Clare Campbell

Music and Poetry With some notes on Benjamin Britten’s setting of words

HE object of this article is to challenge what now seems to be a fairly widely held theory of poetry, that the sounds T (heard physically or mentally) of which a poem consists have

no intrinsic value distinct from their semantic function; and to illustrate the discussion from the work of a composer who values words as acoustic material rather than simply as an extrinsic conceptual “programme”.

The theory I mean is to be found, along with other more acceptable formulations, in Part I11 Chapter IV of I. A. Richards’ Practical Criticism, and particularly on page 232 where he constructs a “nonsense dummy” parallel to verse XV of Milton’s “Nativity Hymn” in order to prove that the mere sound of the verse, the “form” (as he calls it) without the conceptual content, has no “independent aesthetic virtue”. The first objection which springs to mind is that his dummy is much uglier than anything which a genuine nonsense poet would turn out; there is beauty in “The Jabberwocky” (I am aware that this is a petitio principii). He discriminates unwarrantably between vowels and consonants by copying Milton closely in the former while the latter are varied on a more or less mechanical principle. His ignoring of caesurae is remarkable; the dummy has 33 words, deleting hyphens, where Milton has 50. The result is a clogging stodginess. It may be argued that the effect of caesurae and other word-ends in breaking up a line is supplied by the under- standing rather than by the inner or outer ear. I would question how far this is true1. But in any case Richards’ dummy would be unreadable to the eye unless printed with some gaps between “words”, and the placing of these is such as to gelidify the middles of the lines and prevent a due onward impetus towards the rhymes; it enlists the eye against the natural demands of the ear. The chunks of sound are unmanageable. This is not necessarily true of long words in nonsense language. When the Second Lord in All’s Well That Ends Well says “Oscorbidulchos volivorco” it is a gracious remark, as his interpreter tells us. (Perhaps the reference to ‘dulce’ is cheating.) At any rate it is euphonious, in a sense which is obviously meaningful even when applied to gibberish. Wee end of article.

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It would be absurd to deny the inter-dependence of sound and meaning in poetry, but this is quite a different thing from one-way dependence of the former on the latter. Of course the aesthetic effectiveness of particular sounds in any context is relative to what the poet wants to convey there. But it does not follow that sound- considerations can be entirely subsumed under meaning-considera- tions, that sound has no “independent” (Richards’ bogey word) laws of its own. On the contrary, if verbal sounds were mere neutral vectors with no appreciable effect of their own upon us (however vague, primitive and hard to analyse this may be), they could not either help or hamper meaning, and the relationship between the two would be as aseptic as in an arbitrarily devised code. Anyone who has ever made up a poem however bad must have had the experience that finding the satisfactory word is like finding a point of intersec- tion between a sound-curve and a sense-curve, which can no more be reduced to a single variable than can an economist’s curves of demand and supply. Relativistic thinking is needed to account for the process, and this excludes reducing either variable to terms of the other. Mimicry of a poem’s sound in gibberish destroys it, but so also does paraphrase, even if its thought is its chief distinction. No pearl of wisdom is proof against being devalued if it is rephrased in clumsier sounds; for one thing, its memorability will be lessened. The inadequacy of translations of poetry is not just conceptual inadequacy. Naturally song illustrates the point clearly. The new Pears-Raeburn translation of Bach’s St. John Passion achieves remarkable things in equating German sounds with English ones, but there are obstacles which it cannot surmount. Nothing can alter the fact that to sing “Crucify!” in an angry crowd chorus you must shape your mouth to a prim roundness on the first syllable like a choirboy in a Punch drawing, whereas in “kreuzige!” you can bare your teeth and snarl.

To this what I would call the anti-musical school of thought rejoins that it is still “only the meaning” that gives aesthetic superiority to one vowel rather than the other. But this is a quibble on “meaning”. The German and the English verb are conceptually identical, they must be defined exactly alike. If “meaning” is then extended as it must be to cover emotional communication, at that level the snarling vowel operates on us directly, sensually and not just by virtue of the concept. It is true that the sense guides us as to which of various possible emotions we should allow the extrovert German vowel to suggest to us (not “joy” for example! except of an unholy kind). But that only means that the inherent value of the vowel is vague and covers a broad range, not that it has no inherent value. And the vagueness is not as great as it appears to be. It is because we have so limited a number, not of sounds but of written signs for sounds, that they may seem to be emotionally reversible in different contexts to an extent that favours a neutral vectors view of

