Rhythm and Will in Victorian Poetry (review)

Rhythm and Will in Victorian Poetry, by Matthew Campbell; pp. xiv + 272. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999, £37.50, $59.95.

Matthew Campbell's book rejuvenates an old theme combined with an old method of analysis. The theme is that of the Victorian will, striving, seeking, and finding; and the method is that of metrical analysis, which notes how variations in metre cooperate with variations in meaning. The theme is intricately explored, and the metrical analysis subtly done. Campbell combines the traditions of F. R. Leavis and Yvor Winters, John Reed and Walter Houghton, and Eric Griffiths.

The discussion of Victorian will is period-specific but also tends to apply to poetry in general. In the sixteenth stanza of Alfred Tennyson's In Memoriam (1850), a "poetic will has been exercised, in that it has faced the irony of the situation and discovered a form for it" (174) in the manner of Winters. Another stanza, lxxxv, works away from disabling doubt in a more Victorian fashion, and "towards an active will which clears the ground for a continuing faith" (176).

The heart of the book is Campbell's meditation about will in terms of the metrical forms managed by the poets. Thus in Robert Browning's Sordello (1840), the "body of the Pope is locked into its processes of thought, vigorously disputing with itself and showing the fierceness of that dispute in brain, eye, brow, teeth, neck and chin. The rhyming verse chafes with the strain: 'ply/eye,' 'clenched'/'trenched,' 'fought'/'thought'" (7):

     See him stand
Buttressed upon his mattock, Hildebrand
Of the huge brain-mask wielded ply o'er ply
As in a forge; it buries either eye
White and extinct, that stupid brow; teeth clenched,
The neck tight-corded, too, the chin deep-trenched,
As if a cloud enveloped him while fought
Under its shade, grim prizers, thought with thought. (qtd. 7)

In the fifth stanza of Sordello (1840), lines 211 to 215, "Browning rhymes 'work' with 'irk' [. . .] and suggests the labour that is required to achieve a task, and the necessity of keeping to its already beaten road" (11). Presumably such analysis might work as well with free verse, though Campbell is most comfortable talking about the rhymes and variations of traditional metrical verse. Nevertheless, he moves on to Gerard Manley Hopkins's sprung verse, where "Harry Ploughman" (1887) attempts to convey the stillness, decision, act, and movement in Harry's labour. Campbell traces how the visceral bodily effort of the speaker is conveyed in the verse, somewhat in the manner of Alexander Pope's dictum, "When Ajax strives [. . .] The line too labours" (qtd. 18).

Campbell's discussion ranges from the Leavisite celebration of intelligent ordering in verse to the approach of J. Hillis Miller in The Disappearance of God (1963) which describes the tortured agon of Victorian poets seeking to reestablish some embodiment of lost divinity. Campbell portrays the Victorian will as crossed and baffled, struggling with its confusions, searching out its relation to something other which controls it. That something other is the sheer melancholy empathic "drift" of Tennyson's long history of grief, or the God of Hopkins, or the Immanent Will of Thomas Hardy. Tennyson's poem, "Will" (1855) portrays the self-absorption of the paralyzed will, as the self-divided subject disintegrates into rhythmic sinking sands:

He seems as one whose footsteps halt,
Toiling in immeasurable sand [. . .]. (qtd. 26)

This first line "literally halts the poem's iambic steps, and the next line wreaks havoc on the poem's metre," the jarring trochees dissolving in anapaestic and pyrrhic "metrical indeterminacy" (28). Often in Campbell's analysis anapaests have a way of dissolving the firm contours of the embodied metrical will. The phrasing of Browning's description of Guido "'Rapt away by the impulse, One / Immeasurable everlasting wave of a need,'" not the steadier "wave of need," "allows Guido's speech to sound its impulse, a necessity greater than itself" (114). Hardy's Immanent Will...