The Measure of Time: Rising and Falling in Victorian Meters

The Measure of Time: Rising and Falling inVictorian Meters

Emily Harrington*University of Michigan

Abstract

In the Victorian period, metrical experiments and prosodical treatises proliferatedto impressive proportions and stirred intricate controversies in poetics. In a necessaryresurgence of scholarly interest in this body of work, some recent critics of Victorianmeter privilege an account of it that favors either accentualism, organicism, and thebody, or temporal measurement, the abstract, and the purely mental. Victorianpoets and prosodists, however, did not divide along these poles but aimed to connectthem within their own work. Focusing in part on blank verse, I argue that theirattempt to unite the organic and the abstract in concepts of meter articulated idealsof English national identity and served as a means for the expression of social andcultural ideals. I explore how poets and prosodists connect their concepts of metricaltime to the experience of the passage of time, both as a sense of progress and oneof nostalgia.

“What form is best for poems?” (book V, line 223) asks the title characterof Aurora Leigh (1856), Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s verse novel. She posesthis question in fear that she will fail to speak “my poems in mysterious tune/ With man and nature” (V, lines 2 –3). The simplicity of her immediateanswer,“Trust the spirit / As Sovran nature does, to make the form,” beliesboth her careful manipulation of metrical irregularity in blank verse and theurgency and complexity of this question for Victorian poets. This periodsaw a new abundance of experiments with meter and treatises on prosody– the study of meter – that debated the relative importance of time andaccent, the viability of metrical quantity like that used in Greek and Latinin English, and the most appropriate measures for certain subjects. Theprevalence of these debates reveals that issues of poetic form served as a locusfor questions about the relationships between speaking and writing, bodyand mind, nature and science, art and nation. Victorian meter and prosodyengaged a range of social and cultural questions; by looking towards bothclassical models of quantity and Anglo-Saxon accentualism for their literaryinheritance, these experiments raised conflicting ideals of imperial power,education, growing democracy, and national identity. In the case of AuroraLeigh, Barrett Browning uses poetic language to claim a place in poetic andpolitical discourse for women. She argues for a socially engaged poetry© Blackwell Publishing 2007

Literature Compass 4/1 (2007): 336–354, 10.1111/j.1741-4113.2006.00416.x

situated squarely in the present in its representation of modern life and inits use of blank verse.

Since the turn of the twenty-first century, scholars of Victorian poetryhave become increasingly concerned with meter and have produceddiverging views of Victorian metrical theory. Some critics view meter asorganic and locate both the origins and effects of meter in the human voiceand body. An opposing view understands meter as an abstract mode ofmeasurement, concerned with the duration of intervals, which are mentallyperceived without necessarily being heard. Although alternate methods ofscansion have been proposed, current critics of Victorian meter use traditionalfoot scansion, marking stressed and unstressed syllables.1 Their disagreementis conceptual; they diverge over whether Victorian ideas about metercentered around the body and its rhythmic instincts or in the mind and inliterary conventions. I argue that this opposition exists within the workof Victorian writers, even within individual texts. Many poets and prosodistswanted it both ways, to conceptualize meter as time and accent, for meterto be “in mysterious tune with man and nature,” to borrow Barrett Browning’swords, as well as a conventional, carefully measured abstract pattern.

Recent critics, particularly Matthew Campbell and Dennis Taylor, havetold opposing stories of the development of Victorian meter, one associatingdevelopments in accentual verse with rhythm’s organicism and anotherconceptualizing meter as increasingly abstract and temporal. In these stories,the liberties of both approaches culminate in the advent of modernist freeverse. I argue against such teleological views because they overlook thevariety and complexity of Victorian metrical thought. I aim to demonstratethis richness by investigating the ways in which prosodists and poetscross-referenced concepts of poetic time with ideas about natural, corporeal,and sociopolitical time. Victorian prosodists and poets alike sought for meterto seem both natural and scientific and often compared poetic intervals oftime to natural ones, such as the day. As such, time was seen as a controlling,shaping force. Poetically, however, it was a mass to be divided, somethingto be controlled within the conventions of meter. Using these concepts oftime, poets and prosodists articulate ideas about law and order in meter thatreflect ideals about political and social progress. I look at three poets’ conceptsof time, Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s, Alfred Tennyson’s, and AlgernonCharles Swinburne’s, in order to show how these poets both anticipatedand incorporated prosodists’ ideas about poetic time. For Barrett Browningand Tennyson, I specifically investigate blank verse as the meter of Englishnational identity, one that is particularly suited to manipulations of timingand reconceptions of intervals large and small.

During the nineteenth century, prosody underwent significantdevelopment, questioning its own origins and rules. Coleridge publishedhis poem Christabel (1816) with a preface explaining his use of accentualmeter, in which lines had varying numbers of syllables but only four accentseach. This meter was not irregular at all, he contended, but the variation

© Blackwell Publishing 2007 Literature Compass 4/1 (2007): 336–354, 10.1111/j.1741-4113.2006.00416.x

The Measure of Time . 337

was “in correspondence with some transition, in the nature of the imageryor passion” (187). This Romantic accentualism represented a loosening ofthe strictures of eighteenth-century prosody.2 Edwin Guest’s History of EnglishRhythms (1838) came out strongly in favor of such accentualism:

In the great family of languages which has been termed the Indo-European andwhich spread from the Ganges to the Shannon, three made time the index of theirrhythm, to wit the Sanscrit, Greek and Latin; all the others adopted accent. (2)

In the nineteenth century, accent was to English what quantity was toclassical languages; while English poets counted stresses, Greek and Latinpoets counted long and short syllables by using a complex set of rules. AsA. A. Markley notes,Tennyson’s efforts at adapting these rules to produceclassical quantity in English were remarkably impressive, but quantity wasnot, even for Tennyson, a sustainable way of conceptualizing English meter.Although classical hexameters were immensely popular at mid-century, theygenerally used accentual-syllabic rather than quantitative feet.

