Page:Edgar Allan Poe - how to know him.djvu/225

Rh Whatever the effect aimed at, the effect actually produced is that of a subtler melody, a richer harmony, a more centralized rhythm. Repetition in Poe's hands is not a means of emphasizing thought; it is a means rather of lulling thought asleep to music. Crooning takes the place of creating. The thought as thought seems to pause, the repetition throbbing on like the accompaniment to a song heard between the pauses of the singer. Unity of mood, totality of effect, a dreamy sort of "indefiniteness," wrought out by means perfectly definite and adapted,—these constitute the Poe differential. Others had used the same sort of repetition but not as Poe used it. With him it was less an occasional artifice than an habitual art.

After all, however, repetition is of the very essence of rhythm and harmony. It is not an eddy in the current; it is the current itself deepened and less obstructed. It is not something added from without; it is an enlargement and enrichment from within. All rhythm is repetition. In poetry there is first the recurrence of definitely numbered and definitely ordered feet, then of lines, then of terminal or interior rimes, till the stanza, a symphony of antiphonal repetitions,  emerges complete. Then the march begins, stanza following stanza, line-length playing to line-length, rime answering to rime, and perhaps a terminal refrain summarizing and projecting the melody of the whole. But to Poe's ear this was not enough. He diffused other repetitions through his stanzas, and these repetitions not only made each stanza a more musical unit in itself but linked stanza to stanza in an unbroken strain of marching music unheard till then but heard