Recent English Poetry – 2 179The main reliance on the metrical stress can leave room in
powerful hands for very great rhythms, but it has its limitations,
from which different poets try to get release by different de-
vices. Milton sought it in variations of pause and the engulfing
swell of periods of large and resonant harmony, Swinburne by
the cymbal clang of his alliterations and a rush and surge of
assonant lyrical sound, Browning by a calculated roughness.
Shakespeare himself under a great stress of crowding life and
thought suggestions simply broke the back and joints of his
instrument and tortured it into shapes from which he got out
masterfully irregular harmonies sometimes of a great power, a
process of which we may perhaps see in Whitmanesque free
verse the far-off logical consequence. These more recent poets,
whatever metrical devices they may use, depend upon something
else, on a method which at its clearest becomes a principle of
pure sound intonation.
Phillips’ blank verse which is of a very original mould, is
built on this principle. The poet first gets as his basis the most
simple, direct and easy form possible of the metre, which he can
loosen as much as possible, suppress or shift or add as many
stresses as he chooses, or on the contrary weigh extraordinarily
upon his stresses so as to give an impression of long space or
burdened lingering or some echo of infinite duration; but in
either case the object is to get free room for the play of tone.
Four lines come together,
The history of a flower in the air
Liable but to breezes and to time,
As rich and purposeless as is the rose,
Thy simple doom is to be beautiful,in which there are only three stresses, in the last one might
almost say two and a half, a small number of quantitatively long
syllables are the physical support of the verse, — as if quantity
were trying to come back to first importance in a language of
stresses, — and the rest is made up of varying minor tones. Or
the long drawn out syllables are brought in in great abundance,