Later prosodists attempted to shift focus from accent to time as the primarymeasure of verse. E. S. Dallas contended that accent was difficult to defineand proposed using time as a measurement, assessing the duration of feetrather than syllables. Coventry Patmore developed this idea with his widelyread and reprinted Essay on English Metrical Law (1857), in which he arguedfor dividing poetic lines into isochronous intervals – sections each lastingfor precisely the same duration – instead of into accentual syllabic feet.Conceiving of meter as temporal, these prosodists sought paradoxically todefine rules that would account for the liberties of accentualism. Debatesarose about the relative importance of time and accent, how to measureeach, and whether they were apprehended in the body or in the mind. Thesedebates pitted education against instinct, for those who connected meter tobodily rhythms saw meter as innate, while for others meter was a poeticconvention that could only be learned.

Only recently has the nineteenth-century English literary obsession withmeter begun to receive critical interest proportionate to the attention itoccupied in its day. Victorian poets were so consumed with debates aboutmeter that it is impossible to do justice to their work without understandingwhy versification so captivated them and why particular poets chose somemetrical forms and approaches to prosody over others. In the last two decadesof the twentieth century, New Historicism powerfully drew critical focusto the ideological investments of literary texts, but did so often at the expenseof attention to literary form. As critics return to the formal aspects ofliterature, the advances of New Historicism allow us to understand that farfrom existing separately from the cultural and historical significance of atext, literary form often constitutes it. Since Herbert Tucker’s 1999 call for“cultural neoformalism,” an approach that would merge concern for historicaland cultural trends with attention to poetic form, there has been a groundswellof writing addressing meter as a cultural signifier within Victorian poetry.

338 . The Measure of Time


Reminding us that dialects are often shaped by class,Tucker performs culturalstudies at the level of syllable and accent, linking historicism and formalism.

Critics have heeded Tucker’s call, and this work has continued apace. Twocritics have shown how poets have used meter to forward progressive politicalcommitments. Stephanie Kuduk Weiner examines how Swinburne usesmeter and rhyme in order to advance democratic politics. She argues that“Hertha” advances an all-encompassing “I,” shifts stress from “I” to “thou,”and uses a flexible meter, all of which embody an equalizing and thereforedemocratic aesthetic. Jason Rudy illustrates how the Spasmodic poetsconceived of rhythm as originating in and speaking to the human body. Hethen connects this idea to advances in psychological science, in particularto new concepts of the way information is relayed by neurological firings.For Rudy, these psychological and poetic innovations of Spasmodic poeticsled other authors and critics of the period to question their own politicalunderpinnings: “Spasmodic poetics – and especially Dobell’s notion ofrhythm – threatens Victorian culture by promulgating these unconventionalvalues, by offering a vehicle for the widespread dispersal of the eccentric”(452).

Meter was also an important reference point for questions about Englishidentity. Yopie Prins has called attention to the way in which GeorgeSaintsbury’s History of English Prosody (1908) privileges the “English ear”over Latin and Greek quantities. Saintsbury views quantitative meter notonly as unsuccessful in English but unnecessary, given the rich varietiesavailable in accentual-syllabic English meters. The pride Saintsbury takes inEnglish verse, Prins notes, maps onto political ideals for he valuesnineteenth-century innovations in particular for their “ordered liberty,” theway they balance the need for metrical law with the impulse towardsfreedom. Erik Gray and A. A. Markley have also addressed the attempts atquantity in English and the “hexameter mania” (as Saintsbury puts it) thatswept the mid-century. Markley’s book Stateliest Measures: Tennyson and theLiterature of Greece and Rome links disputes about the place of quantity inEnglish meters to the British investment in the classical past. He reads thatpast as a repository for debates about British democracy and empire, bothof which expanded throughout the nineteenth century. In his readingof “The Lotos Eaters,” Markley argues that the way Tennyson varies stanzaand line length gives an impression of meters “gradually changing andgrowing out of proportion” in a way that engages contemporary debatesabout both “right living” and “colonial expansion” (56–8). Victorians werefascinated with meter precisely because its intricacies reflected theirpresent-day social and cultural commitments.

***Poets and prosodists often situated their metrical innovations in adaptationsof the past, not only in their meters but in their subject matter. In AuroraLeigh, Elizabeth Barrett Browning responded to her contemporaries’ frequentpreoccupation with history by insisting that poetry should not languish in© Blackwell Publishing 2007 Literature Compass 4/1 (2007): 336–354, 10.1111/j.1741-4113.2006.00416.x


an idealized past; rather, it should confront the present that poets knowintimately with an appropriately detached vision. She vigorously defendswriting about the current era because writing that is itself alive must comefrom “throbbing” life itself; there is “more heroic heat, / Betwixt the mirrorsof its drawing rooms, / Than Roland with his knights at Roncevalles” (V,lines 205–7). Through an imperative to poets to “catch / Upon the burninglava of a song, / The full-veined, heaving, double-breasted Age,” shefiguratively connects the body of the age, the body of the earth, and thebody of the poem, casting modern English life – the dramas of the drawingroom – as intensely rhythmic.

Barrett Browning defends the present day as a subject for poetry with aparticularly modern take on blank verse. She considered her verse to beboth spiritual and organic and vigorously defended it as reasoned craft.Rather than “Trust the spirit, / to make the form,” she leaves room at timesfor multiple metrical scansions, ultimately trusting the reader to finish theverse. In so doing, Barrett Browning treads the often-debated boundarybetween stiflingly ordered meter and meter so loose the pattern is barelyrecognizable. Her blank verse epitomizes the “ordered liberty” thatSaintsbury praised in Victorian verse. By adapting traditional blank verse,associated with Shakespeare and Milton, she emphasizes her use of the meteras belonging to her own day and age.

