"Dante-on-Steroids": "English Terza" and Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Casa Guidi Windows

Abstract

"Dante-on-Steroids":"English Terza" and Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Casa Guidi Windows Oliver Goldstein (bio) When I began to study Italian and had barely familiarized myself with its phonetics and prosody, I suddenly understood that the center of gravity of my speech efforts had been moved closer to my lips, to the outer parts of my mouth. The tip of the tongue suddenly turned out to have the seat of honour. The sound rushed toward the locking of the teeth. And something else that struck me was the infantile aspect of Italian phonetics, its beautiful child-like quality, its closeness to infant babbling, to some kind of eternal dadaism. —Osip Mandelstam, "Conversation about Dante" Why did George Saintsbury consider the history of terza rima in English to have been a failure? Saintsbury's most extended comments on the matter occur in his discussion of R. W. Dixon's Mano (1883) and are worth consideration at length. Dixon's long poem proves a significant exception in the History of English Prosody, in that Saintsbury loves it not for but despite its versification. So he writes: "I cannot say that its verse-vehicle has much part in my love; or if it has, the part is so occasional as hardly to count, while occasionally also it distinctly interferes with my affection."1 Dixon's terza is most distinctive, Saintsbury here suggests, only when it is actively and materially interfering with the constitution of the verse romance for which he otherwise professes such a liking. When it is not doing this, when it is not unhappily impeding the progress of its own story, however, Dixon's terza is hardly even noticeable as terza rima at all: although its end-stopped disposition and refusal of intralinear caesurae bring it "nearer to Dante than most English terza-writers," as Saintsbury writes, it still possesses "the capital defect—almost the unpardonable sin—of suggesting something else: a fault inseparable from English terza ever since the days of Wyatt" (3: 364). This is why it plays only so "occasional" and so minor a part in Saintsbury's pleasure as "hardly to count." [End Page 1] Without "the inevitableness which all great metre possesses when once the single line is outpassed," Dixon's terza in fact most strongly resembles only other forms than itself—whether "blank verse with straggling Lycidas-like rhymes; or two quatrains, the last uncompleted; or a kind of disturbed rhyme-royal" (3: 365). Saintsbury concludes that the best way to enjoy Mano is to pay no heed to meter at all. This analysis usefully concentrates a range of linguistic and metricorhythmic issues that arise for poets intending to write terza rima in English verse. Unlike Laurence Binyon, for whom the verse form "presents no such problem as the attempt to reproduce for English readers the effect of the Greek or the Latin hexameter," and for whom its failed adoption attests only to its "loose handling" by poets "of more romantic temper," Saintsbury suggests that the problem is essentially a linguistic one.2 The repertoire of constraints that arises from the Commedia—end-stopped lines, falling disyllabic rhymes, the syntactic integrity of progressively interlocking tercets, as well as the general avoidance of intralinear stops—is almost impossible to realize in English without sacrificing either metre or syntax for the sake of keeping up the rhyme scheme. It "either discards or neglects, or, while aiming at it, fails to achieve, that remarkable separation of tercet, without abruptness," as Saintsbury puts it, "which is perhaps the dominant prosodic note of the Commedia" (3: 363). And "there are, of course, not enough doubles in English, without a lavishing of inflections which would simply be disgustful" (3: 363). Although it is "therefore no argument per se against the English terza, that it does not produce the effect of Dante's," Saintsbury adds, "it is important historically to point out the fact that it does not" (3: 363). To make things worse, for Saintsbury, English terza fails to disclose any distinctive characteristics of its own. The metricorhythmic properties of the medium neither heighten our awareness of structurally significant elements nor develop "the inevitableness" through which we would otherwise detect...