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Notes on Verse Technique
Szerző: Howard Phillips Lovecraft • Év: 1932
In trying to decide what real poetry, as distinguished from mere rhyming prose, actually is, we
conclude that the essential marks of poetry are sincere and intense emotion, the use of delicate
suggestion, symbolism, and depiction rather than bald statement as a medium of presentation,
musically rhythmical language with sound expressive of the theme, and a tremendously exact and
intelligent choice of words based on their associative value, literary and colloquial, and on their
fresh unhackneyedness in connexion with the given purpose.
Naturally, so general a definition is of only vague help in enabling the amateur to discriminate
between good and bad verse in specific cases; hence it would be well to inquire further about the
earmarks of poetic merit. Roughly, we may say that any piece of intendedly poetic composition,
whether one’s own or another’s, ought to be studied with a keen eye for at least four points: (1)
suitability of the rhythmical form; (2) appropriateness of the vocabulary, language, and manner of
approach; (3) sincerity, relevance, and vividness of the symbols, images, or figures of speech
employed; and (4) sincerity and truth to human nature of the theme, mood, and plan of
presentation.
The first point—about suitability of form—need not be taken as an argument for regular verse
against intelligently irregular or free verse; for it means only that the basic harmony between
thought and rhythm ought never to be broken, and that when a certain type of cadence-pattern is
once decided on, it ought not to be blindly, carelessly, and capriciously violated by deviations
inherently alien to it.
In free verse, of course, only a sort of natural taste or instinct can tell the beginner exactly what
rhythms are or are not suited to certain passages in a given poem. That is one reason why the
indiscriminate use of this medium is not to be highly recommended to the novice except when he
has a spontaneous inclination toward it. The lack of guiding rules is a severe handicap at an early
stage of poetic growth. In metrical verse, however, it is easy to envisage the various parts of any
chosen rhythm-pattern, whether regular or irregular, and to see that the number of accentual beats
in any given line complies with the understood requirements of a pattern.
Any good poetic manual like Brander Matthews “A Study of Versification”, or any standard
textbook on composition and rhetoric, will give the beginner a full idea of the various English
metres, their names, their rules, and their relative fitness for different types of poetic use. It
remains for him to see just how these metres are to be applied in practice. Many novices appear to
think that the management of line-lengths is a wholly free-and-easy, hit-or-miss process; so that we
often find in the amateur papers something like the following:
“My eyes doth behold the tawdry sky,
My thoughts doth soar up very high,
I study, I meditate, my soul opens wide
Like the rushing and rolling of the daily flood tide.”
Now this will never do. When we agree on a certain pattern, assigning so many beats to a line,
we must stick to it. In the case cited, the author undoubtedly wanted to use iambic tetrameter, or
iambic verse with four beats to a line, thought he succeeded in doing it only in his second line. A
more correct version—with certain points other than metre also straightened out—might read:
My eyes behold the vaulted sky,
While every thought ascends on high;
My brooding soul is opened wide
To Truth’s incessant mounting tide.
It will be noted that the amended version has exactly the same number of syllables, as well as of
beats, to a line; and one may add that of course this must tend to be so, dominantly, in all regular
metre, since each metrical beat is usually associated with a certain number of syllables. Thus four1/7. oldal
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beat iambic verse, since the iambic foot is traditionally an unstressed syllable followed by a
stressed one, will always tend to have just eight syllables per line—as the foregoing revised
specimen has. In general, it is safest for the beginner to count his syllables and plan his metrical
pattern on a syllabic basis; though experienced poets, with a trained ear for subtle harmonies, are
able to vary the number of unstressed syllables provided they keep to the prescribed number of
beats per line. Thus Coleridge, in a specimen of four-beat iambics:
“A snake’s small eye blinks dull and shy,
And the lady’s eyes they shrunk in her head;
Each shrunk up to a serpent’s eye,
And with somewhat of malice and more of dread
At Christabel she looked askance. . .”
Here a genuine poetic master is syllabically irregular without spoiling the regularity of the
underlying metrical pattern; but as in free verse, it takes a very sensitive and well-trained ear to
decide just how to manage the irregular syllables. No beginner is likely to be able to “get away with
it”, hence the advisability of sticking at first to a regular number of syllables per line. Many, of
course, prefer always to retain this absolute regularity; so that some of the world’s foremost poetry
is in lines which may be largely measured by syllable-counting. Everyone, however, should strive to
educate his ear to such a point that he can discriminate between artistic, basically rhythmical
irregularity and the irregularity which is irresponsible and violative of rhythm.