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them. But what is the same sound as another when written, or even to the phoneticist, is not necessarily the same sound in expressive use. One can say “Hi!” in countless different contexts ranging from joy at seeing an unexpected friend to pain at what the dentist is doing, and a physical difference in intonation corresponding to the difference in occasion would almost certainly be perceptible, and could be captured by the ear of a composer, and indeed by a good actor, perhaps more readily than by the typical modern over-intellectual poetry-lover. I think the point I am making here is the same as that of Coleridge’s footnote to Chapter IV of Biographia Literaria where he describes the formation of language from a few initial sounds: “each new application of the same sound (sc. to a new meaning) will call forth a different sensation, which cannot but affect the pronun- ciation”. In other words, the sounds become diversified pari passu with the meanings conveyed; we are dealing with two correlatives which cannot be reduced to a single term. One would not wish to press these points to the extreme conclusion that there is only one prescriptive intonation for a poem, one way of reading it or inwardly hearing it which is alone correct (any more than a particular setting of it to music can be definitive, or not since the time when poetry was the same as song and poet and composer the same person). But in a scientific age of over-emphasis on the conceptual function of language, poetry needs all the support which the composer can give, by means of notational resources which are in some respects much wider than those of the 26-letter alphabet, towards reminding us that language is a treasury of expressive sounds as well as of mentally decodable symbols.

When one turns from individual sounds to patterns of sounds, it is obvious that their power to communicate is not merely emotional. Systematic sound-patterns can, quite apart from the concepts they may carry, convey such intellectual values as symmetry, variety, exploration and return, and all this is common ground shared by poet and musician. Again, the pattern chosen will depend for both poet and composer on the guiding intention, but some kind of adven- ture and return is bound to be involved in a complete design, and patterns of this kind can be regarded as basic. In English poetry the vowels which are the chief tonal element are the chief medium of adventure, with or without return to a rhyme, and the consonants which are primarily percussive serve (particularly when they alli- terate) to establish a recurrent beat, with variations of course but comparatively random ones, nothing like the exact layout of rhythmic variations in, say, a Greek choral lyric. Similarly in western music with its harmonic resources1 tonal adventure looms larger compared

?Since writing this I find that Imogen Holst in the Britten 50th birthday Festschrift published last autumn suggests that a rhythmic figure on the drums can have the same function for Indian musicians and dancers as a tonal cadence for western ears.

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with rhythmic adventure than in primitive music. “Fee fi foh fum” is the basic sound-pattern of English alliterative verse, and could conceivably generate thematic material for a composer whereas “tra-la-la” and “fa-la-la” (consonant changing but vowel constant) would not-these in fact belong typically to the penultimate line of a folk song, where one expects virtuoso cadenza-like treatment of material already heard but not introduction of new thematic material. When Purcell sets “Let Dido smile and I’ll defy The feeble stroke of destiny”, the first line with its vowel monotony is treated simply as a step-ladder (mainly of ascending semitones) to lead to the fancy spring-board dive of the second line. Shakespeare makes marvellous use of vowel monotony in Timon of Athens when the sea which is to be Timon’s only peacemaker is mentioned. After pages of excoriating diatribe we come suddenly upon “Lie where the right foam of the sea may beat Thy gravestone daily”. The peaceful monotony of the waves is in those three close pairs of identical vowels (perhaps “foam” and “-stone” should also be linked by the ear as an over-riding ‘trikumia’). The effectiveness of this passage depends on one’s noticing it as a departure from the norm of progres- sive change-ringing on vowel sounds, depends in fact on the ear’s recognition that there is such a norm, as an “independent” (pace I. A. Richards) constituent of poetry. The same is true of rhythmic variations; they are referred by the ear to a metrical schema where one exists, and even in irregular or “sprung rhythm” verse (which as Manley Hopkins points out does not allow of detailed counter- point between actual and schematic rhythm) they are referred to basic expectations of some kind, only by means of which can they reinforce the meaning of a passage.

