178 The Future Poetry
Those thoughts that wander through eternity,or any of his stately rolling lines or periods of organ music will
do for a great illustration. Pope and Dryden simply overdid the
reliance on measure and chained themselves up in a monotony
of pointed metrical effect. The succeeding poets got back to the
greater freedoms of tone and used them in a new way, but the
principle remains the same, — as in Shelley’s
Rarely, rarely comest thou,
Spirit of Delight,or Wordsworth’s
For old unhappy far-off things
And battles long ago, —both of them examples of the ordinary base used with a deep
simplicity of single tone and a melodious insistence; or other-
wise, where the tone on the contrary makes the most of the
mould,
And wild-roses and ivy serpentine,or,
Breaking the silence of the seas
Among the farthest Hebrides.The base of the old poetry is a march, a walk or a lilt, a measured
flow, roll or surge, — or it is with less competent metrists a
tripping trot, dance or gallop: but even in the freest movements
there is a prevailing metrical insistence. In the new movement
the old base is there, but whatever show it may make, its real
importance tends to drop into a very second place. Insistence of
tone has taken full possession of or even conquered the insistence
of the fall. A spiritual intonation, not content to fill and at its
strongest overflow the metrical mould, but insistent to take it
into itself and carrying it rather than carried in it, is the secret of
its melody or its harmony. There is here the sound of the coming
in, perhaps only the first suggestion of a new music.