I was having the darndest time trying to find Dryden's translation of Horace's famous second epode in a form that was able to be copied and pasted. This happens to be the case with much of Dryden's work in general, and especially his translations (there isn't even a full version of the Fables that is easy to use anywhere). But the unavailability isn't due to indifference so much as the lack of resources to cope with Dryden's massive output: efforts to tackle it (rightly) get concentrated on getting the dramas and the Virgil up first, and then seem to flag.
But his earlier translations (that is, relative to the massive output after he lost the Laureateship), especially those collected in the second volume of the famous miscellanies published with Tonson (1685), are wonderful, and deserve a bit more attention just in general (they include a lot of pastoral and a lot of Lucretius--a really readable version all you philosophers should check out). This translation is one of my favorites: we see Dryden at a marshaling all his skill in heroic versification in a shorter four-beat line, wonderfully varying the rhyme with all the talent involved in deploying his famous triplets (if you're interested in the latter, Christopher Ricks--with his usual brilliance--has addressed this neglected aspect of Dryden's versification in a wonderful piece in Cambridge Companion to Dryden).
It is also just one of Horace's best poems, which I have fond memories of trying my hand at in Latin class: the famous "Beatus ille" epode (you can find the original and a literal translation here), loaded with the counter-pastoral skepticism or rather (because skepticism is too critical and neutral a term) doubled-perspective that can only come from a working-man like Horace, it has a wonderful dignity that is constantly poised upon devolving into something simpler--either through too rich a portrait of the simple life, or through resentment that comes through such doubling, its sardonic sort of turn that would explode the vision--but never does. The achievement of Horace is not tone so much as a sort of pointedness of ridicule: the mockery is not of the simple life so much as of the rich Alfius' impulse to desire it materially--this is what turns the vision into a cartoon. And Dryden captures this perfectly, I think (I should mention that Dryden changes Alfius to Morecraft, a famous contemporary usurer--see also his "Essay of Dramatic Poesie"--a traditional practice in translations of satiric material). But enough prefacing:
The Second Epode of Horace
‘How happy in his low degree,
How rich in humble poverty, is he,
Who leads a quiet country life;
Discharg'd of business, void of strife,
And from the griping scrivener free.
(Thus, ere the seeds of vice were sown,
Liv'd men in better ages born
Who plow'd with oxen of their own
Their small paternal field of corn.)
Nor trumpets summon him to war, [10]
Nor drums disturb his morning sleep,
Nor knows he merchants gainful care,
Nor fears the dangers of the deep.
The clamours of contentious law,
And court and state, he wisely shuns,
Nor brib'd with hopes, nor dar'd with with awe
To servile salutations runs;
But either to the clasping vine
Does the supporting poplar wed,
Or with his pruning-hook disjoin [20]
Unbearing branches from their head,
And grafts more happy in their stead:
Or, climbing to a hilly steep,
He views his herds in vales afar,
Or sheers his overburden'd sheep,
Or mead for cooling drink prepares,
Of virgin honey in the jars.
Or in the now declining year,
When bounteous Autumn rears his head,
He joys to pull the ripened pear, [30]
And clustering grapes with purple spread.
The fairest of his fruit he serves,
Priapus, thy rewards:
Sylvanus too his part deserves,
Whose care the fences guards.
Sometimes beneath an ancient oak
Or on the matted grass he lies:
No god of sleep he need invoke;
The stream that o’er the pebbles flies,
With gentle slumber crowns his eyes. [40]
The wind that whistles through the sprays
Maintains the consord of the song;
And hidden birds, with native lays
The golden sleep prolong.
But when the blast of winter blows,
And hoary frost inverts the year,
Into the naked woods he goes
And seeks the tusky boar to rear,
With well-mouthed hounds and pointed spear;
Or spreads his subtle nets from sight [50]
With twinkling glasses to betray
The larks that in the meshes light,
Or makes the fearful hare his prey.
Amidst his harmless easy joys
No anxious care invades his health,
Nor love his peace of mind destroys,
Nor wicked avarice of wealth.
But if a chaste and pleasing wife,
To ease the business of his life,
Divides with him his household care, [60]
Such as the Sabine Matrons were,
Such as the swift Apulian’s bride,
Sunburnt and swarthy though she be,
Will fire for winter nights provide,
And without noise will oversee
His children and his family,
And order all things till he come
Sweaty and overlabored home;
If she in pens his flocks will fold,
And then produce her dairy store, [70]
With wine to drive away the cold
And unbought dainties of the poor;
Not oysters of the Lucrine lake
My sober appetite would wish,
Nor turbot, or the foreign fish
That rolling tempests overtake,
And hither waft the costly dish.