This applies not only to irregularity of syllables, but to such deviations from the main accent plan
as cause one metrical foot to be substituted for another. In the midst of iambic verse we often
insert a line which begins with a trochaic foot (with accents reversed) or a spondee (with two
equally accented syllables), but we must learn to do this intelligently if we do it at all. Thus the
following from Keats is wholly artistic, even though the lines do not all consist of alternating
unstressed and stressed syllables as implied by the dominant iambic metre:
“Then Lamia breathed death-breath; the sophist’s eye,
Like a sharp spear, went through her utterly;
Keen, cruel, perceant, stinging: she as well
As her weak hand could any meaning tell,
Motioned him to be silent. . .”
Were it not for this variety of accent, a long piece of verse might readily become highly
monotonous, yet it is only too easy to make careless variations which are not permissible at all.
Thus the following is only harsh and ridiculous because of its irregularities:
Bright shines the sun over the serene wold,
And adorns every hedge with refined gold.
Clearly the original plan of an unstressed followed by a stressed syllable should be more closely
adhered to—perhaps like this:
Bright shines the sun above the quiet wold,
Decking each hedge with transcendental gold.
Here the regularity is not absolute, but the exceptions are confined to places where they do not
halt the rhythm. The learner should strive his utmost, by cultivating a rhythmic instinct and by
studying the best poetic models, to develop a subconscious taste in the matter of cadences in
poetry. Also, he should learn to shun freakish and arbitrary variations in his metrical plan, such as
the insertion of lines of one kind of metre in the midst of a poem designed to be in another metre.
All too many amateurs are careless in this respect; irresponsibly putting occasional tetrameter or
hexameter lines in intendedly pentameter verse, and so on.
Now as for the second earmark of good verse—appropriateness of vocabulary, language, and
manner of approach—here we must rely almost entirely on a developed taste, for the specific
guiding rules are very few. We have noted before that certain archaic and affectedly “poetic” words
are taboo—yclept, quoth, cloth, ‘gan, charger, morn, and things of that kind. It may be added that
other words or alleged words such as galore, enthused, doped, disgruntled, etc., are taboo because
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they either do not properly exist or are parts of a lame, feeble type of tame, trite, and stupid
colloquialism or “Babbitt English” without standing in any real art of expression. Further taboos
exist against definitely slang words except in consciously light or comic verse; against the oh’s,
ah’s, alas’s, dear’s, sweet’s, and tender’s of spurious emotion; and above all, against technical or
technically-suggesting words such as psychology, process, inhibition, educational, economics,
terrain, parallax, citizenship, civics, maximum, stabalisation, and the like, which are utterly and
irrevocably confined to prose and the thought-processes peculiar to prose. Thus the following
extracts are hopelessly unpoetical:
“And don’t make your trip purely educational,
But let it be rather somewhat recreational.”
“Service and knowledge solve problems we share,
More applied Religion leads to the goal,
Character, Citizenship, Conduct fair,
Build genuine Peace to master the whole,
Cooperation with duty and care
Will make Better Homes the joy of the soul.”
In the same class are words or terms of expression suggestive of prose logic rather than poetic
symbolism—hence, therefore, thus, namely, respective, corollary, and their kith.
It is, of course, but a step from this matter of vocabulary to the question of manner and
approach. Here we may only say that poetry must convey its message simply and concretely; using
plain, universal, and appropriately symbolic words, and speaking in images, comparisons,
suggestions, and implications rather than in coldly explanatory statements or logical expositions.
Thus the following line (referring to the Mound-Builders of prehistoric America), though taken from
an intended poem, is certainly prose and nothing else:
“And that whole population disappeared without leaving a physical trace.”
To change this into poetry one would have to alter the whole method of diction and approach;
untechnicalising the language, substituting pictures, comparisons, or emotional effects for dry
statements, and producing something more like this:
And like a cloud that melts in mystery
Before the breath of summer’s sun-charged wind,
That race, whose walls had towered from sea to sea,
Vanished, and left a lifeless void behind.
Often the contrast between prosaic and poetic expression is not as clear-cut as in this example;
so that we must look sharply to see whether the poet is really speaking in symbols and images, or
merely “bluffing” by writing literal prose statement in language otherwise fairly acceptable to
poetry. For example, note the relative flatness and tameness of the following entirely correct verse:
Her mouth is sweet and music-fraught,
And on her fair face beams the glow
Of amorous guile and subtle thought
Bequeathed from Egypt long ago.
