Note 155 — Chapter I · GLOSSARY
Reading edition
Note on Musical and Rhetorical Arrangements of Verse
It has been said above (Book I. Chap. V. Rule 41, p. 35) that certain additional arrangements of verse may be made for musical or rhetorical purposes. This no doubt requires explanation and example, the latter especially. It shall now have them.
Tennyson's
The watch|er on | the col|umn to | the end,
and Mr. Swinburne's
The thun|der of | the trum|pets of | the night,
are both regular and unexceptionable "heroics," "five-foot iambics," "decasyllabic lines," etc. But in reading them the voice will not improbably be tempted (and need not resist the temptation) to arrange them as
The watcher | on the column | to the end
and
The thunder | of the trumpets | of the night
respectively, while in the case of the latter line other dispositions are possible. In blank-verse paragraphs especially, the poet is likely to suggest a great deal of such scansion. No doubt there are in this arrangement four-syllable divisions and three-syllable ones like amphibrachs, etc.; but that does not matter, because the line has already passed the regular prosodic tests. And no doubt the sections, or whatever they are to be called, are not strictly substitutable; but then on this scheme, which is not positively prosodic and applies to the individual line only, they need not be. So, too, there is no harm in dividing Hood's famous piece, for musical purposes, into ditrochees:
I remember | I remember, How my little | lovers came,
or even in making what are practically eight feet out of
All ¦ peo¦ple ¦ that ¦ on ¦ earth ¦ do ¦ dwell,
in order to get an impressive musical effect. Here also the lines have passed the prosodic preliminary or matriculation; as in the one case trochaic tetrameters catalectic split in half; in the other, as ordinary "long measure."
Now it is this necessary preliminary which the plain- and fancy-stress prosodists neglect; putting their stress divisions not on the top, but in the place of it. And the probable result would be, if the proceeding were widely followed—as, indeed, it has been already to some small extent,—the creation of a new chaos like that of fifteenth-century South-English verse generally, or of blank verse and heroic couplet in the mid-seventeenth.