The Passion of Meter

A Study of Wordsworth's Metrical Art

Brennan O'Donnell

• Publisher: The Kent State University Press
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9781612771007
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism in Poetry
• Index: Literature

The Passion of Meter is the first extended critical study of Wordsworth's metrical theory and his practice in the art of versification. Until now, relatively little attention has been paid to the relationship between Wordsworth's attempt to incorporate into his poetry the language of "common life" and the highly complex and decidedly conventional metrical forms in which he presents this language. O'Donnell provides a detailed treatment of what Wordsworth calls the "innumerable minutiae" that the art of the poet depends upon and of the broader vision to which those minutiae contribute. Beginning with a reassessment of Wordsworth's frequently misrepresented prose comments about meter, O'Donnell argues that these comments-considered in light of Wordsworth's practice and within their 18th-century context are more unorthodox and challenging than previously thought. In emphasizing the physical body of the poem as the site of a dynamic tension between conflicting passions - "the passion of sense" and "the passion of meter "Wordsworth places issues of metrical form and versification in the foreground of his theory of poetry. The core of this book is dedicated to a close examination of the elements of Wordsworth's craft. It sets forth in detail the rules and conventions that govern the poet's habits of metrical composition, identifying the idiosyncrasies that distinguish his practice from those of his predecessors and contemporaries. It also offers a close reading of a substantial body of Wordsworth's poetry, with careful attention paid to complex relationships between the minutiae of its sensuous forms (metrical form, rhythm, rhyme, assonance, alliteration) and larger thematic, aesthetic, and sophic concerns. As a departure from much contemporary criticism that tends to treat poetry solely as text, The Passion of Meter demonstrates the benefits of studying the details of versecraft. O'Donnell sizes the importance of hearing Wordsworth's poems as sonic performances in time as well as seeing them on the page.

PART ONE

The Passion of Meter

1

Similitude in Dissimilitude

It would not be a useless employment to apply this principle [of the pleasure stemming from the perception of similitude in dissimilitude] to the consideration of metre, and to show that metre is hence enabled to afford much pleasure, and to point out in what manner that pleasure is produced.

—Wordsworth, Preface to Lyrical Ballads (Prose 1:149)

“THE GREAT SPRING OF ACTIVITY”

One of the simplest and least-assuming statements about meter in the Preface to Lyrical Ballads is also one of the most important for understanding Wordsworth’s metrical art.¹ Having listed in rapid succession a number of reasons why he has chosen to write in strict, traditional meters, even while admittedly striving to employ a language as free as possible from the usual distinctions between metrical language and the language of “all other men who feel vividly and see clearly” (Prose 1:142), Wordsworth calls upon the experience of his reader:

All that it is necessary to say … upon this subject, may be effected by affirming, what few persons will deny, that, of two descriptions, either of passions, manners, or characters, each of them equally well executed, the one in prose and the other in verse, the verse will be read a hundred times where the prose is read once. (Prose 1:151)

Good metrical poetry needs no other justification beyond the fact that it invites and rewards rereading. It invites rereading, Wordsworth contends, because the act of reading verse is an inherently and complexly pleasurable activity. Wordsworth’s attempt to identify the source of the pleasure arising from composition in meter leads him to the central statement of his metrical theory:

Among the chief … causes [upon which the pleasure received from metrical language depends] is to be reckoned a principle which must be well known to those who have made any of the Arts the object of accurate reflection; I mean the pleasure which the mind derives from the perception of similitude in dissimilitude. (Prose 1:149)

The “principle” discussed here Wordsworth calls “the great spring of the activity of our minds and their chief feeder.” It is also the source of “sexual appetite, and all the passions connected with it.” It is the very “life of our ordinary conversation; and upon the accuracy with which similitude in dissimilitude, and dissimilitude in similitude are perceived, depend our taste and our moral feelings” (Prose 1:149).² Wordsworth declines to enter into a “systematic” treatment of the topic as it relates specifically to metrical issues (saying instead that it would “not be a useless employment” to do so); nevertheless, the Preface does provide a number of strong indications of the direction such a treatment might take. This is especially true when the partial and relatively narrowly focused arguments advanced in the Preface are considered within the context of some of Wordsworth’s many statements about meter, rhythm, rhyme, and other elements of versification in his essays, letters, notes, and conversations.

