and active. A line drawing is often a more effective stimulus to the mind than a painting, an unaccompanied violin sonata than an orchestral symphony; and in the same way poetry, when merely read to ourselves, though it cannot so imperiously dominate our physical senses, may well make a subtler and profounder appeal to the intellectual imagination.

[Pg 16]

All that has been said with regard to the reading of poetry that was intended to be sung or chanted, should be even more true of modern verse that has been written solely in order to be spoken or read. Such poetry is in fact composed in quite a different medium to the poetry of Homer and Aeschylus; and I must now try to make it clear what this medium seems to me to consist of. In order to do so, I must venture upon a brief excursion over the perilous quicksands of metrical theory. To save[Pg 17] time I shall speak dogmatically, while well aware that none of my assertions can at best do more than express a part of the truth.

[Pg 17]

When we read aloud a leading article, or any other piece of utilitarian and unemotional prose, we are not as a rule in the least aware of the rhythm of the sentences. But suppose we were to read the same leading article with a simulated mock-heroic emotion, we should then find, if we cared to observe, that we were now emphasising the before latent rhythm in two ways: we should be stressing certain syllables with greater force; and at the same time we should be making the intervals between these stressed syllables, not indeed rigidly equal, but far more nearly equal than they were, when we read the passage with the lack of emotion which it merited. And we shall find that the same thing happens whenever we read prose that genuinely moves us. Emotion in fact always[Pg 18] tends to regularise and emphasise rhythm, even in prose. Now the main function of verse is deliberately, by its structure, to regularise rhythm, and so to create emotion artificially. Let us take a normal English verse: “The curfew tolls the knell of parting day.” The five stressed syllables, cur-, tolls, knell, par-, day, are felt to be equi-distant in time. No doubt they are in fact only approximately equi-distant. The human voice is not an instrument like a piano or a violin, by means of which we can divide time into mathematically equal spaces. However, the normal bars, or feet, are felt to be equal in time; and that is sufficient. The rhythmically indeterminate words and phrases of everyday speech are forced into this mould, or rather stretched upon this framework; and that process is a continuous series of 

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