Modern developments which have freed western music from strict key tonality and have imported syncopated and complex rhythms from negro jazz and other such sources have enabled it to reproduce much more closely the tonal and rhythmic character of spoken words. English word-setting has benefited in particular from the rhythmic limbering up, since English words with their built-in accents and their consonants attachable as often to a preceding as to a succeeding syllable (whereas I understand that in French and Italian a consonant is always regarded as beginning a fresh syllable) do not take kindly to “square” metres. The influence of the Court’s exile in France before the Restoration and of Italian opera may have had much to do with the squareness of Augustan “correct” versification and its sacrifice of the rhythmic subtleties of earlier English poetry. A word like “intelligence” in “correct” versification almost inevitably acquires a remorseless second accent which does not belong to it in speech. Britten twice1 sets this word in his cantata “Rejoice in the Lamb” and each time syncopation is used to rub ‘1 now see that what I remembered as a second instance is actually the word “excellence” similarly treated.

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out the potential second accent; “-g-” is placed before the beat and “-ce” after it so that the beat itself falls without weight on the neutral vowel 3. This takes us straight back to the practice of Donne and “We are The intelligences, they the spheres”, where enjambement (abjured by correct versifiers) and a piling up of unimportant syllables on either side of the central “-tell-” establishes by means of symmetry the right centre of gravity, a wave pattern like that of free speech instead of a regular hammer-beat pattern.

Not of course that verismo or naturalistic imitation of speech is a sufficient objective, for the composer any more than for the poet. Shakespeare can write lines which sound as though the English talk blank verse in their sleep-“Oh yes, my Lord, he wore his beaver up”-but they are effective partly by their comparative rareness, as parlante passages in an arioso context. At this point in Hamlet the excitement runs so high that the medium must be completely transparent to the action. When one admires naturalistic speech rhythms in Donne it is as one plane of a many-dimensioned exploration of language. Mere naturalism very quickly becomes jejune; it always embarrasses me that the last five lines of Book V of The Prelude are not printed as the prose which they undoubtedly c0nstitute.l There are some very funny moments of naturalistic intonation in Britten’s Albert Herring, e.g. Lady Billows’ “I’m a very disappointed woman”, but the joke is partly the occurrence of such things in a singing context, and if too much of the rest were equally vraisemblable it would pall. There is a “natural” of a blank verse line later in this libretto, when the policeman says “Give me a decent murder with a corpse!”-but it is actually distorted to some degree in the setting, “me” being drawn out to a length hardly possible for speech, so as to carry the implications of “if you ask me”, “so far as I’m concerned.” (“Corpse” is dropped down upon as befits its dark vowel, and coloured by a gruesome C sharp where one might expect a C natural.) Comedy apart, Britten is notable for his faithfulness to the acoustic lie of the spoken word, and the frequency with which he achieves transparency at climaxes by applying the principle as old as Aeschylus of “one syllable one note”. (Some of his apparent departures from this are in fact logical extensions; e.g. in “William Budd, I accuse you”, “I” gets two notes because it is really a diphthong, “Ah-ee”, and emerges more clearly so, particularly before the simple vowel “a-”.) The result tends to be faithfulness to meaning as well as sound, unless the two have been ill-matched by the librettist as in the tortuously worded Peter Grimes chorus “Him who despises us we’ll despise”, where a powerful mood is built up in the score at the price of awkward enunciation. Britten’s melismas are usually given to meaningful words, which are often uttered

Thus: “But as this work was taking in my thoughts proportions that seemed larger than had first been meditated, I was indisposed to any further progress at a time when these acknowledgements were left unpaid.”

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simply before they are ornamented, e.g, “happy” in the Essex lute- song; he avoids perpetrating what Addison called “the most beautiful graces, quavers and divisions bestowed upon ‘then’, ‘for’ and ‘from’, to the eternal honour of our English particles.” (I admit I get a certain purely literary discomfort, as though the gramophone needle of the thought has stuck in a groove, from the widely admired quartet in his A Midsummer Night’s Dream where the single line “For I have found Lysander (Hermia, etc.) like a jewel” is repeated for several pages.) The one-syllable-one-note principle is so obviously self-recommending that it has probably never disappeared from song, and it accounts for some of the most moving moments even in music of the most ornate periods. No one who has heard Messialt can forget “Thy rebuke has broken his heart”, and its impressiveness is musical and not just poetic. Yet this principle is readily associated with the Wolfian ideal of “poetic supremacy” and taken to imply subordination of the composer to the writer, of musical to verbal and conceptual considerations. Which brings me to the main connection of Britten’s music with my present theme.

