Neil Bowen on
Clumsily amateurish or the real thing?
Try to work out the metrical arrangement of Blake’s impassioned dramatic monologue and you’ll soon discover it seems to be all over the place. Granted, the first line is reasonably regular, an iambic tetrameter that establishes a song-like form:
‘I love to rise in a summer morn’
Even here, though, there’s a little extra unstressed syllable between ‘rise’ and ‘sum’, suitably hurrying the second half of the line along a little, as if in excitement at rising on a summer morning. In a regular, conventional poem, we’d expect the second line to follow a similar pattern to the first. But, as a man and as an artist, Blake was far from regular or conventional. In his lifetime he was viewed at best as an eccentric, at worst as a madman and, certainly, Blake never liked to follow anyone else’s rules. In the light of this, perhaps it’s unsurprising that the second line immediately deviates from the pattern set by the first:
‘When the birds sing on every tree’
This could be read as either a tetrameter or a pentameter, if we decide that the first word, ‘when’ should take a stress. Not only is there an uncertain stress pattern on the first two syllables of the line, but this is followed by two heavy stresses in succession – birds sing – which is called a spondee, before the line settles back into an iambic pattern at the end, though even then, a pendant might argue that ‘every’ can have three syllables, not two.
The poem’s third line runs more smoothly along the groove of the iambic tetrameter:
‘The distant huntsman winds his horn’
And this iambic metre is also maintained in the fourth line:
‘And the sky-lark sings with me’
However, either this line is a stress short, as it’s only a trimeter, with three beats, not the requisite four, or perhaps ‘sky-lark’ is another spondee, in which case the middle of the line would
have three strong beats bunched up in a row; ‘sky-lark sings’.
Deary me, it already seems that Mr. Blake just can’t keep his metre under any kind of control. No sooner has he established a pattern that the poem slips out of it and goes its own way. At least, the full end-rhymes, arranged in a sonorous cross-rhymed structure, impose some sort of sonic order. But the balance and harmony these generate are undercut by Blake adding an extra, unexpected fifth line to his stanza, thereby unbalancing it with a third ‘ee’ rhyme, an effect exacerbated by more uncertain, wobbly metrics:
‘O! what sweet company’
How would you scan that line? It could be:
‘O! what sweet company’
That would make it another shorter line, a trimeter. Or perhaps the emotive first exclamative ‘O’ should be stressed to make a tetrameter, which would make the first two syllables trochaic, not iambic, or, indeed, anapaestic (two unstressed syllables followed by a stress). In any case, there’s no clear iambic pattern and, via the rhyme scheme, the reader is forced to stress a syllable that wouldn’t normally be stressed, the last letter of ‘company’, making what is called a ‘wrenched line’, normally an effect considered clumsy and amateurish in poetry. And all this is made even worse by Blake’s decision to use the adjective ‘sweet’, as this only draws more sonic attention to the run of ‘ee’ rhymes,
making us hear the last one as louder and more pronounced.
From the perspective of metrical orthodoxy, Blake’s first stanza is so clumsily erratic and hopelessly irregular, so awkwardly out-of-kilter and seemingly ill-managed, that it’s almost beyond repair.
In his primer on poetry, ‘The Ode Less Travelled’, Stephen Fry performs a similar metrical interrogation of some of Blake’s verse and finds the lines from Auguries of Innocence ‘messy, mongrel and mawkish’. Having mocked the ‘scansion, syntax and manifold inconsistencies’, Fry goes on to say, however, that such ‘ill-made felicities’ ‘only go on to convince us of the work’s fundamental honesty and authenticity’. Concluding his discussion with the famous quatrain beginning ‘To see a world in a grain of sand’, Fry writes that ‘the metre is shot to hell in every line, but who cares. It is the real thing.’