in verse # 31 : dark Satanic mills

If I were to tell you that I was writing a parody bent on displaying a hacker’s mindset, based on Ira Gershwin’s “I got rhythm,” and that it began

I got rhythm
Algorithm
I got rhythm
Who could ask for anything more?

would you revise the title for this post to “dork Satanic mills”?  What if my parody morphed into

I got rhythm
Al Gore rhythm
I got rhythm
Who could ask for anything more?

would that incline you to a more charitable view?  Would you even notice the change in rhythm in the second line with the change in wording?

Of course you would, because the stresses in the first word falls on “al” and “rith,” while in the second case, the stresses fall on the first three syllables of the line, with a slightly stronger stress in “Gore” than “Al” because the former requires a diphthong and the latter does not.  It is with these subtleties of poetic rhythm that Derek Attridge is concerned in The rhythms of English poetry.  He draws his examples from “a single remarkably homogeneous body of poetry:  the main tradition of regular accentual-syllabic verse in Middle and Modern English.”  In the analysis that follows, Attridge asserts, “my interest is primarily in the singleness of this metrical tradition — in the capacity, that is, of the modern reader to engage directly with rhythmic forms produced over the past six hundred years….”  That means that he ignores “some of the most picturesque byways of English versification, such as syllabic verse, classical imitations, concrete poetry, and the metrical experiments and theories” [1]  of wanderers in those byways, such as William Blake.  Or rather, he ignores Blake’s experiments with a long line in his later poems.

Attridge expounds on these basic matters by way of one further distinction, between rhythm and meter — or rather somewhat refuses to, saying “I have no wish to differentiate between them by means of simple definitions.  The connotations which they carry are basically those of common usage…” arguing that it is the purpose of the book so to do.  But he does say that, if “obliged to be more explicit, I would hazard the assertion that rhythm … has special reference to patterns apprehended through ordinary habits of perception, whereas metre is dependent on habits acquired through familiarity with a particular tradition of verse.”[2]

I am still reading Attridge, and since I began reading his second book[3] on the topic first — and both appear to be out-of-print [and are both hard to come by, and dear] — I will resort to repeating the description of the theory as it was first called to my attention in The Milton encyclopedia (and first referred to in the 29^th of these posts).  In his fine article on Milton’s prosody, John Creaser describes how Milton was able to work so well within the conventions of blank verse.  Creaser begins by summarizing Attridge’s description of “the prevailing norms” of speech rhythm in English:

Fundamental to the rhythm of English speech are (1) isochrony — the tendency, allowing for sense “breathings,” to perceive stressed syllables as falling at equal intervals of time; and (2) duple movement — the tendency for stressed and unstressed syllables to alternate.[4]

This is why Attridge does not go back beyond Middle English for his examples.  As we have seen, the Anglo-Saxon poets had 4 stresses in a line, and anywhere from none to 6 or 7 unstressed syllables.  This is the reason poems of the alliterative revival are not all truly alliterative (with the poems of the Gawain poet coming closest):  English had lost its inflections, tied itself to word order, and opened its word-hoard for a great influx.  Creaser then discusses the variation possible in the duple movement, which is where a “foot”-based metric ties itself in knots, especially in trying to account for the variations in the feet actually used by poets.  This is his summary:

Attridge has shown that all the variety in five centuries of regular iambics is released by only three deviations from the basic duple alternation: (1) Demotion:  when three stresses occur in sequence, careful utterance gives the second the time of a stress, but slightly less emphasis (as in “good white wine,” where “white” would only take, or be felt as taking, full stress to mark a distinction from, say, “good red wine”).  (2) Promotion:  in a sequence of three non-stresses, the second is given a little extra weight or time (at PL 4.74, “Infinite wrath, and infinite despair,” the second “infinite” is felt as drawn out by a secondary stress on its final syllable).  (3) Pairing:  where only two stresses are adjacent and demotion is therefore impossible, an iambic line is thrown off balance; the imbalance is kept as brief as possible by immediately following or preceding the pair of stresses with two (and only two) non-stresses….  A demoted syllable is a stress that is not a metrical beat (that is, one of the five structural emphases in a pentameter); a promoted syllable is a beat without being fully stressed; a pairing comprises two beats and two off-beats.[5]