Aurora asserts that poetic form and time must emerge from natural bodilyrhythms, dictated by both physical and mental instincts, instincts which canhardly be distinguished here. Blank verse is the meter of choice for thought,and the verse allows the room for reflection that the words request:

What form is best for poems? || Let me thinkx / | / x | x /|x|| / | x /|xOf forms less and the external. Trust the spirit,As Sovran nature does, to make the form;For otherwise we only imprison spiritand not embody.|| Inward evermoreTo outward,|| – so in life, and so in art.Which still is life. (V, lines 223–9)

Aurora answers her question with a line that tests the bounds of iambicpentameter, refusing to let the spirit be “imprisoned” within it. Line 224swells with syllables. Barrett Browning fits this line to the form by reducingtwelve syllables to ten with an elision (th’external) and a final extrametricalunstressed syllable. The line’s renegade scansion, with a trochaic substitution,a mid-foot pause, and a dangling unstressed syllable all in the same line,indicates that the “spirit” can lead the poet to startling irregularities. Themid-foot caesuras before “Trust the spirit” and “Let me think” slow theline, creating space for the thought necessary to scan line 224. This mid-footbreak effect appears again in the line,“And not embody. Inward evermore,”(between “embody” and “inward”) and again in,“To outward, – so in life,and so in art,” this time almost literally underlined by a dash. Barrett



Browning draws a fine distinction between imprisonment, in which theform moves the words, and embodiment, where the rhythms of the bodyand mind dictate the rhythm of the line.

Barrett Browning’s use of blank verse in Aurora Leigh is flexible enoughto allow multiple possible scansions of the same line. This openness is thesort of variability that Saintsbury would later see as essential to the “fancyprosody” important not only to Patmore but to pre-Raphaelite poets DanteGabriel Rossetti, Christina Rossetti, and William Morris. Following anexhortation not to adhere strictly to rules of number, fire appears as ametaphor for the passion that will form poetry: “Keep up the fire, / andleave the generous flames to shape themselves” (lines 235–6). The movingfire mirrors the ambiguous stresses in the line that cause its own shape toshift. Do we say “Keep UP the FIRE,” “KEEP up the FIRE,” or “KEEPUP the FIRE”? These options allow the reader to continue the iambic lineor to include a substitution; the reader thereby determines the speed of thephrase and whether she prefers ordered regularity or the freedom toexperiment. These liberties must “embody” and not “imprison” and havean “inward” rather than an “outward” origin. Metrical regularity must bea choice here instead of a requirement, allowing a reader to enjoy the bondsof verse but not to suffer from them. In a work devoted to advancingwomen’s rights and considering the relationship of poetry to philanthropy,Barrett Browning’s flexible use of blank verse links readerly liberty to thebroader freedoms she wishes for English civic life.

***Aurora Leigh epitomizes multiple conflicts in Victorian metrical debates,focuses on modernity and temporal progress, balances metrical order andliberty, and casts verse as at once organic and as the product of the mentaleffort of poet and reader. Hoping for what is “inward” to be “embodied,”Barrett Browning was not alone among Victorian poets and prosodists inher struggle with the relationship between meter, the body, and the mind.But the question of meter as organic or abstract has divided critics of ourown day, who take it up in considering poetry as both a vocal and a writtenphenomenon. Eric Griffiths and Dennis Taylor both note the contrastbetween meter and spoken language, but while Griffiths remains concernedwith meter’s relation to voice, Taylor insists that the Victorian periodcontributed to prosody by abstracting meter away from the voice. In ThePrinted Voice of Victorian Poetry (1989), Griffiths emphasizes that the featuresof voice are essential to understanding any utterance and yet impossible torecord fully on the written page. The absence of the voice on the writtenpage is not just a loss but a gain since poetry’s place between speaking andwriting allows for multiple interpretations. For Griffiths, interpretive richnessbenefits from the absence of vocal nuance in writing: “The intonationalambiguity of a written text may create a mute polyphony through whichwe see rather than hear alternatively possible voicings, and are led by suchvision to reflect on the inter-resonance of those voicings” (66). Griffiths© Blackwell Publishing 2007 Literature Compass 4/1 (2007): 336–354, 10.1111/j.1741-4113.2006.00416.x


casts meter as an attempt to capture vocal features on the page, pointing outthat meter matters to the eye as well as to the ear. The tension between thevisual and aural elements of meter creates prosodic interest. This insightcolors what Griffiths views as the Wordsworthian inheritance in Victorianmeter so that the metrical intuition is at odds with a poem’s emotion. Thedramatic monologue, for instance, grows out of the potential dissonancebetween the feelings expressed and the meter, which calls attention to thedivision between poet and character (73).

Taylor’s Hardy’s Metres and Victorian Prosody (1988) also emphasizes theway meter complicates meaning, pointing to the new prosodists’ conceptof metrical tension between the freedom of language and what Patmorecalled “the bonds of verse” (8). The most important development, accordingto Taylor, is the new prosodists’ view of meter as abstract, by which hemeans that it is apprehended by the mind as much as, if not more so, thanthe ear.3 Developing a view of meter as more variable than ever before, oneallowing numerous foot substitutions and a broad range of stanza forms,new prosodists found a new organizing principle in time, not measured inseconds, but in mentally felt beats. Taylor summarizes:

The common solution was that the metrical accents were “mental” or “felt”rather than “heard” . . . What Patmore called intervals,Omond called time-spaces,and Saintsbury called feet – all ways of naming these mental spaces. (23)

In Taylor’s account, new prosodists did not so much separate meter fromfeeling as they distinguished meter from voice. The increasingly interiorview of poetry’s forces renders it abstract.

