Pulse in verbal rhythm / by Mary Hallock-Greenewalt.

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

Licence: In copyright

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

Provider: This material has been provided by The Royal College of Surgeons of England. The original may be consulted at The Royal College of Surgeons of England.

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    [R« PULSE IN VERBAL RHYTHM. BY MARY HALLOCK-GREENEWALT PHILADELPHIA, PA. GREAT poet and at the same time great musician has shown by scientific analysis that poetry is such things as music is made of. Accent, rhythm, tone-color, intensity, and pitch, all are present in spoken verse. Some of them, as every musician knows, can be measured by mathematical accuracy; some of them cannot. One species of accurate measure, far reaching in its meaning, escaped Mr. Lanier’s attention. Simply, trenchantly, this poet, musician, scientist proved his points; the firmest lightest stroke settling once and for all the fact that verbal rhythm is bred of quantity, not born of accent. Regular time dimensions measured as by the clock stand at the root of verbal rhythm just as they are the life and breath of music. For why then should pauses within and without the lines be part and parcel of the rhythmic form? Accent cannot exist where sounds are not. Silence can supply nothing but time. This way he arrives at a signal truth, holding within itself the proof that the most exalted poetic workman- ship stands with its ‘ feet ’ on a Mother Goose floor. All that we may say of the quantitive rhythm of a nursery rhyme will be found equally true of the iambics of Shakespeare’s blank verse. In reciting ‘Jack and Jill’ then, or ‘Mother Hubbard,’ or ‘Mary, Mary, Quite Contrary,’ the same amount of time measured as by the clock elapses between every pair of syllables pointed to as vital to the rhythm. Prosodists have not yet agreed as to what accent in verse really is. A syllable may be raised above its fellows by alliteration, intensity, tone-color, pitch, or any one of a dozen ways used similarly in music to bring out a note. In Jack and Jill no one will deny that these syllables are: / / Jack and Jill went up the hill To fetch a pail of water; / / Jack fell down and broke his crown / . / And Jill came tumbling after.