Talks on Poetry

TALK SIX

We spoke of Hugo soon after discussing, the value of metre. Apropos of Hugo I may continue my remarks on metre by a brief consideration of how metre operates in English and French and some other languages. Let me give you, as a short guide, a piece of verse composed by Coleridge and adapted in some places as well as enlarged at the close by Amal — not exactly rendered, as I would believe if I were of D'Annunzio's temper, belle or magni-fique by being made Amalienne. At the same time it tells us the characteristic of each important metrical foot and illustrates in the greater part of the line the very foot which is being spoken of. Coleridge is employing the old terminology of long and short for what we now call stress and slack.

Thus far Coleridge adapted. Now the enlargement. Trochees and Iambics (or Iambs) are opposites, so are Dactyls and Anapaests, Amphibrachs and Amphimacers (or Cretics). But Spondees are left unopposed. So I have to round off:

After the "giant racer", "a tail-end" is quite in place, you will agree. The Pyrrhic is a pretty common foot in English, but, unlike the others, it must always be followed by some other foot and cannot repeat itself. If you put even two Pyrrhics in succession —

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that is, four shorts in two pairs — you will come in for as much criticism from Prosodists as this Ashram of Yoga has incurred from Puritans by its group on group of girls in "shorts".

When somehow four shorts (or slacks) do happen in succession; as in the second line of the three —

With the brief beauty of her face drunk, blind

The song-impetuous mind? —

what are we to do? The way out is the foot named tribrach: three slacks. The first two feet of the line in question would be scanned as a tribrach and an iamb:

In earlier days the poet would have solved the problem by putting an apostrophe after th and contracting the three slacks to two: "To th' in..." A sort of solution is also possible by giving the opening syllable of "inexhaustible" a minor accent and converting the tribrach into what is termed a glide-anapaest — an anapaest in which a syllable (here the third) starts with a vowel almost merging with the vowel-end of the preceding syllable. (The last foot — "... tuous mind" — of line 3 is also a glide-anapaest.)

Now you are technically equipped to meet every situation. Pope, in his Essay on Man, wrote:

Know then thyself, presume not God to scan: The proper study of mankind is Man.

But if you know your feet you can even attempt the scansion of the poetry written by an Avatar, the poetic work of Sri Aurobindo whom we regard as the Incarnate Divine: you can flout Pope's warning and presume to scan God! But before you disobey that Papal injunction against sacrilege, I should advise you to add to your technical equipment some understanding of the metrical needs of the inspiration. About this, anon.

English metre is based on stress. Let us not forget that the English language is a language of stresses. It is never enough to know the correct pronunciation of English words in order to speak

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English with an English intonation. We must deliver hammer-strokes upon certain syllables. This hammer-striking is at a fixed place in a word and unless we know the place we shall commit a lot of awkwardness in metricising our phrases and composing poetry; for, what we think to be correct metre will turn out to be a chaos of stresses to the ear that knows where the hammer-strokes should fall. There is, of course, another point to bear in mind in the speaking of English. It is something that in an exaggerated form gave to the traitor Englishman who used to broadcast over Berlin Radio during World War II the name "Lord Haw-Haw". English is to be haw-hawed to a certain extent — a bit of extra breath, a bit of special throat-work and a bit of stylishness in the enunciation add the last touch of Englishness to "the tongue that Shakespeare spake". Not that all Englishmen themselves know how to use their own tongue well. Bernard Shaw has remarked that no Englishman can open his mouth to speak his own language without your learning to hate him. This piece of typical Shavian paradox means that even Englishmen must consciously train themselves to speak if they are to achieve English worth hearing.

Shaw is famous for his neat inversion of common opinion in order to shake us up from conventional thinking. He sometimes hits on truths whose presence people do not realise. I remember what he said apropos of the result of the Suffragette Movement of nearly fifty years ago. The Suffragettes were the women who under leaders like Mrs. Pankhurst claimed the right of suffrage, the right to vote. In the first decade of the present century Englishwomen woke up to a sense of inferiority because men could go to the polling booth and women could not. In England today women can influence elections by their votes and even sit in Parliament. In France women have had no suffrage up to now. They evidently feel not the slightest need to go to the polling booth in order to influence the election of ministers or the trend of politics. Frenchwomen are quite confident of their hold on the minds of their menfolk — perhaps through both the hearts and the stomachs of the males. If the Frenchman votes for a candidate or takes to a political action unapproved by his better half, he may get a frigid look at night and a rotten breakfast in the morning — two things he dreads very much. Englishwomen did not feel so sure of their grip on their menfolk and they organised groups of resolute skirted fighters for the right to vote. Demonstrations were held in public