Underlying the entire discussion of meter and diction in the Preface to Lyrical Ballads is Wordsworth’s assumption that the poet is by definition bound to provide a particular kind of salutary pleasure: the “end of Poetry is to produce excitement in coexistence with an overbalance of pleasure” (Prose 1:147). The “pleasure which a Poet may rationally endeavour to impart” (1:119) is itself complex. Because the passion involved in poetry frequently issues from “an unusual and irregular state of the mind,” it “may be carried beyond its proper bounds” by powerful words “or images and feelings [that] have an undue proportion of pain connected with them” (1:147). In such cases, meter, operating as a familiar and constant presence in the midst of uncommon and unsettling passion, may act to oppose and to temper this excitement: “Now the co-presence of something regular, something to which the mind has been accustomed in various moods and in a less excited state, cannot but have great efficacy in tempering and restraining the passion by an intertexture of ordinary feeling, and of feeling not strictly and necessarily connected with the passion” (1:147).

The words “co-presence” and “intertexture” are of fundamental importance in Wordsworth’s theories. They maintain a distinction, upon which Wordsworth frequently insists, between two potentially oppositional activities: the selection of “real” language (a selection that theoretically follows no rules but those dictated by the passion itself) and the “fitting” of that language to metrical arrangement (which involves a complex process of framing passionate language in conventional form for aesthetic purposes). These two processes correspond roughly to the dynamics suggested in Wordsworth’s familiar description of a poem as a “spontaneous overflow” of feeling, “recollected in tranquility”: feeling overflows in expressive syntactic structures, figures, and imagery; metrical arrangement and all of the patterns of rhythm and sound that go along with it may be regarded as a sign of the presence of the tranquilly purposeful mind directing and shaping the passion toward the proper ends of poetry.

Because meter functions as a sign of purposefulness, and because it stimulates associations between the generating passions of a poem and moods and states of mind other than those that are the immediate occasion of the poem (“in a less excited state”), the effects of metrical organization are not, and cannot be, entirely subordinate to the impulses of that generating passion. Two systems of organization are at work, and in good verse they will be felt as interconnected and dynamic “co-presence[s]”—a passionate overflow of spontaneous emotion and an “intertexture” of “ordinary feeling … not strictly and necessarily connected with the passion.”

The potential complexity of the “intertexture” of meter and diction (and its genuine contrariety) is developed further on in Wordsworth’s argument when he makes the seemingly contradictory claim that meter frequently performs a function directly opposite to that mentioned in the preceding quotation. In cases in which the “Poet’s words should be incommensurate with the passion” and “inadequate to raise the Reader to a height of desirable excitement,” meter may “impart” the requisite passion “(unless the Poet’s choice of his metre has been grossly injudicious)”:

In the feelings of pleasure which the Reader has been accustomed to connect with metre in general, and in the feeling … which he has been accustomed to connect with that particular movement of metre, there will be found something which will greatly contribute to impart passion to the words, and to effect the complex end which the Poet proposes to himself. (1:149)

Wordsworth recognizes here that it is probable, the complexities and insufficiencies of language being what they are, that many parts of his own, or any poet’s, work will be too personal or too idiosyncratic to convey successfully the full intensity of the passion. In such cases, the intrinsic pleasures issuing from the sonic patterns and rhythmic movement of verse itself, and from its powerful ability to call up associations between such movement and previous experiences of pleasure in measured language, will help supply the deficiency. The “complex end” of the poem, that is, may be effected by unusually passionate language couched in rhythmic structures that temper the impulses of the passion, or by language which in some cases fails to embody satisfactorily what Wordsworth calls elsewhere “the passion of the subject” but which nevertheless commands and repays attention because its physical properties are organized in an insistent and inherently pleasurable way.³

In both of these cases, the poet depends heavily on the relationship between meter and diction to create a sense of the difference between the language of “real life” and the language of poetry. Meter, says Wordsworth, contributes “imperceptibly” to “make up a complex feeling of delight” through “an indistinct perception perpetually renewed of language closely resembling that of real life, and yet, in the circumstance of metre, differing from it so widely” (Prose 1:151). The same idea is discernible in the following paragraph of the Preface, when Wordsworth says that in these poems he “endeavoured to bring [his] language near to the language of men” (1:151; emphasis added). He states clearly that he understands the extremely subtle—even “imperceptible”—intrinsic pleasures of meter and consciously seeks to use these in creating an idiom somewhere between the language of common life and something that feels more significant and perhaps more permanent and directly communicative than does that frequently unpredictable language, subject as it is to becoming incommunicative through its very familiarity. He strives for an idiom that may be perceived to be “near” to speech. At the same time, he consciously creates a context in which specifically idiomatic tendencies (in the sense of radically personal and individual) will be modified by virtue of his voluntary obedience to a system of organization that he shares with all poets in a four-hundred-year-old tradition of accentual-syllabic verse.

