Those RULES of old discover'd, not devis'd,
Are Nature still, but Nature Methodiz'd;
Nature, like Liberty, is but restrain'd
By the same Laws which first herself ordain'd.
(Pope 211)
Does contemporary English have prosody? It would seem not. The rule of the twentieth century—in painting, sculpture, and music as well as in literature—has been that “anything goes.” The standard of art is the individual. To follow nature is old fashioned—nature is what one makes it. Originality is the supreme value, and self-expression the common goal.
Now, individuality and innovation are all very good. “The highest praise of genius,” says Johnson, “is original invention” (252). Besides, as Dryden notes, “the Genius of every Age is different” (201), and it would be irksome for each generation to repeat the accomplishments of the last. Humans are prone to boredom. There is a Gulliver in each person, who longs for ever-new horizons.
But in each heart there is also an Odysseus, who, weary and homesick, seeks comfort in the familiar hearth and the ancient customs. It is unwise to neglect either Gulliver or Odysseus, and prudent to remember that the standard gives zest to the deviation. “There is no place like home” only if some place is home. There can be no diversity where there is no unity. The twentieth century’s unlimited thirst for originality breaks down, because to make diversity the primary goal is to make it meaningless. The speakers of the English language, in their exotic voyages of adventure, have suffered the ruin of their valuable native tradition of structured verse, with its two-fold treasures of harmony and heritage.
What heritage? A cursory glance at the greatest poets of the British tongue will reveal certain patterns of prosody as venerable and sacred as the name of poetry itself. First, works are divided by rhyme into verses. Second, each verse contains a definite number of stressed syllables. Third, each verse is subdivided by caesura. These three simple rules are the Cardinal Laws of English Verse, the underlying basis for all English verse before the last century. They are taken for granted in almost every poetic work of our language, and were inherited from the hoary tradition of German verse, older than human memory. Observe them in a sample from Beowulf:
Oft Scyld Scefing || sceaþena þreatum,
monegum mægþum, || meodosetla ofteah,
egsode eorlas. (Beowulf 2).
This sentence is written in alliterative verse, strictly following the Cardinal Laws. First, each verse is distinguished from the others by rhyme—not, perhaps, by the full end rhyme to which modern readers are accustomed, but by rhyme in its broader definition: “agreement in sound between words or syllables” (Shapiro and Beum 86).1 Three alliterative syllables in each line make each verse into a single unit, just as end rhyme would do. Second, each verse contains four stressed syllables. Third, each verse is separated by caesura (marked by the double lines).
Moving ahead a number of years yields the poetry of Chaucer, a good representative of trends in English verse up to and after his time. Notwithstanding the lapse of several centuries, The Canterbury Tales’ opening lines follow the three rules as punctiliously as Beowulf does:
Whan that Aprill || with his shoures soote
The droughte of March || hath perced to the roote,
And bathed every veyne || in swich licour
Of which vertu engendered || is the flour... (Chaucer 1)
Lines are now distinguished from each other by end rhyme, rather than alliteration—a development due to the French influence after the Normandy invasion. Rhythm, too, shows French influence. The new, imported syllabic line (where every syllable is equally counted) is combined with the old, German accentual line (where only stressed syllables are counted), producing a line with a fixed number of total syllables, but wherein the stressed syllable is still the basis of the verse. Finally, the caesura, while not as essential as in Saxon poetry, is still clearly existent in nearly every verse. So the three elements of English verse are still intact: rhymed lines, stressed syllables, and caesura.
The greatest English poet after Chaucer is generally acknowledged to be Spenser, whose mastery of form is prodigious. Succeeding him is Shakespeare, the most celebrated poet of our language. Sonnet forms, varying only slightly in rhyme scheme, have been named after both of these masters. Two quatrains, one from Spenser’s Amoretti LXVIII (the famous “Easter Sonnet”) and the other from Shakespeare’s number 17, both illustrate once again the three basic principles, through end rhyme, iambic pentameter, and caesura.
Most glorious Lord of lyfe, || that on this day
Didst make thy triumph || over death and sin,
And having harrowd hell, || didst bring away
Captivity thence captive, || us to win... (Spenser 730)
* * * * *
Who would believe my verse || in time to come
If it were fill’d || with your most high deserts?
Though yet, heaven knows, || it is but as a tomb
Which hides your life || and shows not half your parts. (Shakespeare 1374)
The general pattern is now established, and further examples are superfluous. In the lyrics of Donne, Pope, Gray, and even the great Romantics from Wordsworth to Byron, the Cardinal Laws are observed steadfastly, with only two caveats and a qualification. The qualification is that caesura is only acceptable in lines of four or more feet; a verse with three feet is seldom if ever sub-divided. The caveats are more substantial.
