The Visual Impact of Ottava Rima

Abstract

Does the layout of Byron's ottava rima matter? The following paper offers a new discussion of the impact of this particular stanza shape on the reader. Students sometimes complain about the unnecessary fussiness of the 'wobbly' margins of poetry, not only in Byron's ottava rima, but also, for example, in Elizabethan sonnets. The technology and economics of book production today seem to be responsible for the increasing homogeneity in appearance of books from the major academic presses. In some cases the publisher's editorial process involves a neat justification of the lefthand margin of poetic quotations. This standardization obviously helps to cut costs but may at the same time serve a pedagogic purpose. For contemporary first-year university students the traditional appearance of ottava rima (where the 'B' rhyming lines are indented and the couplet realigned with the 'A' rhyming lines) sometimes appears almost gothic in its intricacy. To streamline delivery of Byron's poetry in critical discussion many distinguished Romantic scholars and critics (or their publishers) have abandoned the traditional presentation of Byron's ottava rima stanza. Scholars who have dispensed with the indentations in Don Juan include Bernard Beatty in Byron's Don Juan (Barnes and Noble), Andrew Bennett in Romantic Poets and the Culture of Posterity (Cambridge University Press), Michael G. Cooke in The Blind Man Traces the Circle (Princeton University Press) and Acts of Inclusion (Yale University Press), Caroline Franklin in Byron's Heroines (Clarendon Press), Moyra Haslett in Don Juan and the Don Juan Tradition (Clarendon Press), Malcolm Kelsall in Byron's Politics (Harvester), Peter Manning in Byron and His Fictions (Wayne State), Philip Martin in Byron: A Poet before His Public (Cambridge University Press), Jerome McGann in Fiery Dust (Chicago University Press), Lucy Newlyn in Paradise Lost and the Romantic Reader (Clarendon Press), Alan Richardson in A Mental Theater (Penn State University Press) and Paul West in Byron and the Spoiler's Art (Chatto and Windus). All these books are brilliantly attentive to Byron's use of form without following the actual appearance of Byron's ottava rima on the page. By contrast, nineteenth-century booksellers took an obvious pride in the reproduction of ornate verse forms as if, for their readers, it enhanced the aesthetic appeal of the work they were marketing. Byron's manuscripts show that he preserved the traditional indented setting of ottava rima when drafting Don Juan even when writing cross-wise in the margins. Apart from odd complaints by Byron's contemporary reviewers about the expensive presentation of poetry from Murray's publishing house ('a rivulet of text flowing through a meadow of margin'), we have no way of recovering how Byron's readers reacted to the visual appearance of poetry on the page.1 In our own time, however, psychologists have been increasingly interested in what happens when our eyes first encounter a text and this sort of empirical research offers one way of answering the question at the start of this essay. Assisted by an AHRB Innovation Award in 2002, colleagues in the departments of English and Psychology at the University of Dundee have been investigating the effects of poetic form and technique on cognition, aesthetic response and evaluation in reading. We have been using methodology drawn from experimental psychology, which assesses the cognitive effort involved in reading a text by measuring eye movements during reading. This is a recognized scientific way of determining how difficult a reader finds a particular piece of text. Characteristically when we read, our eyes do not sweep smoothly across the page but perform a series of irregular jumps forwards and (sometimes) backwards which most of us are not conscious of and cannot voluntarily control. The general rule is that more difficult texts entail longer pauses or 'fixations' on words or parts of words, more jumps back to check on earlier words in the text ('regressions') and shorter, more cautious jumps forward to new material ('saccades'). …