The Ornaments of Latin Verse

POETRY, on its purely formal side, has often been defined as the art of making a pattern or design in words. ¹ The metaphor must not be pressed, since the design of a carpet or wallpaper is regular throughout, whereas poetry admits—and, indeed, requires—some deviation from the type, to avoid monotony: the whole art of the verse-maker is to give variety within the limits imposed by the metre—to digress from the fixed rhythm so far, and only so far, that no other rhythm may be suggested by the variations. Bearing this difference in mind, we may accept the metaphor as a useful analogy, and may even develop it, by regarding the metre as the plan or design itself, and the words as threads, of varying colours, which are the material of the tracery. So far, we have been concerned only, or mainly, with the threads in bulk; it remains to examine the pattern in which they are arranged; or—to drop the metaphor—we have to view them, not as a mere vocabulary, but as composed, blended, and interwoven. Here, after all, is the real beginning of poetic art. The Gradus is not a poem. It might seem superfluous to mention this elementary truth; but, as a fact, both the practice and criticism of poetry have often suffered from the assumption that the Word is an end in itself. The eighteenth century was, no doubt, the greatest sinner; but in every generation (not least, in our own) there are words on which the minor poet 254seems to fasten, as if they were invested with some peculiar magic or virtue. Even great poets have been dazzled by this aura surrounding “beautiful words”, as when Keats, in the loveliest of his lines, was reminded of a tolling bell by the word forlorn; and perilous, which he used in the same passage with such effect, has certainly become a danger to his followers. But, though Keats could load every rift with poetic ore, he knew that these words were counters for his imagination to marshal. The Greek critics, in laying stress on Arrangement, used the term in its widest sense, including not only logical synthesis but euphony. But the necessity of clearness—the lucidus ordo of Horace—was often taken for granted, and a critic like Dionysius lays perhaps more stress on euphony as the essential of composition. ¹ That the Romans, too, with their love for intellectual poetry, were above all things concerned with lucid order, is so evident as to need no proof; ² but, like the Greeks, they paid as much attention to the euphonic order. Although there are various ways of producing beauty by verbal juxtaposition, no method, perhaps, has been so widely used in European poetry as the devices of assonance and alliteration. Poetic melody is indeed attainable without the conscious use of either; but, in a greater or less degree, they are natural to poetry as forms of its repeated pattern. In itself, Repetition is not especially poetic, since it is rooted in an association of ideas which is instinctive to the human mind. Just as one train of thought “suggests” another, so one word calls up another, by the likeness of sound as often as of sense. Indeed, the mind often seems to hanker after more repeated sound than the poet thinks it fit to supply. How, otherwise, can we account for the fact that Milton’s “fresh woods” are so freely misquoted ? The poet wanted no feeble synonym for pastures, but the alliteration 255of “fresh fields” is too strong for the inaccurate to resist. Still, Repetition—in some form or other—is the basic expression of poetry, since all rhythm, whether of dance or song, is repetitive; and, although the sense of rhythm may be satisfied by metre alone, the employment of assonance and alliteration is at least a powerful help to the rhythm. Sometimes alliteration has been organic and structural, inseparably linked with the metre, as in English down to the time of Langland. At other times, the expectation which metre holds out has been gratified by rhyme, a development of assonance; ¹ and rhyme may supersede alliteration, as in French poetry, which generally avoids any marked alliterative effect. There, rhyme seems to be a necessity, in order to mark an emphatic syllable at the end of a line consisting of syllables duly counted and pronounced with even stress; but the absence of a stress-accent makes a distinct alliteration far less tolerable than in English, with its strongly accented syllables. Besides this, the effect of French verse depends on more delicate sound-values, whereas English taste admits broader and more striking harmonies. In English itself, alliteration—after losing its structural function—was reintroduced as a luxury, which could be observed or neglected according to the changing fashion of different periods or the taste of individual poets. But English has nearly always found the artifice “apt”, if not absolutely necessary; for, as Johnson noted, the language is “overstocked with consonants”, and needs, far more than French, the euphony of liquids and nasals to smooth the harshness of its rougher sounds. ²