nothing short of baffling. we need not abandon the current system of prosody so far as it will go, we must have recourse to the terms and distinctions of music; and this is just, because the lyric movement, according to its intensity, is really an advance toward song; on the conventional metre adopted for the basis it superinduces an overtone of musical rhythm. Committing ourselves frankly to the principles of musical rhythm, we find the baffling phenomena of lyric metre, which in truth are not anomalous or erratic, falling into ordered and self-justifying system.

To account for them rightly, while

ILLUSTRATION. How much more satisfactory is a musical than a prosodical interpretation of some measures may be seen from Tennyson's Charge of the Light Brigade. Measured by the only metrical unit open to us, the dactylic, it jerks along in a strange sort of hippity-hop movement: "Half ǎ leǎgue, | half ă leǎgue, | Half ǎ league | ōnward;" | which after all does not catch the tune, the metre coming to our ears not as longs balanced by coupled shorts but as a palpable triple time. Put it now in the musical rhythm it naturally suggests, and all its syllabic values and quantities become clear:

d d

J.

Half a league, half a league, Half a league on - ward,

All in the

3

valley of Death Rode the six hun dred.

Phenomena to be explained. In order to realize how far short of its full duty our current prosody comes, it may be well to recount here the most salient of the characteristics that stand yet in need of explanation. These are taken not from exceptional but from everyday poetic usage.

1. At the outset, the existing metrical system, with its meagre choice of longs and shorts, is not a true because not

1 This ought perhaps to be rather than ; but the quarter note measure is here used as more generally familiar.

a delicate standard of measure; as a matter of fact, syllables are of all lengths, not absolutely long and short but relatively longer and shorter. This fact should have some means of

notation and record.

2. The last foot of a line is often, and other feet are sometimes, left incomplete; a single syllable may represent them. Is there, or is there not, something a pause or a prolongation to fill the gap?

3. The first syllable not infrequently reads like a kind of tag or remainder from the last foot of the previous line, or as if it were a short preliminary to the serious business of its own line.

4. The interior feet are much changed about; anapests and iambics, dactyls and trochees, freely interchanging. Indeed, so constantly do the trisyllabic feet interchange and blend with one another that some have doubted whether they were distinct measures; and others, yielding the whole question of classic metres, have introduced instead the scanning of verse by accents.

ILLUSTRATIVE NOTE. - Coleridge's Christabel has already been mentioned on p. 177 as an alleged innovation in metre; the innovation consisted in keeping four accented positions, in lines varying from seven to twelve syllables in length; thus::

"I wón der'd whát | might áil | the bird; |

For nothing neár | it coúld | I seé, |

Save the gráss | and green hérbs | undernéath | the old trée."

This explains the number of feet; but the controlling lilt, the anapestic tune, is not accounted for.

To show how much elision and interchange may be admitted without impairing the underlying measure, take the following old nursery rhyme, the tune of which is set by the first word "Remember," making an amphibrach scheme (~ _ ~):—

“Rĕmēmbĕr, | rĕmēmbĕr, | the fifth of | Nŏvēmber, |

✓ Gūnpŏw děr trea- | son plōt

|

The following stanzas, from Kipling, the tune of which is set by the words "The cities," are throughout in the same amphibrach movement, though only two measures in the two stanzas are complete :—

The Musical Interpretation. These last cited examples suggest, however clumsily, a law underlying the lyric measures and existing as the clearest basal principle in musical rhythm: the law, namely, of compensation and equivalence. If one foot is substituted for another, as an iambus for an anapest, the substitute has the same rhythmic value; nay, if only a single syllable represents a foot, we are mentally aware of a pause, or a prolongation of the syllable given, sufficient to make up the same net effect. Now all this, which we can feel so much better than we can express in prosodic terms, is perfectly expressed in the musical measure. All the measures in any chosen time-double, triple, quadruple — are exactly equivalent to each other, and in whatever way they are made up the parts of one compensate for the parts of the other. The notation of the details of this law leads us to note the following elements:

1. Notes may be prolonged or shortened with absolute freedom; they simply take up thereby so much more or so much less of the measure, leaving so much less or more time to fill the remainder of the measure.

2. A pause in the rhythmical sense is counted in the same values as an utterance; either by a rest or a prolongation.

3. As a musical measure begins with the accented beat, we often begin the musical utterance not at the beginning of a measure but on some unaccented note of the previous measure. This accounts for the tag in the opening foot; it is really an up-beat preparatory for the accent which begins the

next measure.

4. When a line begins with the up-beat, musical rhythm observes the compensation by ending with a measure lacking just that remainder of being full; so the end answers to the beginning, and the beginning, however insignificant, has its integral part in the whole.

EXAMPLES.

All that can be done here to illustrate this large subject is to set a few examples to their natural musical rhythm, leaving the student to select the illustrations of the various details of the principle.

1. The compensation and equivalence in different measures of the same scheme may be seen illustrated in the setting of Tennyson's Charge of the Light Brigade on p. 191, where the basal measure is represented in no fewer than five different ways: —

all, however, coming to exactly the same thing, and simply representing delicate differences in syllabic value.

2. The up-beat, or last note of a foot, with the corresponding shortening at the close, is illustrated in Hullah's melody to Kingsley's Three Fishers, which brings out thereby the value of the words as it actually exists : —

3. To illustrate the significance of the rest, or what comes to the same thing, the prolongation, in lyrical rhythm, we may take Tennyson's "Break, break, break," which, unless we regard these opening words as monosyllabic

Take them,

representatives of whole feet, is a puzzling problem in metre. however, as notes in a triple (or §) time, and everything is clear:

♪

Break, break, break,

On thy cold gray stones, O

Sea!

The form of the prolonged note is used in Boott's setting of the poem:

Break, break, break, On thy cold gray stones,O

Sea 1

Break, break,

break,

On thy cold gray stones, O

Sea!

4. As a further general illustration of this subject, let us try to set the first stanza of Tennyson's Bugle Song to musical rhythm:

2 This, it will be observed, is the true quantitative dactylic measure.

dying,

dying,