The Complete Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Edgar Allan Poe [726]
The further illustration of this point will enable me to take an important step.
One of our finest poets, Mr. Christopher Pearse Cranch, begins a very beautiful poem thus:
Many are the thoughts that come to me
In my lonely musing;
And they drift so strange and swift
There's no time for choosing
Which to follow; for to leave
Any, seems a losing.
,p> "A losing" to Mr. Cranch, of course- but this en passant. It will be seen here that the intention is trochaic;- although we do not see this intention by the opening foot as we should do, or even by the opening line. Reading the whole stanza, however, we perceive the trochaic rhythm as the general design, and so after some reflection, we divide the first line thus:
Many are the / thoughts that / come to / me.
Thus scanned, the line will seem musical. It is highly so. And it is because there is no end to instances of just such lines of apparently incomprehensible music, that Coleridge thought proper to invent his nonsensical system of what he calls "scanning by accents"- as if "scanning by accents" were anything more than a phrase. Whenever "Christabel" is really not rough, it can be as readily scanned by the true I laws (not the supposititious rules) of verse, as can the simplest pentameter of Pope; and where it is rough (passim) these same laws will enable any one of common sense to show why it is rough and to point out instantaneously the remedy for the roughness.
A reads and re-reads a certain line, and pronounces it false in rhythm-unmusical. B, however, reads it to A, and A is at once struck with the perfection of the rhythm, and wonders at his dulness in not "catching" it before. Henceforward he admits the line to be musical. B, triumphant, asserts that, to be sure the line is musical- for it is the work of Coleridge- and that it is A who is not; the fault being in A's false reading. Now here A is right and B wrong. That rhythm is erroneous (at some point or other more or less obvious), which any ordinary reader can, without design, read improperly. It is the business of the poet so to construct his line that the intention must be caught at once. Even when these men have precisely the same understanding of a sentence, they differ, and often widely, in their modes of enunciating it. Any one who has taken the trouble to examine the topic of emphasis (by which I here mean not accent of particular syllables, but the dwelling on entire words), must have seen that men emphasize in the most singularly arbitrary manner. There are certain large classes of people, for example, who persist in emphasizing their monosyllables. Little uniformity of emphasis prevails; because the thing itself- the idea, emphasis- is referabie to no natural- at least to no well comprehended and therefore uniform-law. Beyond a very narrow and vague limit, the whole matter is conventionality. And if we differ in emphasis even when we agree in comprehension, how much more so in the former when in the latter too! Apart, however, from the consideration of natural disagreement, is it not clear that, by tripping here and mouthing there, any sequence of words may be twisted into any species of rhythm? But are we thence to deduce that all sequences of words are rhythmical in a rational understanding of the term?- for this is the deduction precisely to which the reductio ad absurdum will, in the end, bring all the propositions of Coleridge. Out of a hundred readers of "Christabel," fifty will be able to make nothing of its rhythm, while forty-nine of the remaining fifty with some ado, fancy they comprehend it, after the fourth or fifth perusal. The one out of the whole hundred who shall both comprehend and admire it at first sight- must be an unaccountably clever person- and I am by far too modest to assume, for a moment, that that very clever person is myself.
In illustration of what is here