Sylvia Adamson find — Standard English as the medium of discourse in their new worlds, later examples of the genre offer a range of alternative varieties, such as Newspeak in Orwell's 1984 (1949), Neanderthal in Golding's The Inheritors (1955), 'nadsat', the Russo-English of c space-age hooligans' in Burgess's A Clockwork Orange (1962) and post-holocaust Cockney in Hoban's Riddley Walker (1980). Often more is involved than a delight in exotic forms. Halliday argues, for instance, that the unusual patterns of transitivity in Lok's language in The Inheritors encode a pre-modern understanding of cause—effect relations (Halliday 1981: 325—360) and Laadan, the language constructed by Elgin for Native Tongue (1984), was deliberately designed to show that c if women had a language adequate to express their perceptions, it might reflect a quite different reality than that perceived by men' (Elgin 1988: 3). The paradigm case for such experiments is to be found, I believe, in the language of children's literature, the genre which occupied in the nineteenth century the place held by science fiction in the twentieth. 7.2.7 The logic of non-Standard English The eighteenth-century prescriptive grammarians who were the arbiters of the emerging Standard were motivated by the desire to make the language not only stable but rational, and the belief that Standard English is in fact more logical than non-Standard dialects remains deeply rooted in folk mythology. As recendy as the 1960s, Labov found it necessary to demon- strate that a speaker of Black English Vernacular could argue as cogendy as a Standard speaker (Labov 1969). It was largely the presumption of con- ceptual gaps and rational deficiencies in low and rustic' speech that made Coleridge reject the more radical part of Wordsworth's poetic programme (Coleridge [1817]: ii.52—5). And yet elsewhere Coleridge himself expresses interest in varieties of language that, in comparison to educated Standard English, were not simply deficient but deviant in their reasoning. The two varieties he chooses are Irish English and children's language. The feature of Irish English that attracted Coleridge's attention was the kind of self-contradictory statement known as an Irish bull, for example: (18) a. Follow me, sir, I'm right behind you. b. No English hen ever laid a fresh egg. c. I was a fine child but they changed me. d. Whatever you say, say nothing. Largely ridiculed by earlier writers, or cited as a sign of the mental inferi- ority of Irish speakers, the bull was rehabilitated by the Edgeworths (1802), Gil Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008 Literary language who like Coleridge, stressed its affinities with the workings of the poetic imagination. (18c) for instance exploits the ambiguity of the term /(self- as-speaker and self-as-referent) to unsetde apparendy rational notions of the persistence of personal identity. For Coleridge, it is this power to disrupt norms of reasoning that links the Irish bull to the anomalies and contradictions found in children's language - in which it is possible to speak in opposites or issue an imperative in relation to past time (Ricks 1993: 187-91). The importance of children's language as a model for the Wordsworth- ian school was noted by contemporaries and Jeffrey coupled it with their interest in lower-class varieties in claiming that their style was derived from 'plebeian nurseries'. Its virtue, for Wordsworth, lay in combining the simplicity of vocabulary and syntax which he found in low and rustic' speakers with a visionary violation of the standard logico-linguistic cate- gories of experience. The most notable example in Lyrical Ballads is the 'idiot boy' who conflates the categories of night and day in: (19) The cocks did crow to-whoo, to-whoo, And the sun did shine so cold. (Wordsworth 1798) but the apparendy rational 'Utile Maid' in We are Seven poses an equal chal- lenge to the assumptions of her adult interlocutor when she questions the categorial distinction between life and death by insisting that she still has six siblings even though two of them have died. The encounter between adult and child reasoning becomes a recurrent moti f in nineteenth-century literature, but in early examples, as in Wordsworth's case, the narrating voice is typically adult and employs stan- dard logic as well as Standard English. It is only towards the end of the century that children are cast in the role of narrator, as in tjie novels of Nesbit. But from the mid-century, the non-Standard semantics of chil- dren's language had been exploited on a large scale in works written for chil- dren by Lear and Carroll, often subversively parodying the moral and practical inductions into adult values purveyed by previous children's litera- ture. Compare, for example: (20) a. 