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and women brandishing their umbrellas went about clamouring for justice and equality. They would, for instance, confront a police-man and ask him if he was for granting the vote to women. If he did not say "Yes" he would get his moustaches twisted. Even the King became a target for criticism and opposition. Indeed, as the chief male in the United Kingdom he was held especially respon-sible for the deaf ear turned by men to the Suffragettes' clamour. Once at the Derby the King's horse was in the lead near the winning post. A Suffragette rushed out to the course and tried, as it were, to twist the horse's moustaches. She was knocked down but the animal too had a toss and the King lost the race. Soon after, World War I broke out. At once the Suffragettes laid down their militant umbrellas and threw themselves whole-heartedly into co-operation with their men. What the twisting of moustaches had failed to do, this generous gesture achieved. Immediately after the War the women were given access to the ballot-box. What was the comment of Bernard Shaw? He said, "Thank God women are at last equal to men. I can now kick a woman with impunity." This hits us in the eye with the truth that being officially equal is not an unmitigated advantage for women and can in fact rob them of certain privileges and superiorities enjoyed by them in private.

Shaw's itch to kick an Englishman as soon as he spoke his own language is a reminder all the more pointed for us who are not even Englishmen and yet use their language for our creative as well as practical purposes. We must try our best to give the language its true sound, and so far as metre is concerned it is the attention to the strong stresses that matters most. German too builds on stress. But French does not. French words have a kind of tone-accent on the last syllable. This naturally does not play a determinant role in the metre. French metre consists of counting the number of syllables. Each foot consists of two syllables and a certain number of such dissyllabic units make a line. Purely metrical beauty is thus debarred. You cannot have a variety of metrical patterns as you can in English with the possibility of disposing variously the stress and the slack in a foot. But, as a critic has observed, English on the other hand cannot approach the wonderful effects produced in French by diphthongs, nasals and long syllables. The critic goes on to say that the wretched indeter-minate vowels in English and the English tendency to pronounce clearly just one syllable, in every polysyllabic word or word-group,

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cut English off from such effects as Hugo's

Comme c'est triste voir s'enfuir les hirondelles, (How sad to see the swallows fly away,)

or

Puisque j'ai vu tomber dans l'onde de ma vie Une feuille de rose arrachee a tes jours, (Since I have seen upon my life's wave fall One rose-leaf that was torn out of thy days,)

or

Et venger Athalie, Achab et Jezabel.

(And to avenge Athalie, Achab and Jezabel.)

A language which goes by hammer-strokes is incapable of getting the full value out of words like "Jezabel". Sri Aurobindo has somewhere mentioned that an Englishman, when he wants to say "Strawberries", seems just to say "Strawbs", because the syllables that are unstressed tend to get slurred over. Similarly an English-man. would make "Jezabel" sound like Jezz'bl. His language can-not produce the same effect as the French which makes each of the three syllables distinct with its proper vowel-length: Je-za-bel.

English differs from French in also being less inflected. For instance, French adjectives as well as past participles have a mas-culine and a feminine gender and therefore different endings, while in English the same adjective-sound or participle-sound does duty for both the genders and the neuter gender into the bargain. The inflection in French is not sufficient to allow a large freedom in word-arrangement as in Latin or Greek, and whatever freedom it does allow is not very deliberately exploited: I know of only one great poet who exploits it to a marked result — Mallarme. Latin simply invites you to virtuosities of word-arrangement. In English the words are related to one another by their order in a sentence and not by inflections. Therefore one single order, with minor exceptions, rules the English sentence. Latin and also Greek are so inflected that they can vary the order as they please: the word-endings immediately denote the proper connections of the words. Words which the writer has married in his mind can stand quite separate in his sentence without the reader ever being fooled into thinking they have obtained a divorce. If a Latin poet were to translate Sri Aurobindo's

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I caught for some eternal eye the sudden

Kingfisher flashing to a darkling pool

and if he thought that a finer Latin rhythm would be got from the words by completely breaking up Sri Aurobindo's order he could go even to the length of rearranging them in such a manner that a step-by-step translation back into English might read:

Kingfisher some eternal pool the sudden

I to a darkling flashing caught for eye.

What would be gibberish in English might be marvellous literature in Latin. The words in the above lines would in their Latin forms indicate with perfect precision how they were to be mentally combined in order to make the intended sense. The highly inflec-ted character of Latin, like that of Greek, enables this language to achieve countless delicate beauties of rhythm which are impossible in English.

