Procrustean operations, of slight lengthenings or contractions, and imperceptible changes of stress and emphasis. Almost the[Pg 19] most important difference between good and bad verse is that in good verse this process of moulding and stretching words increases their emotional expressiveness, whereas in bad verse it does not. Of course the versification of a good poem is never continuously regular. Accents are dropped or displaced; unstressed syllables are left out, or extra syllables inserted. But we are, or should be, always conscious of the underlying pattern, the ideal rhythmical base.

[Pg 18]

[Pg 19]

Such metrical irregularities are necessary not merely in order to prevent monotony: for any writer who knows his business they are a powerful instrument for controlling and modifying the emotional values of language. In Milton’s line,

there are only three stressed syllables. If these words were to occur in a newspaper[Pg 20] article we should probably read them so rapidly that they would not sound like a blank verse at all. In order that they may become a verse, we must either put artificial stresses upon to and of, and read, “Trans- | fíx us | tó the | bóttom | óf this | gúlf,” which, though formally a blank verse, is not English; or else we must linger upon certain syllables, and stretch them out sufficiently to compensate for the absent stresses: “Trans | fíx us | to the | bóttom | of this | gúlf.” What happens here is something of the same nature as syncopation in music. The two pairs of syllables, -fix us and bottom, are each dwelt upon and prolonged, so that they expand and bulge over from their own bars into the bars that follow them, and so push away the unemphatic syllables to and of from the positions at the beginning of the bar, where a stress would normally occur. We are in fact compelled, if the line is to make metrical[Pg 21] sense, to read the words slowly and spaciously, which produces the rhetorical and emotional effect that Milton intended. The following lines from Milton are instances of the opposite process of forcing into the rhythmical mould words which in ordinary prose speech would claim more elbow-room than the metre allows them:

[Pg 20]

[Pg 21]

The natural way of spacing these words, if they were prose, would be: “Rócks, | cáves, | lákes, | féns, | bógs, | déns, and | shádes of | déath.” But the metrical framework compels us to crowd these monosyllables together, and read them twice as 

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