A Metrical Accident

________________________________________________
Title:     A Metrical Accident
Author: Samuel Taylor Coleridge [More Titles by Coleridge]

Curious instance of casual metre and rhyme in a prose narrative (_The Life of Jerome of Prague_). The metre is Amphibrach dimeter Catalectic [breve macron breve] | [breve macron], and the rhymes antistrophic.

  Then Jerome did call                _a_
  From his flame-pointed Fence;       _b_
  Which under he trod,                _c_
  As upward to mount                  _d_
  From the fiery flood,--             _e_
  'I summon you all,                  _a_
  A hundred years hence,              _b_
  To appear before God,               _c_
  To give an account                  _d_
  Of my innocent blood!'              _e_

NOTES BY PROFESSOR SAINTSBURY

1. I think most ears would take these as anapaestic throughout. But the introduction of Milton's

Drunk with Idolatry, drunk with wine

as a _leit-motiv_ is of the first interest.

Description of it, l. 4, very curious. I should have thought no one could have run 'drunk with wine' together as one foot.

2. Admirable! I hardly know better trochaics.

3. Very interesting: but the terminology odd. The dochmius, a five-syllabled foot, is (in _one_ form--there are about thirty!) an antispast [breve macron macron breve] _plus_ a syllable. Catalectic means (_properly_) _minus_ a syllable. But the verses as quantified are really dochmiac, and the only attempts I have seen. Shall I own I can't get any _English_ Rhythm on them?

4. More ordinary: but a good arrangement and wonderful for the date.

5. Not nonsense at all: but, metrically, really his usual elegiac.

6. This, _if early_, is almost priceless. It is not only lovely in itself, but an obvious attempt to recover the zig-zag outline and varied cadence of seventeenth century born--the things that Shelley to some extent, Beddoes and Darley more, and Tennyson and Browning most were to master. I subscribe (most humbly) to his suggestions, especially his second.

7. Very like some late seventeenth-century (Dryden time) motives and a _leetle_ 'Moorish'.

8. Like 6, and charming.

9. A sort of recurrence to _Pindaric_--again pioneer, as the soul of S. T. C. _had_ to be always.

10 and 11. Ditto.

13. Again, _I_ should say, anapaestic--but this anapaest and amphibrach quarrel is +aspondos+.

FOOTNOTES:

[1014:1] 'He attributed in part, his writing so little, to the extreme care and labour which he applied in elaborating his metres. He said that when he was intent on a new experiment in metre, the time and labour he bestowed were inconceivable; that he was quite an epicure in sound.'--Wordsworth on Coleridge (as reported by Mr. Justice Coleridge), _Memoirs of W. Wordsworth_, 1851, ii. 306.

In a letter to Poole dated March 16, 1801, Coleridge writes: 'I shall . . . immediately publish my _Christabel_, with the Essays on the "Preternatural", and on Metre' (_Letters of S. T. C._, 1895, i. 349). Something had been done towards the collection of materials for the first 'Essay', a great deal for the second. In a notebook (No. 22) which contains dated entries of 1805, 1815, &c., but of which the greater portion, as the context and various handwritings indicate, belongs to a much earlier date, there are some forty-eight numbered specimens of various metres derived from German and Italian sources. To some of these stanzas or strophes a metrical scheme with original variants is attached, whilst other schemes are exemplified by metrical experiments in English, headed 'Nonsense Verses'. Two specimens of these experiments, headed 'A Sunset' and 'What is Life', are included in the text of _P. W._, 1893 (pp. 172, 178), and in that of the present issue, pp. 393, 394. They are dated 1805 in accordance with the dates of Coleridge's own comments or afterthoughts, but it is almost certain that both sets of verses were composed in 1801. The stanza entitled 'An Angel Visitant' belongs to the same period. Ten other sets of 'Nonsense Verses' of uncertain but early date are now printed for the first time.

[1014:2] Sumptuous Tyranny floating this way. [MS.] On p. 17 of Notebook 22 Coleridge writes:--

--[u][u],--[u] [u],--[u],--
Drunk with I--dolatry--drunk with, Wine.

A noble metre if I can find a metre to precede or follow.

S[=u]mpt[)u][)o]us D[=a]l[)i]l[)a] fl[=o]at[)i]ng th[)i]s w[=a]y
Drunk with Idolatry, drunk with wine.

Both lines are from Milton's _Samson Agonistes_.

[The end]
Samuel Taylor Coleridge's poem: Metrical Accident

________________________________________________



GO TO TOP OF SCREEN