UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA A STUDY OF ENGLISH RHYME I THE POETRY OF EARTH RHYME is an identity or close similarity between stressed sounds in corresponding places. Thus defined, rhyme has analogies in all the realm of nature. Matter is a condition of force; force is motion; motion is measured by waves; and wave-motion, whether of heat, light, sound, or electricity, is, like music or verse, a series of phases of stress and interval. In a strictly physical sense, "the poetry of earth is never dead.” Emerson spoke not more as poet than as observer when he said: "Thou canst not wave thy staff in air, Or dip thy paddle in the lake, But it carves the bow of beauty there, And the ripples in rhymes the oar forsake." The whole universe swings to rhythm, and through the ages men have fancied themselves hearing some notes of the cosmic harmony. The Psalmist, meditating on the heavenly bodies by night, perceived their "march of soundless music in the vision of the seer," and exclaimed: "The heavens declare the glory of God; And the firmament showeth his handy-work. Day unto day uttereth speech, And night unto night showeth knowledge. Their voice is not heard." More confident was the lumberman in the woods of northern Maine, who, when told of the music of the spheres, declared that he had often heard it, when lying awake on winter nights. It was, he said, "just like a kind of little fine whizz." There is more than an elaborate metaphor in the famous introduction to Dryden's shorter Song for Saint Cecilia's Day. It is a fair summary of nineteenth-century views of evolution and the correlation and conservation of forces: "From Harmony, from heavenly Harmony When Nature underneath a heap Of jarring atoms lay And could not heave her head, The tuneful voice was heard from high, Arise, ye more than dead! Then cold, and hot, and moist, and dry In order to their stations leap, And Music's power obey. From Harmony, from heavenly Harmony This universal frame began: From Harmony to Harmony Through all the compass of the notes it ran, The diapason closing full in Man.” 1 When Galileo and Bruno perceived that the solid earth itself was but keeping time in an orderly whirl of suns and stars, they were not far from the idea of Addison, who heard them singing as they shine. And thus Shakespeare made Lorenzo say to Jessica: "Look how the floor of heaven Is thick inlaid with patines of bright gold. There's not the smallest orb which thou behold'st But in his motion like an angel sings, Still quiring to the young-eyed cherubins." A hundred years before the time of Dryden George Puttenham, in his Arte of English Poesie (1589), reminded his readers that "Does not the Earth really live a universal life? Are not all its parts, the liquid interior and the firm crust, the ocean and the atmosphere, comprehended into a grand whole whose parts interact in manifold ways and yet in harmony? Ebb and flow, day and night, summer and winter, are they not life-rhythms, similar to those which the individual life experiences; or, rather, do not animals and plants, with their little rhythmical vital processes, take part in the great life of the Earth? Is not the life of the Earth mirrored in their sleep and waking, their bloom and withering, their origin and decay?” — Paulsen: Introduction to Philosophy, 207. doctors of theology said that God made the world by number, measure, and weight; and that philosophers set forth a triple proportion, the arithmetical, the geometrical, and the musical. Thomas Campion, at the beginning of the seventeenth century, packed this truth into a few words: "The world is made by symmetry and proportion, and is in that respect compared to music, and music to poetry." Thus, in studying the unity of the arts, we find one general law of harmonious satisfying proportion, so that we speak of a poetical picture; of tone-color; or find painting, song, orchestration, and the drama combining in a Wagnerian opera. Perhaps the symphony is, as yet, man's highest contribution to pure art; but there are other symphonies than those of the orchestra. Every simplest consonance of sound is an illustration of the pleasure humanity has always taken in that musical unity which binds agreeable diversities. It is no wonder, then, that man, standing in a universe of harmonious contrasts, "Through worlds, and races, and terms, and times, When one hears the whisper of the breeze, the roar of the sea, the ripple of the brook, the trill of the bird, pleasure stirs him to imitation. The fable of Pan's flute was but the anticipation of Beethoven's Pastoral Symphony or Whitman's Proud Music of the Sea-Storm.1 Thoreau once assured us that he heard finer music in the tinkle of his hoe on the pebbles, as he worked in his garden on the shore of Walden Pond, than in any symphony concert. To his simple mind the telegraph-wire was a "redeemer," which always brought him a message from the highest: "As I went under the new telegraph wire, I heard it vibrating like a harp high overhead; it was as the sound of a far-off glorious life; a supernal life which came down to us and vibrated the lattice work of this life of ours an Æolian harp. It reminded me, I say, with a certain pathetic moderation, of what finer and deeper stirrings I was susceptible, which grandly set all argument and dispute aside, a triumphant though transient exhibition of the 1 The original and better title. |