One of the chief effects of the poet’s use of metrical language as Wordsworth defines it is that it creates a potentially pleasurable sense of aesthetic distance between the language of the poem and the “language really used by men.” The operation of language itself, and especially the complex interplay of mind with and against language, becomes objectified through the reader’s consciousness of the movements and turnings of verse. Wordsworth suggests that no matter how successful a poem is in employing language that is informed by an occasion of real passion, and no matter how it resists the limiting influence of preconditioned notions derived from other poems, meter itself will tend to counter, for better or for worse, these distinguishing and individuating impulses through its “tendency … to divest language, in a certain degree, of its reality, and thus to throw a sort of half-consciousness of unsubstantial existence over the whole composition” (1:147). The presence of meter works continually and subtly to impress the reader with the obviously composed, overdetermined nature of the speech. Each phrase, each word, even each syllable is simultaneously able to be apprehended as an element of the syntax of expressive passion, as an element of an overarching, conventional pattern of repeated stress and sound, or (strangely and even mysteriously) both. Does the sequence “meadow, grove, and stream” take the form that it takes primarily as an index of a mind moving figuratively from fixity and containment to change and fluidity? Or is it also—or even more fundamentally—evidence of an ear attuned to the slowing effect of a late pause after an unstressed syllable (move “meadow” to the second position in the string of nouns and note how the line lurches forward at its close) and to the pleasures of assonance operating in contiguous syllables that are simultaneously distinguished by degree of stress (méad-ŏw, gróve)? Wordsworth’s discussion suggests that he holds such intersections of distinct motives as a deep source of the enduring pleasures of verse.⁴

To take another example virtually at random, did the “well-dressed” woman walking by the side of Loch Ketterine in “Stepping Westward” actually say, as Wordsworth claims she said, the metrically tractable phrase “What you are stepping westward?” or has Wordsworth transformed it in his tranquil recollection? Is the fit between this supposedly actual salutation and the metrical scheme of the poem an instance of an actual and chance utterance approximating a metrical form (which instance thereby dictates the choice of the metrical frame that will control the rest of the poem), or has the actual speech been recomposed in conformity with Wordsworth’s need for an eight-syllable line with end rhyme:

“What you are stepping westward?” – “Yea.”

The point, of course, is that the demands of both systems—expressive syntax and metrical form—are fulfilled by the same speech instance. I would argue that this issue of simultaneous fulfillment, raised by the very act of quoting speech metrically, goes a long way toward explaining why the salutation proves so powerful to the speaker of “Stepping Westward.” As an instance of actual speech that catches the poet’s ear—an ear attuned by training to distinctions between permanently pleasurable utterance and the ephemeral noise of much daily discourse—it is more than a merely courteous form of address or a gesture insignificant beyond its conventional form. Instead, the greeting (like a poem) seems to embody the very spirit of a particular kind of human communication, and that spirit is communicated in large part through the contours of its physical form—it had the “very sound of courtesy” (l. 20). Whether or not the line has been revised, the effect on the ear and in the mind is a conviction that there is, or can be, a kind of poetry in the sound of everyday speech.

THE PASSION OF METER

In a letter of 1804 to John Thelwall, Wordsworth puts some of these issues in more practical terms and within a context that may help to show more concretely what is peculiarly Wordsworthian about his ideas concerning the “intertexture” of metrical frame and expressive motives. Thelwall was at this time promulgating an innovative theory of meter as part of his campaign to reform English elocutionary principles. Following the work of Joshua Steele and others, Thelwall argued for a system of scansion based on analogies between musical quantities and the metrical treatment of syllables, through which he believed the music of English verse could be liberated from the narrow strictures of neoclassical conceptions of the line. Thelwall apparently had raised one of the central issues of his work—the correct, natural, and appropri...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Halftitle Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Abbreviations
• Introduction: An Ear for Poetry
• Part One: The Passion of Meter
• Part Two: The Versification of Poems
• Conclusion: On the Power of Sound
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index