The points brought out in the analysis of all these examples of prose lead to the conclusion that rhythmical prose is prose that is read, like verse, with a very perceptible division into approximately equal time parts, but these time parts are not grouped in regularly recurring metrical units (lines) like those of verse. This kind of prose has also an approach to rhythmical pattern, but in the best examples, one pattern is not, as in verse, consistently carried through a whole passage; rather, two or three patterns are irregularly repeated or alternated.

This definition of rhythmical prose will include most of the poetry of Walt Whitman and his followers-what is called free verse, or vers libre.12 If we print as free verse one

12 Walt Whitman himself is credited with saying that the Leaves of Grass contains both prose and verse.

of the prose passages we have been discussing we see that the two forms may be in reality the same thing, e. g.

Remember now thy creator

In the days of thy youth,
When the evil days come not,

Nor the years draw nigh

When thou shalt say, I have no pleasure in them.

Or we may treat in the same way a passage from Joseph Conrad's story, Youth:

And this is how I see the East.

I have seen its secret places and have looked into its very soul; But now I see it always from a small boat,

A high outline of mountains,

Blue and afar in the mornings; like a faint mist at noon;

A jagged wall of purple at sunset.

I have the feel of the oar in my hand,

The vision of a scorching blue sea in my eyes.

And I see a bay, a wide bay,

Smooth as glass and polished like ice,

Shimmering in the dark.

Compare the general effect of this with Whitman's

By the bivouac's fitful flame,

A procession winding around me, solemn and sweet and slow;— but first I note,

The tents of the sleeping army, the fields' and woods' dim outline, The darkness, lit by spots of kindled fire-the silence;

Like a phantom far or near an occasional figure moving;

The shrubs and trees, (as I lift my eyes they seem to be stealthily watching me)

Which wind in procession thoughts, O tender and wondrous thoughts,

Of life and death-of home and the past and loved, and of thou that

art far away;

A solemn and slow procession there as I sit on the ground,

By the bivouac's fitful flame.

The biblical verse and the Conrad paragraph appear as poems or parts of poems in the manner of the vers libre school. The only difference which printing it in this form can make is that most readers would pause slightly at the end of each line, thus making the rhythmic units more distinct than the phrases were when printed as prose. This, in fact, is what the writers of free verse gain merely by beginning each line with a capital. The feeling that he is reading verse impels the reader to give more attention to rhythm than he does in reading prose. This is merely another indication that verse rhythm is to a very considerable extent subjective.

But some so-called free verse is not as much like rhythmical prose as it is like blank verse. It has a very even rhythmic pattern, though the line length is irregular. Here is a passage in duple rhythm:

Once on a time

There was a little boy: a master mage

By virtue of a Book

Of magic-O, so magical it filled

His life with visionary pomps

Processional! And Powers

Passed with him where he passed. And Thrones

And Dominations, glaived and plumed and mailed,

Thronged in the criss-cross streets,

The palaces pell-mell with playing-fields,

Domes, cloisters, dungeons, caverns, tents, arcades,
Of the unseen, silent City, in his soul

Pavilioned jealously, and hid

As in the dusk, profound,

Green stillnesses of some enchanted mere.

(W. E. Henley: Arabian Nights.)

Matthew Arnold, who experimented much with free verse, has a poem, the Future, in a perfectly regular triple rhythm, but in irregular unrimed meter.

A wanderer is man from his birth.

He was born in a ship

On the breast of the River of Time.
Brimming with wonder and joy

He spreads out his arms to the light,

Rivets his gaze on the banks of the stream.

The freedom of vers libre, then, may be a freedom from rime and from metrical pattern, and it may also be a freedom from regular rhythmical pattern. In the second case it is, except for the manner of printing, identical with rhythmical prose.

The effect of any of the forms defined in this chapterverse, free verse, rhythmical prose, and ordinary proseis dependent to a great extent upon the way it is read. A poor reader is likely to ignore the intention of an author and miss a carefully wrought artistic effect. The finest Shakespearian verse when spoken on the stage today usually becomes merely fine rhythmical prose, because most actors seem unable to give it properly expressive interpretation without obscuring the pattern; and the rhythmical prose of Ruskin, Pater, or the Authorized Version may be read to sound like the morning paper.13

13 A more detailed study of free verse will be found in Chapter XIX.

Both are tetrameter, in duple rhythm, and both have eight syllables; but in the former, each unstressed syllable seems to be associated more closely with the stress that follows it than with that which precedes. In the latter, the reverse is true. The difference is due to what we may call the movement of the rhythm. There are two kinds of movement, rising and falling. Rising movement is illustrated by

The stag at eve had drunk his fill.

This kind of rhythm we may compare with that of a hammer driving a nail; a preparatory lifting comes before the stroke. Falling movement is illustrated by

Happy field or mossy cavern.

This kind of rhythm we may compare with that of a typewriter key, which rebounds after being pressed.

Below are quoted six passages of verse that have each a separate and distinctive rhythmic effect when read. This is due to the combination of a rising or falling movement with one of three types of rhythmical pattern distinguished in the fourth chapter. For convenience we may as well call

1 Quadruple rhythm has not been used enough as yet in serious verse to have its possibilities well developed. It appears at present to be used only with a rising movement.