The Future Poetry

330 The Future Poetry

The line is divided into three word-groups; the first contains
two stresses, the others carry each three stresses, but the beats
are distributed at pleasure: sometimes they are close together,
sometimes they stand separated by far intervals amid a crowd
of short unstressed syllables. Sometimes there is a closely packed
movement loosening itself at the end, —

O

|

ver its hea

|

d|like a go

|

ld ba

|

ll the su

|

n|to

|

ssed by the go

|

ds in their

pla

|

y.|

Sometimes a loose run gathers itself up in its close into a compact
movement:

He

|

re or o

|

therwhere,|— poi

|

sed on the unrea

|

chable abru

|

pt|

sno

|

w-so

|

litary asce

|

nt.|

Or any other movement can be chosen which is best suited to
the idea or the feeling of the individual line. Quantity as such
is here immaterial for metre building; it is of value only in so
far as it coincides with stress and gives it an ampler fullness
of metrical length so as to build and sustain more strongly the
rhythmic totality of the line and the stanza.
But what then of this third element, quantity? Its importance
is evident, but it does not form by itself the backbone of the
natural rhythm of the language; quantity in English seems to
intervene only as a free element taking its chance part in the
general movement or its place assigned at will in the architec-
ture. And yet quantity of some kind, shorts, longs, intermediate
sounds, is ubiquitous and there seems to be no reason why it
should not regulate metre. Indeed, every system affirms some
kind of quantity as its constituent material. Stress metre ar-
ranges its rhythms by taking all stressed syllables as long, all
unstressed syllables as metrically short; accent affirms similarly
its own principle of quantity, though here the word seems to be a
misnomer. Can then quantity properly speaking, pure quantity,
stand by itself as the whole basis of a metrical system, as ac-
cent and stress have done? Can it similarly leave the other two