Melodic Lines in Goethe's Verse

Abstract

I am not the first to observe that the practice of reading aloud, once a favorite form of entertainment, is rapidly becoming extinct, and that even the ability to read aloud shows a marked decline: the number of American adults who cannot read aloud an ordinary bit of prose without stumbling or making it unintelligible is already alarmingly large. Regrettable as this development is bound to be in general, it takes on a more serious aspect when we consider the entire field of poetry, more particularly those departments of poetry which involve patterns: patterns of rhythm, patterns of rhyme, patterns of both combined. For all such patterns are essentially auditory in nature. It is the poet's ear which sets up the original pattern, and it is the listening ear which confirms its effectiveness. Indeed, if we are able to apprehend the auditory pattern through the transmitting eye, that is only by virtue of a sort of recall deriving from repeated auditory experiences. We are still listening while we look, just as we can read aloud without making a sound. But all this transfer presupposes a full set of auditory experiences on which the reader can draw. Both the patterns of rhythm and the patterns of rhyme are protected, as it were, by the external forms of verse. Rhyme, indeed, is even evident to the eye, and both English and German recognize what are conveniently called eye-rhymes, such as goodblood, or full-dull. While the controversy over the legitimacy of so-called impure rhymes in German continues to rage, there is no denying the fact that German poets, including Goethe, have actually used such rhymes and are still doing so. Although rhythm cannot be actually seen, it too is externally manifest in the normal speech patterns of which it is composed. Even such a line as: With how sads steps, 0 Moon, thou climb'st the sky (Wordsworth, 1802), although every word in it is a monosyllable, and all are words of nearly equal weight, excepting only the, no reader of experience will mistake it for other than it is, an iambic line of five feet.