In Rhythm and Will in Victorian Poetry (1999), Matthew Campbell citesGriffiths and Taylor as having brought to light the breadth of Victorianprosody and verse. Their contributions, he writes, make way for his ownidealization of voice as a conduit of the self and meter as the representationof voice. Campbell claims that Victorian poetry is “concerned with movingtowards the rhythmic representation of the human voice . . . a concern withsounding a sense of self or caracter [sic] through the experience of thatcharacter’s volitional abilities or failings” (5). Whereas Taylor identifies thenew prosody as the central poetic innovation of the Victorian period,Campbell hardly touches on it. He prefers a narrative of Victorian prosodyin which Coleridge’s accentualism builds throughout the nineteenth century,underscores Victorian medievalism, and peaks with Gerard Manley Hopkins’ssprung rhythm. This emphasis on accent avoids the abstraction of laterVictorian prosodists’ concept of mental time and privileges a link betweenmeter and the body over meter and the mind, ultimately reinforcingCampbell’s suggestion that meter is organic.

It is no wonder, then, that in her own account of Victorian prosody YopiePrins, who calls frequently on later prosodists Patmore and Saintsbury,presents a radically different approach to meter that argues against Campbell.For her, meter does not link a poem to a voice that produces or reproduces



it; rather, by mediating between speaking and writing, meter turns voiceinto a mode of counting that often follows conventions of quantity learnedin scansion and recitation. In her view,Victorian metrical theory “developsan account of meter that is neither an imitation of voice nor a script forvoice but a formal mediation that makes ‘voice’ a function of writing”(“Victorian Meters” 90). In Prins’s version of Victorian prosody, meter isdetached from the human body and located in spatial and temporal patterns.Deemphasizing the centrality of speech, Prins points to the way that AliceMeynell, the prominent fin-de-siècle poet and essayist, understands meter asa way of controlling and exhibiting thought: “Measured in the silent musicof her meters, thinking was a metrical performance for Meynell . . . Herpoetry recalls the past century as a period when prosody was regularly usedfor the regulation of thought” (“Patmore’s Law” 268).

The opposition that has arisen in recent criticism, between a viewof Victorian verse as a version of voice with the body as its source andVictorian verse as abstract and mental, does not hold sway in the Victorianperiod itself. Rather, those writing metrical theory in the latter half of thenineteenth century struggled with the extent to which meter’s abstractioncoincided with their view of it as rooted in the organic, in human andgeological bodies. While Victorian prosodists rarely idealize the voice in theway that critics like Campbell do, they do seek the place of verse in relationto the natural world, and particularly in a scientific concept of it. Victorianprosodical schools of thought ranged widely and poets and prosodists oftenvehemently disagreed, but at the same time, many sought to unify thequestions that divide scholars of our own day.

Victorian critics disagreed, of course, about what qualified as “natural.”Although Meynell viewed meter as a mental phenomenon, as typified byher reverence for silence and pauses in poetry, she also saw its principlesembodied in the natural world.“Periodicity rules over the mental experienceof man, according to the path of the orbit of his thoughts,” Meynell writesin “The Rhythm of Life,” comparing these patterns of thought and emotionwith natural bodies both human and astronomical: the processes of disease,sleep, the “rhythmic pangs of maternity,” the tides, the moon, the sun (79–81). For Meynell, then, the body and the mind are linked not only to oneanother, but to global and planetary bodies. The actions of these bodiesform the basis of natural law, and therefore Meynell brings this view ofmeter as broadly natural to her strict adherence to metrical law, and, as Prinsnotes, to Patmore’s “bonds of verse.”This convergence in her ideas aboutmeter puts a great deal of faith in an ideal of law and positions poetry as thelocus of the mental, the physical, and the political.

While Meynell argued for the place of metrical law in nature, GeorgeEliot advocated laws rooted in a version of the natural that depended onenduring habits:

All valid rules – all rules not voluntarily assumed for the mere pleasure of bondage– must have a psychological or physical basis. They must be founded whether



on physical necessities or on an organic bias which habit has made a necessity,or on a firmly established sense of relations which is not natural merely butpermanently human. (288)

Condemning rules for their own sake, Eliot attempts to identify “valid rules”by defining the organic in such a way as to make meter sound as essentialas eating, breathing and sleeping. She connects the physical to thepsychological, implying that the psychological is not merely an alternativeto the physical (as implied by the conjunction “or”) but constituted in a“permanently human” “sense of relations.” Arguing for the abstraction ofmeter, Eliot divorces it from sound. She insists that most of the beats ofmeter “are perceived by the inward sense only, & are not represented insounds that strike the tympanum” (287). Since meter is perceived only bythe inward sense, and yet its laws must have a physical basis, for Eliot thephysicality of meter must lie elsewhere than in sound and the voice. Thisview contradicts earlier metrists, both Guest and Dallas, who argued thataccent was defined by audible sound, either in volume or sharpness. Perhapsin this unpublished draft Eliot works towards a notion of linguisticmaterialism that nonetheless has a basis in the “organic.”

Under the surface of Joseph Mayor’s 1886 defense of foot scansion asitself a science, which he likens to botany, lies a nature-nurture debate. Onthe one hand Mayor insists that scanning by feet is “both natural andnecessary and also . . . scientific,” that “routine scansion is the natural formof poetry to a child” (6). On the other hand, a solid understanding of therhythms of really complex poetry is the product of education. He claimsthat girls, unless they have a very good ear, are not as good at scansion andat writing poetry as boys are because boys have had to learn Latin verses.He then suggests, however, that both genders should be trained in theseskills, particularly in English:

It is at all events desirable that a purely English education should enable peopleto enter into and appreciate the beauties of English verse. For this purpose, boysand girls should be practiced in observing how the mechanical pendulum swingof scansion is developed. (7)

Mayor attributes what he views as girls’ weakness in poetry not to an innatelack but an educational one. His argument that both genders should be givena “purely English education” is forward-thinking in its subtle advocacy forgirls and in his preference for modern English literature over the classics.Mayor typifies a Victorian conviction that verse is at once natural andcultural, a product of a proud linguistic national inheritance. His connectionof verse to the natural and scientific world validates the national pride thatmetrists and poets take in their verse.

