EDGAR ALLAN POE Ultimate Collection: 160+ Short Stories, Novels & Poems (Including Essays, Letters & Biography) by Edgar Allan Poe

Author:Edgar Allan Poe [Poe, Edgar Allan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9788027219070
Publisher: Musaicum Books
Published: 2017-10-05T00:00:00+00:00

Many a / thought will / come to / memory. /

Here ‘many a’ is what I have explained to be a bastard trochee, and to be understood should be accented with inverted crescents. It is objectionable solely on account of its position as the opening foot of a trochaic rhythm. Memory, similarly accented is also a bastard trochee, but unobjectionable, although by no means demanded.

The further illustration of this point will enable me to take an important step.

One of our finest poets, Mr. Christopher Pearse Cranch, begins a very beautiful poem thus:

Many are the thoughts that come to me

In my lonely musing;

And they drift so strange and swift

There’s no time for choosing

Which to follow; for to leave

Any, seems a losing.

“A losing” to Mr. Cranch, of course — but this en passant. It will be seen here that the intention is trochaic; — although we do not see this intention by the opening foot as we should do, or even by the opening line. Reading the whole stanza, however, we perceive the trochaic rhythm as the general design, and so after some reflection, we divide the first line thus:

Many are the / thoughts that / come to / me.

Thus scanned, the line will seem musical. It is highly so. And it is because there is no end to instances of just such lines of apparently incomprehensible music, that Coleridge thought proper to invent his nonsensical system of what he calls “scanning by accents”— as if “scanning by accents” were anything more than a phrase. Whenever “Christabel” is really not rough, it can be as readily scanned by the true I laws (not the supposititious rules) of verse, as can the simplest pentameter of Pope; and where it is rough (passim) these same laws will enable any one of common sense to show why it is rough and to point out instantaneously the remedy for the roughness.

A reads and re-reads a certain line, and pronounces it false in rhythm-unmusical. B, however, reads it to A, and A is at once struck with the perfection of the rhythm, and wonders at his dulness in not “catching” it before. Henceforward he admits the line to be musical. B, triumphant, asserts that, to be sure the line is musical — for it is the work of Coleridge — and that it is A who is not; the fault being in A’s false reading. Now here A is right and B wrong. That rhythm is erroneous (at some point or other more or less obvious), which any ordinary reader can, without design, read improperly. It is the business of the poet so to construct his line that the intention must be caught at once. Even when these men have precisely the same understanding of a sentence, they differ, and often widely, in their modes of enunciating it. Any one who has taken the trouble to examine the topic of emphasis (by which I here mean not accent of particular syllables, but the dwelling on entire words), must have seen that men emphasize in the most singularly arbitrary manner.

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