'Tis the Voice of the Sluggard, I hear him complain You have wak'd me too soon, I must slumber again. (Watts 1715; original italics) b. 'Tis the voice of the lobster; I heard him declare, 'You have baked me too brown, I must sugar my hair.' (Carroll 1865) 613 Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008 Sylvia Adamson The emergence of nonsense writing as a distinct genre promoted the styl- isation of semantic deviance: in particular, the use of anomalous combina- tion, which occurs at the syntactic level in (19) and (20b), extends to the lexical and phonological level, producing: treacle-well, star-bespringled, slithy, borascible, ipwergis, and even mhruxian. Modernism brought a diffusion of such techniques to adult genres, most notoriously in the wholesale adoption into Joyce's Finnegans Wake of portmanteau words coined on the same principles as slithy and boras- cible (e.g. athemisthued, blasphorous). The element of nonsense-technique has also been noted in Hopkins (Sonstroem 1967) and critics have argued for the influence of Carroll and Lear on Eliot (and hence on surrealist poets of the 1930s, such as Gascoyne and Dylan Thomas) and for the influence of the Irish bull on Beckett (and hence on the absurd- ist novel and drama of the later twentieth century) (Sewell 1962; Ricks 1993: 153-203). Many of these later writers make explicit the challenge to established categories of thought and social ordering which are implicit in earlier practice. Auden, for instance, who celebrates Lear's nonsense as a land of escape from the "Terrible Demon' of bourgeois adult reality, adopts the techniques of nonsense - nursery rhyme stanza and semantic anomalies - to create a scenario that threatens the comforts and conventions on which that 'reality' rests. (21) The glacier knocks in the cupboard, The desert sighs in the bed, And the crack in the tea-cup opens A lane to the land of the dead. Where the beggars raffle the bank-notes, An d the Giant is enchanting to Jack, And the Lily-White Boy is a roarer, And Jill goes down on her back (Auden 1937) 7.3 Breaking the pentameter 7.3.1 Introduction (22) a. When this Verse was first dictated to me I consider'd a Monotonous Cadence like that used by Milton & Shakspeare & all writers of English Blank Verse, derived [i.e. detached] from the modern bondage of Rhyming; to be a necessary and indispensible part of Verse. But I soon found that in the mouth 614 Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008 Literary language of a true Orator such monotony was not only awkward, but as much a bondage as rhyme itself. I therefore have produced a variety in every line, both of cadences & number of syllables. Every word and every letter is studied and put into its fit place: the terrific numbers are reserved for the terrific parts the mild & gende, for the mild & gende parts, and the prosaic, for inferior parts: all are necessary to each other. Poetry Fetter'd, Fetters the Human Race. (Blake 1820) b. (to break the pentameter, that was the first heave) (Pound 1948) For both Blake and Pound* poetic revolution begins with a revolution in metre, a repudiation of the syllabo-tonic tradition of versification estab- lished in the Renaissance. Both epitomise this ancien regime in the iambic pentameter, the verse-form that, in the period since 'Milton and Shakespeare', had come to occupy the position of a metrical norm in English poetry. Eighteenth-century metrics were essentially mathematical, as seen in the common use of the term 'numbers' for rhythm and in Johnson's definition of versification as 'the arrangement of a certain number of syllables accord- ing to certain laws' (Johnson 1755: sig.Nl^). The laws generally prescribed for the iambic pentameter were that an abstract pattern, for which 'the ingenious Mr Mason' devised the now familiar schema: (23) ti-TUM ti-TUM ti-TUM ti-TUM ti-TUM should be realised as transparendy as possible in linguistic material - ideally as a sequence of ten syllables with stressed syllables occurring only in TUM positions, though not necessarily in a/trvM positions. This conceptualisa- tion profoundly influenced the way in which the iambic pentameter was composed and performed in the eighteenth century. Writers aiming at a verse-style^that would be judged 'harmonious' produced a high proportion of lines like (24), in which the distribution of stressed syllables falls natu- rally into the pattern of (23): (24) the CURfeu TOLLS the KNELL of PARTing DAY (Gray 1751) and the more irregular practice of earlier periods was often re-interpreted t o fit the same pattern. When we see the scansion that