***For Victorian prosodists, that national pride inheres in blank verse, whichis unique to the English language and thereby embodies the nationalcharacter. John Addington Symonds considers blank verse to be “more



various and plastic than any other national metre. It is capable of being usedfor the most commonplace and the most sublime utterances” (16). As themost versatile meter, blank verse can adjust its speed and represent a rangeof thoughts and feelings. By extension, then, Symonds implies that Britainis the most adaptable nation, open to variety and change. He goes on to say that

Blank verse is a type and symbol of our national literary spirit – uncontrolled byprecedent or rule, inclined to extravagance, yet reaching perfection at intervalsby an inner force and vivida vis of native inspiration. (72–3)

Symonds may have made these observations based on the work of poets likeBarrett Browning, who, as I have shown, celebrates the versatility of blankverse as a means of representing modern English life in Aurora Leigh. Writingin 1857, the year after the publication of Aurora Leigh, Patmore recognizesblank verse as a standard English meter, but claims that it is “the most difficultto write well in, because it, of all others, affords the greatest facilities tomediocrity” (47). For Patmore, its variety is its primary pitfall, for if executedbadly, it renders the verse dull. The variety, for him, must not exist forits own sake, but should be “incessantly inspired by, and expressive ofever-varying emotion” (48). Here he anticipates what Eliot will assert adecade later when she says that verse must have a basis in the psychological.Patmore views emotion not as something to be controlled but as itself anorganizing force in blank verse, one that takes the place of other rules thatmight accompany stricter versification. These differences in the character-ization of meter reveal divergent ideas about the national character. Patmorecannot view extravagance and lack of control as particularly English; on thecontrary, to stray too far away from the law precludes any sense of identityat all.

Poets’ uses of blank verse embody concepts of time and inform their ownviews of the national character and the direction of the nation. Symondsdubs Tennyson “the greatest living writer of blank verse” for the way hetakes advantage of the meter’s plasticity. In works of Victorian prosody,perhaps the most often-praised poem is Tennyson’s “Tears, Idle Tears,” asong in blank verse from his longer narrative poem The Princess. The blankverse songs of The Princess – particularly “Tears, Idle Tears” – stand out forSymonds as performing the lyric in a meter often reserved for narrative anddramatic verse. Patmore considers it one of the few successful unrhymedpoems (41). Although Saintsbury condemns Symonds’s ideas about blankverse as an anarchistic “prosodic go-as-you-please,” he echoes Symondsterms when he praises Tennyson’s blank verse in The Princess:“And the skillwith which he sustains the long verse paragraph – hardly stopped at all, butpaused with infinite variety – is astonishing.” For Saintsbury, it seems, it ispossible for variety to coincide with masterly control. “Tears, Idle Tears”comes in for special praise: “There are no lyrics in English which have amuch more individual and self-rendered music . . . [they are] a marvel ofrhythmic adaptation” (203). For Saintsbury, the flawless integration of blank



verse and lyric create the impression of mastery without a master. With its“self-rendered music,” the poem seems to make itself.

The songs from The Princess self-consciously experiment in compressingthe longer narrative and dramatic time that readers associate with blank verseinto the momentary time of lyric. I turn to “Tears, Idle Tears” now becauseit was so highly regarded as a successful experiment with meter and time.Indeed because it is embedded in the narrative of The Princess, thecompression of time is all the more remarkable in context.4 Contemporaryreaders would easily have recognized that Tennyson’s manipulation of blankverse form as a lyric mirrors the poem’s subject of nostalgia:

Tears, idle tears, I know not what they mean,Tears from the depth of some divine despairRise in the heart and gather to the eyes,In looking on the happy autumn-fields,And thinking of the days that are no more.

Fresh as the first beam glittering on a sail,That brings our friends up from the underworld,Sad as the last which reddens over oneThat sinks with all we love below the verge;So sad, so fresh, the days that are no more.

Ah, sad and strange as in dark summer dawnsThe earliest pipe of half-awaken’d birdsThe dying ears, when unto dying eyesThe casement slowly grows a glimmering square;So sad, so strange, the days that are no more.

Dear as remember’d kisses after death,And sweet as those by hopeless fancy feign’dOn lips that are for others; deep as love,Deep as first love, and wild with all regret;O Death in Life, the days that are no more! (IV, lines 21–41)

Because this poem so impressed Symonds, perhaps he had it in mind whenhe wrote that blank verse “seems adapted specially for thought in evolution;it requires progression and sustained effort” (72). The first stanza declaresthe song to be a product of and a representation of nostalgic thinking. Inlamenting “the days that are no more,” the song casts the apprehension oftime as a mental process. By the last verse paragraph,“the days that are nomore” seem to be the days that never were when compared to the sweetnessof kisses “by hopeless fancy feign’d / On lips that are for others.”The allusionto a memory that never happened emphasizes that the song is a series ofmetaphors, comparisons that never suggest an “actual” past for a putativesinger. The “as” that appears in the first and subsequent lines of all but thefirst verse paragraph is never stressed in the meter, and easy to glide over inits gentle lilt. The song finds strange and painful the juxtaposition ofbeginnings and endings, magnifying them so that “The earliest pipe of



half-awakened birds” is heard by “dying ears.” In a metaphor important toprosodists, intervals of time are twice represented by the sunrise and sunset,from the first beam on the horizon to the last, from the “dark summer dawn”to the casement that “grows a glimmering square.” This presentation oftemporal intervals as a product of thought anticipates the way that Patmoreand others would define meter in later decades.

