328 The Future Poetry
expressive rhythm could have been contrived to convey potently
the power, the excitement and the amplitude of the poet’s vi-
sion.^3 Afterwards there follow five lines of a normal iambic
movement, but still with a great subtlety of variation of rhythm
and distribution of quantity creating another kind of rhythmic
beauty, a beauty of pure harmonious word-music, but this too is
the native utterance of the thing seen and conveys by significant
sound its natural atmosphere. This passage shows us how much
the metrically unrecognised element of intrinsic quantity can tell
in poetic rhythm bringing real significations into what would be
otherwise only sheer beauty of sound; quantity is one among its
most important elements, even though it is not reckoned in the
constitution of the metre. It combines with stress distribution to
give power and expressive richness to the beat or, as it has been
called, the strokes and flicks of accentual verse.
It has been seen that accentual high pitch and stress most
frequently coincide; — indeed, many refuse to make any distinc-
tion between stress of accent and stress proper. The identity is so
close that all the passages cited — and accentual verse generally
— can, if we so choose, be scanned by stress instead of accentual
inflexion. But that at once brings in a difference: for the lesser
accentual inflexions have then to be ignored because they do not
carry in them anything that can be called a stress; as a result,
syllables which are treated as long in the conventional scansion
because of this slight accentual help have now, since they are
unstressed, to be regarded as short. Iambs, so reputed, cease,
in this reckoning, to be iambs and become pyrrhics; an iambic
pentameter has often to be read in the stress scansion as an
imperfectly iambic stress verse because of the frequent modula-
tions, trochee or pyrrhic, anapaest, amphibrach or spondee. But
apart from this, there can be a more independent stress principle
of metre; for, properly speaking, stress means not accentual high
(^3) A combination of powerful intrinsic longs and equally powerful short-vowel stresses
help to create two of the most famous “mighty lines” of Marlowe, —
Wa s t h i
|
sthefa
ce that lau
nched a thou
⊥
sand shi
|
ps
And bu
⊥
rnt the to
|
pless to
⊥
wers of I
⊥
lium?