ABSTRACT
What is often called ‘poetic’ language is usually marked by a high incidence of imagery, metaphor and the ‘rich’ sounding of words. But these features might just as often be encountered in prose (which, for all its apparent spaciousness, would in itself have to be described as a ‘form’). What most marks off poetry is the line. In Chapter 2 we saw how the claps in the schoolyard rhyme ‘When Suzi was…’ defined the verse. Each clap is a beat, and the beats are put together in lines. The rhythm created in the line is a sound in the head and the ear, and, later, a defined space on a page. These lines of rhythm have been fundamental to the practice and concept of poetry both as a mnemonic and as a device working on the senses. Once more we must recall poetry’s oral roots. During its speaking, the way that the poem manipulates the time by deployment of pace, length of syllable, and emphasis, or beat, is decisive. These qualities constitute the cadence of the words (see Chapter 2, ‘Deliberate space’). ‘Cadence’ comes from Latin and Italian words meaning to fall, and this description, as when the wistful Orsino in Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night says of a song ‘It had a dying fall’ (Act I, Scene i, line 4), is as often used of verse as of music. Under ‘cadence’, the Oxford English Dictionary quotes George Puttenham writing in 1589 of
the fal of a verse in euery last word with a certaine tunable sound which being matched with another like sound, do make a concord.
