ABSTRACT
The distinction we have drawn between the rhythm of the language and elementary rhythmic forms is to some extent a misleading one: our experience of rhythm as a general phenomenon may well be coloured by our deeply-ingrained habits of speech production and perception, and the rhythms we create and hear in language are certainly conditioned by more general rhythmic principles. Nevertheless, the two do have an existence independent of each other: the movement of normal English speech does not exhibit regular rhythmic forms, and patterns of rhythm are perceptible in media other than language. Regular verse is a wedding between the two, and like any good marriage, involves compromises on both sides: the language has to give up its freedom to arrange syllables in whatever patterns the sense requires, and to submit to a new set of principles, while the rhythmic forms have to give up the perfect regularity and symmetry they possess in their ideal state, and accept the distortions to be expected from union with the unruly material of speech. These compromises are made easier by the underlying compatibility already mentioned, however, and by a set of established conventions giving precise expression to that compatibility. The formal statement of those conventions – the marriage contract, one might say – is the set of metrical rules. 1
