346 The Future Poetry
own bondage; it is in spite of its appearance of human con-
vention a law of Nature, an innermost mind-nature, a highest
speech-nature.
But it does not immediately follow that the metrical appli-
cation to poetry of the normal rhythm of the language, discov-
erable even in its colloquial speech and prose, is imperatively
called for or that the construction of quantitative metres in that
mould will be a needed or a right procedure. It might be rea-
soned, on the contrary, that precisely because this is a normal
movement for colloquial speech and prose, it must be ill-fitted
for poetry; poetic speech is supernormal, above the ordinary
level, and its principle of rhythm should be other than that of
common language. Moreover, it may be said, the admission of
intrinsic rhythmic quantities to a share in determining the met-
rical basis would in practice only give us an accentual or stress
metre with a slight difference, and the difference would be for the
worse. For the function which quantity now serves in accentual
verse as a powerful free element in the variation of the rhythm,
would be sacrificed; quantitative verse would be bound to a rigid
beat which would impose on it the character of a monotonous
drone or would fix it in a shackled stiffness like the drumming
of the early “decasyllabon” or that treadmill movement which
has been charged, as an incurable defect, against the English
hexameter.
But let us note, first, that there can be no idea of replac-
ing altogether the normal accentual mould of English verse by
a quantitative structure; the object can only be to introduce
new rhythms which would extend and vary the established
achievement of English poetry, to create new moulds, to add
a rich and possibly a very spacious modern wing to an old
edifice. Even if the new forms are only an improvement on
stress metre, a rhythm starting from the same swing of the
language, that is no objection; it may still be worth doing if
it brings in new tunes, other cadences, fresh subtleties of word-
music. As for the objection of a tied-up monotony caused by
the disappearance of the free placing and variation of the pure
quantitative elements in metrical rhythm, that need not be the