Victorian Poetry

YOPIE PRINS

enumerates the ancient Greek authors who have taught him to speak in this
way:

[/ x x][/ x x][/ x x][/xx][/ x x ][/ /]

Aeschylus, Sophocles, Homer, Herodotus, Pindar, and Plato.

(II. 289)

But he is eager to take a vacation from books and proclaims himself ready
to pursue new paths, untrodden by familiar feet: "Weary of reading am I,
and weary of walks prescribed us" (II. 304). In the winding course of the
narrative, as Philip ventures into the Highlands where he will discover his
bride, the hexameters seemingly "prescribed" by classical convention also
change their course. Here the poem begins to project another kind of
metrical allegory into the landscape, self-consciously naturalizing the
formal mechanism of its verse.
In Book III of The Bothie, for example, we encounter the detailed
description of a stream that flows through the Highlands and leads the
students to a swimming hole:

Springing far off from a loch unexplored in the folds of great mountains,

Falling two miles through rowan and stunted alder, enveloped

Then for four more in a forest of pine, where broad and ample

Spreads, to convey it, the glen with heathery slopes on both sides:

Broad and fair the stream, with occasional falls and narrows;

But, where the lateral glen approaches the vale of the river,

Met and blocked by a huge interposing mass of granite,

Scarce by a channel deep-cut, raging up, and raging onward,

Forces its flood through a passage, so narrow, a lady would step it.

(III. 21-29)

The stream running down from distant mountains corresponds to the
movement of the verse, as it streams along in one continuous sentence,
"springing far off" in the first line, "falling two miles" in the second line
and "four more" in the next four lines, moving laterally across each line
and ever downward, until it is forced along a channel "deep-cut." Here we
see a caesura, a mid-line pause in the comma after "cut" that literally cuts
the line in two and redirects the flow of language:

[/ x x][/ x x ][/ II

Scarce by a channel deep-cut

This strong masculine caesura (so designated because it comes after the
accented syllable of the third foot) is followed by a double feminine caesura
(a weaker pause, placed after unaccented syllables) in the next line:

104