Not heath-poult, or the rarer bird
Which Phasis or Ionia yields,
More pleasing morsels would afford [80]
Than the fat olives of my fields;
Than chards or mallows for the pot,
That keep the loosened body sound,
Or than the lamb, that falls by lot
To the just guardian of my ground.
Amidst these feasts of happy swains,
The jolly shepherd smiles to see
His flock returning from the plains;
The farmer is as pleased as he
To view his oxen, sweating smoke, [90]
Bear on their necks the loosened yoke:
To look upon his menial crew
That sit around his cheerful hearth,
And bodies spent in toil renew
With wholesome food and country mirth.’
This Morecraft said within himself,
Resolved to leave the wicked town,
And live retired upon his own.
He called his money in;
But the prevailing love of pelf [100]
Soon split him on the former shelf,
And put it out again.
Showing posts with label Dryden. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Dryden. Show all posts
Wednesday, September 8, 2010
Tuesday, September 7, 2010
The itch to translate
Dryden once said he was “troubled by the disease (as I may call it) of translation” (Preface to Sylvae). And he’d have to be, I think, in order to English (wonderful verb), not just the venerable works of the Greek, Latin, French, or Italian languages, but also those of English. It takes an itch to translate, in other words, in order for an English poet like Dryden to translate Chaucer or Milton.
Of course, in either case it’s pretty unjust to seriously consider Dryden’s attempts as translations of English. The language of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, some of which Dryden included in his Fables, Ancient and Modern (1700), was foreign enough for many readers. And in Milton’s case the foreignness was most immediately felt in Paradise Lost’s blank verse (though the diction wasn't really English either), which Dryden smoothed and evened out into heroic couplets in his unpublished drama The State of Innocence (1674). But I want to insist on the intensity of Dryden’s “paroxysm” (as he called it, again in the "Preface") in considering these “adaptations” or “modernizations” (as they are often called) and not just to connect efforts quite distant in time and purpose. Dryden eventually weighed the particular cast of English society itself in terms of translation, saying that
the genius of our countrymen in general [is] rather to improve an invention than to invent themselves, as is evident not only in our poetry but in many of our manufactures.
We have to remember that the same genius is also a “fit” (a paroxysm, a disease) to grasp the true ambivalence of this comment about improvement--usually taken as a straightforward progressivist, modern (not ancient and modern) ideology (though as such it doesn’t quite merit the name, ideology never being straightforward).
Of course, in either case it’s pretty unjust to seriously consider Dryden’s attempts as translations of English. The language of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, some of which Dryden included in his Fables, Ancient and Modern (1700), was foreign enough for many readers. And in Milton’s case the foreignness was most immediately felt in Paradise Lost’s blank verse (though the diction wasn't really English either), which Dryden smoothed and evened out into heroic couplets in his unpublished drama The State of Innocence (1674). But I want to insist on the intensity of Dryden’s “paroxysm” (as he called it, again in the "Preface") in considering these “adaptations” or “modernizations” (as they are often called) and not just to connect efforts quite distant in time and purpose. Dryden eventually weighed the particular cast of English society itself in terms of translation, saying that
the genius of our countrymen in general [is] rather to improve an invention than to invent themselves, as is evident not only in our poetry but in many of our manufactures.
We have to remember that the same genius is also a “fit” (a paroxysm, a disease) to grasp the true ambivalence of this comment about improvement--usually taken as a straightforward progressivist, modern (not ancient and modern) ideology (though as such it doesn’t quite merit the name, ideology never being straightforward).
Monday, August 16, 2010
Dryden's Chaucer
One of the most striking aspects of Fables, Ancient and Modern is its prominent inclusion of Chaucer. In the famous Preface, Dryden has more to say about him than anyone else, and it is in remarks about the Middle English poet that Dryden also makes some of his most important statements about his view of language. This makes sense, however, as translating what is nearest to Dryden's English--which is what Dryden does with Chaucer--would seem to require the most far-reaching justification in order for it to be considered translation. This is not just because Chaucer is arguably more intelligible than those authors Dryden translates who wrote in a genuine foreign language, as much as it is because the nature of the un-foreignness which translation brings to the reader is undefined. Indeed, Dryden doesn't argue that Chaucer's English is in effect foreign: this is accepted from the get-go. What he argues is that translation has a definite, positive linguistic contribution, which is different and distinct from the mere fact of bringing foreignness into English; and this closes the door on arguments maintaining that Dryden just repeats Chaucer--translation at best being the mere transmission of the original. That positive contribution Dryden defines as intelligibility, by which he means something like resonance: translation allows words to be updated, not just historically, but in terms of their "significancy," their ability to hit home within a certain community of language users. The ancient-modern quarrel hangs over all of this, but what's really important, and escapes the dichotomy, is the way Dryden makes translation fight obsolescence:
But there are other judges, who think I ought not to have translated Chaucer into English, out of a quite contrary notion: they suppose there is a certain veneration due to his old language; and that it is little less than profanation and sacrilege to alter it. They are farther of opinion that somewhat of his good sense will suffer in this transfusion, and much of the beauty of his thoughts will infallibly be lost, which appear with more grace in their old habit. [...] Yet my reason was not convinc’d with what [was] urg’d against [the undertaking]. If the first end of a writer be to be understood, then as his language grows obsolete, his thoughts must grow obscure [...] When an ancient word for its sound and significancy deserves to be reviv’d, I have that reasonable veneration for antiquity, to restore it. All beyond this is superstition. Words are not like landmarks, so sacred as never to be remov’d; customs are chang’d, and even statutes are silently repeal’d, when the reason ceases for which they were enacted. As for the other part of the argument, that his thoughts will lose of their original beauty, by the innovation of words; in the first place, not only their beauty, but their being is lost, where they are no longer understood, which is the present case.
