the irregularity of the " fine frenzy " of such a poem, for instance, as Coleridge s Kubla Khan, there is a difference in kind. Strange that it is not in an ode at all but in this unique lyric Kubla Khan, descriptive of imagina tive landscape, that an English poet has at last conquered the crowning difficulty of writing in irregular metres. Having broken away from all restraints of couplet and stanza, having caused his rhymes and pauses to fall just where and just when the emotion demands that they should fall, scorning the exigencies of makeshift no less than the exigencies of stanza, he has found what every writer of irregular English odes has sought in vain, a music as entrancing, as natural, and at the same time as inscrutable, as the music of the winds or of the sea. uaic The prearranged effects of sharp contrasts and anti- V11( l phonal movements, such as some poets have been able to compass, do not of course come under the present defi- v nition of irregular metres at all. If a metrical passage does not gain immensely by being written independently of stanzaic law, it loses immensely ; and for this reason, perhaps, that the great charm of the music of all verse, as distinguished from the music of prose, is inevitableness of cadence. In regular metres we enjoy the pleasure of feel ing that the rhymes will inevitably fall under a recognized law of couplet or stanza. But if the passage flows independently of these, it must still flow inevitably it must, in short, show that it is governed by another and a yet deeper force, the inevitableness of emotional expres sion. The lines must be long or short, the rhymes must be arranged after this or after that interval, not because it is convenient so to arrange them, but because the emotion of the poet inexorably demands these and no other arrangements. When, however, Coleridge came to try his hand at irregular odes, such as the odes " To the Departing Year " and " To the Duchess of Devonshire," he certainly did not succeed. As to Wordsworth s magnificent " Ode on Intimations of Immortality," the sole impeachment of it, but it is a grave one, is that the length of the lines and the arrange ment of the rhymes are not always inevitable ; they are, except on rare occasions, governed neither by stanzaic nor by emotional law. For instance, what emotional necessity was there for the following rhyme-arrangement 1 " My heart is at your festival, My head hath its coronal, The fulness of your bliss I feel I feel it all. Oh, evil day ! if I were sullen "While earth herself is adorning, This sweet May morning ; And the children are culling, On every side, In a thousand valleys far and wide, Fresh floAvers. " Beautiful as is the substance of this entire passage, so far from gaining, it loses by rhyme loses, not in perspicuity, for Wordsworth like all his contemporaries (except Shelley) is mostly perspicuous, but in that metrical emphasis the quest of which is one of the impulses that leads a poet to write in rhyme. In spite, however, of its metrical defects, this famous ode of Wordsworth s is the finest irregular ode in the language ; for, although Coleridge s "Ode to the Departing Year" excels it in Pindaric fire, it is below Wordsworth s masterpiece in almost every other quality save rhythm. Among the writers of English irregular odes, next to Wordsworth, stands Dryden. The second stanza of the " Ode for St Cecilia s Day " is a great triumph. r icrue Leaving the irregular and turning to the regular ode, it i(! " nc is natural to divide these into two classes: (1) those C g, r which are really Pindaric in so far as they consist of strophes, antistrophes, and epodes, variously arranged and 271
- ontrasted ; and (2) those which consist of a regular Is it
succession of regular stanzas. Perhaps all Pindaric odes suited to tend to show that this form of art is in English a mistake. mo ^ em It is easy enough to write one stanza and call it a strophe, pc another in a different movement and call it an antistrophe, a third in a different movement still and call it an epode. But in modern prosody, disconnected as it is from musical and from terpsichorean science, what are these 1 No poet and no critic can say. What is requisite is that the ear of the reader should catch a great metrical scheme, of which these three varieties of movement are necessary parts, should catch, in short, that inevitableness of structure upon which we have already touched. In order to justify a poet in writ ing a poem in three different kinds of movement, governed by no musical and no terpsichorean necessity, a necessity of another kind should make itself apparent ; that is, the metrical wave moving in the strophe should be metrically answered by the counter-wave moving in the antistrophe, while the epode which, as originally conceived by Stesi- chorus, was merely a standing still after the balanced movements of the strophe and antistrophe should clearly, in a language like ours, be a blended echo of these two. A mere metrical contrast such as some poets labour to effect is not a metrical answer. And if the reply to this criticism be that in Pindar himself no such metrical scheme is apparent, that is the strongest possible argument in support of our position. If indeed the metrical scheme of Pindar is not apparent, that is because, having been written for chanting, it was subordinate to the lost musical scheme of the musician. It has been contended, and is likely enough, that this musical scheme was simple as simple, perhaps, as the scheme of a cathedral chant ; but to it, whatever it was, the metrical scheme of the poet was subordinated. It need scarcely be said that the phrase " metrical scheme " is used here not in the narrow sense as indicating the position and movement of strophe and antistrophe by way of simple contrast, but in the deep metrical sense as indicating the value of each of these component parts of the ode, as a counter-wave balancing and explaining the other waves in the harmony of the entire composition. We touch upon this matter in order to show that the moment odes ceased to be chanted, the words strophe, antistrophe, and epode lost the musical value they had among the Greeks, and pretended to a complex metrical value which their actual metrical struc ture does not appear to justify. It does not follow from this that odes should not be so arranged, but it does follow that the poet s arrangement should justify itself by dis closing an entire metrical scheme in place of the musical scheme to which the Greek choral lyric was evidently sub ordinated. But even if the poet were a sufficiently skilled metricist to compass a scheme embracing a wave, an answering wave, and an echo gathering up the tones of each, i.e., the strophe, the antistrophe, and the epode, the ear of the reader, unaided by the musical emphasis which supported the rhythms of the old choral lyric, is, it should seem, incapable of gathering up and remembering the sounds further than the strophe and the antistrophe, after which it demands not an epode but a return to the strophe. That is to say, an epode, as alternating in the body of the modern ode, is a mistake ; a single epode at the end of a group of strophes and antistrophes (as in some of the Greek odes) has, of course, a different function altogether. The great difficulty of the English ode is that of pre venting the apparent spontaneity of the impulse from being marred by the apparent artifice of the form ; for, assuredly, no writer subsequent to Coleridge and to Keats would
dream of writing an ode on the cold Horatian principles