The meter of “Tears, Idle Tears” uses frequent trochaic and even spondaicfoot substitution to slow it down, as though the meter itself were resistingits own movement through time. The first three lines begin this way so thatthe meter seems to fall, only to rise as the line continues:

/ /|x / |x / | x / | x /Tears, idle tears, I know not what they mean,

/ x | x / |x / | x / | x /Tears from the depth of some divine despair

/ x | x / | x / | x / | x /Rise in the heart, and gather to the eyes

Taking a pause between the two stressed syllables, the first foot adds bothan extra stress and extra time to the line. Here and throughout the poem,as in “Deep as first love,” which scans / x | / / , trochees and spondeeshold back the free flow of iambs. For the same reason that spondees takelonger to pronounce than pyrrhics (feet with two unstressed syllables), astress at the end of a line followed by one at the beginning of the nextenforces a slight pause, even when the lines are enjambed. This pause isdoubly enforced by the immediate repetition of the “r” between “despair”and “Rise.”To avoid a stutter, even one internally heard or felt, the readermust pause. However much the suggestion of mental abstract intervalsanticipates Patmore in this poem, there are not isochronous intervals. Witha pause in the middle of a spondee, in the same verse paragraph as a footsuch as “–er to,” whose stress is only nominal, the feet vary in duration. Thisvariation underscores the thematic anxiety about beginning new intervalsand ending old ones.

The song is not rhymed, but Tennyson creates a feeling of rhyme byrepeating sounds, not only in the refrain that ends verse paragraphs, “thedays that are no more,” but with alliteration, primarily of sounds in the firstword, “tears.” “R”s and “s”s appear throughout the poem, particularly atthe ends of lines, so that the word groups around these sounds, such as“despair” “more,” “square,” “underworld,” “verge” and “eyes,” “fields,”“birds” and “dawns,” establish a hint of rhyme, making blank verse lyric. The“r” particularly echoes throughout the poem, occurring in a stressed syllablemost of the time. Even the “are” in the phrase “the days that are no more”is stressed. Although a reader might be tempted to stress the “no,” the meter’siambic force is strong enough to discourage it. Working against the senseof the phrase, the meter attempts to undercut the negative and enact thewish that the days still “are,” in present tense. The days are “more,” becausethey are remembered, repeated, refigured in thought and in the song. The© Blackwell Publishing 2007 Literature Compass 4/1 (2007): 336–354, 10.1111/j.1741-4113.2006.00416.x


repetition attempts to create a recurring present that focuses on the past, themeter falling back before it can move forward.

The micro time of meter here argues for a concept of macro time thatalways looks back. In the context of the narrative, the Princess, who hasestablished a university for women, regards the song as full of reactionarysentimentality. She dismisses it as a siren song that lulls both men and womeninto the unproductive comfort of conservative and pre-defined gender roles:

. . . But thine are fancies hatch’dIn silken-folded idleness; nor is itWiser to weep a true occasion lost,But trim our sails and let old bygones be,While down the streams that float us each and allTo the issue, goes, like glittering bergs of ice,Throne after throne, and molten on the wasteBecomes a cloud; for all things serve their timeToward that great year of equal mights and rights.Nor would I fight with iron laws, in the endFound golden. (IV, lines 48–58)

Although there are a few substitutions here, as in “Throne after throne” or“Wiser to weep,” they function only to keep the regularity of the iambsfrom being monotonous. The more frequent enjambment keeps the metermoving at a brisker pace than the song’s. It supports the Princess’ ideathat it is necessary to keep moving forward – towards equal rights forwomen. Time, for her, is the great equalizer; as much as a song like “Tears,Idle Tears” might try to manipulate it, everyone is subject to its “iron laws.”In the song and in the voice of the Princess,Tennyson uses the “national”meter of blank verse to present dual concepts of time that uphold opposingpolitical views. While the Princess’s concept of objective, external timeimagines the nation in the throes of a democratizing, equalizing progressiveforce, the song’s mental, subjective view of time succumbs to the nostalgiaof privileged men.

***This dispute in The Princess about whether time is mental and subjective orobjective and external appears in mid-century prosody, between prosodistsand within texts that argued for time as at once a phenomenon of perceptionand an “iron law.” Increasingly, prosodists argued that because accent wastoo ambiguous, time, not classical quantity, and not accent, should beregarded as the central feature of meter. E. S. Dallas criticizes “loudness” asGuest’s primary criterion for accent. Without much clarification, he offers“sharpness” instead. Patmore delivers a summary of available explanationsof accent: “compound of loudness and tone,” “compound of height andduration of tone,”“general prominence.” Because these seem unsatisfactory,Patmore fits the concept of accent into his theory of meter as made up ofisochronous intervals; accent is a marker for the borders of those intervals.It “like a post in a chain railing, shall mark the end of one space and the



commencement of another” (15). The obscurity of accent led, in part, tothe ascendancy of time as the key feature of meter. In Blank Verse, Symondsuses the language of Patmore to define accent as “the increased effort of thevocal organs needed for marking the ictus,” noting that it is within “thecategory of time” (7–8). Discussing Patmore, Saintsbury declares incharacteristic bluster that he believes in isochronous intervals but that“I prefer to economise letters and call it a foot” (440).