The first caveat is the existence of blank verse, a pedigreed but startling exception to the rhyming rule. Johnson seems to be correct in his assertion that blank verse, in English, is “verse only to the eye” (252). His reasoning is that “in languages melodiously constructed with a due proportion of long and short syllables, metre is sufficient” (Johnson 251), but that in English, the effect of iambic pentameter is so faint that, to be discerned and appreciated, it is necessary to have “the preservation of every verse unmingled with another as a distinct system of sounds; and this distinctness is obtained and preserved by the artifice of rhyme” (251). And yet blank verse has earned a small but permanent and significant place in English literature, having gained status through use for one reason or another by Shakespeare, Milton, and Wordsworth.2
In Shakespeare, the reason had to do with drama, the second caveat. Drama is different from other genres of poetry, because it attempts to portray naturally the dialogue of real characters in everyday situations. With rare exceptions like Dryden, English playwrights have avoided overly-versified language. The morality plays of Chaucer’s era generally exhibit end rhyme of a more or less complicated pattern, but their meter is very rough, and caesura is uncommon. Shakespeare’s meter is usually consistent and uses caesura, but rarely employs rhyme—the rule in King Lear (as well as the other plays) apparently is that “as a situation becomes more formal, the language tends toward verse” (Shapiro and Beum 72). Congreve and others wrote entirely in prose, and after the eighteenth century, as fiction centered more and more on the common man, versified drama all but died.
These caveats, minor lapses in a grand scheme, do not alter the ancient and universal laws of English poetry. The fact is that the peerless tongue of the British Isle once maintained a definite structural tradition, lasting from the musty pages of Beowulf to around the time of Whitman’s sacrilegious strains.
That is not to say, of course, that Whitman wrote bad poetry, or even that all poetry must be verse.3 Sidney, among the first real critics to write in the English language, reminds us that “it is not riming and versing that makes poesy” (137). Even so, he immediately commends the use of verse for its beauty and memorability—recognizing that though verse and poetry can be separated, they ought not to be. As Poe puts it, “music (in its modifications of rhythm and rhyme) is of so vast a moment in Poesy, as never to be neglected by him who is truly poetical—is of so mighty a force in furthering the great aim intended that he is mad who rejects its assistance” (249). Mad, because in his quest for freedom and diversity he abandons nature and unity. One who would break the shackles of “nature methodized” will often find that he has broken nature’s legs as well, and one who seeks infinite diversity finds only chaos.
Actually, verse is unity, and unity in language is verse. Samuel Johnson says, “The essence of verse is regularity, and its ornament is variety. To write verse is to dispose syllables and sounds harmonically by some known and settled rule” (Johnson 261). The soul of verse, Johnson is saying, is the rule behind it. One cannot write verse which is free from all constraints, because the constraints are the verse. If one would have the harmony, the unity, in short, the beauty of verse, one must accept its limits. And only once the limits are accepted, once the rule is known and settled on, can there be pleasant deviations from it.
Not only can there be; there must be. “[E]very great poet must inevitably innovate upon the example of his predecessors in the exact structure of his peculiar versification,” writes Shelley (517), as long as “the harmony, which is the spirit, be preserved” (Shelley 517). There is a fine line between harmony and monotony. Too strict or too simple a pattern is tedious, and too loose or too complex a pattern is bewildering—and both tedium and bewilderment produce boredom. Poetry, in the broadest, truest sense of the word, which encompasses far more than mere words, is finding a perfect balance of order and variety. That balance, which art seeks, is harmony.
Harmony of form is a treasure that was valued and guarded by English poetry for centuries. It was valued because of its double power, to communicate and to delight. The power of communication exists because sounds intrinsically convey more than the strict meanings of the words they form. “Sounds as well as thoughts have relation both between each other and towards that which they represent,” says Shelley. “Hence the language of poets has ever affected a certain uniform and harmonious recurrence of sound, without which it were not poetry” (517). But this harmonious recurrence not only delivers a message; it is a pleasure all on its own. The power of sheer sound to delight is known to anyone who has enjoyed the melody of a poem in an unknown language. Poe tells us that “[v]erse originates in the human enjoyment of equality... [which is] similarity, proportion, identity, repetition, and adaptation or fitness” (198). It does not matter why such unity is enjoyable; it is.
The treasure of harmony was long guarded by means of custom, in the unspoken but unchallenged Cardinal Laws. In a day when people are more apt to overvalue what is new than what is old, custom is not often deemed a worthy reason for any sort of action. And yet the English heritage of structured verse is a treasure worth preserving for at least three reasons.
First of all, it is the watchman of harmony. Remember what Johnson said: “To write verse is to dispose syllables and sounds harmonically by some known and settled rule” (261). When the rule is not known and settled, when it is new or strange or unrecognizable to the reader, no harmony occurs. If nothing is settled, nothing can be stirred up. If all is disorder, there is no balance between order and variety.