This is smooth enough, but there is no life in it because it merely states something instead of
picturing it. It is really a paraphrase of the opening of Swinburne’s “Cleopatra”, and when we turn
to the original we may instantly see how the concrete and figurative language vitalises and makes
poetry of the description:
“Her mouth is fragrant as a vine,
A vine with birds in all its boughs;
Serpent and scarab for a sign
Between the beauty of her brows
And the amorous deep lips divine.”
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The third earmark of good verse—sincerity, relevance, and vividness of the symbols, images, or
figures employed—is an infinitely subtler point than either of the preceding ones; and can be
perfectly understood only through the development of one’s own inmost taste. Often a poem may be
as wholly figurative as the Swinburne original just quoted, yet it will fail to ring true because the
symbols, images, and comparisons are forced, artificial, inapplicable, or not deeply felt. A figure of
speech, to be really effective, must directly, powerfully, naturally, and genuinely symbolise the
actual object, condition, or occurrence which the poet intends it to tell about. If it does not, the
effect can never ring true, but will always be bad poetry. It is better to drop into figureless prose
than to concoct flimsy and artificial figures which really apply very little to the thing depicted. Such
pseudo-figures always reveal their irrelevance to the reader and make a poem feebler instead of
stronger. Thus in the first specimen quoted in this article the final image is a palpably false one—a
mere rhetorical flourish without relevance or meaning:
“. . . my soul opens wide
Like the rushing and rolling of the daily flood tide.”
Does the wide opening of anything bear any resemblance to the rolling of a tide? If we have a
symbol, it must be an applicable one. Had the poet compared the opening of his soul to the
unfolding of flower-petals, the raising of a portcullis, or better still, the opening of a flood-gate, his
parallel would have been an applicable and therefore potentially effective one. Some cases, of
course, are far subtler than this. It is so easy in poetry to perpetrate passages like:
The roseate dawn at last flared up
Like wine within a magic cup;
While on the green the shadows fell
Like Titans half-invisible...
Yet when we look closely at such concoctions we can easily see that the comparisons are forced,
inept, and obviously devised merely of the sake of creating a poetic-looking exterior. They are not
real because they are not exact, natural, and spontaneously generated in the poet’s subconscious.
They are no more real to the poet than to the reader. It will be useful to contrast a bit of typically
pompous “hokum” with a piece of genuinely poignant concrete expression on the same subject;
hence at the risk of consuming too much space the following pair of Memorial Day verses—collated
some years ago by B. K. Hart, Literary Editor of the Providence Journal—are given in full. A is
smooth, and even free from really false figures, but the symbols are in this case ruined by sheer
tameness and triteness. Notice the tremendously increased vitality of B, whose symbols and images
are really living and potent ones:
A
Sleep, comrades, sleep and rest
On this Field of the Grounded Arms,
Where foes no more molest,
Nor sentry’s shot alarms.
Ye have slept on the ground before,
And started to your feet
At the cannon’s sudden roar
Or the drum’s redoubling beat.
Rest, comrades, rest and sleep!
The thoughts of men shall be
As sentinels to keep
Your rest from danger free.
Your silent tents of green
We deck with fragrant flowers;
Yours has the suffering been;
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The memory shall be ours.
B
Do not cry!
But gather buds! And with them greenery
Of slender branches taken from a tree
Well bannered by the Spring that saw them fall,
And you, for you are cleverest of all,
Who have slim fingers and are pitiful!
Brimming your lap with bloom that you may cull,
Will sit apart and weave for every head
A garland of the flowers you gathered.
Be green upon their graves, O happy Spring!
For they were young and eager who are dead!
Of all things that are young and quivering
With eager life, be they remembered
They move not here. They have gone to the clay.
They cannot die again for liberty!
Be they remembered of their land for aye!
Green be their graves, and green their memory!
But the fourth earmark of good verse—the sincerity and truth to human nature of the theme,
mood, and plan of presentation—is the hardest one of all for the amateur to define and identify.
Literature is so full of favourite stock subjects and conventional modes of treatment that it is really
hard sometimes for a novice to know whether he is singing his own mood or the mood of an endless
crowd of other writers whose style he relishes and tends to echo. If he is wise, he will beware of
trusting himself to be original and sincere in any piece of work except one born directly out of his
deepest personal feelings as distinguished from his polite and palpably acquired literary feelings.
one ought not to make a show of great emotion where little or none exists. This sort of deception
always results in feebleness, unconvincingness, and mushy sentimentality as distinguished from
actual warmth. It is fairly easy to detect in the novice, for he usually reveals his hollowness by
parading the long string of false-sentiment adjectives and ejaculations—fond, grand, rare, mighty,
wonderful, beauteous, sweet, oh, alt, hark, lo, etc. etc.—with which he has whipped up a spurious
enthusiasm for something that may or may not merit any enthusiasm at all. Much is revealed by
choice of subject, as well—for we are on guard against saccharine and perfervid rhapsodings about
home, mother, spring, pure love, snow, righteousness, pearly gates, the moon, courage, success,
and all the rest of the old standbys.
