Victorian Poetry

YOPIE PRINS

And the silvery marish-flowers that throng

The desolate creeds and pools among,

Were flooded over with eddying song. (21-42)

While "we have merely had the fact of the swan's lament noted" in the first
two stanzas, Saintsbury emphasizes that the final stanza simultaneously
describes and enacts "the death-song itself" through metrical manipulation:
"the metre lengthens, unrolls, is transformed by more and more infusion of
the trisyllabic foot, till the actual equivalent of the 'eddying song,' the
'awful jubilant voice,' the 'music strange and manifold,' is attained" (III,
192-93).
With this remark, Saintsbury marks the meter as a necessary condition
for hearing the sound of the poem. He notices how the poem gathers
momentum from stanza to stanza in tetrameter, with an increasing number
of anapestic feet. We can extend this reading of the poem into our own
metrical notation. (I will use the following metrical notation: / = stressed
syllable, x = unstressed syllable, [ ] = foot boundaries, and II = caesura.) For
example, the seemingly despondent spondees in

[x /][ / /][ / / ][x /]

The wild swan's death - hymn took the soul

give way to trisyllabic rhythms as follows:

[/ x x] [/ x][x / ][xx / ]

Hidden in sorrow: at first to the ear

[ X / ] [X X / ]

The warble was low.

Here dactyls and anapests emerge from the iambic meter to reanimate the
lament, rapidly accelerating in the description of the swan's voice:

[x x /][x /][x /][xx / ]

But anon her awful jubilant voice,

[x x /][x / ][x /][x /]

With a music strange and manifold.

The strange music of the second line makes the meter itself seem manifold,
as two iambs shade into a dactyl in the word "manifold." This orchestra-
tion of manifold meters is conveyed in the description of music that
follows,

[x / ] [x x / ] [x x / ] [x /]

With shawms, and with cymbals, and harps of gold

and further echoed by nature in a gradual amplification of anapests: