Text: John Phelps Fruit, “Experiment in Rhythm and Rime,” The Mind and Art of Poe's Poetry (1899), pp. 96-107

[page 96, unnumbered:]

POE had found the cunning of his hand in the work of the volume of 1829. By the time he was ready to publish the edition of 1831, he realized that but little of all that had gone before was worthy of another edition. He inserts whole lines and even passages from the omitted minor poems into the poems retained and included in the new volume. Conspicuously is this the case with Tamerlane where an insertion disrupts the unity of the Tamerlane of 1829. This procedure indicates a somewhat desperate depreciation of his apprentice-work in favor of a conviction that he possessed a surer and finer skill. The critical and dogmatical spirit of his prefatory letter corroborates this view.

But, strange to think, the volume of 1831 is disappointing. None of its new pieces but undergo significant changes for the edition of 1845. We must, therefore, pass to their revised forms for any profitable study.

Two of these challenge a first consideration, because they are connected in thought with the Al Aaraaf of 1829. They make the most natural transition to the volume of 1831, as also to the remoter edition of 1845. The theme of invocation, To Helen, is Beauty, but the conception is more concrete, more definite, in its expression, than the “idea of Beauty” in Al Aaraaf. One can imagine it to be an apology for the vagaries of Al Aaraaf. The other [page 97:] poem is Israfel, which connects itself in a like way with “Ligeia.”

That, the lines to Helen, is a highly poetical way in which to express a final thought on Beauty and Art, and the consequent gratification. Helen's beauty is like a bark upon a perfumed sea, gently bearing a weary wayworn voyager, long wont to roaming on desperate seas, to his own native shore. What a wealth of suggestion! There is the rhythm of gently flowing water put in contrast with desperate seas, that is to be imagined and enjoyed. More particularly: her classic face, her hyacinth hair, her Naiad airs, bring him home -

The sensuous side of beauty is here suggested as against the “mere nothing of a name” in Nesace, or Ligeia.

When he enters home, his eyes fall upon the figure of Psyche in a window-niche, and with rapture he exclaims,

The more prosaic intention of these pictures is to maintain that beauty is a something to be embodied, that although Psyche stands “statue-like” she is more than marble, a living entity, and that she comes from regions which are Holy Land.

But who has the prerogative to transport her hither? In other words, who can sing “divine ideas here below”? Israfel is the type. In contrast with Ligeia, whose harshest idea to melody runs, we have the more concrete suggestion of a spirit “whose heart-strings are a lute.”

It is most happy to conceive Israfel as an angel, for then it strikes one as less exaggeration to say that the giddy stars attend the spell all mute, and that the tottering moon, [page 98:] enamored, blushes with love, and that the red lightning, with the rapid Pleiads, pause in heaven; that the starry choir say —

What a power there is in his notes! The stars turn giddy, the moon totters, all listening things are mute that is a music sweeter than the music of the spheres. It is the creative harmony that Dryden celebrated in his ode to Saint Cecilia, which begins with —

While the starry choir say that his charm is due to those unusual strings, the mortal poet says that the angel treads the skies —

therefore to him the laurels belong, —

This explains the concord of the ecstasies above with the burning measures of the angel's lute, and his consequent power. Yes, but Heaven is the angel's home, while the poet's sojourn is in this world of sweets and sours; the shadow of the perfect bliss up there is the sunshine down here. Could the angel exchange places with the poet and sing so wildly well a mortal melody? A bolder note might swell from the poet's lyre towards the sky. This is a sly — poetical — way of exalting the poet above the angel, as did Dryden when he wrote, — [page 99:]

Thus we have passed in review the rich sequence of perceptible images that constitute this poem. What a Golconda for the imagination! There are treasures to be revelled in, but not to be reckoned. This procession of pictures keeps step with the rhythm and the rime. Would you test the effect of the music of the verse? Take in, first, sharply defined, the images of a stanza, then read for the verbal rhythm, and there will come the delightful sense of being lapped in soft pensive airs. Pictures and music! Pictures to music!

With the exception of Lenore, it would profit naught to speak in particular of the revised forms of the poems of 1831, because the changes in them indicate nothing new for his art.

If you should try, first, for yourself, to fix the boundaries and physical aspects of Fairy-Land, and then read Poe's poem, you will be impressed with the skill which has given definite feature, for the instant, to that ever dissolving realm of fancy. He is all the more an artist that he can be “Fancy's child” too.

