“You have bound me to the completion of Kehama, and, if I have health and eye-sight, completed it will be within twelve months. Want of practice has not weakened me: I have ascertained this, and am proceeding.
“I will use such materials as have stood the test; those materials are the same in all languages, and we know what they are. With respect to metre it is otherwise: there we must look to English only, and in English we have no other great poem than the Paradise Lost. Blank verse has long appeared to me the noblest measure of which our language is capable, but it would not suit Kehama. There must be quicker, wilder movements; there must be a gorgeousness of ornament also,—eastern gem-work, and sometimes rhyme must be rattled upon rhyme, till the reader is half dizzy with the thundering echo. My motto must be,—
Ποιχίλον είδος έχων, οτι ποιχίλον άϕάσσω. |
146 | LIFE AND CORRESPONDENCE | Ætat. 34. |
“One inference I think must be drawn from the obscurity of Pindar’s metre,—that, be it what it may, the pleasure which it gave did not result from rhythm. Indeed, the whole system of classical metres seems to have been that of creating difficulty for the sake of overcoming it. We mis-read Sapphics without making them worse; we mis-read Pentameters and make them better; and the Hexameter remains the most perceptible of all measures, though in our pronunciation we generally distort four feet out of the six.
“A great deal more may be done with rhyme than has yet been done with it; there is a crypto-rhyme which may often be introduced with excellent effect; the eye has nothing to do with it, but the ear feels it without, perhaps, perceiving anything more than the general harmony, and not knowing how that harmony is produced. Sometimes the sparing intermixture of rhymes in a paragraph may be so managed as to satisfy the ear, and give greater effect to their after profusion. These are not things which one thinks of in composition, but they are thought of in correcting; they are the touches in finishing off, when a little alteration produces a great difference.
“Your dislike to the ballad metre is, perhaps, because
you are sick of a tune which has been sung
Ætat. 34. | OF ROBERT SOUTHEY. | 147 |