I HAVE already attempted to show Poetry as the Recorder’s prÉcis of a warm debate between the members of the poet’s mental Senate on some unusually contraversial subject. Let the same idea be expressed less personally in the terms of coloured circles intersecting, the space cut off having the combined colour of both circles. In the Drama these circles represent the warring influences of the plot; the principal characters lie in the enclosed space and the interest of the play is to watch their attempts to return to the state of primary colouring which means mental ease; with tragedy they are eventually forced to the colourless blackness of Death, with comedy the warring colours disappear in white. In the lyrical poem, the circles are coinciding stereoscopically so that it is difficult to discover how each individual circle is coloured; we only see the combination.

If we consider that each influence represented by these circles has an equivalent musical rhythm, then in the drama these rhythms interact orchestrally, tonic theme against dominant; in lyrical poetry where we get two images almost fused into one, the rhythms interlace correspondingly closely. Of the warring influences, one is naturally the original steady-going conservative, the others novel, disquieting, almost accidental. Then in lyrical poetry the established influence takes the original metre as its expression, and the new influences introduce the cross rhythm modifying the metre until it is half submerged. Shakespeare’s developments of blank verse have much distressed prosodists, but have these ever considered that they were not mere wantonness or lack of thought, that what he was doing was to send emotional cross-rhythms working against the familiar iambic five-stress line?

I remember “doing Greek iambics” at Charterhouse and being allowed as a great privilege on reaching the Upper School to resolve the usual short-long foot into a short-short-short or even in certain spots into a long-short. These resolutions I never understood as having any reference to the emotional mood of the verse I was supposed to be translating, but they came in very conveniently when proper names had too many short syllables in them to fit otherwise.

A young poet showed me a set of English verses the other day which I returned him without taking a copy but I remember reading somewhat as follows:—

“Good heavens,” I said, “what’s that last line all about?”

“Oh, it’s just an experiment in resolution.”

“Take a pencil, like a good fellow, and scan it for me in the old fashioned way as we used to do at school together.”

He did so:—

“It’s a sort of anapaestic resolution,” he explained.

“Anapaestic resolution of what?”

“Of an iambic decasyllabic line.”

“Excuse me, it’s not. Since we’re talking in that sort of jargon, it’s a spondaic resolution of a dactylic line.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, you’ve put in four extra syllables for your resolution. I’ll put in a fifth, the word “in.” Now listen!

In this case the cross-rhythm, which my friend explained was meant to suggest the curious ethereal look of cherry blossoms in moonlight, had so swamped the original metre that it was completely stifled. The poet has a licence to resolve metre where the emotion demands it, and he is a poor poet if he daren’t use it; but there is commonsense in restraint.