Pulse in verbal rhythm / by Mary Hallock-Greenewalt, Philadelphia, P.

  • Greenewalt, Mary Elizabeth Hallock, 1871-1950
Date:
[1905?]
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: Pulse in verbal rhythm / by Mary Hallock-Greenewalt, Philadelphia, P. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    North and His Friends,’ by Dr. S. Weir Mitchell) confirm this testi¬ mony of a time measuring instrument. He says: ‘ Speech at the rate of three syllables a second is slow; below that number wearisome to listen to. The fastest talkers in the Senate reach a speed of four and a half syllables a second. For a single minute, uneducated Irish women and negroes excited on the witness stand can reach a speed of eight syllables a second. ’ Slower than one quantity, three syllables or their value a second, verse is wearisome to listen to; in double quick time, unusual and rare, if not impossible, a rate of beat synchronous with the heart’s considered in its cycle of daily unpathologic variation. The comparison is fraught with meaning. The idea that inward beat not only suggests but interprets the outward externalization furnishes the one possible solution to many a verbal riddle. To that most practical of rhythmists, the pianist, it is one of the great mysteries of the world how the written words of a verse quite by themselves suggest orderly rhythm to the reader. What is it in Jack and Jill which makes the word ‘water’ suddenly demand the time taken by four syllables before? In asking for a glass of water the word is certainly more concisely uttered, even if in certain parts of the country it were not pronounced ‘ watter. ’ ‘After ’ in the fourth line is different in length from ‘ after ’ in ‘After the Ball. ’ Take also the following primitive verse from Gummere’s ‘The Beginnings of Poetry,’ more useful than pretty in this connection. How from the punctuation can the quantities be determined as the bar lines undoubtedly indicate them? Nine are washing the | lye Nine. | Nine are washing it, | Nine are rubbing it, | Pretty Marion | in the shade, | Pretty Marion, | Let us to the | fountain go. | By what verbal logic does the preposition ‘ in ’ receive an accent in the fifth line? Does anything in the page mark the spot where illog¬ ical accent marks the rhythmic limits? And, generally speaking, what denotes the place where change from iambus to anapest fugitively occurs? So practical as the musician the poet has not been. Rhythm is time bounded regularly. In the insect’s call it is the fall of the chirp, chirp, chirp which measures off the time; in poetry and music it is the regularly recurring accent.