He is agreed to be a composer outstandingly responsive to words and deriving unusually much of his inspiration from them. In some quarters this reckons as derogatory to his achievement as a composer, as though he used words as an extra-musical crutch to an invention which might otherwise halt. This attitude seems to me to correspond to the over-conceptual view of poetry which I began by discussing; to spring from the same reluctance to admit how important a dimension of language is acoustic material common to the musician and the user of words, the legitimate property of both of them. Thus Myfanwy Piper writing in the Britten Festschrift referred to above says of his operas that “every single word is set to be heard, not only for its part in the story but for its quality as part of the human instrument. The actual human speech, articulated in sorrow or joy, in pain or commonplace exchange, is as much part of the music of the voice as the note itself; the word and the note is one thing, not two”.

Granted that the programme provided by the words’ meaning is no less a basic factor, yet there is no reason why sound as exploited in music should not as in poetry be able to make something unique and integral out of the joint product; the test is whether, as Michael Tippet put it in a recent television interview, what is finally expressed ‘‘could not one feels have been expressed in any other medium.” Depreciators of music that contains any programme element tend to forget that “abstract” music is much indebted to an outside discipline, mathematics; and they often seem to be those who care to notice only the most superficial aspects of music’s interpretation of other realms of life, to whom in fact my charge once again applies of overlooking how deeply our experience of sound reaches into and ramifies through the rest of our experience.

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One gets tired of hearing attention drawn to such trivial details as that Bachs Disciples mount the hill of Olives up the steps of a scale (a journey which I always find too smooth to be at all convincing). Bach is sometimes naively representational in such matters ; he does frequently illustrate ascent and descent-most beautifully, for example, in the B Minor Mass “Et in unum”, the descent of the Son from Heaven. The angel in the Abraham and Isaac section of the War Requiem comes up on the harp arpeggios, not down; a cryptic piece of modernist theology? Perhaps: but height and depth are after all dimensions which belong to music in its own right, and can carry many different kinds of significance ranging between the literal and the metaphoric. Britten will copy the rising intonation of a question if it serves his purpose, but by no means automatically. I have heard him say that the persistent rising semitones of “Quid sum miser tunc dicturus?” in the War Requiem reflect the urgency of the question. He did not add, but it is equally clear, that when this phrase is exactly inverted in notation at “Salva me fons pietatis” it droops down upon its knees in prayer and despondency. But often he will choose to follow the strictly tonal values of his words. “Was it for this the clay grew tall?’ (War Requiem.) That is a question, and the main concept embodied is one of growing upwards, yet the notes of the last three words drop steeply, just as the vowels within them drop. There is no violation of the poet’s intention, for Owen had a musically sensitive ear and can be presumed aware of the extent to which the fall of his line reverses its image and asks one of those questions beginning with “num” which does not expect a favourable answer. Compare the end of the Winter Words song cycle: “How long?” is set finally to one of the least questioning of intervals. a falling fourth. Neither Hardy nor Britten expects an answer. This Hardy song (“Before Life and After”) also affords an example that verisrno is by no means a practice which Britten slavishly adheres to. I mentioned the care he takes in a Cantata to give the word “intelligence” its natural speech rhythm. When I played a record of this Hardy song to a poetry-lover I know, he complained that the word “testimonies” in its second line is spelled out with four almost equal accents, whereas its function when naturally spoken would be to speed up the line. But there is an over-riding purpose here. The stanzas are constructed of three long lines followed by a short one on whose simplicity the main emotional burden falls. It is partly because the long lines have been built up to full stature in the musical setting that the brevity of “When all went well”, set very simply to the rise and fall of a major second, can bring tears to the eyes. These matters of proportion are, again. common property for poet and musician; there is no borrowing involved in this respect except that the poem existed first, no importing into music of a device which only makes aesthetic sense by reference to a different medium.

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An instance which is perhaps rather far from my main concern with word-setting but which shows a shallow and a profound parallel between music and text coexisting together is in Schubert’s setting of a translation of Colley Cibber’s “The Blind Boy”. The superficial link, the borrowed programme, is that the blind boy’s stick is heard tapping in the piano accompaniment. This if done unimaginatively with a more of less steady tapping would be meaningless. But what happens is that an isolated double tap is heard every now and then, spaced unpredictably, and conveys an extraordinary sense of being brought up short in the exploration of experience, of being suddenly confronted by baffling limitation. This musical trip or stammer struck me in listening well before the idea of the tapping stick, because it is a brilliant translation of blindness into aural terms, which would make the point even to someone who knew nothing about the blind using sticks. But one does not want to cry down the “programme” element, since it has served to beget the more powerful imaginative effect.