Making the original resonate also justifies significant elaboration on the original: the argument allows translation the dignity and freedom of imitation, by giving it this unique and slightly different power:
Chaucer, I confess, is a rough diamond, and must first be polish’d, ere he shines. I deny not, likewise, that, living in our early days of poetry, he writes not always of a piece, but sometimes mingles trivial things with those of greater moment. Sometimes also, tho’ not often, he runs riot, like Ovid, and knows not when he has said enough. But there are more great wits, beside Chaucer, whose fault is their excess of conceits, and those ill sorted. An author is not to write all he can, but only all he ought. Having observ’d this redundancy in Chaucer, (as it is an easy matter for a man of ordinary parts to find a fault in one of greater,) I have not tied myself to a literal translation; but have often omitted what I judg’d unnecessary, or not of dignity enough to appear in the company of better thoughts. I have presum’d farther, in some places, and added somewhat of my own where I thought my author was deficient, and had not given his thoughts their true luster, for want of words in the beginning of our language. and to this I was the more embolden’d, because (if I may be permitted to say it of myself) I found I had a soul congenial to his, and that I had been conversant in the same studies.
But what's most surprising about this view of translation as an active, engaged force, is that however much it obliterates, it allows so much freedom for revision that it creates a sense of historical continuity between the various attempts to update the words. History ceases to be a barrier, and begins to be a tradition that translation alone establishes. Thus Dryden continues:
Another poet, in another age, may take the same liberty with my writings; if at least they live long enough to deserve correction.
And you can see some of these principles in the amazing translations. I'll end the post by just selecting two. First, the opening of the Knight's tale, and then the unbelievable translation of the description of the Parson. Here's Chaucer's opening of the Knight's tale:
Whilom, as olde stories tellen us,
There was a duke that highte Theseus.
Of Athens he was lord and governor,
And in his time such a conqueror
That greater was there none under the sun.
Full many a riche country had he won.
What with his wisdom and his chivalry,
He conquer'd all the regne of Feminie,
That whilom was y-cleped Scythia;
And weddede the Queen Hippolyta
And brought her home with him to his country
With muchel glory and great solemnity,
And eke her younge sister Emily,
And thus with vict'ry and with melody
Let I this worthy Duke to Athens ride,
And all his host, in armes him beside.
And certes, if it n'ere too long to hear,
I would have told you fully the mannere,
How wonnen was the regne of Feminie,
By Theseus, and by his chivalry;
And of the greate battle for the nonce
Betwixt Athenes and the Amazons;
And how assieged was Hippolyta,
The faire hardy queen of Scythia;
And of the feast that was at her wedding
And of the tempest at her homecoming.
But all these things I must as now forbear.
I have, God wot, a large field to ear;
And weake be the oxen in my plough;
The remnant of my tale is long enow.
I will not letten eke none of this rout.
Let every fellow tell his tale about,
And let see now who shall the supper win.
There as I left, I will again begin.
And here's Dryden:
In days of old, there lived, of mighty fame,
A valiant prince, and Theseus was his name:
A chief, who more in feats of arms excell'd,
The rising nor the setting sun beheld.
Of Athens he was lord; much land he won,
And added foreign countries to his crown.
In Scythia with the warrior queen he strove,
Whom first by force he conquer'd, then by love;
He brought in triumph back the beauteous dame,
With whom her sister, fair Emilia, came.
With honour to his home let Theseus ride,
With love to friend, and fortune for his guide,
And his victorious army at his side.
I pass their warlike pomp, their proud array,
Their shouts, their songs, their welcome on the way.