Even worse than the insincere treatment of a theme which may in itself be intrinsically sound, is
the juggling of false ideas and values which have no relation whatever to any form of life or reality.
By this is meant, for one thing, the personification or attribution of feeling and consciousness to
things utterly incapable of such treatment—the process by which mawkish poets speak of tender
rocks that dream in the sweet twilight, or tell about the song of the fond blossom that woos the
nightingale. Another form of this insincerity is the display of extravagant emotion over things which
warrant it—as when the poetaster avers he is ravished and transported by the fact that a robin has
laid an egg in his bird-house, or wails of being plunged into abysses of grief by the death of the day
at sunset or that of the year in autumn. These are the kind of fellows whom beauty hurts, and who
cannot see a butterfly without chanting a hymn of praise. A recent example of this type of artificial
sentiment addresses the much-overworked moon as follows:
“But to me—you’re like a beautiful prayer—
Something aloof—marvelous and rare.”
Only wide reading, keen observation, and cultivated sensitivity will enable the novice to draw an
exact and instant line between mawkishness and true feeling; but with time and growth the faculty
becomes acute and readily available. The other points—form, language, vividness—likewise become
clear under such a regimen; so that to the young bard in any stage of evolution we may always
safely give one dominant piece of advice—to read, watch, think, feel, and practice for all he is
worth; analysing every specimen of verse he writes or encounters, and refusing to be sidetracked
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by carelessness or inflated with false sentiment.
***
Recent months have brought such a profusion of good verse in the papers of the National that it
will hardly be possible to do more than glance at certain salient examples.
In Masaka for October and January Mr. Burton Crane reveals himself as one of the cleverest and
most intelligent of our poets, furnishing several specimens of diverse forms and varying degrees of
seriousness whose connecting thread is a definite mood of ironic, half-jaunty disillusionment in
which easy assurance is faintly touched with traces of light wistfulness. It is a poetry of ideas rather
than of images; but the authenticity and distinctiveness of the mood, the mature flow of the
language, and the aptness of the turns of thought all give it a lyric grace which places it far outside
the field of mere rhyming prose. Current colloquialism is often used to great advantage, especially
in those pieces which frankly belong to the light verse category. “Lipstick”, “A Bronx Cheer for
Life”, the sonnet sequence “In Passing”, and others are all worth more than casual mention. The
technique is in general so good that one wonders at the presence of two small but slightly irritating
flaws—the assigning of a disyllabic value to the monosyllable hours, and the accenting of romance
on the first syllable. Lighter pieces are “The Seal”, “Your Love”, and “The Ballad of Alexis”, all of
which contain an especially keen and sophisticated wit. “Little Streets at Night” is in many ways
the finest of the offerings from an imaginative point of view, being full of vivid pictures which
arouse a horde of pleasantly exotic vistas in the reader’s mind. As the lines themselves say,
“The silver ghosts of old Japan
Come gliding forth from vase and fan
And coloured prints live once again in little streets at night.”
An additional word of praise is due to Mr. Crane for his brief but very illuminating article on
Japanese poetry.
Ripples from Lake Champlain continues to purvey poetry of an exceptionally high order. The
contributions of Vrest Orton, mostly in the sonnet form, attain a literary level which puts them in
competition with the best of recent American verse, whether inside or outside amateurdom. Mr.
Orton’s instinctive command of symbols and images expressive of precise shadings of emotion, and
of verbal effects which convey worlds of thought in a single deft twist or eloquently significant
pause, makes him a poet in the most genuine sense, and causes us to forgive any signs of careless
workmanship which may now and then creep into his lines. “Pension” is a remarkably—almost
disturbingly—vivid study of old age, which Editor Kelley has honoured by reprinting in a highly
tasteful broadside form. “Mirage” is charged with an unusual amount of harmony despite an
irregularity in the rhyme scheme and an employment of the somewhat outmoded archaisms ‘neath
and o’er. But the lyric “To Helen” is probably the most thoroughly poignant example of Mr. Orton’s
recent verse. The musical cadences of these brief couplets blend magnificently with the graphic
and delicate procession of autumnal imagery—so that we quite forget the disyllabic use of hour in
the first line.
