Saint Augustine's Meter and George Herbert's Will (review)

BOOK REVIEWS59 William H. Pahlka, Saint Augustine's Meter and George Herbert's Will. Kent, Ohio, and London: Kent State University Press, 1987. xxi + 241 pp. $26. by Mark Taylor In Saint Augustine's Meter and George Herbert's Will William Pahlka argues that Augustine, especially in his today often neglected De musica, "saw a clear analogy between the foundation of the universe and the foundation of versification" (p. 27), which means that versification offered a way of reproducing eternal meanings in otherwise ephemeral human language; that this connection is entirely consistent with much of verse theory in the English Renaissance; and that from a consideration of Augustinian pronouncements and later theory, and an examination of Herbert's poetic practice, an understanding of his meter, and of his prosody in general, can be derived. And although the meter is indeed understood in part through the actual achievement of Herbert's verse, once its outlines are grasped it yields an increased understanding of that verse, as Pahlka combines considerable practical criticism with his theory. The results are most illuminating. Following "the Pythagorean doctrine that number underlies all things," Pahlka writes, and that "Equality and proportion are . . . mathematical principles," Augustine believes "The more perfectly anything imitates the unity of God and its expression in the Logos, the more proportional and the more beautiful the thing is. . . . The maker of verse creates an object in which language, a human institution based on conventions, comes to be imitative in the same way the natural world imitates the Logos; that is, the poet imposes on language number, measure, proportion, self-likeness" (pp. 20-21). In doing so, the poet expresses or reaches toward truths, or truth, usually denied to language. One way or another Augustine's notions insinuate themselves into Renaissance theory. "Whether they came to the Elizabethan writers directly from Augustine or by way of intermediate sources, most of the general principles of De musica are discoverable in a variety of sixteenth-century texts 60BOOK REVIEWS on poetics, though often in more secularized and naturalized terms" (p. 36). Of Elizabethan theorists Pahlka sees Puttenham as the "most Augustinian" (p. 38); and in addition to sharing his distant predecessor's view of the importance of number and proportion, Puttenham saw also that in English verse "rhyme . . . performs the time-marking function of the quantities of classical verse" (p. 38). "For the Elizabethans," therefore, "verse was not simply superior in some vaguely esthetic way to ordinary speech or to prose; because of its numbers and proportions, it possessed a higher degree of being. It participated in the structure of divine creation in a way that plain English, an Idol of the Marketplace, could not" (p. 47). Although one might like to see some evidence of these large assertions in the verse of poets of the 1 580s or 1 590s, Pahlka is generally convincing in his reading of Augustine's presence in late sixteenth-century poetics. It follows from this reading that the meter of so deliberate an artist as George Herbert enacts a contract with "divine creation" as well as mere poetry. Pahlka's fifth chapter, on Herbert's meter, is particularly refreshing because it seeks to describe the metrical achievement of "The Church" in terms of the simplest available paradigm, instruments, and nomenclature. For Pahlka syllables are almost always either stresses or slacks (there are some instances of the "promotion" or "demotion" of a "medial syllable" because of its position in the line, but these are infrequent), from which follows the convenient and traditional vocabulary of iambs, trochees, and so forth. This means not only that his discussion is happily free of the terminology of linguistics (which Pahlka dismisses as "inappropriate to any study that emphasizes meter rather than spoken rhythms" [p. 76]), but also that it is far more manageable than, say, Arnold Stein's, in George Herbert's Lyrics, which (after Trager-Smith) postulates four levels of stress. Stein's scansion at first seems highly technical and "sophisticated," but in fact (as Pahlka almost says) there is something very arbitrary and unsophisticated about the assumption that one can always differentiate between levels two and three of stress. Pahlka's own results are...