But, were it not too long, I would recite
The feats of Amazons, the fatal fight
Betwixt the hardy queen and hero knight;
The town besieged, and how much blood it cost
The female army, and the Athenian host;
The spousals of Hippolita the queen;
What tilts and tourneys at the feast were seen;
The storm at their return, the ladies' fear:
But these, and other things, I must forbear.
The field is spacious I design to sow,
With oxen far unfit to draw the plough:
The remnant of my tale is of a length
To tire your patience, and to waste my strength;
And trivial accidents shall be forborne,
That others may have time to take their turn;
As was at first enjoin'd us by mine host:
That he whose tale is best, and pleases most,
Should win his supper at our common cost.
Despite the amazing reordering that goes on in Dryden's version--most significantly in terms of the syntax of the sentences themselves--the use of triplets and particular rhyme words to me actually seems to give some spirit of the original. What's gone is the rambling tone we attribute to Middle English, and I find that it actually makes me think about whether I really do take Chaucer seriously when I read him in the original--no small feat of Dryden's.
Now, for the Parson. Dryden notes under the title that it is "imitated from Chaucer," not translated. He also says it is "enlarged." Now, this is because (as you will see) he sticks in many lines that turn Chaucer's original into reflection on the state of religion under William and Mary--a clear instance of not only giving the words resonance, but the content as well. But, while he perhaps nowhere else used this much freedom with the content (for 13 lines in the Chaucer, Dryden takes over 40), I still think it is still a great example of how the language is updated as well. Here's Chaucer:
A good man was ther of religioun,
And was a povre PERSOUN OF A TOUN,
But riche he was of hooly thoght and werk.
He was also a lerned man, a clerk,
That Cristes gospel trewely wolde preche;
His parisshens devoutly wolde he teche.
Benynge he was, and wonder diligent,
And in adversitee ful pacient,
And swich he was ypreved ofte sithes.
Ful looth were hym to cursen for his tithes,
But rather wolde he yeven, out of doute,
Unto his povre parisshens aboute
He koude in litel thyng have suffisaunce.
And here's Dryden:
A parish priest was of the pilgrim train;
An awful, reverend, and religious man.
His eyes diffused a venerable grace,
And charity itself was in his face.
Rich was his soul, though his attire was poor;
(As God had clothed his own ambassador;)
For such, on earth, his bless'd Redeemer bore.
Of sixty years he seem'd; and well might last
To sixty more, but that he lived too fast;
Refined himself to soul, to curb the sense;
And made almost a sin of abstinence,
Yet, had his aspect nothing of severe,
But such a face as promised him sincere.
Nothing reserved or sullen was to see;
But sweet regards, and pleasing sanctity:
Mild was his accent, and his action free.
With eloquence innate his tongue was arm'd;
Though harsh the precept, yet the preacher charm'd.
For letting down the golden chain from high,
He drew his audience upward to the sky;
And oft, with holy hymns, he charm'd their ears:
(A music more melodious than the spheres.)
For David left him, when he went to rest,
His lyre; and after him he sung the best.
He bore his great commission in his look:
But sweetly temper'd awe; and soften'd all he spoke.
He preach'd the joys of heaven, and pains of hell;
And warn'd the sinner with becoming zeal;
But on eternal mercy loved to dwell.
He taught the gospel rather than the law,
And forced himself to drive: but loved to draw.
For fear but freezes minds; but love, like heat,
Exhales the soul sublime, to seek her native seat.
To threats the stubborn sinner oft is hard,
Wrapp'd in his crimes, against the storm prepared;
But, when the milder beams of mercy play,
He melts, and throws his cumbrous cloak away,
Lightning and thunder (heaven's artillery)
As harbingers before the Almighty fly:
Those but proclaim his style, and disappear;
The stiller sound succeeds, and God is there.
The tithes, his parish freely paid, he took;
But never sued, or cursed with bell and book.
With patience bearing wrong; but offering none:
Since every man is free to lose his own.
The country churls, according to their kind,
(Who grudge their dues, and love to be behind),
The less he sought his offerings, pinch'd the more,
And praised a priest contented to be poor.
But there are other judges, who think I ought not to have translated Chaucer into English, out of a quite contrary notion: they suppose there is a certain veneration due to his old language; and that it is little less than profanation and sacrilege to alter it. They are farther of opinion that somewhat of his good sense will suffer in this transfusion, and much of the beauty of his thoughts will infallibly be lost, which appear with more grace in their old habit. [...] Yet my reason was not convinc’d with what [was] urg’d against [the undertaking]. If the first end of a writer be to be understood, then as his language grows obsolete, his thoughts must grow obscure [...] When an ancient word for its sound and significancy deserves to be reviv’d, I have that reasonable veneration for antiquity, to restore it. All beyond this is superstition. Words are not like landmarks, so sacred as never to be remov’d; customs are chang’d, and even statutes are silently repeal’d, when the reason ceases for which they were enacted. As for the other part of the argument, that his thoughts will lose of their original beauty, by the innovation of words; in the first place, not only their beauty, but their being is lost, where they are no longer understood, which is the present case.