You may recall descriptions of Death, and the Dominions of Hell, from Epic verse; but you should read The City in the Sea, because it is unique, ethereal, and subjective. The art of it is a marvel. It is a crowd of contradictory ideas that is hurried upon our mental eye.

It is a strange city; it is alone, and far down in the dim west; it is deserted, for long ago all that dwelt there went to their eternal rest; there are shrines there, and palaces, and towers, — “Time-eaten towers that tremble not.” It must be strange indeed, for these things resemble [page 100:] nothing that is ours. How can we conceive them? This city is in the sea, but there are no winds to ruffle the melancholy waters. No ray from the holy heaven has pierced through the long night-time of that town, but there is light there. No winds, but the light streams up from the lurid sea; silently it gleams up the long-forgotten turrets, and pinnacles, and spires, —

All is held “pendulous in air” till we are reminded that no ripples curl the waters, and no swellings tell of winds on far-off happier seas; then there is a stir in the air, a movement, and the city settles down, down, amid no earthly moans, into the waves that have now a redder glow.

The same interest in subtle and mysterious analogies is to be found in The Sleeper (Irene, 1831).

Lenore, which is A Pæan of 1831 and Lenore of 1843 (10: 169), shows greater transformation than the Tamerlane of 1829.

The first two stanzas of A Pæan run thus, —

Compare with this the first stanza of the version of 1843, — [page 101:]

And with this the first stanza of the version of 1845, —

Here one can test what effect the form of the verse upon the page as presented to the eye has upon the reading. A stanza of irregular and choppy lines suggests, in its bulk to the eye, a somewhat spasmodic, or jerky, move ment, and the vocal organs are disposed accordingly, be fore the lips have enunciated a single word. This has been verified in every observant reader's experience.

Why is the form of the stanza of 1845 better than that of 1843? Because the dominant idea of the poem is that of a chant, a dirge, a requiem, and the form of 1845 makes to the eye the first, and proper, suggestion.

Poe had realized that there was much that was poetry only to the (physical) eye, that is, stanzaic form. As has [page 102:] been indicated, he wrote to the mind's eye in perceptible images, and to the soul, through the fleshly ear, in music.

In discussing Longfellow's Ballads in 1842, he speaks, among other things, of his own definition of poetry in these words: “The elements of that beauty which is felt in sound may be the mutual or common heritage of Earth and Heaven. Contenting ourselves with the firm conviction that music (in its modifications of rhythm and rhyme) is of so vast a moment to Poesy as never to be neglected by him who is truly poetical — is of so mighty a force in furthering the great aim intended that he is mad who rejects its assistance — content with this idea, we shall not pause to maintain its absolute essentiality for the mere sake of rounding a definition.”

He admits that this definition excludes much that supine tolerance has hitherto ranked as poetical, but he is willing to risk the approval of the thoughtful.

For all the jingle of rime, Poe would not dignify the Essay on Man as more than an “Essay in Rhyme.” While he considers sound of vast moment to Poesy, it is inclusive in the thought that a true poem is a creation. He cannot be misunderstood in this, for he maintains that the Greek word [[Greet text]], the French expression L’art d’exprimer les pensees par la fiction, and the German terms Dichtkunst, the art of fiction, and dichten, to feign, are all in remarkable accord. We can surmise that Poe missed the dichten-element in Pope's poetry, without which sound is unavailing to raise it to the plane of Art. Poe is the poet of sound, but he is a poet.

He was fully cognizant of “the vast effect or force of melody in itself — an effect which could elevate into even momentary confusion with the highest efforts of mind com positions such as are the greater number of satires or burlesques” (6: 126). [page 103:]

Granted that you have in a given piece the genuine dichten-element, it is not a poem without melody, or the sound-element. Melody is essential. It is sound-element that he makes the test of the stanza as presented to the eye.

This is illustrated in The Rationale of Verse, where he says that, “What the modern chiefly appreciates and admires in the Greek hexameter, is the melody of the abundant vowel sounds.” In the connection he remarks that the writers of English hexameters, Professor Long fellow among them, find it difficult to get their hexameters to sound Greek. After some pertinent words as to whether they looked Greek, or not, he quotes a specimen of English hexameter from Longfellow, for looks’ sake, —

Poe is impressed with the “long-leggedness” of these hexameters, but he turns them into prose.

