by Ezra Pound
length
Dead as a buried vestal whose whole
strength
Goes, when the grate above shuts heavily,
So dwell these noiseless girls, patient to see
Like priestesses because of sin impure
Penanced forever, who resigned endure,
Having that once drunk sweetness to the
dregs.
And every eve, Sordello’s visit begs
Pardon for them; constant at eve he
came
To sit beside each in her turn, the same
As one of them, a certain space; and
awe
Made a great indistinctness till he saw
Sunset slant cheerful through the buttress-
chinks,
Gold seven times globed; surely our
maiden shrinks
And a smile stirs her as if one faint
grain
Her load were lightened, one shade less
the stain
Obscured her forehead, yet one more bead
slipt
From off the rosary whereby the crypt
Keeps count of the contritions of its
charge?
ROBT. BROWNING 1812-89
* * *
Victorian half-wits claimed that this poem was obscure, and the predecessors of Z, Y, X, Q, N and company used to pride themselves on grinning through the horse-collar: ‘Only two lines of Sordello were intelligible.’
As Renan has remarked, ‘Il n’y a que la bêtise humaine qui donne une idée de l’infini’.
Browning had attained this limpidity of narration and published Sordello at the age of 28 (A.D. 1840).
There is here a certain lucidity of sound that I think you will find with difficulty elsewhere in English, and you very well may have to retire as far as the Divina Commedia for continued narrative having such clarity of outline without clog and verbal impediment.
It will be seen that the author is telling you something, not merely making a noise, he does not gum up the sound. The ‘beauty’ is not applied ornament, but makes the mental image more definite. The author is not hunting about for large high-sounding words, there is a very great variety in the rhyme but the reader runs on unaware.
Again as in the case of Golding, the reader must read it as prose, pausing for the sense and not hammering the line-terminations.
WHITMAN
FROM an examination of Walt made twelve years ago the present writer carried away the impression that there are thirty well-written pages of Whitman; he is now unable to find them. Whitman’s faults are superficial, he does convey an image of his time, he has written histoire morale, as Montaigne wrote the history of his epoch. You can learn more of nineteenth-century America from Whitman than from any of the writers who either refrained from perceiving, or limited their record to what they had been taught to consider suitable literary expression. The only way to enjoy Whitman thoroughly is to concentrate on his fundamental meaning. If you insist, however, on dissecting his language you will probably find that it is wrong NOT because he broke all of what were considered in his day the rules’ but because he is spasmodically conforming to this, that or the other; sporadically dragging in a bit of ‘regular’ metre, using a bit of literary language, and putting his adjectives where, in the spoken tongue, they are not. His real writing occurs when he gets free of all this barbed wire.
Certainly the last author to be tried in a classroom.
In the main I don’t see that teaching can do much more than expose counterfeit work, thus gradually leading the student to the valid. The hoax, the sham, the falsification become so habitual that they pass unnoticed; all this is fit matter for education. The student can in this field profit by his instructor’s experience. The natural destructivity of the young can function to advantage: excitement of the chase, the fun of detection could under favourable circumstance enliven the study.
Whereas it is only maturer patience that can sweep aside a writer’s honest error, and overlook unaccomplished clumsiness or outlandishness or old-fashionedness, for the sake of the solid centre.
Thus many clever people have overlooked Thomas Hardy’s verses, even though the author of the Mayor of Casterbridge lurks behind them.
Narrative sense, narrative power can survive ANY truncation. If a man have the tale to tell and can keep his mind on that and refuses to worry about his own limitations, the reader will, in the long or short run, find him, and no amount of professorial abuse or theoretical sniping will have any real effect on the author’s civil status. Barrels of ink have flowed to accuse Mr. Kipling of vulgarity (that was perhaps before the present reader was born), to accuse him of being a journalist … etc….
Thomas Hardy’s Noble Dames and Little Ironies will find readers despite all the French theories in the world.
More writers fail from lack of character than from lack of intelligence.
Technical solidity is not attained without at least some persistence.
The chief cause of false writing is economic. Many writers need or want money. These writers could be cured by an application of banknotes.
The next cause is the desire men have to tell what they don’t know, or to pass off an emptiness for a fullness. They are discontented with what they have to say and want to make a pint of comprehension fill up a gallon of verbiage.
An author having a very small amount of true contents can make it the basis of formal and durable mastery, provided he neither inflates nor falsifies: Vide the Aucassin, the Canzoni of Arnaut, the Daphnis and Chloe.
The plenum of letters is not bounded by primaeval exclusivity functioning against any kind of human being or talent, but only against false coiners, men who will not dip their metal in the acid of known or accessible fact.
TREATISE ON METRE
I
I HEARD a fair lady sigh: ‘I wish someone would write a good treatise on prosody.’
