Musical and Poetic Rhythms

Musical and Poetic Rhythms October 17, 2006

Victor Zuckerkandl points out that Western music since the 17th century has been measured music, that is, music in which beats are organized into groups, into measures. This innovation in musical organization creates a complex rhythmic situation. At one level, there is a recognizable beat running through a piece of music, and this beat is organized into regular clusters of beats. Yet, the tones that make up the melody of the piece do not match the beats in a one-for-one fashion. The tones are of different durations, and in some pieces of music or in some portions of a composition, a minority of the tones have the duration of a single beat. Yet, even though the beat is not directly heard, and the tones don’t directly communicate the beat, “the beat emerges from an irregular succession of long and short tones as a common measure of all their durations.” Even with a very simple melody, we have at least two rhythms running concurrently: The beat grouped into a regular meter, and the actual tones that are played, whose length varies considerably.


Though Zuckerkandl contrasts this situation with language and texts, there are analogies between musical rhythms and textual rhythms. Gerald Manley Hopkins remarks that poetic rhythms can be layered in a similar way. Departures from regular metrical order are common in poetry. He describes a “reversed foot” as “the putting the stress where, to judge by the rest of the measure, the slack should be and the slack where the stress, and this is done freely at the beginning of a line and, in the course of a line, after a pause.” This “reversal of the first foot and of some middle foot after a strong pause is a thing so natural that our poets have generally done it, from Chaucer down.”

What’s less common is the reversal of “two feet running,” two feet in succession, which “must be due either to great want of ear or else is a calculated effect, the superinducing or mounting of a new rhythm upon the old.” The effect is thus a double rhythm: “since the new and mounted rhythm is actually heard and at the same time the mind naturally supplies the natural or standard foregoing rhythm, for we do not forget what the rhythm is that by rights we should be hearing, two rhythms are in some manner running at once and we have something answerable to counterpoint in music, which is two or more strains of tune going together, and this is Counterpoint Rhythm.”

Hopkins considered Milton the “great master” of this double rhythmic effect, particularly in the “choruses of Samson Agonistes .” In an 1878 letter to R. W. Dixon, he suggests that “the choruses of Samson Agonistes are in my judgment counterpointed throughout; that is, each line (or nearly so) has two different coexisting scansions. But when you reach that point the secondary or ‘mounted rhythm,’ which is necessarily a sprung rhythm, overpowers the original or conventional one and then becomes superfluous and may be got rid of; by taking that last step you reach simple sprung rhythm.”

If we stretch the idea of “rhythm,” we can find even more extensive analogies between music and poetry, or even between music and narrative, drama, and even didactic texts. Hopkins also suggests this, using the terms “overthought” and “underthought” to express the doubleness that is present in narrative, drama, and lyric poetry. In an 1883 letter to A. W. M. Baillie, he claims that “in any lyric passage of the tragic poets . . . there are – usually . . . two strains of thought running together and like counterpointed.”

What he calls the “overthought” is “that which everybody, editors, see . . . and which might for instance be abridged or paraphrased in squared marginal blocks as in some books carefully written.” The “underthought” is “conveyed chiefly in the choice of metaphors, etc used and often only half realized by the poet himself, not necessarily having any connection with the subject in hand but usually having a connection and suggested by some circumstance of the scene or of the story.” He offers an example of the Suppliants of Aeschylus, in which “The underthought which plays through this is that the Danaids flying from their cousins are like their own ancestress Io teazed by the gadfly and caressed by Zeus and the rest of that foolery.” He concludes that “the underthought is commonly an echo or shadow of the overthought, something like canons and repetitions in music, treated in a different manner,” and claims to find a similar “principle of composition in St. James’ and St. Peter’s and St. Jude’s Epistles, an undercurrent of thought governing the choice of images used.” (Thanks to Aaron Rench for the Hopkins citations.)

Thus, for instance, the “overthought” of Isaiah might be the threat of exile and the promise of return, while the “underthought” that shapes the imagery employed is of the Exodus. The overthought of Matthew is the story of Jesus, while the “underthought” is the history of Israel. We thus have a kind of double rhythm working in the narrative; the events of the life of Jesus are the “tones” that Matthew plays or sings, but the “unheard” beat running beneath the story is the history of Israel.


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