Making the original resonate also justifies significant elaboration on the original: the argument allows translation the dignity and freedom of imitation, by giving it this unique and slightly different power:
Chaucer, I confess, is a rough diamond, and must first be polish’d, ere he shines. I deny not, likewise, that, living in our early days of poetry, he writes not always of a piece, but sometimes mingles trivial things with those of greater moment. Sometimes also, tho’ not often, he runs riot, like Ovid, and knows not when he has said enough. But there are more great wits, beside Chaucer, whose fault is their excess of conceits, and those ill sorted. An author is not to write all he can, but only all he ought. Having observ’d this redundancy in Chaucer, (as it is an easy matter for a man of ordinary parts to find a fault in one of greater,) I have not tied myself to a literal translation; but have often omitted what I judg’d unnecessary, or not of dignity enough to appear in the company of better thoughts. I have presum’d farther, in some places, and added somewhat of my own where I thought my author was deficient, and had not given his thoughts their true luster, for want of words in the beginning of our language. and to this I was the more embolden’d, because (if I may be permitted to say it of myself) I found I had a soul congenial to his, and that I had been conversant in the same studies.
But what's most surprising about this view of translation as an active, engaged force, is that however much it obliterates, it allows so much freedom for revision that it creates a sense of historical continuity between the various attempts to update the words. History ceases to be a barrier, and begins to be a tradition that translation alone establishes. Thus Dryden continues:
Another poet, in another age, may take the same liberty with my writings; if at least they live long enough to deserve correction.
And you can see some of these principles in the amazing translations. I'll end the post by just selecting two. First, the opening of the Knight's tale, and then the unbelievable translation of the description of the Parson. Here's Chaucer's opening of the Knight's tale:
Whilom, as olde stories tellen us,
There was a duke that highte Theseus.
Of Athens he was lord and governor,
And in his time such a conqueror
That greater was there none under the sun.
Full many a riche country had he won.
What with his wisdom and his chivalry,
He conquer'd all the regne of Feminie,
That whilom was y-cleped Scythia;
And weddede the Queen Hippolyta
And brought her home with him to his country
With muchel glory and great solemnity,
And eke her younge sister Emily,
And thus with vict'ry and with melody
Let I this worthy Duke to Athens ride,
And all his host, in armes him beside.
And certes, if it n'ere too long to hear,
I would have told you fully the mannere,
How wonnen was the regne of Feminie,
By Theseus, and by his chivalry;
And of the greate battle for the nonce
Betwixt Athenes and the Amazons;
And how assieged was Hippolyta,
The faire hardy queen of Scythia;
And of the feast that was at her wedding
And of the tempest at her homecoming.
But all these things I must as now forbear.
I have, God wot, a large field to ear;
And weake be the oxen in my plough;
The remnant of my tale is long enow.
I will not letten eke none of this rout.
Let every fellow tell his tale about,
And let see now who shall the supper win.
There as I left, I will again begin.
And here's Dryden:
In days of old, there lived, of mighty fame,
A valiant prince, and Theseus was his name:
A chief, who more in feats of arms excell'd,
The rising nor the setting sun beheld.
Of Athens he was lord; much land he won,
And added foreign countries to his crown.
In Scythia with the warrior queen he strove,
Whom first by force he conquer'd, then by love;
He brought in triumph back the beauteous dame,
With whom her sister, fair Emilia, came.
With honour to his home let Theseus ride,
With love to friend, and fortune for his guide,
And his victorious army at his side.
I pass their warlike pomp, their proud array,
Their shouts, their songs, their welcome on the way.
But, were it not too long, I would recite
The feats of Amazons, the fatal fight
Betwixt the hardy queen and hero knight;
The town besieged, and how much blood it cost
The female army, and the Athenian host;
The spousals of Hippolita the queen;
What tilts and tourneys at the feast were seen;
The storm at their return, the ladies' fear:
But these, and other things, I must forbear.
The field is spacious I design to sow,
With oxen far unfit to draw the plough:
The remnant of my tale is of a length
To tire your patience, and to waste my strength;
And trivial accidents shall be forborne,
That others may have time to take their turn;
As was at first enjoin'd us by mine host:
That he whose tale is best, and pleases most,
Should win his supper at our common cost.
