CHAPTER X

FREE VERSE

The conceits of the poets of other lands I'd bring thee not,
Nor the compliments that have served their turn so long,
Nor rime, nor the classics, nor perfume of foreign court or
indoor library.

Walt Whitman: "Thou Mother with thy Equal Brood"

RIME, as we have seen, is not essential to poetry; for if it were, we should be forced to the absurd conclusion that Hamlet and Paradise Lost are not poetry. Writers of free verse have forced us to abandon meter, the traditional mark of distinction between poetry and prose. Rhythm, every one admits, is essential; but literary prose has also a rhythm of its own which it is difficult, if not impossible, to distinguish from that of poetry. A brilliant contemporary critic, J. E. Spingarn, actually goes so far as to say, "The fact is that there is no real distinction between prose and verse."

Certain older poets and critics long ago conceded the fundamental principle of free verse when they admitted that meter is not an essential of poetry. Aristotle, writing over two thousand years ago, said that poetry is to be distinguished from prose by something other than meter. The history of Herodotus, he said, would remain history if it were written in verse. Sidney, Wordsworth,

Coleridge, Shelley, and Emerson all admitted that meter is not essential, although none of them attempted free verse, as logically they should have done. Poetic prose, or prose poetry, however, many older authors did write. In this anomalous form Sidney, Sir Thomas Browne, Milton, DeQuincey, Lamb, Poe, and Emerson, to name no others, all endeavored, like present-day writers of free verse, to explore the uncertain borderland which separates verse from prose. The prose poems of Ossian, which enjoyed a tremendous vogue all over Europe in the late eighteenth century, are perhaps the most famous of the early specimens of free verse.

Ever since the divorce of poetry from music, there has been an increasing tendency to irregularity in poetic form. Many older poems are to be distinguished from free verse only by the use of rime. Dryden's "Alexander's Feast," Coleridge's "Kubla Khan," Arnold's "Dover Beach," and Tennyson's "Ode on the Death of the Duke of Wellington" have neither regular stanzaic form, length of line, nor uniform metrical movement. Dryden, in his irregular ode, mixes trochaic, iambic, and anapestic feet almost as freely as Walt Whitman and Carl Sandburg do. Moreover, in poems which purport to be regular, we find wide variations from the normal form. Browning's line,

Historical and philosophical,

is meant for blank verse; but so also is Milton's

Rocks, caves, lakes, fens, bogs, dens, and shades of death. Both these lines are meant to be read as iambic pentameter! Anapestic and dactylic poems, as we have seen,

are almost invariably irregular. Their popularity throughout the nineteenth century is significant.

Long before the time of Whitman, English poets experimented with unrimed forms apart from blank verse. Orthodox poets like Scott, Tennyson, Longfellow, and Lowell imitated Anglo-Saxon and Icelandic poetry, which employed alliteration instead of rime and required no fixed number of syllables in each line. In fact, as one reads Tennyson's translation of the Old English "Battle of Brunanburh," free verse seems almost a reversion to the earliest known form of English poetry. In "Merlin and the Gleam," Tennyson, without stressing alliteration, imitated this Anglo-Saxon unrimed form.

Launch your vessel,

And crowd your canvas,
And, ere it vanishes

Over the margin,

After it, follow it,

Follow the Gleam.

Aside from blank verse and free verse, probably the best unrimed poem in the language is William Collins's "Ode to Evening." The stanza which Collins employs consists of two iambic pentameter lines followed by two of iambic trimeter.

ODE TO EVENING

If aught of oaten stop or pastoral song
May hope, chaste Eve, to soothe thy modest ear
Like thy own solemn springs,

Thy springs, and dying gales;

O Nymph reserved, while now the bright-haired sun
Sits in yon western tent, whose cloudy skirts,
With brede ethereal wove,

O'erhang his wavy bed:

Now air is hushed, save where the weak-eyed bat,
With short shrill shriek flits by on leathern wing;
Or where the beetle winds

His small but sullen horn,

As oft he rises midst the twilight path,
Against the pilgrim borne in heedless hum:
Now teach me, Maid composed

To breathe some softened strain,

Whose numbers, stealing through thy darkening vale,
May, not unseemly, with its stillness suit,

As musing slow, I hail
Thy genial loved return.

For when thy folding star arising shows
His paly circlet, at his warning lamp
The fragrant Hours, and Elves
Who slept in buds the day,

And many a Nymph who wreathes her brows with sedge, And sheds the freshening dew, and, lovelier still,

The pensive Pleasures sweet

Prepare thy shadowy car.

Then let me rove some wild and heathy scene;
Or find some ruin, midst its dreary dells,
Whose walls more awful nod

By thy religious gleams.

Or if chill blustering winds, or driving rain
Prevent my willing feet, be mine the hut

That from the mountain's side

Views wilds, and swelling floods,

And hamlets brown, and dim-discovered spires;
And hears their simple bell, and marks o'er all
Thy dewy fingers draw

The gradual dusky veil.

While Spring shall pour his showers, as oft he wont,
And bathe thy breathing tresses, meekest Eve!
While Summer loves to sport
Beneath thy lingering light;

While sallow Autumn fills thy lap with leaves;
Or Winter, yelling through the troublous air,
Affrights thy shrinking train,

And rudely rends thy robes;

So long, regardful of thy quiet rule,
Shall Fancy, Friendship, Science, smiling Peace,
Thy gentlest influence own,

And love thy favorite name.

William Collins (1721-1759)

If we go to other literatures than English, we find that both rime and meter are often unknown. Rime is not found in classical Latin, Greek, or Hebrew, and very rarely in English poetry until after the Norman Conquest in 1066. Hebrew poetry has nothing, either in the original or in translation, which corresponds to English meter or rime. Yet who that disputes the claims of free verse will deny that the following lines from the Nineteenth Psalm are poetry?