Page:The Harvard Classics Vol. 51; Lectures.djvu/72

 62 Rhythm alone, however, is not enough to constitute a poem. A mere drone of words in meaningless repetition, though it may illustrate one of the origins of poetry, is not poetry itself. There must be progress in the recurrence, and the repeat must build itself up into a pattern. Any bit of experience, to be truly understood or vitally assimilated, must be apprehended as a whole. In the tumult of the world external to him the mind of man insistently demands order and significance. Nature has compelled the poet to her own rhythm; that is his inspiration. The poet must now compel nature to his purposes of expression; that is his art. His temperament has vibrated to the sweep of cosmic influences; now his mind enters as a controlling and organizing force to shape his perception and his meaning into a single total unity. Out of rhythm in repetition and combination he frames a harmony. And so his poem presents a wholeness of impression. His pattern is built of the repeat of single elements: metrical bars or feet compose the line or verse; lines combine into stanzas; and stanzas fashioned after a common design succeed one another in progress to the end. Here again, the structure is not mechanical or arbitrary: each verse is measured to the turn of the thought; and the formal unity of the whole poem corresponds to the unity of mood or idea that the poem is framed to express.

The poet's medium, or means of expression, is words. The painter works with color, the sculptor with form, the musician with tone. Color and form and tone are pleasurable in themselves, as sensations; they become beautiful and significant by force of what they may be made to express. So words in themselves also have a sensuous value. When used as instruments of beauty, they may add to the rhythmic structure of a poem the element of melody. This tonal quality is secured most easily and obviously by rhyme, which is perfect concord of vowel sounds together with the consonants following to complete the syllable, as in sight, night. Besides adding musical value to the phrase, rhyme, when adroitly managed, serves to define the pattern of the poem and to emphasize the meaning of the words in which it falls. Lesser components of the melodic element are assonance, alliteration, and tone-color. Assonance is the repetition of