Despite the amazing reordering that goes on in Dryden's version--most significantly in terms of the syntax of the sentences themselves--the use of triplets and particular rhyme words to me actually seems to give some spirit of the original. What's gone is the rambling tone we attribute to Middle English, and I find that it actually makes me think about whether I really do take Chaucer seriously when I read him in the original--no small feat of Dryden's.
Now, for the Parson. Dryden notes under the title that it is "imitated from Chaucer," not translated. He also says it is "enlarged." Now, this is because (as you will see) he sticks in many lines that turn Chaucer's original into reflection on the state of religion under William and Mary--a clear instance of not only giving the words resonance, but the content as well. But, while he perhaps nowhere else used this much freedom with the content (for 13 lines in the Chaucer, Dryden takes over 40), I still think it is still a great example of how the language is updated as well. Here's Chaucer:
A good man was ther of religioun,
And was a povre PERSOUN OF A TOUN,
But riche he was of hooly thoght and werk.
He was also a lerned man, a clerk,
That Cristes gospel trewely wolde preche;
His parisshens devoutly wolde he teche.
Benynge he was, and wonder diligent,
And in adversitee ful pacient,
And swich he was ypreved ofte sithes.
Ful looth were hym to cursen for his tithes,
But rather wolde he yeven, out of doute,
Unto his povre parisshens aboute
He koude in litel thyng have suffisaunce.
And here's Dryden:
A parish priest was of the pilgrim train;
An awful, reverend, and religious man.
His eyes diffused a venerable grace,
And charity itself was in his face.
Rich was his soul, though his attire was poor;
(As God had clothed his own ambassador;)
For such, on earth, his bless'd Redeemer bore.
Of sixty years he seem'd; and well might last
To sixty more, but that he lived too fast;
Refined himself to soul, to curb the sense;
And made almost a sin of abstinence,
Yet, had his aspect nothing of severe,
But such a face as promised him sincere.
Nothing reserved or sullen was to see;
But sweet regards, and pleasing sanctity:
Mild was his accent, and his action free.
With eloquence innate his tongue was arm'd;
Though harsh the precept, yet the preacher charm'd.
For letting down the golden chain from high,
He drew his audience upward to the sky;
And oft, with holy hymns, he charm'd their ears:
(A music more melodious than the spheres.)
For David left him, when he went to rest,
His lyre; and after him he sung the best.
He bore his great commission in his look:
But sweetly temper'd awe; and soften'd all he spoke.
He preach'd the joys of heaven, and pains of hell;
And warn'd the sinner with becoming zeal;
But on eternal mercy loved to dwell.
He taught the gospel rather than the law,
And forced himself to drive: but loved to draw.
For fear but freezes minds; but love, like heat,
Exhales the soul sublime, to seek her native seat.
To threats the stubborn sinner oft is hard,
Wrapp'd in his crimes, against the storm prepared;
But, when the milder beams of mercy play,
He melts, and throws his cumbrous cloak away,
Lightning and thunder (heaven's artillery)
As harbingers before the Almighty fly:
Those but proclaim his style, and disappear;
The stiller sound succeeds, and God is there.
The tithes, his parish freely paid, he took;
But never sued, or cursed with bell and book.
With patience bearing wrong; but offering none:
Since every man is free to lose his own.
The country churls, according to their kind,
(Who grudge their dues, and love to be behind),
The less he sought his offerings, pinch'd the more,
And praised a priest contented to be poor.
Friday, August 13, 2010
Dryden's version
Achilles cut him short; and thus replied:
My worth allow'd in words, is in effect denied.
For who but a poltroon, possess'd with fear,
Such haughty insolence can tamely bear?
Command thy slaves: my freeborn soul disdains
A tyrant's curb; and restive, breaks the reins.
Take this along; that no dispute shall rise
(Though mine the woman) for my ravish'd prize:
But, she excepted, as unworthy strife,
Dare not, I charge thee dare not, on thy life,
Touch ought of mine beside, by lot my due,
But stand aloof, and think profane to view:
This falchion, else, not hitherto withstood,
These hostile fields shall fatten with thy blood.
He said; and rose the first: the council broke;
And all their grave consults dissolv'd in smoke.
The royal youth retir'd, on vengeance bent,
Patroclus follow'd silent to his tent.
Mean time, the king with gifts a vessel stores;
Supplies the banks with twenty chosen oars:
And next, to reconcile the shooter god,
Within her hollow sides the sacrifice he stow'd:
Chryseis last was set on board; whose hand
Ulysses took, entrusted with command;
They plough the liquid seas, and leave the lessening land.
Atrides then, his outward zeal to boast,
Bade purify the sin-polluted host.
With perfect hecatombs the god they grac'd;
Whose offer'd entrails in the main were cast.
Black bulls, and bearded goats on altars lie;
And clouds of savory stench involve the sky.
