344 The Future Poetry
The measures of this prose rhythm find their units of order
in word-groups and not as in poetry in metrical lines; the syl-
labic combinations which we call feet do not follow here any
fixed sequence. In colloquial speech the sequence is arranged by
impulse of Nature or by the automatic play of the subconscious
mind, in prose either by the instinctive or by the conscious action
of an inner ear, by a secret and subtle hearing in our subliminal
parts. There is not an arrangement of feet previously set by the
mind and fixedly recurrent as in metre. But still the measures
of speech are the same and in all these prose passages there
is a dominant rhythm, — even sometimes a free recurrence or
dominance of certain measures, not laid down or fixed, but easy
and natural, — which gives an underlying unity to the whole
passage. In the instance taken from Shakespeare a remarkable
persistence of four-foot measures, with occasional shorter ones
intervening, builds up a grave and massive rhythmic feeling and
imparts even a poetic motion to the unified whole.
In free verse the difference of prose movement and poetic
rhythm tends to disappear; poetry steps down to or towards
the level of rhythmic, sometimes a very poorly rhythmic prose;
but it is too often a rhythm which misses its aim at the ear
and is not evident, still less convincing, though it may exist
incommunicably somewhere in the mind of the writer. That
indeed is the general modernistic tendency — to step back to
the level of prose, sometimes to the colloquial level, both in lan-
guage and in sound movement; the tendency, the aim even, is to
throw away the intensities of poetic rhythm and poetic language
and approximate to a prose intonation and to a prose diction;
one intensity only is kept in view and that too not always, the
intensity of the thought substance. It is the thought substance
that is expected to determine its own sound harmonies — as in
prose: the thought must not subject itself to a preconceived or
set rhythm, it must be free from the metrical strait-waistcoat; or
else the metrical mould must be sufficiently irregular, capricious,
easily modifiable to give a new freedom and ease of movement
to the thought substance.
Our immediate concern, however, is with quantitative metre