Monboddo pro- posed for the first line of Paradise Lost. (25) of MANS first DISoBEdience AND the FRUIT 615 Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008 Sylvia Adamson we can understand why Blake in (22a) describes Milton's cadence as 'monotonous'. One indication of changing attitudes appears when Joshua Steele draws on his study of English intonation to contest the scansion of (25). He pro- poses instead: (26) of MANS FIRST disoBEdience and the FRUIT and justifies his analysis on the grounds that poetic rhythm reflects the natural emphases of speech and that 'our sense of rhythmus [is] much more instinctive than rational* (Steele 1775: 76—8,166-7). From the turn of the century, these ideas were taken up more widely as Romantic writers, rejecting the calculation implied by mathematical models, looked for met- rical theories more consonant with an ideal of poetry as a form of dis- course organised by passion rather than reason. Coleridge was an influential spokesman: (27) Physicians assert that each passion has its proper pulse. — So it was with metre when righdy used. A state of excitement produced is, in truth, an analogy of the language of strong passion — not that strong passion always speaks in metre, but it has a language more measured than is employed in common speaking. (Coleridge 1811) Here metre is organically related to the speaker; it imitates the regularities o f passionate speech. Later theorists developed the implications of Coleridge's medical analogy and there have been many attempts to ground metre in the regularities of human biology — the tempo of the heartbeat, for example, or the rhythm of breathing. In terms of metrical practice, these views ultimately result in attempts t o create verse-forms in which such regularities are structural, as in Frost's proposal to base metre on intonation patterns ('sentence-sounds', as he called them) or Olson's claim that his lines (as in (3d)) correspond to breath-units (Scully 1966: 50-53, 271-282). But for the immediate heirs of eighteenth-century poetics, the first priority was to break the domi- nance of the iambic pentameter. What we find in Romantic and Victorian poets is a variety of formal experiments which have in common the sub- version of what had become the pentameter's salient features: the iambic foot; the five-stress line; and finally, rhyme, that 'modern bondage' resisted by Milton, which eighteenth-century practice, under the influ- ence of Dryden and Pope, had made central to the ideal of 'English Heroic Verse'. 616 Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008 Literary language 7.3.2 The iambicfoot The foot as a unit of metre can be seen as a stylisation of the foot of ordi- nary speech, that is, a stressed syllable associated with a variable number of unstressed syllables and perceived to occur at roughly isochronous inter- vals in the utterance. In the case of the iambic foot (ti-TUM in Mason's schema) the stylisation is a doubly unnatural one, since the foot of conversational English frequendy contains more than one unstressed syl- lable and, on the most plausible analysis, the stressed syllable occupies initial rather than final position. The new naturalism in nineteenth-century metrics generated experiments that attempted to match metre to speech rhythm by varying the length of the metrical foot and/or reversing its stress pattern. A variable foot is in effect the 'new principle' that Coleridge announced for Christabek (28) the metre of the Christabel is not, properly speaking, irregular, though it may seem so from its being founded on a new principle: namely, that of counting in each line the accents, not the syllables. Though the latter may vary from seven to twelve, yet in each line the accents will be found to be only four. (Coleridge 1816) The effects Coleridge was aiming at may be judged from the poem's openin g lines: (29) 'Tis the middle of night by the casde clock, And the owls have awaken'd the crowing cock; Tu—whit!—Tu—whoo! And hark, again! the crowing cock, How drowsily it crew. The influence of Christabel appears intermittendy through the nineteenth century, for example, in Shelley's Sensitive Plant (1820) and Browning's Flight of the Duchess (1845), and towards the end of the century, Coleridge's 'new principle' was rediscovered by Hopkins as the basis for his own 'sprung rhythm'. The practice found its major academic theorist in Guest, whose History of English Rhythms (first published 1838, more influentially re-issued under the aegis of Skeat in 1878) showed that the new principle was in effect a reappearance of the old principle of accentual prosody which had regulated the practice of Old and Middle English poetry and, he argued, had