180 The Future Poetry
in a variety of combinations, closely packed and largely spaced,
as in
The fiery funeral of foliage old,or,
With slow sweet surgery restore the brain,or again,
The vault closed back, woe upon woe, the wheel
Revolved, the stone rebounded, for that time
Hades her interrupted life resumed.These and others are the means used, but at their back
is the principle of a free intonation. It is the tone that builds
the verse, gives it its real form and the metrical mould, forced
to become and to do whatever the tone chooses, whatever is
needed for the intonation of the inmost thought, is a flexi-
ble convenience and a needed restraint, — for if loosened or
freely spaced, it is not broken, — but no longer a chain and
hardly felt even as a limitation. The significance is that the
poet has a rhythm of thought and spirit already sounding
somewhere within him and in bringing it out he imposes
it consciously on his outer instrument with an imperious
sovereignty and does not get to it, like the older masters,
as the result of a faithful observance of the metrical har-
mony.
The other poets use a different, less open and forceful outer
method, but the same principle emerges in greater or less degree
as if by some spiritual necessity. Meredith’s poetry belongs to
an earlier technique, observes faithfully the metrical law, but the
subtler thing is already coming: some curious turn is given to the
beat which persistently compels it to serve some dominant soul-
tone of the thought and seeing and to dance attendance on that,
as in the four lines already quoted fromThe Lark Ascending,
or else there is the turn towards long spaces and lingering tones
where the metrical sound floats and seems always on the point
of drowning in some deep sea of inner intonation, —