Founding of Petrograd, the third capital of Russia Oppressive rule stirrings of revolt On to the north Where a blue-white light faintly glimmers Over the frozen seas. Two cities have long ago fallen, But there is one city to found yet— A city of death. At the edges of the north, At the borders of the locked sea, The pale horse rears And stands. Darkness, total darkness! And in the darkness Furiously from east to west The winds go forth to battle. V But the souls of them that were slain Rise up again at midnight And cry their final cry: "How long, how long the darkness, How long wilt not avenge us? 1917 A. D. Revolution "For here our cause is crushed So they cry all together, Has given them power to live. And they go out to the streets of the city, How the last seal will be loosened, VI Dawn comes out of the east, Dawn with a tumult of flying horses; Stallion on stallion charging Her tossing, golden hair Is mingled with the sea of manes; Out of ten thousand trenches A million weary eyes Shall see her pass across the plains, And cry, "Come faster!" A million starving ones Shall smile at her, Shall stretch out their cold hands to her A million broken ones Shall make their bodies The pathway for her feet; A million eager ones Shall leap forth from their trenches To follow her command. Like a white flame that gathers force. She shall fill all the land With song of victory. Like the great flame of noon, She shall spread out her wings; And grant us all we longed for, could not find, March 16, 1917, 1.15 p. m. HYTHM-the universality of the principle, its scientific basis, its application in the arts, especially in the speech arts-has always fascinated me. Of course it is an element of unalterable law: from the electron to the most enormous sun in space, every object moves rhythmically, in vibrations or pulsations or orbits, hastened or retarded between incredible extremes of slow or swift. All life is governed by heart-beats, and the arts are man's effort to respond to the universal impulse, his effort to create movement in time, or to mark off color-rhythms and space rhythms in patterns which suggest that movement. From childhood I have groped among rhythms strongly felt but difficult to analyze. Many of them are beyond the scope of this inquiry-they would lead us far afield; but among them I have speculated long and often on the rhythmic laws that govern verse, prose, and speech-laws which these phenomena of human utterance can not escape. It has seemed to me obvious that not verse alone is rhythmical, but that prose also, whether on the page or the tongue, is bound to follow the universal law, is set to a pattern of time-intervals which it must unconsciously fulfil. And it has seemed to me strange that whereas musical notation is, in effect, a scientific analysis-a kind of picturing-of the rhythms of music, neither verse nor prose has been scientifically presented in any exact system of notation. Science, which has been speculating during the past century in almost every other direction, had apparently neglected to investigate language-rhythms for of course the puerile systems of versescansion inherited from our ancestors are as unscientific and out of date as pre-Galileo astronomy. So it is like going home after a long journey to read The Rhythm of Prose, by Dr. William Morrison Patterson of the English department of Columbia University, published by the university press-a book which I would have read a year ago if some incorrigible borrower had not snatched it out of reach and mind. So science has been invading at last my favorite field; indeed, she has been building up, during the last twenty years, quite a bibliography on the subject, while I, ignorant of the German language and of journals of psychology and philology, have been groping along with only Lanier's Science of English Verse for a basis-a book which began the discussion in 1880. Dr. Patterson, fully informed in all this literature, possesses also a scientific mind, and scientific instruments for making photographic and phonographic records of the human voice in its utterance of both verse and prose. I am quite out of sympathy with those sensitive poetic souls who resent this intrusion of science. The truth can do no harm, and in this case it must do incalculable good in the enrichment of our sense of rhythmic values. The poet of the future, discarding the wilful empiricism of the past and proceeding upon exact knowledge, will greatly develop and enrich our language-rhythms just as music-rhythms are |