Another difference of Latin from English is that metre in Latin is based on the lengths of vowels, the time taken by the voice to pass over a long vowel or a short one — and in Latin the time is determined not only by the intrinsic length or shortness of a vowel but also by the presence of consonants coming after the vowel, consonants of the next word no less than the same word since in Latin, unlike in English, the words do not stand out in their individuality as separate units but tend to join up with each other in a general flow. Stress is not the principal determinant. The metres of all ancient languages, including our Sanskrit, are not accentual but quantitative. The quantitative metres wove delight-ful patterns which the poets never broke, and the attention to proper quantities brought out the full value of a vowel — as French does also by its lack of stress.

Not that in English no vowel can get its full value. It can but only when it is stressed and acquires importance by the voice-weight on it. Of course, among the unstressed vowels, the ear has to distin-guish between the intrinsic long and the intrinsic short. Part of the subtly expressive power of a line of poetry depends on the distinc-tion. But normally the intrinsic long does not come into its own in the full sense, even when it contributes to a line's expressive power. To make it acquire its full value we should have to establish

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a new principle of metre or rather to develop a principle which is latent in the language and unconsciously operative on many occa-sions yet not openly recognised. The development has been made by Sri Aurobindo in what he calls "true English quantity" as contrasted to the quantity of the old languages transferred un-naturally into English. Some day I shall elaborate on this matter. At the moment we are concerned with English metre as it stands.

A few words now about practical scansion. We have spoken of the basic beat and the modulations. In English, a lot of modulated movement is the rule, but sometimes we have a choice between one such movement and another. There can be, technically, alter-native scansisons. But I believe there is always one scansion which is of true help to the significance and the feeling of a line. The critic Chapman has instanced the opening of Sarojini Naidu's Flute-player of Vrindavan as posing us a small problem in scansion. Technically both the following lines —

Why didst thou play thy matchless flute

'Neath the Kadamba tree? —

have a trochee as their first foot: "Why didst", "Neath the". But if the second line is given a trochaic start the effect is flat and artificial in rhythm, not expressive of the delicate sentiment, with its warm unexpressed shades. This line should be scanned:

A single stressed syllable standing at the beginning of a line as here is known as a truncated foot. It may be compensated, as here, by an extra syllable in the next, but at times there is no compensa-tion: take Marlowe's famous bombast —

On rare occasions a truncated foot comes elsewhere than at the beginning to make what may be called syncopation, a term which in regard to language means really the shortening of a word by dropping a letter or a syllable, as "symbology" for "symbolology". (If some day the oddities of your own professor come in for serious study, we may get the syncopated coinage: Amalogy.) Shakes-

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peare has even that rarer phenomenon, double syncopation:

The last two feet have only one syllable each — a long stressed syllable which we are supposed to lengthen out and weigh down heavily to make up for the missing part.

Lines with a truncated first foot or syncopation elsewhere are not hard to scan, for the abnormal movement is apparent. Diffi-culty comes in when a line like Sri Aurobindo's

Measuring vast pain in his immortal mind

is met with in a blank verse of pentameters on an iambic base. We may scan it, a little awkwardly, as

where the prominent feature is an inverted third foot, a trochee in place of the expected iamb: the initial trochee is too frequent to be notable. Or we may scan the verse as

where there are two feet with minor accents: the second takes the major on "pain" and the minor on "vast", the third has only one accent and that a minor on the usually unaccented "his" in order to help out the rhythm. Or else we may adopt the scansion:

where the first foot is a dactyl and the second a spondee.

As a foot consisting of one slack and two stresses is not part of normal English prosody but as the adjective "vast" is too impor-tant to be slightly slurred over with a minor accent, the second way of scanning disqualifies itself. The first gives "vast" its due weight, but divides it from "pain" and confers on the latter an extra impor-tance by making it start an inverted foot; and the scansion breaks up, just as the second scansion does, the present participle "Measur-ing". One feels that no special need exists to stick out "pain" so

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much and that "vast pain" loses its true effect if divided and that the suggestive power of "Measuring" is also maimed when the word is broken up. The third scansion allows the second foot its full force by making a spondee of "vast pain" and, by dactylising the first foot, renders the participle "Measuring" a strong and deep metrical movement which answers to the psychological act ex-pressed and which strikes one as most apt vis-a-vis the spondaic massiveness of the next foot whose verbal significance — "vast pain" — is intended to be both balanced and combated by the verbal significance of "Measuring". Evidently the third scansion is the sole one in tune with the inspiration and also with the natural reading of the line. In dealing with the metrics of a poet like Sri Aurobindo we have to be careful in particular about what I have designated as the inner form: we must see closely to its needs when we scan the outer.

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