Rhythm and Movement
Rhythm is the premier necessity of poetical expression because
it is the sound-movement which carries on its wave the thought-movement
in the word; and it is the musical sound-image which most helps
to fill in, to extend, subtilise and deepen the thought impression
or the emotional or vital impression and to carry the sense beyond
itself into an expression of the intellectually inexpressible -
always the peculiar power of music.
But this is only the technical side, the physical means by which
the effect is produced. It is not the artistic intelligence or the
listening physical ear which is most at work, but something within
trying to bring out an echo of hidden harmonies, a secret of rhythmical
infinities within us. It is not a labour of the devising intellect
or the aesthetic sense which the poet has achieved, but a labour
of the spirit within itself to cast something out of the surge of
the eternal depths. The other faculties are there in their place,
but the conductor of the orchestral movement is the soul coming
forward to get its own work done by its own higher and unanalysable
methods. The result is something as near to word-less music as word-music
can get, and with the same power of soul-life, of soul-emotion,
of profound supra-intellectual significance. In these higher harmonies
and melodies the metrical rhythm is taken up by the spiritual; it
is filled with or sometimes it seems rolled away and lost in a music
that has really another and spiritual secret of movement.
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