continued as an underground resistance movement throughout the period of the syllabo-tonic tradition, which he identified as 'the rhythm of 6i 7 Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008 Sylvia Adamson the foreigner'. Metre was thus drawn into the nationalist movement in philology, with the consequence that poets like Morris and Hopkins, who replaced latinate with Anglo-Saxon in vocabulary (see 7.2.5—7.2.6 above), also experimented with the alliterative metre of Beowulf (which Morris translated) and Piers Plowman. The complex and systematic patterns of these historical precedents are not closely imitated (indeed, before Sievers 1893, they were imperfecdy understood), but the flavour of their versifica- tion is captured by using alliteration to foreground some of the stressed syllables in the line (as in (30a—b)). In later experiments, the form is at once more knowingly and more metaphorically used: by Pound as an indigenous equivalent of Homeric epic verse (30c), by Auden and Wilbur as a metrical image of primitive heroism in sardonic counterpoint with modern life- styles, whether effete as in (30d) or sordid as in (30e): (30) a. The jails of the Jtorm of £atde adown the dickering Mast (Morris 1876) b. Thou art /ightning and /ove, I found it, a winter and ^arm (Hopkins 1875 publ. 1918) c. 7bmb hideth /rouble. The blade is /ayed low (Pound 1912) d. lightning at noonday iwifdy Jtooping to the .rummer-house (Auden 1948) e. An axe angles from my neighbor's ^shcan (Wilbur 1961) In another strand of nineteenth-century poetics, the practice of the vari- able foot was justified from classical prototypes. The hexameter was par- ticularly favoured, Coleridge's experimental Hymn to the Earth (1799) being followed by large-scale works such as Southey's Vision of Judgment (1821), Longfellow's Evangeline (1847), Clough's Amours de Voyage (1858) and Kingsley's Andromeda (1858). The similarity in effect between this and the experiments in accentual prosody can be seen in (31), an example of what Clough called his Anglo-savage hexameters': (31) ARchi/TECtural/BEAUty in/APPli/CAtion to/WOmen (Clough 1848) The model is the Virgilian hexameter, which utilises three of the foot-types of classical metrics: spondee (TUM-TUM), dactyl (TUM-ti-ti) and trochee (TUM-ti). The Anglo-savage equivalent is created by substituting syllable stress for syllable length in the realisation of the foot and permitting a 618 Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008 Literary language trochee where Latin verse would require a spondee. The structure of (31) is thus trochee, dactyl, dactyl, trochee, dactyl, trochee. In terms of the effect, what is striking is the way in which the repeated, if slight, variation in foot length together with the consistent use of stress-initial foot-types in place of the stress-final iamb (U-TUM) is enough to distance the sound from the familiar pattern of (23-24) and create an approximation to the rhythms of prose, as in (32a), or conversational speech, as in (32b): (32) a. They, too, swerved from their course; and, entering the Bayou of Plaquemine, Soo n were lost in a maze of sluggish and devious waters, Which, like a network of steel, extended in every direction. (Longfellow 1847) b. Take off your coat to it, Philip, cried Lindsay, outside in the garden Take off your coat to it, Philip. Well, well, said Hewson, resuming; Laugh if you please at my novel economy; listen to this, though (Cloughl848) The hexameter features one elongation of the foot that achieved a special status in the nineteenth century, the dactyl, a tri-syllabic foot in which the stressed syllable is followed by two unstressed syllables (TUM-ti- ti). This, or its stress-final counterpart, the anapaest (ti-ti-TUM), is widely used to vary iambic rhythms (as in Cbristabel), and sometimes appears as the metrical base-form itself, giving rise to what is often known as triple metre. In the eighteenth century, triple metre was largely associated with burlesque or with songs, but Cowper extended its range in his plaintive The Poplar-field (1785), and in the nineteenth century it encroaches on the terri- tory of the iambic pentameter when it is made the vehicle of epic narra- tive, as in Byron's anapaestic Destruction of Semnacherib (33a), or of lyric elegy, as in Hardy's dactylic The Voice (33b): (33) a. For the Angel of Death spread his wings on the blast, And breathed in the face of the foe as he pass'd; An d the eyes of the sleepers wax'd deadly and chill (Byron 1815) b. Woman much missed, how you call to me, call to me, Saying that now you are not as you were When you had changed from the one who was all to me (Hardy 1914) 619 Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008 