On Quantitative Metre 345constructed on this principle of quantity, — though free verse
also on that basis has to be taken into consideration as a sub-
ordinate possibility. After all, the swing against metre has not
justified itself; it goes contrary to a very profound law of speech,
contradicts a very strong need of the ear, and the metreless verse
it prefers disappoints, by the frequent flatness and inequality
which seems natural to it at its ordinary level, the listening
consciousness. All creation proceeds on a basis of oneness and
sameness with a superstructure of diversity, and there is the
highest creation where is the intensest power of basic unity
and sameness and on that supporting basis the intensest power
of appropriate and governed diversity. In poetic speech metre
gives us this intensest power of basic unity and sameness —
rhythmic variation gives us this intensest power of expressive
diversity. Metre was in the thought of the Vedic poets the re-
production in speech of great creative world-rhythms; it is not a
mere formal construction, though it may be made by the mind
into even such a lifeless form: but even that lifeless form or
convention, when genius and inspiration breathe the force of
life into it, becomes again what it was meant to be, it becomes
itself and serves its own true and great purpose. There is an
intonation of poetry which is different from the flatter and
looser intonation of prose, and with it a heightened or gathered
intensity of language, a deepened vibrating intensity of rhythm,
an intense inspiration in the thought substance. One leaps up
with this rhythmic spring or flies upon these wings of rhythmic
exaltation to a higher scale of consciousness which expresses
things common with an uncommon power both of vision and
of utterance and things uncommon with their own native and
revealing accent; it expresses them, as no mere prose speech
can do, with a certain kind of deep appealing intimacy of truth
which poetic rhythm alone gives to expressive form and power
of language: the greater this element, the greater is the poetry.
The essence of this power can be there without metre, but metre
is its spontaneous form, raises it to its acme. The tradition of
metre is not a vain and foolish convention followed by the great
poets of the past in a primitive ignorance unconscious of their