-in Fables Ancient and Modern, lines 411-441
The break in the speech, where Homer makes Achilles' speech buckle under the force of his anger, is wonderfully rendered. Where Pope smoothes it out, and Fagles makes too big a deal of it, Dryden simply repeats: "Dare not, I charge thee dare not, on thy life..." You'll notice it takes advantage of the line, which Dryden always segments deftly: never breaking it up, and never shooting for too much equipoise or balance, he nevertheless uses all its parts to help him out. He doesn't treat the form as an empty container, or rather is happy to let what is transfused (his famous metaphor for translation), settle into the form in this or that way, and be moulded by it. It's like blowing glass, to use another metaphor from manufacture (Dryden, by the way, was fond of these: "the genius of our countrymen in general [is] rather to improve an invention than to invent themselves, as is evident not only in our poetry but in many of our manufactures"). You blow the glass and try to get the shape as perfect as you can, but you're constantly having to negotiate the ways this very fluid material changes, under the influence of time, heat, gravity. So you work with these forces and the changes they make in the material: you turn the shape around, smooth it out, or sometimes puff it out more and change its whole dimension (if you can't get it the way you want it on the small scale, you simply switch scales, shifting between them). You'll see what I mean when you look again at the passage and see the amount of enjambment, and find the heavy use of very hard caesuras--which start as medial but then, falling too early and too late, make the middle of the line a space of action instead of a place of balance (this is why the "Dare not" line is so great).
But there are also just some really crazy, creative choices, which just win you over. "Poltroon" is just amazing, a wonderful blurty sort of word, strange and foreign. It doesn't so much break propriety as transform itself into a cussword--the effect of this being differently forceful. Something similar happens with "in effect," which sounds way too familiar to our ears now but, if you hear it and stress it a little can hear has a wonderful sort of poignancy. There's also "ravish'd," which is quite unexpected, though you might miss it the first time through. And "dissolv'd in smoke." And then a wonderful metonymy, "the shooter god." "And leave the lessening land" is wonderful, and works well with the longer hexameter closing the scene. This also highlights Dryden's relatively sparing use of alliteration and assonance: unlike Pope, who (in my opinion) uses it too much in an effort to speed up the line, Dryden uses it economically, in select moments. This makes it stick.
Overall, though, there is that vigorousness that you can see in the first phrase, "cut him short": what a surprising, fresh way to lead you into the rest of the speech. If both Pope makes Homer energetic, nimble, rapid, restoring what he calls the "light" in the classic, Dryden's version of that energy is a sort of directness, forthrightness, even plainness, a willingness to be satisfied with less and with something rougher, but weirder or more curious.
Tuesday, August 3, 2010
The heroic couplet
Yvor Winters has a very famous defense of the heroic couplet in his mammoth collection In Defense of Reason. I'm inclined to agree with nearly all of its conclusions, though not with the vengeful sort of impulse that leads Winters to them (and often takes him further into more absurd generalizations). This is understandable though, since even if wasn't a consequence of his particularly vengeful poetics, which tried to undo years of a particularly expressionist or expressivist (what he loves to call "Romantic") view of the role of poetry and literature by valorizing an austere hyper-rationalism, the heroic couplet had been so crapped upon over the years by so many insensitive people that some retribution was due. What's really great and still shocking, though, is that Winters focuses his argument by pitting the couplet aganst blank verse:
The heroic couplet must have certain qualities which enable the poet employing it to pass easily from description, to lyricism, to didacticism, to satire, and so on, or even at times to combine several of these qualities at a single stroke. It is doubtful whether so much freedom is possible in blank verse; the only satirical poet who has employed blank verse with major success is Ben Jonson, and much of his satire depends upon significance derived from the structure of the play--the details from line to line are usually variations upon an anterior theme rather than autonomous summaries.
-In Defense of Reason, 141
You have to appreciate that poet-critic sense of there being a stake in various verse forms, such that the fate of poetry itself seems to be in the triumph of one form over another. Though I've expressed annoyance with the sort of overzealousness of poet-critics when they get on such a track as this in the past, you can't at all blame them here, when the issue is form; and critics actually can only benefit from trying to feel things more intensely in this way (as long as they don't, like poet-critics, start turning the focus of criticism away from interpretation and towards manifesto-writing: that's how you get theory). But I say this as if critics weren't this impassioned already: most good ones are, because they have a deep, nuanced sense of form and know the significance of shifts in form throughout literary history.
Of course, everything about Winters' argument turns on his equivocating about "freedom" when he says: "It is doubtful whether so much freedom is possible in blank verse." Later, he will say that he means by freedom what we usually take to be its opposite. But if we agree that there is some sense in which freedom in general includes ease in passing between the functions Winters enumerates (description, lyricism, didacticism, satire, etc.), it's very true that the heroic couplet actually has more freedom here than blank verse.