Given that sketch, you might expect a simple discussion of Blake when Attridge summons him.  It is not so, because Attridge discusses Blake’s poem “LONDON” (one of the Songs of Experience), in “Part Four: Practice” of The rhythms of English poetry, chapter 9, section 4, “Emphasis and Connection.”  He is discussing a particular repeated rhythmic pattern, and given Blake’s long history with the long line, Attridge has a generous amount to say about the metrical poems.  This is the poem “LONDON:”

I wander thro’ each charter’d street
Near where the charter’d Thames does flow
And mark in every face I meet
Marks of weakness, marks of woe.

In every cry of every Man,
In every Infant’s cry of fear,
In every voice, in every ban
The mind-forg’d manacles I hear.

How the Chimney-sweeper’s cry
Every black’ning Church appalls;
And the hapless Soldier’s sigh
Runs in blood down Palace walls.

But most thro’ midnight streets I hear
How the youthful Harlot’s curse
Blasts the new born Infant’s tear,
And blights with plagues the Marriage hearse.[6]

The poem is written in a four-stress line, but Attridge descries in the third and fourth stanzas a pattern of rhythm in “two phrases characterised by three strong beats alternating with single offbeats, a predominantly falling movement, and a possessive construction matched in a particular way to this rhythmic pattern”[7], i.e. “chimney sweeper’s cry” and “hapless soldier’s sigh”[8], about which Attridge says “Rhythm, syntax and rhyme all contribute to the equation of two phenomena which might seem to have no logical connection.  In the next stanza these phrases are echoed by a third, to bring into the same sphere another form of exploitation”[9]:  “youthful harlot’s curse”, which leads in the next line to another instance relating “these images of suffering to a kind of sorrow considered by the society under attack to be totally unrelated to and unaffected by them:”[10] “new born Infant’s tear” (which, believe me, seems to run in blood down palace walls — we are hosting a newborn grandson, and there are times when he seems inconsolable).  This is a rhythmic motif which is echoed in the last image of the poem, which retains the connection of rhyme, although the possessive construction is gone:  “plagues the Marriage hearse” (talk about two irreconcilable images yoked by violence together).  Attridge concludes “Rhythmic echoes no doubt work subliminally for the most part, and only when they are made obvious by such means as Blake uses do we become conscious of them.”

So here’s an invitation to you:  can you find a similar use of a rhythmic motif in this poem, from the prefatory matter to Blake’s Milton?

And did those feet in ancient time,
Walk upon Englands mountains green:
And was the holy Lamb of God,
On Englands pleasant pastures seen!

And did the Countenance Divine,
Shine forth upon our clouded hills?
And was Jerusalem builded here,
Among these dark Satanic Mills?

Bring me my Bow of burning gold;
Bring me my Arrows of desire:
Bring me my Spear: O clouds unfold!
Bring me my Chariot of fire!

I will not cease from Mental Fight,
Nor shall my Sword sleep in my hand:
Till we have built Jerusalem,In Englands green & pleasant Land[11]

Is it any wonder that Orson Scott Card brings William Blake to America to serve as Alvin Maker’s mentor and guide?

And, since I ought to have some skin in the game, here’s a sonnet that happened to me in Sacrament Meeting, when I should have been listening to other voices:

I think of Milton blind and broken, who sang
of Paradise and loss, how each we take
of our own will the fruit from the helical snake
aglow in the dawn, glistening single fang
to help us eat experience and its pang.
We pluck where he points and as we bite we break
the skin that keeps us; we poison our heart’s long ache
at having initiated into his gang.
For Milton, who had seen his Commonwealth
shattered & smashed by the Stuart Restoration,
the musing anchored him while he waited to sink.
But filling his lungs with dawn again, good health
overcame him, as he called up a new nation
and sung with such voice as to heal its king.

But hold on, I hear you saying; isn’t that just filler, avoiding a discussion of Blake’s long line?

Your turn.