Second, it forms a link across generations. Every English-speaking person of the world can open a volume of Shakespeare and feel the ineffable thrill of his language. Could people understand the classics half as well as they do, if every century had seen as much change in form as the twentieth century did? Can students now comprehend most English literature half as well as they could have done without the twentieth-century paradigm-shift blocking their way? The body of pre-twentieth-century English literature is too immense and rich to be lightly discarded.
Third, the English heritage of verse comprises over a thousand years of accumulated wisdom concerning what forms work best in this language. The test of time, the test of experience, and the lore of innumerable masters passed to countless students, cannot be replicated by every poet who wishes to remake his medium. By all means, let poets experiment, but let them also learn from their fathers. “Don’t re-invent the wheel.” The Cardinal Rules of English Verse are founded on the nature of the English language. Sidney, in his classic “Defense of Poesy,” shows the suitability of English for accent, caesura, and rhyme—especially for end rhyme, which in English can be from one to three syllables long:
[T]hough we do not observe quantity, yet we observe the accent very precisely, which other languages either cannot do, or will not do so absolutely. That cæsura, or breathing-place in the midst of the verse, neither Italian nor Spanish have, the French and we never almost fail of. Lastly, even the very rime itself the Italian cannot put in the last syllable... The French, of the other side, hath both the male, as bon: son, and the female, as plaise: taise; but the sdrucciola he hath not. Where the English hath all three. (Sidney 151)
Of course, the modern still prefers “free” verse. To him, harmony is nothing to self-expression, the work of past generations is nothing to the promise of the future, and nature is an internal development, not an external reality. Does the poet beautify the world he lives in, or create his own? That is the question which decides the fate of the old Cardinal Laws.
Ironically, in our day the answer must be decided by every individual for himself, and so even choosing to cling to objective reality becomes the declaration of one’s personal universe. All is swallowed up in Ego. And yet there are some who deny defeat its exultation, by refusing to take notice of it. They cling to those “Rules of old discover'd, not devis'd,” and are content, whatever their own fate, that nature shall never be remade by lunatics, for “Nature, like Liberty, is but restrain'd/ By the same Laws which first herself ordain'd.”
1 According to the prosody which provides this definition, alliteration is one of four main categories of rhyme, of which the others are full rhyme, slant rhyme, and assonance (Shapiro and Beum 87).
2 It is the author’s humble opinion that both Milton and Wordsworth could have done better. Milton, in the words of Johnson, probably “finding blank verse easier than rhyme, was desirous of persuading himself that it is better” (251). At any rate, Milton’s style was not solidly based in the tradition of the English language, and should not be taken as a guide for English poets. “He was desirous to use English with a foreign idiom” (Johnson 251). As for Wordsworth,
Who both by precept and example shows
That prose is verse, and verse is merely prose... (Byron 340)
his genius leads him to pleasant exceptions, which nonetheless do not disprove the rule.
3 The author appreciates the semi-verse of Whitman and others, but laments that their example assaulted more traditional verse, and ultimately led to an era where puffy, washed out prose is passed off as verse because its text is divided into lines on a page. As one prosody puts it,
Unfortunately, their myriad followers are aware only of what Pound and Eliot did not use (i.e., regular stanzas), and consequently use essentially nothing. The resulting prose, cut at random into short or long lines, does not constitute poetry and is usually pretty poor prose. (Hammes)
The fact that some poets managed to write excellent poetry without traditional forms only shows the genius of those poets, despite their blunted medium. There is nothing wrong with free verse as long as it attains linguistic harmony, and as long as it remains an exception which does not replace real verse. Unfortunately, modern free verse does neither.
Beowulf. New York: Farrar, Stratus and Giroux, 2000.
Byron, George Gordon. “English Bards and Scotch Reviewers.” Harmon 333-347.
Chaucer, Geoffrey. Canterbury Tales. New York: Everyman’s Library, 1992.
Dryden, John. “An Essay of Dramatic Poesy.” Harmon 159-208.
Hammes, Dennis. Prosody. Moorhead, MN: Scrawlmark Publishing, 1995. 1 May 2007.
Harmon, William, ed. Classic Writings on Poetry. New York: Columbia University Press, 2003.
Johnson, Samuel. Lives of the Poets. Harmon 245-267.
Poe, Egar Allan. “The Rationale of Verse.” Poe. Ed. Peter Washington. New York: Random House, 1995. 198-227.
Pope, Alexander. “An Essay on Criticism.” Harmon 209-228.
Shakespeare, William. Complete Poems and Plays. Cambridge: Houghton Mifflin 1942.
Shapiro, Karl and Robert Beum. A Prosody Handbook. New York: Harper & Row, 1965.
Shelley, Percy Bysshe. “A Defense of Poetry.” English Romantic Poets. Ed. Stephens, Beck, Snow. Chicago: American Book Company, 1933. 515-531.
Sidney, Sir Phillip. “The Defense of Poesy.” Harmon 114-152.
Spenser, Edmund. The Complete Poetical Works of Spenser. Cambridge: Houghton Mifflin, 1936.