Once late nineteenth-century critics, led largely by Patmore, shifted thefocus of prosodic debates from accent to time, they had also to define thenature of poetic time. For Dallas, time is externally measured but resolutelymental:

Although we reckon it by suns, moons, tides, and other objective standards, itsreal value with every man is subjective, what is long to one being short to another,and this value is found in the more or less rapid succession of thought. Themeasure of time, therefore, which the imagination will provide, is not a uniformbeat, like that of a clock, but one like the pulse, varying according tocircumstances. (160)

For Patmore, the marking of time can only be mental and therefore abstract.He puts it more succinctly than Dallas does and without reservation:

Yet all important as this time-beater is, I think it demonstrable that, for the mostpart, it has no material and external existence at all, but has its place in the mind,which craves measure in everything, and, wherever the idea of measure isuncontradicted, delights in marking it with an imaginary beat. (15)5

Some recent criticism has attempted to read isochronous intervals inVictorian poetry and this work attests to Patmore’s assertion that they existonly in the mind. When Donald Hair scans passages from Fifine at the Fairin isochronous intervals, he offers no proof that the intervals actually all lastthe same amount of time (27). In the course of arguing that an isochronousstructure is at the heart of Hopkins’s sprung rhythm, Jeanne Levasseur resortsto “multiple readings with a stop watch,” a practice unavailable in thenineteenth century and unappealing now (436). These attempts prove theimpossibility of measuring isochronous intervals. Critics have attempted toco-opt Hopkins both for accounts of meter that are increasingly accentualand increasingly temporal. These opposing views demonstrate how conflictedpoets and prosodists were themselves on questions of the prevalence of timeor accent. While current critics associate instinctual impulses with accent,Victorians understood time to be an instinctual measure as well. Theymeasure poetic time by internal experience rather than by a clock (or astopwatch). Because poetic time is mental and abstract, these poets are in aunique position to speed it up and slow it down. As I have shown forTennyson and Barrett Browning, poets’ manipulations have social andcultural implications. Whereas the forward push can represent progressivismand change – advocacy for women’s education, for instance – the impulseto slow, stop, and move back can represent a desire to maintain the status quo.



While Patmore considered the basis of meter to be mental, he also insistedon obedience to metrical law. He wrote that “the language should alwaysseem to feel, though not to suffer from the bonds of verse” (8; originalemphasis). Algernon Charles Swinburne, one who enjoyed suffering fromthe bonds of verse, epitomizes a post-Patmore turn towards moreexperimental, though no less ordered, meters. If the disyllabic rhythms ofblank verse were thought of as a national meter, one whose characterembodied the English ethos, then Swinburne’s frequently trisyllabic rhythmsposed a challenge to this ethos. His meters have all of the versatility thatSymonds praises in the meter of blank verse, but no one could accuse himof anarchism, as Saintsbury accuses Symonds. Prins notes that

Even the tour-de-force meters in Swinburne’s Poems and Ballads can be read asa virtuosic elaboration of Patmore’s principles . . . Swinburne seems to takepleasure in inventing infinitely varied ways to perform his subjection to Englishmetrical law. (“Patmore’s Law” 108)

If blank verse is suitable for thought and reflection, Swinburne’s meters aredesigned for feeling; the reader is meant to be swept up in the sensuality ofhis rhythms.

Swinburne’s “Itylus,” like The Princess and Aurora Leigh, reflects on themovement of time, but casts memory as a haunting curse that mustnevertheless be willingly borne. Forward movement in time is not progressbut a cowardly refusal to let the painful past inform subsequent moments.“Itylus” adapts the story from Ovid’s Metamorphoses in which King Tereusrapes his sister-in-law Philomela and then cuts out her tongue so she cannotsay what happened. Instead she weaves a narrative tapestry. When her sisterProcne finds out, she punishes her husband Tereus by killing their son Itysand then serving him to Tereus for dinner. Philomela is subsequently turnedinto a nightingale and Procne into a swallow. In Swinburne’s poem, thenightingale addresses the swallow, whom she depicts as “swift,” “fleet,”“changing,”“shifting,” imploring her not to try to escape from the horrorof the past, but to stay with her to grieve perpetually in song:

“Swallow, my sister, O sister swallow,”How can thine heart be full of the spring?

A thousand summers are over and dead.What hast thou found in the spring to follow?

What hast thou found in thine heart to sing?What wilt thou do when the summer is shed?

O swallow, sister, O fair swift swallow,Why wilt thou fly after spring to the south,

The soft south whither thine heart is set?Shall not the grief of the old time follow?

Shall not the song thereof cleave to thy mouth?Hast thou forgotten ere I forget?

. . . O swallow, sister, O fleeting swallow,



My heart in me is a molten emberAnd over my head the waves have met.

But thou wouldst tarry or I would follow,Could I forget or thou remember,

Couldst thou remember and I forget. (lines 1–12, 37–42)

The rhyme and meter complicate the nightingale’s argument with theswallow about whether to look forward or back and how to encounter the past.In response to the swallow’s desire to forget and move on, the nightingaleasserts that it is not only impossible to forget the horrors of the past, butimportant to hold on to them. The poem as a whole, however, is moreambiguous, displaying tension between the two sisters’ positions. The poemseems to move steadily forward but persistently moves back as it does so.By rhyming in successions of three rather than two or four interlocked lines,its abcabc scheme puts the rhyme almost out of hearing before pulling thereader back with a recognizable sound. The chiasmus, as in the word patternforget-remember-remember-forget, appears several times in this poem asthe figure of the eternal return. By enclosing “remember” within “forget,”the poem casts the two concepts as dependent on each other; forgetting ishollowed out without remembrance and remembrance is only defined byan outline of forgetting.