Passing to instances of word-setting which display what I would call “verbal inspiration without verbal supremacy”, I can best show what I mean by giving first an example from one of Britten’s masters, Verdi. In Fulstuf, Mistress Quickly comes to arrange with Falstaff an assignation with Alice “dalle due’ alle tre”, between two and three o’clock. These words are repeated to a group of triplets (equal quavers beginning with a quaver rest) several times with relish by Falstaff and then picked up excitedly by the orchestra, and referred to again from time to time in the rest of the Act. Now no one I think would feel that when the orchestra takes up this phrase an extra-musical excitement is being imported, simply through our minds being referred to the idea of the assignation. The link is not primarily conceptual; the excitement is there in the acoustic properties of the words, which is why they suit their context, in their tripping haste and their missing first beat and their roly-poly character such that a child who did not even know what they meant might gabble them over and over with enjoyment. The composer is exploiting the acoustic dimension of his words and deriving from it inherently musical material. Britten does this kind of thing constantly in his operas. When Grimes leaves the stage in the Sunday morning seaside scene crying “God have mercy upon me!”, the notes of this phrase provide the ground bass of the Entr’Acte Passacaglia which follows shortly afterwards and is among the most famous pieces of music in the opera. One of Britten’s gifts is to see how to formalise such a phrase, often by slight exaggerations of a basically naturalistic rendering-here for example “God” and “merc-” are drawn out to twice the length of the other syllables (one can hear effects of the kind in naturally occurring emphatic speech, for example a mother calling out to her children “For goo-oodness’ sake don’t play with

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that!”), and the resulting rhythm is asymmetrical and anxious1. (In the Passacaglia sinister rests replace the second halves of the long syllables.) There is also a heavy-hearted stressed landing on the “-on” of “upon me”, imitated in effect from the character of the Morning Service responses which have been audible from the

adjacent church during the scene. (“Lord have mercy upon us” as intoned by a congregation is already half-way from ordinary speech to a schematised sound-pattern.) Of course opera is a syncretic art and it does add to the dramatic interest if one remembers during the Passacaglia what words can be attached to its burden, but musically the phrase proves viable and fertile after severing all connection with its message. This Interlude has been separately recorded and is often played separately at concerts, and thus as purely abstract music has moved many listeners who have no notion of what words, or that any words, can be associated with the ground bass. Could words beget music in this way if their formal sound-pattern were necessarily as devoid of “aesthetic virtue” as I. A. Richards insists? One cannot of course be certain that Britten did not make up the tune first and then fit the words to it; but there are countless instances in his works which suggest the contrary procedure2.

I should like to give a final example from the Nocturne of how closely Britten can follow the acoustic properties of his lines and make this help and not hinder melody. There is an enchanting simple tune in the Coleridge setting in this song cycle which comes three times and is most memorable in its one-syllable-one-note form when it goes with the words “It was a climate where they say The night is more belov’d3 than day.” It begins “doh’ lah doh’ te doh’ ray’ doh‘ lah.” When I first heard it my commonplace musical mind reared on hymn tunes expected the largest melodic step to come nearer the middle of the line than the smallest one and also expected the conceptually important word “climate” to be marked out by a large step rather than the little word “was”, so I came away humming “doh te doh lah” to the opening words and wondered why it sounded so disappointing. But once one realises that “was” has a deeper vowel than “cli-” one gets it right, and the slight side-stepping of commonplace expectations is in fact a source of the charm. The emphasis on “was” is also right because we are at once removed by

it far from the workaday speech rhythm of “rt was a climate” into a realm of runic incantation and dreamy legato, in which each syllable gets a full crochet and is valued for its sound as well as its sense, its pretty shape and not just its semantic purpose. Further, the

‘See end of article. aE.g. in The Turn ofthe Screw, many short rhythmic phrases such as “Who is it?”, “dear God!”, “What has she written 7” are generated by the voices and then exploited in the orchestral texture.

T i i s word alone has a melisma.

I I I

* * I +

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rhyme is musically represented: “day” returns to the same note as “say”.

