MUSIC AND METRE: BROWNING'S ‘PIETRO OF ABANO’

Abstract

APART from Arthur Symons, who thought it 'a fine piece of genuine grotesque art',' few readers have found anything to admire in 'Pietro of Abano'. It has all the worst faults of the Dramatic Idyls: tongue-twisting consonant clusters and awkward vowel sequences, ugly inversions, mannered archaisms such as 'whilom' and 'aroint', a diffuse narrative and a bland moral. The compound rhymes are as outrageous as any in 'Jocoseria' but generally less amusing, and the trick soon palls whereby much of the story is sandwiched between the 'Bene. . . 'of stanza 22 and '-dicite!' of stanza 51. The whole is couched in the most obscure metre Browning ever invented, giving Edward Dowden the impression of 'jolting in a springless waggon over a rough road and a long'. 2 The poem has, however, one striking feature: the eight bars of music printed at the end and written by Browning himself in an attempt, unique in English poetry, to indicate the metre of a poem by appending an equivalent musical rhythm. It provides a useful piece of evidence in the controversy, which has been going on intermittently since Joshua Steele's Prosodia Rationalis (I 779), over the feasibility of scanning English metres by some system of musical notation., The theoretical and methodological implications of this controversy are wide-reaching. Since 'musical' scansion is a graphic method of representing relative duration it attracts those prosodists who advocate a theory of metre based on isochronous stress, and although contemporary metrics is dominated by linguistic theories which tend to ignore duration in favour of complex analyses of relative intensity of stress, 4 a rearguard action has quite recently been fought by Hendren and Schwartz. Also, since tied and dotted notes, rests, pauses and so on