Sylvia Adamson As these examples show, triple metre is more monotonous and less conversational than iambic metre. Its popularity in the nineteenth century — unparalleled in any other period of literature — is therefore remarkable and must suggest that, for some poets at least, the imperative to break the iambic pentameter took priority over the desire to re-create the sound-pat- terns of speech. Triple metre is the perfect antidote to iambics, since its principle of construction — that every third syllable must carry a stress — means it is continually breaking one of the basic rules of metricality for iambic metre: that a stress maximum must not fall on an odd-numbered syllable. This happens in every line of (33a), for instance, where stress maxima occur in line 1 on syllable 3 (ANG); in line 2 on syllable 5 (FACE)', in line 3 on syllable 3 (EYES). It's worth noting in this context that the opening line of the consciously revolutionary Christabel (34a) announces its departure from the iambic norm in the same way, by employing a stress maximum on syllable 3 (or, in traditional terminology, by replacing the expected initial iamb with an anapaestic foot); similarly, Pound boasts of breaking the pentameter (34b) in a twelve-syllable line with stress maximum on syllable 5 — in the middle of the word pentameter. (34) a. 'Tis the MID Die of night by the castie clock b. to break the penTAmeter, that was the first heave 7.3.3 The five-stress line To avoid the pentameter's five-stress line, poets in our period have experi- mented with both shorter and longer options. Three influential precedents for these experiments appeared in the 1760s, though their main effects were felt in the following century. Initially, all were associated with the image of primitive rural language invoked by Wordsworth and with the notion that poetry was a natural form of utterance in early stages of a language or society. The most popular of the short-line verse-forms ballad metre — qua- train stanzas, alternating 4 and 3 stress lines and rhyming on lines 2 and 4, as in (21) - derived its prestige for the Romantics from its role as the vehicle of traditional folk poetry, children's nursery rhymes and popular hymns. Folk-ballads surviving in oral tradition were published in collec- tions such as Percy's Reliques of Ancient English Poetry (1765) and their importance as a model is acknowledged both in the title of Lyrical Ballads and in the choice of Coleridge's The Rime of the Ancyent Marinere as the opening poem of the first edition. Ballad influence continues through to 620 Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008 Literary language the late nineteenth century, with Kipling's Barrack-room Ballads (1892) and Wilde's Ballad of Reading Gaol (1898), and can be detected in the twentieth century in the work of both Modernists and traditionalists. In many of these modern examples, the form is metaphorised, being used as a metri- cal image of pastoral continuity or child-like simplicity, set in ironic counterpoint with its subject-matter, whether the rural decay of Housman's Shropshire Lad (1896) or the urban depravity depicted by Auden in (21). Or else both form and content are radicalised: for Blake, Dickinson and Christina Rossetti in the nineteenth century and for Stevie Smith in the twentieth, the ballad provided a starting-point and precedent for more experimental short-line quatrains in which irregular metre (varying both number and placement of stresses) is combined with visionary — or revi- sionary — contents. The process can bef seen in action in the contrast between the first and second stanzas of (35): (35) I asked a thief to steal me a peach, He turnd up his eyes; I ask'd a lithe lady to lie her down, Holy & meek she cries. As soon as I went An angel came He wink'd at the thief And smild at the dame (Blake 1791-2) On the side of elongating the pentameter, the influential work again appeare d in the 1760s with Macpherson's enormously famous, largely bogus, translations of ancient Gaelic writing by 'Ossian son of Fingal', which provided an inspiration and model for Blake's Prophetic Books and set the pattern for later long-line verse from Whitman in the nineteenth century to poets of the late twentieth: (36) a. Shadows of Prophecy shiver along by the lakes and the rivers and mutter across the ocean, France rend down thy dungeo n (Blake c. 1790) b. The sniff of green leaves and dry leaves, and of the shore and darkcolored sea-rocks, and of hay in the barn (Whitman 1855) c. I remember the first time, out of a bush in the darkness, a nightingale's piercing cries and gurgles starded the depths of my soul (Lawrence 1921) 621 Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008 [...]