his line crowded richly with syllables, —

which much of the criticism of the eighteenth century, and too much of the nineteenth, would have called mere cacophony, triumphantly pointing to the redundance of syllables and the “erroneous” fall of accent. But, if one will remember that poetry is greater than arithmetic, and not to be counted off upon one’s fingers, and if the ear and the spirit of the line alone are consulted, it will be found, in its stress, to be a pure, full-flowing iambic pentameter.

Again, one notes how the bells’ resonance is contrived in

much as Milton made a brook by saying “Siloa’s brook” instead of holding to the tranquil, still-water word “Siloam.”

And how the trained ear finds pleasure in that extra syllable laid boldly upon the end of the line,—

or when it is left clinging to that wailing eleventh syllable in

or is laden with cadences in the manydeviced stanza,—

or is caught, at the poet’s will, in three varied effects of indescribable sadness; first, in that next heavy-footed, unaccented, many-syllabled

or second, in the line (strewn with those prodigal o’s), with its accents exquisitely déplacés, —

in which the effect would have been ruined by the tripping iambus of “upon;” and third, by the dragging Alexandrine,

And what imagery of burdened boughs and wind is released from the line with its extra-metrical syllable in “heavy,” —

All these are matters which are as far beyond the critic’s precept as is the birth of poetry itself, and to be alive to these pleasures is comparable to having knowledge of the speech of the sea; while never to have known them is to denominate blank verse “laziness,” or to deplore the “liberties,” forsooth, taken by the poets.

Lately, in talk with a cultivated gentleman who is engaged upon a play to be executed in blank verse because he feels that he “does not sufficiently understand metre to attempt anything else,” Shakespeare was named.

“Ah, yes,” said this gentleman, “ Shakespeare was exceedingly careless in his use of metre. But of course he could do what he liked. In fact, one is always finding most inexcusable liberties taken with metre, by all the great poets.”

Truly, Shakespeare played havoc with the iambic pentameter. But, as Mr. Henry Newbolt has said, in his admirable essay upon The Future of English Verse, the only possible answer to these people is: “Whose iambic pentameter?”

Indeed, there is virtually no limit to the possible deviations of verse from the colorless normal of its form; and these deviations — and this is the point to be emphasized — are essential to English verse. Page after page of rhymed or unrhymed pentameter — in which, as Mr. Lang says,

The wave behind impels the wave before — is no more truly poetry than the intoning of do re mi fa sol an infinite number of times is song.

It is in these difficult and delicate particulars that Mr. Torrence has succeeded in the composition — in the painter’s sense — of his Threnody, Consider, for example, his first two verses,—

and note the rush of the first anapests subsiding to the orderly iambic beat, with the delicate fall of accent upon“blows,” where, according to the precepts, it “does not belong,” though thus the very wind of dusk is in it. In the third verse, —

the single lawless trochee modulates the entire line, and, one may incidentally note, isolates itself as the voice would isolate “nightly” in speech. And not until the fourth verse does the waiting ear greet the beat and tread of a full ri-tum, ri-tum, ri-tum iambic pentameter,—

which holds something of the march of the stars, as, similarly, the march of days is in its next use two lines farther on,— Passed up the ways of time to sing and part. Then, the approach having been made, occurs the first trimeter, —

followed by three slightly “irregular” verses given over to imagery, —

Thereafter the movement sweeps on, spurred forward by the initial “misplaced ” accent, trochee and iambus dovetailed at will,—

and so to the tranquil iambics which close the first scene, —

So the Threnody proceeds with fine art and inspired touch in the control of its music, and it is hardly too much to say that there is not a deviation or an eccentricity or a surprise in stress that is not impelled. But if, by this analysis, the unprogressive are answered who regard all such variation as caprices and the “ignoring of accent,” there arise now the more imaginative critics who cry that all such effects must be instinctive, compact of the poet’s inspiration. Mr. Henry Dwight Sedgwick has already quoted George Savile, Marquis of Halifax, who, in accepting the dedication of Cotton’s translation of Montaigne, actually said of that artist and artificer, —

“He showeth by a generous kind of negligence that he did not write for praise . . . and dependeth wholly upon the natural force of what is his own.”

This ignorant opinion attacks more than any other the art of writing, forgetting that there can be no flame unpreceded by an infinite process of building up that which burns. No one regrets that “day of small and laborious ingenuities,” the time of “buzzing in a corner, trifling with monosyllables;” but the business of taking infinite pains is more than these. And this is admitted to the prose stylist, yet where more than in poetry is Mr. Pater’s dictum true, that “all beauty is only fineness of truth, or what we call expression, the finer accommodation of speech to that vision within?” And where, save in his sole medium, words and metre, is the poet to strive for that fineness of truth in bodying forth his vision ?

The poet’s right deliberately to secure effects by his choice of words has long been admitted; his right to secure effects by his metre would seem to be a grave offense. There will be many, for example, to whom metrical triumphs are unknown, who will readily note, in the lines just quoted, the effect within an effect by which variety is secured when in “doors,” “pours,” and “shores,” though the ear is kept upon one note, the eye detects no rhyme; and yet one is prepared by past performances to hear some methodical commentator even go a step farther and announce that these are not true rhymes for this very reason! However, he may be anticipated by commendation of the taste which dictated the offering of “noon” and “June" — an isolated instance, instead of true rhymes, of that “partial resemblance, that perfect use of imperfect rhymes which is an element of beauty.” Indeed, these word felicities are within the ken of every “lover of poetry;” as will be the Threnody’s singing bird that “ burned aloud; ” or

or

or even the opposite effects secured in two successive lines by the mere use of o, — namely, the gladness of the russet verse,—

and the dolour of its fellow,—

And, too, there is hardly a “lover of poetry” from whom will be hidden the noble elevation of

or of what may be termed the poem’s peroration, beginning with

And these will commend the absence of all sensuous color effects, or effects secured by any luxurious use of words; and even the total absence of the exclamation point — that offense too often allowed “in a kind most hateful to the Muses” — even though that clarion

might have tempted it. And yet, alert for all like gratifications of diction and taste, there will be many who will miss the essential musical structure of the poem, as of all poetry. They respond to the singing ecstasy of verse, and never fathom the utter sweetness and solemnity of the orchestration.

But in truth there is not heard with frequency in modern verse such an orchestra as this which in the Threnody Mr. Torrence has summoned to his hand.