Aptly supplementing Mr. Orton’s work in Ripples are the twin replies to his “Pension” by
Berniece L. Beane-Graham. While scarcely equalling the potency and rhythm of the original, they
display much cleverness and observation, and exemplify an irregular metre which generally
escapes harshness.
“Water Lily”, by Rev. Philip Jerome Cleveland, is rich in visions of natural beauty, and is cast in a
metre of alternating Alexandrine and pentameter lines which proves highly satisfactory until the
Alexandrines, toward the close of the poem, unaccountably swell into heptameters. “Stars”, by
Daniel W. Smythe, “The Hell of Wrath”, by Marie Tello Phillips, and various brief items by Bettie
Margot Cassie, are all clear-cut and adequate in the expression of single ideas. “Eroti”, by Ray H.
Zorn, has images of genuine power, though the verses as a whole retain vague traces of an
immature workmanship betrayed by the conscious rather than unconscious management of the
rhythm. “An Evening and a Morning”, by William Sheppard Sparks, is a free verse experiment
whose panoramic glimpses indicate a very promising selective imagination, while “Universal
Ripples”, by Leonard Twynham, is exceedingly eloquent and melodious. The work of Miriam Irene
Kimball, here as often elsewhere, suffers from a spirit of prose which persists in spite of the use of
metre. It is a matter of vocabulary, mode of approach to the subject, type of diction, and the habit
of making flat statements instead of using symbolism, association, suggestion, and pictorial
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imagery in conveying the desired effect. It would pay Miss Kimball to form a completely fresh idea
of the province and methods of poetry through the study of some contemporary manual like the
recently published works of L. A. G. Strong. A similar criticism might sometimes be applied to the
work of Florence Grow Proctor. Another kind of weakness—the weakness of trite, vague
phraseology, dif. fuse, rather imitative stock emotion, and careless, uncritical, and unselective
construction—is exhibited in “Oh! Moon”, by Hazel Jacobs.
In “The Woodland Smoke” Rev. Eugene B. Kuntz is seen most advantageously as a weaver of
exact, delicate images to mirror his sensitive responses to natural beauty. R. Malcolm Beal also
shews much eloquence and vividness in his “Syrian Beggar’s Prayer”, though the form is somewhat
irregular. Always graphic and meritorious are the short lyrics and vignettes by Marjorie Tullar, of
which an untitled specimen heads the Autumn Ripples. Other excellent recent work by Miss Tullar
includes “Irony” in the April Sea Gull, “Treasure Chest” in the January New Amateur, and
“Sanctuary” in the November Goldenrod.
Scattered through the different papers of the day are many more poems of undoubted value.
William Henry Blauvelt’s “Evening”, in the New Amateur, is very graceful except for the use of the
awkward pseudo-poetic idiom does rear. “After the Christmas Dance”, by Mary Elizabeth Mahakey
in the December Reg’lar Fellows, has a pathos and simplicity belonging to the true poetic tradition.
In the ample February Amateur Affairs several good verses occur; notably George W. Roberts’
artistically sincere though not very polished “Regrets”, Max Kaufman’s “The Untapped”, and Arthur
Canto’s “Sunset”—which latter would perhaps be more convincing if not so reminiscent of the
synthetic “folksiness” of James Whitcomb Riley and his school. “The Beautiful Night”, by N. B.
McCarter, shews undoubted poetic feeling but an almost complete lack of technical training, which
calls for remedy.
At least two poetry brochures of great merit have appeared in the National since the last report.
Thoughts and Pictures (22 pp.), by Eugene B. Kuntz, D.D., contains a selection of Dr. Kuntz’s lighter
newspaper verse compiled by the able editor of The Tryout, and includes a great deal of highly
pleasing material. Perhaps the most notable poem is “Dusk on a Rainy Night”, in which the author’s
responsiveness to delicate visual impressions, and his instant ability to translate a subtle image into
a definite mood, are exhibited with particular force.
Poems from the Heart of Vermont (60 pp.) is an ambitious anthology of work both amateur and
non-amateur compiled and published by Mr. Stanton C. Muzzy. It is adorned with two delightful
illustrations—a woodcut frontispiece by F. Gilbert Hills, “A Vermont Hillside”, and a fine halftone
view of a steepled hilltop village photographed by Frank H. Craig and entitled “Sabbath Morn”.
Perhaps the most distinctive original ingredient is Arthur Goodenough’s majestic piece of
pageantry, “The Clouds”, where we see something of the imaginative power which Lord Dunsany
praised over a decade ago when awarding Mr. Goodenough a laureateship in a United contest.
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