The Future Poetry

On Quantitative Metre 355

a very low pitch; we hear, not the roll of the hexameter, but

some six-foot dactylic rhythm resembling a sort of measured

prose recitative —

Then he arose from his bed and heard what the people were saying,

Joined in the talk at the door with Stephen and Richard and Gilbert,

Joined in the morning prayer and in the reading of Scripture.^10

And yet even the accentual (or perhaps one should say the

stress) hexameter is capable of better things. Clough, aiming at

this stronger efficiency, tries to escape from the treadmill motion,

the sing-song, the monotone; but he does not altogether get away

from it and arrives only at a familiar vigour or a capable but

undistinguished movement, or falls into a trotting and stumbling

rhythm which is sometimes hardly even a rhythm. In attempting

to shun the monotony of the unuplifted dactylic beat, he often

totally overlays or half overlays the metrical basis of the hexame-

ter rhythm which must be always a sustained dactylic movement.

He perpetrates frequently lines that are wholly trochaic and have

only this in common with the hexameter that they walk on six

feet; a host of other lines are, if not wholly, yet predominantly

trochaic. This, which can sometimes be done in a true hexameter

rhythm with a special intonation and a special purpose, is fatal

if constantly used as an ordinary action of a machine. Very

often the trochees break a line that would otherwise have been

adequate; sometimes there is what seems to be a cross between

hexameter and pentameter; often he indulges in an anapaestic

line, sometimes three at a time, disguised as hexameters by turn-

ing an initial pyrrhic into a false trochee. The result tends to be

tedious, trivial and disappointing; let us take a sample —

So they bathed, they read, they roamed in glen and forest

Far amid blackest pines to the waterfalls they shadow,

Far up the long long glens to the loch and the loch behind it

Deep under huge red cliffs, a secret, and oft by the starlight

(^10) Note the detestable combination of two flat trochees with a falsified tribrach in the
middle of this line. These false movements abound in the accentual hexameter.