As she had been a famous actress of Ibsen, this was not simple dilettantism, but the sincere wish for something whereof the lack had been inconvenient. Apart from Dante’s De Vulgari Eloquio I have encountered only one treatise on metric which has the slightest value. It is Italian and out of print, and has no sort of celebrity.
The confusion in the public mind has a very simple cause: the desire to get something for nothing or to learn an art without labour.
Fortunately or unfortunately, people CAN write stuff that passes for poetry, before they have studied music.
The question is extremely simple. Part of what a musician HAS to know is employed in writing with words; there are no special ‘laws’ or ‘differences’ in respect to that part. There is a great laxity or vagueness permitted the poet in regard to pitch. He may be as great a poet as Mr. Yeats and still think he doesn’t know one note from another.
Mr. Yeats probably would distinguish between a g and a b flat, but he is happy to think that he doesn’t, and he would certainly be incapable of whistling a simple melody in tune.
Nevertheless before writing a lyric he is apt to ‘get a chune1 in his head’.
He is very sensitive to a limited gamut of rhythms.
Rhythm is a form cut into TIME, as a design is determined SPACE.
A melody is a rhythm in which the pitch of each element is fixed by the composer.
(Pitch: the number of vibrations per second.)
I said to a brilliant composer2 and pupil of Kodaly:
These people can’t make a melody, they can’t make a melody four bars long.
He roared in reply: Four bars, they can’t make one TWO bars long!
Music is so badly taught that I don’t suggest every intending poet should bury himself in a conservatory. The Laurencie et Lavignac Encycléopdie de la Musique et Dictionnaire du Conservatoire‘3 has however an excellent section on Greek metric, better than one is likely to find in use in the Greek language department of your university.
In making a line of verse (and thence building the lines into passages) you h
ave certain primal elements:
That is to say, you have the various ‘articulate sounds’ of the language, of its alphabet, that is, and the various groups of letters in syllables.
1 ch Neo-Celtic for. 2 Tibor Serly
3 Pub. Delagrave, Paris
These syllables have differing weights and durations
A. original weights and durations
B. weights and durations that seem naturally imposed on them by the other syllable groups around them.
Those are the medium wherewith the poet cuts his design in TIME.
If he hasn’t a sense of time and of the different qualities of sound, this design will be clumsy and uninteresting just as a bad draughtsman’s drawing will be without distinction.
The bad draughtsman is had because he does not perceive space and spatial relations, and cannot therefore deal with them.
The writer of bad verse is a bore because he does not perceive time and time relations, and cannot therefore delimit them in an interesting manner, by means of longer and shorter, heavier and lighter syllables, and the varying qualities of souud inseparable from the words of his speech.
He expects his faculty to descend from heaven. He expects to train and control that faculty without the labour that even a mediocre musician expends on qualifying to play fourth tin horn in an orchestra, and the result is often, and quite justly, disesteemed by serious members of his profession.
Symmetry or strophic forms naturally HAPPENED in lyric poetry when a man was singing a long poem to a short melody which he had to use over and over. There is no particular voodoo or sacrosanctity about symmetry. It is one of many devices, expedient sometimes, advantageous sometimes for certain effects.
It is hard to tell whether music has suffered more by being taught than has verse-writing from having no teachers. Music in the past century of shame and human degradation slumped in large quantities down into a soggy mass of tone.
In general we may say that the deliquescence of instruction in any art proceeds in this manner.
I A master invents a gadget, or procedure to perform a particular function, or a limited set of functions.
Pupils adopt the gadget. Most of them use it less skilfully than the master. The next genius may improve it, or he may cast it aside for something more suited to his own aims.
II Then comes the paste-headed pedagogue or theorist and proclaims the gadget a law, or rule.
III Then a bureaucracy is endowed, and the pin-headed secretariat attacks every new genius and every form of inventiveness for not obeying the law, and for perceiving something the secretariat does not.
The great savants ignore, quite often, the idiocies of the ruck of the teaching profession. Friedrich Richter can proclaim that the rules of counterpoint and harmony have nothing to do with composition, Sauzay can throw up his hands and say that when Bach composed he appears to have done so by a series of ‘procedures’ whereof the secret escapes us, the hard sense of the one, and not altogether pathetic despair of the other have no appreciable effect on the ten thousand calves led up for the yearly stuffing.
Most arts attain their effects by using a fixed element and a variable.
From the empiric angle: verse usually has some element roughly fixed and some other that varies, but which element is to be fixed and which vary, and to what degree, is the affair of the author.
Some poets have chosen the bump, as the boundary.
