Kindly revise once more, especially page 3 where I have inserted a few... [incomplete]Sri Aurobindo
Letters of Sri Aurobindo
Volume 4
Letter ID: 943
Sri Aurobindo — Roy, Dilip Kumar
December 24, 1942
Kindly revise once more, especially page 3 where I have inserted a few... [incomplete]
Milford accepts (incidentally, with special regard to the word frosty in Clough’s line about the Cairngorm1), the rule that two consonants after a short vowel make the short vowel long, even if they are outside the word and come in another word following it. To my mind this rule accepted and generally applied would amount in practice to an absurdity; [line illegible] verse where quantity by itself has no metrical value but in any attempt at quantitative metre in eccentricities like the scansions of Bridges. I shall go on pronouncing the y of frosty as short whether it has two consonants after it or only one or none; it remains frosty whether it is a frosty scalp or frosty top or a frosty anything. In no case does the second syllable [assume] a length of sound equivalent to that of two long vowels. My hexameters are intended to be read naturally as one would read any English sentence; stress is given its full metrical value, long syllables also are given their full metrical value and not flattened out so as to [assure] a fictitious metrical [theory]; short vowels [??] two consonants after the one treated as short, because they [?] value in any natural reading. But if you admit a short syllable to be long whenever there are two consonants after it, then Bridges’ scansions are perfectly justified. Milford does not accept that conclusion; he says Bridges’ scansions are an absurdity and I agree with him there. But he bases this on his idea that quantitative length does not count in English verse. It is intonation that makes the metre, he says, high tones or low tones – not longs and shorts, obviously stress is a high tone of the greatest importance and to ignore it is fatal to any metrical theory or natural treatment of the language – and so far I agree. But on that ground he refuses to discuss my idea of weight or dwelling of the voice or admit quantity or anything else but tone as determinative of the metre; he even declares that there can be no such thing as metrical length, the very idea is an [error]. Perhaps also that is the reason why he counts frosty as a spondee before scalp; he thinks that it causes it to be intoned in a different way. I don’t see how it does that. For my part, I intone it just the same before top as before scalp.
The ordinary theory is, I believe, that the sc of scalp acts as a sort of stile (because of the opposition of the two consonants to [rapid metre]) which you take time to cross, so that ty must be considered as long because of this delay of the voice, while the t of top is merely a line across the path which gives no trouble. I don’t see it like that; the delay of metre, such as it is and it is very slight, is not caused by any dwelling on the last syllable of the [preceding] sound, it is in the word scalp itself that the delay is made; one takes longer to pronounce scalp, scalp is a slightly longer sound than top and there is too a slight natural impediment to the voice that is absent in the lighter syllable and this may have some effect for the rhythm of the line but it cannot change the metre; it cannot lengthen the preceding syllable so as to turn a trochee into a spondee. Sanskrit quantitation is irrelevant here (it is the same as Latin or Greek in respect to this rule); but both of us agree that the Classical quantitative conventions are not reproducible in English metre and it is for that reason that we reject Bridges’ eccentric scansions. Where we disagree is that I treat stress as equivalent to length and give quantity as well as stress a metrical and not only a rhythmic value.
This answers also your question as to what Milford means by “fundamental confusion” re. aridity. He refuses to accept the idea of metrical length. But I am concerned with metrical as well as natural vowel quantities. My theory is that natural length in English depends, or can depend, on the dwelling of the voice giving metrical value or weight to the syllable; in quantitative verse one has to take account of all such dwelling or weight of the voice, both by ictus (= stress) and weight by prolongation of the voice (ordinarily syllabic length); the two are different, but for metrical purposes in a quantitative verse can rank as of equal value. I do not say that stress turns a short vowel into a long one!
Milford does not take the trouble to understand my theory – he ignores the importance I give to modulations and treats cretics and antibacchii and molossi as if they were dactyls, whereas they are only substitutes for dactyls; he ignores my objection to stressing short insignificant words like and, with, but, the – and thinks that I do that everywhere, which would be to ignore my theory. In fact I have scrupulously applied my theory in every detail of my practice. Take for instance (Ahana):
“Art thou not heaven-bound even as I with the earth?
Hast thou ended....”
Here art is long by natural quantity though unstressed, which disproves Milford’s criticism that in practice I never put an unstressed long as the first syllable of a dactylic foot or spondee, as I should do by my theory. I don’t do it often because normally in English rhythm stress bears the foot – a fact to which I have given full emphasis in my theory. That is the reason why I condemn the Bridgesean disregard of stress in the rhythm – still I do it occasionally whenever it can come in quite naturally2. My quantitative system, as I have shown at great length, is based on the natural movement of the English tongue, the same in prose and poetry, not on any artificial theory.
1 Clough’s line: “Found amid granite dust on the frosty scalp of the Cairngorm....”
2 E.g. Opening tribrachs are very frequent in my hexameter: Is he the first? was there none then before him? shall none come after? (Ahana)
But Milford thinks I have stressed the first short syllable to make them into dactyls – a thing I abhor. Cf. also Ahana (initial anapaest): In the hard reckoning made by the grey-robed accountant at even or (two anapaests
Yet survives bliss in the rhythm of our heart-beats, yet is there wonder