The meter would seem to contrast with the nightingale’s argument andto be more like the swallow in its swift movement; but in alternating betweenfalling and rising meters, the lines carry on the birds’ arguments amongstthemselves. The poem is largely in the falling dactylic tetrameter, but moststanzas include rising anapestic, or even predominantly iambic lines. Forinstance, the rising lines “a THOUsand SUMmers are OVer and GONE”or “and OVer my HEAD the WAVES have MET” vary the largely fallingmeter of the stanzas in which they appear, as if to alter the direction notonly of the meter but of the thrust of the nightingale’s plea. In addition tothis alternation of falling and rising lines, some lines are ambiguous. Althoughthe stresses fall so strongly as to give his verse an incantatory quality, thereis ambiguity in some lines about how to divide the feet. Which of thesescansions better suits the poem?

/ x x | / x x | / x x | / (x) (x)What wilt thou do when the summer is shed?

/ x | x / | x x / | x x /What wilt thou do when the summer is shed?

The first scansion has the advantage of following the falling meter of theline that precedes it,“What hast thou found in thy heart to sing” ( / x x |/ x x | / x | x / ). The first version implies pauses at the end of the linethat the second does not assume. In this way, the first scansion is morePatmorian in its use of pause to fill out isochronous intervals.6 The secondversion shifts right away from a falling to a rising meter but fits the feetwithin the allotted syllables, without adding pauses. This particular order of



stressed and unstressed syllables appears numerous times throughout thepoem, sometimes in the middle of the stanza, rather than at the end, as inthe above line. Counting or inserting pauses can add length to the line andmodulate the speed of the meter. The difference between the two versionsof the line lends a measure of variability and readerly choice within a meterwhose motion seems inevitable. The overall alternation between rising andfalling meters renders the rhythm of the poem circular rather than driving,a surge up followed by a surge down. Swinburne deftly shows that metricalspeed does not always denote an impulse to push into the future. For him,it retains a chiastic logic, spinning in circles. Saintsbury praises Swinburne’sspeed and his ability to modulate it:“But perhaps you do not like gallopingmetres. You are wrong; but the poet is ready for you” (341). His controlledspeed forms much of what was largely regarded as Swinburne’s genius.

In “Itylus,” memory and its meter are both curse and obligation, displayinga wish for the past to inform the present and the future, not so that it canbe idealized and repeated, but so that it might be resisted. I conclude withSwinburne not only because he is perhaps the most virtuosic practitionerof Victorian meter, but also because his poetry embodies the oppositionsthat I have argued characterize the poetry and prosody of the period. Thepoem “Itylus” casts its own motion as organic and yet it resists the naturalprogression of the seasons. Read silently, the poem’s rhythms may beat theirtime mentally, but they always appeal nonetheless to the senses. ForSwinburne, forward progress through time, in small intervals and large, isimpossible without regression; time is circular for him rather than linear.He follows this law of time not willfully but compulsively, expanding thelimits of what a perfectly ordered meter will allow.

In her introduction to Barrett Browning’s letter to Uvedale Price,published as an essay entitled “The Art of Scansion,” Alice Meynell writesthat “In this controversy on ‘accents ancient and modern’ ” her subject may“have lost her temper over a matter so exciting” (ix). Meynell’s rhetoricalquestion, “And what is so exciting to poets as these questions of theirtechnique?” answers itself in a way that critics are only now beginning toregain sight of. For Victorian poets, nothing was more exciting. Failure totake this into account can only lead to a limited understanding of their work.Meter was not only a source of excitement in this period but one ofcontroversy, as Meynell attests:

If I had ever had a fierce passage of arms with Francis Thompson (but I neverhad) it would have been on the question of trochaic endings, and whether onemight pause on them before carrying on the weak syllable to the next line. (ix)

Such controversies – whether extrametrical syllables were permissible, howmuch and what sort of foot substitution should be allowed, whether tomeasure feet by accents or time, and whether to call them feet at all – ragedthroughout the period. To imply that they culminate in a modernistavant-garde undermines the powerful force they constituted in their own



day. Philosophical, political, and cultural ideals, particularly about the natureof the experience of time rose and fell with stresses of Victorian meters.

Short Biography

Emily Harrington is currently a postdoctoral fellow at the University ofMichigan, where she recently received her Ph.D. Her article on the poeticsof sympathy in A. Mary F. Robinson and Vernon Lee appeared inNineteenth-Century Literature and is part of a book-length project entitledLyric Intimacy and British Women Poets 1860–1900. She will join the EnglishDepartment at Penn State University in 2007.

Notes

* Correspondence address: Department of English, University of Michigan, 435 South State Street,3187 Angell Hall,Ann Arbor, Michigan 48109-1003, USA.1 For an alternative method of scansion see Cureton.2 For more on eighteenth century prosody, see Bradford.3 “New prosody” is the term used first by T. S. Omond, and then by Taylor. Saintsbury refers tothe same ideas stemming from Patmore as “fancy prosody.”4 The frame narrative of The Princess, in which a group of college men on holiday take turns tellingthe story in the voice of the Prince, who quotes liberally from other characters, creates a poeticeffect of multiple voices.“Tears, Idle Tears,” then, is a song in the voice of a man in the voice ofanother man in the voice of a woman, a song that has many voices, and none at all.5 Patmore compares his isochronous intervals to bars in music, and insists on comparing musicand poetry:“The relation of music to language ought to be recognized as something more thanthat of similarity, if we would rightly appreciate either” (17). This principle was disputed in theperiod, particularly by Hopkins, as Michael Hurley notes in “Darkening the Subject of Hopkins’Prosody.” Donald Hair has addressed the musicality of scansion in isochronous intervals inBrowning’s “Fifine at the Fair” in his “Note on Meter, Music, and Meaning.”6 Hopkins disapproved of the use of any extrametrical effect, which “is and is not part of themetre.” In a letter to Robert Bridges he criticized Milton for using “a standard rhythm which isnever heard but only counted and therefore really does not exist” (143). Hopkins wrote that“Swinburne’s dactyls and anapests are halting to my ear” (142).

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The Measure of Time: Rising and Falling in Victorian Meters

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