Some have chosen to mark out their course with repetition of consonants; some with similar terminations of words. All this is a matter of detail. You can make a purely empiric list of successful manœuvres, you can compile a catalogue of your favourite poems. But you cannot hand out a receipt for making a Mozartian melody on the basis of take a crotchet, then a quaver, then a semi-quaver, etc….
You don’t ask an art instructor to give you a recipe for making a Leonardo da Vinci drawing.
Hence the extreme boredom caused by the usual professorial documentation or the aspiring thesis on prosody.
The answer is:
LISTEN to the sound that it makes.
II
THE reader who has understood the first part of this chapter has no need of reading the second. Nothing is more boring than an account of errors one has not committed.
Rhythm is a form cut into time.
…..
The perception that the mind, either of an individual or a nation, can decay, and give off all the displeasing vapours of decomposition has unfortunately gone into desuetude. Dante’s hell was of those who had lost the increment of intelligence with the capital. Shakespeare, already refining the tough old catholic concept, refers to ignorance merely as darkness.
From the time Thos. Jefferson jotted down an amateur’s notes on what seemed to be the current practice of English versification, the general knowledge, especially among hacks, appears to have diminished to zero, and to have passed into infinite negative. I suppose the known maxima occurred in the North American Review during Col. Harvey’s intumescence. During that era when the directing minds and characters in America had reached a cellarage only to be gazed at across the barriers of libel law, the said editorial bureau rebuked some alliterative verse on the grounds that a consonant had been repeated despite Tennyson’s warning.
A parallel occurs in a recent professorial censure of Mr. Binyon’s Inferno, the censor being, apparently, in utter ignorance of the nature of Italian syllabic verse, which is composed of various syllabic groups, and not merely strung along with a swat on syllables two, four, six, eight, ten of each line.
You would not expect to create a Mozartian melody or a Bach theme by the process of bumping alternate notes, or by merely alternating quavers and crotchets.
Great obfuscation spread from the failure to dissociate heavy accent and duration.
Other professors failed to comprehend the ‘regularity’ of classic hexameter.
So called dactylic hexameter does NOT start from ONE type of verse.
There are, mathematically, sixty-four basic general forms of it; of which twenty or thirty were probably found to be of most general use, and several of which would probably have been stunts or rarities.
But this takes no count either of shifting caesura (pause at some point in the line), nor does it count any of the various shadings.
It ought to be clear that the variety starting FROM a colony of sixty-four different general rhythm shapes, or archetypes, will be vastly more compendious, will naturally accommodate a vastly greater amount of real speech, than will a set of variants starting from a single type of line, whether measured by duration or by the alternating heaviness of syllables,
specifically:
ti tum ti tum ti tum ti tum ti tum
from which every departure is treated as an exception.
The legal number of syllables in a classic hexameter varied from twelve to eighteen.
When the Greek dramatists developed or proceeded from anterior Greek prosody, they arrived at chorus forms which are to all extents ‘free’, though a superstructure of nomenclature has been gummed on to them by analysers whom neither Aeschylus nor Euripides would ever have bothered to read.
These nomenclatures were probably invented by people who had never LISTENED to verse, and who probably wouldn’t have been able to distinguish Dante’s movement from Milton’s had they heard it read out aloud.
I believe Shakespeare’s ‘blank verse’ runs from ten to seventeen syllables, but have no intention of trying to count it again, or make a census.
None of these professorial pint pots has anything to do with the question.
Homer did not start by thinking which of the sixty-four permitted formulae was to be used in his next verse.
THE STROPHE
THE reason for strophic form has already been stated. The mediaeval tune, obviously, demanded an approximately even number of syllables in each strophe, but as the duration of the notes was not strictly marked, the tune itself was probably subject to variation within
limits. These limits were in each case established by the auditive precision of the troubadour himself.
In Flaubert’s phrase: ‘Pige moi le type!’ Find me the guy that will set out with sixty-four general matrices for rhythm and having nothing to say, or more especially nothing germane or kindred to the original urge which created those matrices, and who will therewith utter eternal minstrelsy, or keep the reader awake.
As in the case of Prof. Wubb or whatever his name was, the ignorant of one generation set out to make laws, and gullible children next try to obey them.
III
THE populace loved the man who said ‘Look into thine owne hearte and write’ or approved Uc St. Circ, or whoever it was who recorded: ‘He made songs because he had a will to make songs and not because love moved him thereto. And nobody paid much attention to either him or his poetry.’
All of which is an infinite remove from the superstition that poetry isn’t an art, or that prosody isn’t an art WITH LAWS.
But like the laws of any art they are not laws to be learnt by rule of thumb. ‘La sculpture n’est pas pour les jeunes hommes’, said Brancusi. Hokusai and Chaucer have borne similar witness.
Pretended treatises giving recipes for metric are as silly as would be a book giving you measurements for producing a masterpiece à la Botticelli.