The Medium of Spoken Verse

When we read Homer or Aeschylus to ourselves, we do not as a rule attempt to imagine what their poems must have sounded like, when they were recited or sung. We transpose them, as it were, into a medium more or less resembling that of modern poetry. Let us try to measure what our loss must be, and what, if any, the compensations. To begin with, the elements of music and intonation, and also, in drama, of acting and dancing, have disappeared altogether. The intensity and mass of our emotions cannot possibly be the same as they would have been, could we have heard and beheld the living reality of which the text is but a pale,[Pg 14] colourless shadow. It is true that rhythm is still there, and the general proportions of the whole: but rhythm and movement, unembodied and uninterpreted by performers, are far more difficult for us to realise by the less sensuous, more purely mental process of reading; while in the absence of musical and histrionic contrasts and emphasis, even the general proportions are likely to be somewhat obscured. It is as though we were studying a photograph or a monochrome copy of a painted picture; or rather we might be said to experience the same kind of difficulties as when we are contemplating colourless fragments of Greek sculpture against the background of a museum wall, at a distance and in a light that were never intended for them by their creators. How different would be our emotions, could we see the figures of the Olympian or Parthenon pediments placed in their right relation to the architecture and to the landscape,[Pg 15] unmutilated, and glowing with colour which harmonised with that of the temples of which they were an organic part! It is a poor compensation that by long loving study we may perhaps become more intimate with the indestructible beauty of certain details, than we could ever have been, had we seen them less closely as elements of a complex work of art.

[Pg 14]

[Pg 15]

In some ways our plight with regard to ancient poetry is less unhappy. Many of our texts are unmutilated, and when we read the Oedipus to ourselves, it should seem to us as much an organic unity as Othello. There may also be a real gain in our sensitiveness to the more purely literary qualities, such as verbal, as distinguished from musical colour, the suggestive values of words and combinations of words, their overtones, and the complicated reverberations they evoke in our minds. As none of the work is being done for us by performers, our imagination, thrown[Pg 16] back on its own unaided resources, should be all the more wide awake 

 Prev. P 7/32 next