... find the others 7 .4. 4 The syntax of Modernism In Modernism, the information deficit staved off or compensated for by these devices is foregrounded and the resulting disconnection thematised In (59a), for example, Waugh exploits the fragmenting potential of Mackenzie's short-sentence narrative style: apart from the placing of the second sentence, the sequence seems arbitrary and the continual change of. .. with the language of the Bible and the liturgy (Coleridge [1817]: ii .44 ) What the Bible provided was a model of metre founded on the 622 Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008 Literary language principle of lexical and syntactic repetition, as Hopkins put it, a 'figure of sense' rather than the figure of sound which is the basis of the iambic pen tameter But when the principle is... (1838, '42 , '67, '76) and by Eliot in some of the Choruses from The Rock (38b), and it can be felt behind much long-line verse of the period, notably Whitman in the nineteenth century and Lawrence in the twentieth (38) a They cannot smite the wheat, nor quench the fatness of the earth They cannot smite with sorrows, nor subdue the plow and spade They cannot wall the city, nor moat round the casde of princes... opening of Boswell's The Life of SamuelJohnson In ( 49 a), the subject (To write the life) has a deferred predi cate (is an arduous task); in ( 49 b), several subordinate clauses (the reiter ated conditional Had DrJohnson written had he employed ) precede the main^clause (the world wouldprobably have had ) ( 49 ) a To write the life of him who excelled all mankind in writing the lives of others, and... writing, but by increasing the 'frequency and regularity of this device', Cowper gave it the status of stylistic innovation (Brown 1 94 8 :132 -4) If the periodic sentence epitomised the virtues of hypotaxis for the eighteenth century, the parenthesis, as the most extreme form of parataxis, has had an equivalent importance since the beginning of the nineteenth As well as being a device of naturalism, used, as... alexandrine but also of the accentual verse of Old and Middle English which Hopkins and others took as their model For the nineteenth century at least, the model of the long bi-partite line was further endorsed by the third of the metrical influences emanating from the midreighteenth century, the Bible, which at that point gained a new, and specifically poetic, status from Lowth's assimilation of the Old Testament... instance, as 'wantonly obscured ( 64) The song, the varied action Qf the blood Would drown the warning from the iron wood Would cancel the inertia of the buried (Auden 193 0; in Hamilton 1 94 9 : 47 -8) 645 Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008 Sylvia Adamson Line 1 contains two noun phrases in apposition and it is tempting to read the two verb phrases of lines 2 and 3 as appositional... sound pattern, producing more often than not a bi-partite line of approximately equi-stressed halves: (37) There the wicked cease from troubling; and there the weary be at rest There the prisoners rest together; they hear not the voice of the oppressor The small and great are there; and the servant is free from his master This style was direcdy imitated by Blake (38a), by the immensely popular Victorian... instance, entities one of his 19 64 poems MCMXIV as a reminder both oi the Roman numerals chiselled on civic memorials to the generation lost in the First World War and of the Roman values of civic self-sacrifice that died with them But these allusions are available only to the eye; they are lost when the tide is read out as 'nineteen fourteen' At the other extreme of contemporary metrics, the conversational... 19 84: 310) For evi dence of the salience of parenthesis at the end of the eighteenth century, we may return to (3b) and to Cowper Unwilling as he was to violate his period's stylistic ideals of couplet and hypotactic syntax, he used the paren thesis to push against their formal constraints, disrupting the neat corre spondences of verse unit and syntactic unit with the (apparent) improvisations of . — Standard English as the medium of discourse in their new worlds, later examples of the genre offer a range of alternative varieties, such as Newspeak in Orwell's 19 84 (1 94 9 ), Neanderthal. of the alexandrine but also of the accentual verse of Old and Middle English which Hopkins and others took as their model. For the nineteenth century at least, the model of the long bi-partite. being there). The reader faces the choice of pre- serving the tone-group of normal speech or the metrical unit of the line. Such an extreme instance of the conversational challenging the metrical