168 The Future Poetry
Out of the cradle endlessly rocking,
Out of the mocking-bird’s throat, the musical shuttle,
Out of the ninth-month midnight,one of them wanting only one foot to be a very perfect hexameter
or the subtly varied movement of this other passage,
Over the hoarse surging of the sea,
Or flitting from brier to brier by day,
I saw, I heard at intervals the remaining one, the he-bird,
The solitary guest from Alabama,one has almost the rhythmical illusion of listening to a Sopho-
clean or Aeschylean chorus. In the opening stanzas of the noble
Prayer of Columbus, there is a continuous iambic metrical stress,
but with the choric movement. One finds the same thing some-
times in Frenchvers libre, — one poem at least of the kind I have
seen of wonderful beauty, — though the success is not so easy in
that language. Tagore has recently attempted a kind of free verse
in Bengali, not so good as his regular metres, though melodious
enough, as everything must be that is written by this master
musician of the word, and throughout there is the same choric
or dithyrambic principle of movement. This then seems to be the
natural high-water mark of free poetical rhythm; it is a use of the
poetic principle of measure in its essence without the limitations
of a set form. Evidently much can be done in this rhythmical
method. But it is yet doubtful whether in languages which lack
the support of quantitative measure, poetical expression in this
form can carry home with at all the same force as in the received
ways of word-music.
We may get some idea of the limitations of the form by one
or two examples from the poetry of Carpenter I find quoted by
Mr. Cousins in his essay. Carpenter with a poetic faculty of a high
order, a prophet of democracy and of the Self, like Whitman, but
of a higher more spiritual truth of the Self, has like him found it
impossible to restrain the largeness of his vision and personality
in the bonds of metrical poetry. In both we see that the prophet
and thinker predominate over the poet and artist. Less rough and