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So it is with the imaginary speech of the River. Not until the borrowed fourth line: "All of them, all are sleeping on the hill," Masters's way of introducing a strongly rhythmical and even metrical line into a passage otherwise flatly "prosaic" in its time-intervals.
But when we are taught in school that Longfellow's Evangeline is also written in "dactylic hexameters," trouble begins for the few inquisitive, since it is certain that if you close your eyes and listen carefully to a dozen lines of Homer's Greek, and then to a dozen lines of Longfellow's English, each written in so-called "hexameters," you are listening to two very different arrangements of time-intervals, so different, in fact, that the two poems are really not in the same "measure" or "metre" at all.
Two streams of sound pass constantly through the inner ear of one who understands or appreciates the rhythm of our verse: one, never actually found in the real sounds which are uttered, is the absolute rhythm, its equal time-intervals moving on in infinitely perfect progression; the other, represented by the actual movement of the verse, is constantly shifting by quickening, retarding, strengthening or weakening its sounds, yet always hovers along the line of the perfect rhythm, and bids the ear refer to that perfect rhythm the succession of its pulsations."
As soon as the dominant beat which is commonly, but not always, apparent in the opening measures of the poem once asserts itself, the poet's mastery of technique is revealed through his skill in satisfying the ear with a verbal music which is never absolutely identical in its time-intervals, its stresses or its pitch, with the fixed, wooden pattern of the rhythm he is using.
In order to understand the phrase "this morning" it is necessary that we should have a way of feeling time-intervals, and that this feeling should give what is constant in the meaning of the words "this morning." This appreciation of time-intervals is, however, obviously a product of memory, not a presupposition of it.
Measured intervals of time are the basis of all verse, and their regularity marks off poetry from prose; so that Time is thus the chief element in Poetry, as it is in Music and in Dancing. From the idea of measuring these time-intervals, we derive the name Metre; Rhythm means pretty much the same thing, 'a flowing, an even, measured motion.
We agree, then, that in all spoken language and this is as true of prose as it is of verse there are time-intervals more or less clearly marked, and that the ear is the final judge as to the nature of these intervals. But can the ear really measure the intervals with any approximation to certainty, so that prosodists, for instance, can agree that a given poem is written in a definite metre?
Let us apply these facts to some of the more simple of the vexed questions of prosody, No one disputes the universality of the rhythmizing impulse; the quarrel begins as soon as any prosodist attempts to dogmatize about the nature and measurement of those flowing time-intervals whose arrangement we call rhythm.
Vierordt has proved experimentally, by making a person try to reproduce the varying time-intervals between the strokes of the pendulum of a metronome, that when the interval is a very small one, we uniformly tend to exaggerate it in retrospection; when a large one, to regard it, on the contrary, as less than it actually was.
Instead of stop watches, therefore, we used a timing device capable of recording the most minute time-intervals with perfect precision. The whole system was immeasurably superior to the German, and at least twenty times as accurate, for the British system was absolutely automatic.
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