ABSTRACT
In the course of an ordinary day we perform a multitude of tasks that require highly complex skills of which we are scarcely conscious, and of these the production and comprehension of speech is one of the most remarkable. In order to employ language, we do not need to understand how it works, any more than we need to understand the musculature of the leg to be able to walk; but in order to conduct a meaningful discussion of its use, including its use in poetry, we have to subject what we do so effortlessly and unselfconsciously to a very deliberate examination. When we learn to speak, we learn not only the grammar of a language, but also a particular way of employing the speech apparatus – lungs, vocal cords, tongue, lips, and so on – to create the sounds of that language; and because different languages require different ways of using that apparatus, a new one will always present an adult learner, to whom the sounds of his own language seem ‘natural’, with problems of pronunciation. Even if he succeeds, by dint of effort and practice, in getting his tongue and lips to behave in the manner demanded by the new language, he will probably find that there are some kinds of muscular activity that are so little under conscious control that he cannot alter their habitual movements, ingrained since childhood. This is especially true of the more fundamental processes in the production of speech, such as the action of the muscles controlling the lungs, and the relationship between this pulmonary activity and the movements of the speech organs higher up the vocal tract – David Abercrombie (1967, p. 36) notes that the deep-rootedness of these processes is reflected in certain types of aphasia in which these are the only features of speech production to survive brain damage. This fact is of crucial importance in our investigation, since it is these fundamental processes which determine the rhythmic features of the language: its patterns of stress and intonation, its pauses, its control of speed, and its modes of emphasis. And it is upon the rhythmic characteristics of the language that metrical form is founded. In the discussion of these characteristics that follows, it will become clear that our understanding of them is far from complete, but what is known has important consequences for the study of verse. It will be necessary to make one initial simplification: I shall ignore the fact that there exist rhythmic differences among the varieties of English spoken both now and in the past. There is a homogeneity about the tradition of English verse which suggests that it will not be too great a falsification to relate poetry written at different times and in different places to a single mode of speech rhythm; and in fact that homogeneity itself provides evidence for the continuity and uniformity of the English language’s deeper articulatory processes.