Not all composers are susceptible to verbal inspiration and not all compositions which include words exhibit it. The Lutyens cantata “0 saisons o chateaux” had been completed as music before it was suggested to the composer by another person that the French poem would fit it. Some of the greatest composers seem comparatively insensitive to words. Who but Beethoven would ask a choir to sing a tongue-twister like “sturzt” in Schiller’s Ode to Joy on a note so short that it is physiologically impossible to do? One of Beethoven’s sublimest works, the F major Quartet, op. 135, has the words “muss es sein? es muss sein” attached by him to its last movement. The philosophy fits, and the words are technically fittabie to the intended notes, but I can never feel that there is any particular aesthetic kinship between the two, and the clumsily sigmatic words have nothing to recommend them as sound.

I suggest, then, that it is particularly for his sensitivity to accoustic values in words that the study of Britten’s work is a fruitful antidote to the over-conceptual attitude to poetry which is now common. Of course any memorable piece of word-setting also illuminates the meaning, the mood and spirit of the whole. Music cannot be explicit along the same lines as language (though I am convinced that the horn says “No” at figure 75 of the War Requiem), but in certain respects it can illuminate a situation more sharply, can short-cut questions raised by words. When Captain Vere in the Billy Budd trial scene says “I myself am present as witness--as sole earthly witness”, the words make one conscious that he could resolve the whole dreadful dilemma by means of a simple lie. But the sudden appalled mysterious solemnity of the music to the italicised words transfers the mood at once to a plane on which lying and the case for it become beside the point, a metaphysical absurdity; a plane on which the action lies above where is no shuffling. Great poetry can without benefit of composer achieve similar effects, but it does so by similar means, by dint of what it adds to its conceptual content. The boundaries between different arts and disciplines are not absolute. “Word-music” is not just an old-fashioned fancy metaphor but a reality which deserves far more study than it commonly receives.

Longer Notes 1 . (to page 253.) Caesurae. Whether or not caesurae and other word-ends are actual temporal breaks or

dips in the flow of sound, they are certainly metrical phenomena, matters of “phrasing” in the musician’s sense and not simply of conceptual definition. Gay’s words to a famous tune, “Polly, we might have toy’d and kiss’d”, suit it better than the familiar “Golden slumbers kiss your eyes”; the phrasing of “we might have toy’d” reflects the balance of the central arch of the melody better than “-den slum -krs kiss”. When Sullivan’s Penzance policemen make

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choral refrains out of “-cent enjoyment” and “culty smother” the joke is musical as well as verbal, not only the Procrustean treatment of the words but also the mechanical rhythm serving to reflect the punctilious b l inked routine mindedness of the policemen. A composer without a sense of musical humour

would have pointed up the verbal joke with the hiccup of a short rest-“ 7 Cent enjoyment”-and in so doing would have destroyed the rhythmic joke.

2. (to page 261.) Asymmetrical rhythms. The emotive, disturbing power of asymmetrical rhythms is much exploited by

Britten, particularly in the War Requiem with its long sections in 714 and 5/16. 7 5 -

When I first looked at the opening of this score, which is ’ ,j ,) ; I wondered

if it was precious. By the end of the work one has learnt just h<w much more

can be than an ordinary quarter-length semiquaver. In frightening

the pianissimo drum figure which opens the “Libera me” I find I have a strong aural illusion (analogous to optical illusions by which, e.g., circles can be made

to look as if they are spiralling) that the P is positively longer than

a semiquaver, because it will not fall into place, it insistently detaches itself, like the first crumblings from a cliff which by the end of the movement is going to crash on us in cosmic landslide. In The Rape of Lucretia, Tarquin’s ride though rhythmically very exciting is always four-square and controlled and “masculine” (using Ronald Duncan’s Jungian symbology); then when he is brought up short by the river Tiber and decides to ride across, the water swirls away round the horse in unmanageable, hysterical quintuplets which represent the victory of the emotional and “feminine” over the rational (cf. Duncan’s libretto later, “Now the great river underneath the ground Flows through Lucretia and Tarquinius is drowned”). It is an intriguing parallel that one of Donne’s poems selects the number five to represent woman. This probably has some reference to the connection of the pentangle with the Virgin. But I am convinced it is not fanciful to link the emotive power of rhythmic asymmetries in music with the appeal of odd-lined stanzas to an erotic poetic like Donne. why does he so often choose to write in 5-, 7-, 9- or 11-line stanzas rather than in even-lined ones? What is it which rime royale has that ottava rima lacks? (an Irish question I admit).

7-

J” - 5 - 7

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