“Also the church within was adorned; for this was the season when the young, their parents’ hope, and the loved ones of Heaven, should at the feet of the altar, renew the vows of their baptism. Therefore, each nook and corner was swept and cleaned; and the dust was blown from the walls and ceiling, and from the oil-painted benches.”

He adds: “There! — That is respectable prose; and it will incur no danger of ever getting its character ruined by anybody's mistaking it for verse” (6: 103).

The inference is that a true poem cannot be mistaken though it take the form of prose to the eye; music in its [page 104:] modifications of rhythm and rime would distinguish it from prose.

Assonance, not in any specific prosodical sense, is a term applicable to the aspect of Poe's art exemplified in Lenore. Because recasting seems to be more difficult than creating first hand from amorphous material, Lenore may be taken as his apprentice-piece in this line. There are crudities in the dichten, or fiction, element, as well as in the assonantal.

The first line —

contains incongruent perceptible images. Think of the conceived facts from which the metaphor is derived: a creature with wings shut up in a golden bowl, — not in a golden cage; the bowl bursts, the bird (or butterfly?) flies away. The Scriptural prestige of “golden bowl” does not quite save the line from the bad effects of a mixed metaphor. The figure is changed again in the second line, saying, “A saintly soul floats on the Stygian river.” The ideas of floating and flying do not agree. The connection of thought is too close for the breach to be excused on the ground that these expressions are — two of them — distinct exclamations. There are other jumbles in the stanza, looked at from the standpoint of consistency of perceptible images, but there is hardly need to delay to make note of them.

Read now the stanza aloud. Observe how the assonance atones for the faults in the fiction of the stanza. Read the second line, —

See what onomatopeia there is in “Let the bell toll!” Why, the movement suggests the pulling of the bell-cord [page 105:] as well as the tones that swing out upon the solemn air. How aptly follows “a saintly soul,” answering in perfect measure of sound and sense the first part of the line! Consider how fittingly the word “floats” is used. The tone of the bell floats out upon the air, that means death; “a saintly soul floats on the Stygian river,” that means death too. The concord of intermingling sound and sense in this single line is noteworthy!

The stanza concludes with a repetend, —

Within the stanza the assonantal element is forceful in producing a sort of confusion, the mind is kept in agitation between resemblances of sound and differences of meaning, the repetend most appropriately restores equanimity.

There is no repetend to the second stanza, but observe the sentiment of it, —

The third stanza recurs to the sentiment of the first, but with the thought of the second fresh in mind, —

How much more pronounced is the assonance here! But the shaping motive of the stanza is radically different [page 106:] from that of the second. Here is that melancholy, which Poe believed, in 1842 (8: 270), to be inseparable from the higher manifestations of the beautiful, that finds proper and peculiar help for its expression, in “rhythm and rhyme”?

This stanza can claim nothing in favor of its fictional element over stanza one. Indeed, we are tempted to in quire if some of its perceptible images are not puerile.

As to its assonantal qualities, it is in some respects below the first stanza. How does “Peccavimus; but rave not thus” compare with “Let the bell toll! — a saintly soul”? Grant that the reader feels the force of “Peccavimus,” is there not a querying about how many correspondences in sound are intended, and what adaptations of pronunciation are necessary? The repetend, though, is fine; the best.

The last stanza catches up, and blends, and solves, the conflict in the sentiments for Lenore and for the “wretches.” The stanza is quoted without further comment, —

Something in the nature of a summary would enable us to realize adequately the importance of Lenore in an ac count of Poe's art. He was a poet; he felt the silent tone of the self-supremacy that belongs to Genius, but believed in the absolute necessity of reconciling genius with artistic skill. The constant revision of his work attests this. He says, “I have never disbelieved in the perfect consistency, and even congeniality, of the highest genius and profoundest art” (6: 109). [page 107:]

He became a critic, and for the poetry that should come before -him, he resolved to be honest rather than politic in expressing his opinions. He found occasion to deliver himself upon the mooted question of English hexameters. They did not sound Greek; they did not even look Greek.

This thought smashed, with him, that idolon of authority for the scansion of English verse. You may believe Greek, and Latin, verse was read as scanned, but surely not so with English verse; we read according to “rhythm and rhyme.” English versification thus simplified itself to his mind. Music, in its modifications of rhythm and rime, furnished the creative imagination assistance so essential and powerful that it were madness to neglect it.

Lenore is really the first exemplification of the composite character — of sound and sense — of Poe's art in poetry.