Chapter XIII: we saw an analogous situation arising in the case

of the discrimination of colours. The obvious comparison with the difference between what even musical notation can record in music and the player’s interpretation can usefully be made here.

A more serious omission is the neglect by the majority of metrists of the pitch relations of syllables. The reading of poetry is of course not a monotonous and subdued form of singing. There is no question of definite pitches at which the syllables must be taken, nor perhaps of definite harmonic relations between different sounds. But that a rise and fall of pitch is involved in metre and is as much part of the poet’s technique as any other feature of verse, as much under his control also, is indisputable. Anyone who is not clear upon this point may compare as a striking instance Milton’s _Hymn on the Morning of Christ’s Nativity_ with Collins’ _Ode to Simplicity_ and both with the second Chorus of _Hellas_ discussed in Chapter XXVIII. Due allowances made for the natural peculiarities of different readers, the scheme of pitch relations, in their contexts, of

That on the bitter cross
Must redeem our loss;

and of

But com’st a decent maid,
In Attic robe array’ɖ,

are clearly different. There is nothing arbitrary or out of the poet’s control in this, as there is nothing arbitrary or out of his control in the way in which an adequate reader will stress particular syllables. He brings both about by the same means, the modification of the reader’s impulses by what has gone before. It is true that some words resist emphasis far more than perhaps any resist change of pitch, yet this difference is merely one of degree. It is as natural to lower the pitch in reading the word ‘loss’ as it is to emphasise it as compared with ‘our’ in the same context.

Here again we see how impossible it is to consider rhythm or metre as though it were purely an affair of the sensory aspect of syllables and could be dissociated from their sense and from the emotional effects which come about through their sense. One principle may, however, be hazarded. As in the case of painting the more direct means are preferable to the less direct (see