This is because what matters in blank verse is argument. Now, argument means much more than we tend to think it does in all sorts of verse forms, or subordinates more elements to its elaboration than we--who have a very un- or anti-didactic sense of the role of literature--are usually willing to grant. But blank verse takes this to the max, because without the unity of the line, it needs higher semantic connection or a tighter syntactic arrangement. At the same time, this grammatical demand actually allows nearly any rhetorical possibility to be deployed: rather than fall back on just a few--heroic verse notably squeezes everything it can get out of parallelism, chiasmus, zeugma, and the simile, because it isn't quite capacious enough to admit any other figures--the whole canon of rhetoric is open to blank verse, and can vary them with ease. Also, because the line is stable, but not confining, new areas of interplay between meter and sense open up that are less concerned with reinforcement and more with pure rhythm. All of this explains why Milton is so much better at blank verse than Wordsworth, though the latter has more nuanced sense of the line itself and everything it can do: each speech, each narrative bit of Paradise Lost is masterfully put together as an argument and advances the argument of the whole, and this is what drives the verse along and wins you over to its movements. In Wordsworth, the more reflective and lyric turn of the verse does not lend itself to such clarity of argument, and the principled resistance of Wordsworth to the classical canon of rhetoric--his immense privileging of certain tropes over others, which reorients rhetoric immensely--does not allow such full-on deployment of all linguistic possibilities. Only in meter does Wordsworth perhaps excel Milton as far as blank verse goes: whenever he wants to, he can easily pull off the contrapuntal effects which are the most spectacular sign of Milton's utter mastery of prosody, and complete exploitation of all the freedom of the open line--but he has such a nuanced sense of the role of rhythm (despite his rather flat theoretical presentation of it) that he can subordinate it to a timing which works on scales Milton (if only because of the novelty of his work) could not go down.
The point though, is that all of this can't happen in the heroic couplet--and that, really, this isn't a problem. For there are downsides to having the argument so much at the fore, and upsides to having a less strained relation between it and the verse form. Since in blank verse we are suddenly dealing with structures that extend over huge amounts of lines, and that suddenly become juxtaposed to the slightest variation in meter, the turns in the language, the points of pressure, become at once larger in scale and smaller than they were. This is wonderful if everything is connected via argument--we've seen what Wordsworth can do when these larger scales are exploited, and Milton most definitely plays with the smaller ones--but where argument now fills things in and connects, there was a very tight, well-fitting scale already established. And the heroic couplet takes advantage of nearly everything at this scale--which is, if not all of rhetoric, certainly most of rhetoric as well as all the tightest relations between rhyme, sense, and meter. So if we start to think of freedom in terms of a certain right-sizedness, being in the sweet spot which allows one to deftly switch between all these techniques of versification, we can see heroic couplet doesn't seem rigid or inflexible at all. Thus, Winters continues:
Ben Jonson himself employed the heroic couplet in some of his shorter poems, when he wished to indulge in a more direct and concentrated attack, and with remarkable vigor, in spite of the roughness of his versification. As a didactic instrument, blank verse is comparatively heavy and comparatively incapable of epigrammatic point; as a lyrical instrument, the range of blank verse, though wide, tends to be more closely limited to the grandiloquent and is less capable (in spite of charming passages in Fletcher and of Tears Idle Tears) of approaching the flexibility and variety of song. The heroic couplet, all things considered, appears to be the most flexible of forms: it can suggest by discreet imitation, the effects of nearly any other technique conceivable; it can contain all of these effects, if need be, in a single poem.
-In Defense of Reason, 141
You see, that's a bit strained, since whenever you read a heroic couplet you find it can very, very easily become monotonous (too regular) or, when it turns epigrammatic, too forced (too irregular). And then the comparison to blank verse becomes comical, since you'll find none of that there (the threat in blank verse, of course, is the prosaic, and even Milton falls into this sometimes). But Winters has certain very amazing possibilities of the couplet in mind, like the following, which he quotes:
No, no, poor suff’ring Heart, no Change endeavour,
Choose to sustain the smart, rather than leave her;
My ravish’d eyes behold such charms about her,
I can die with her, but not live without her:
One tender Sigh of hers to see me languish,
Will more than pay the price of my past anguish:
Beware, O cruel Fair, how you smile on me,
’Twas a kind look of yours that has undone me.
This is Dryden's very famous "One Happy Moment," and Winters is thinking about how, with the feminine ending here and the internal rhyme at the caesura, the thing turns into a song meter (see In Defense of Reason, 135-6).
But what's more telling to me is that he turns precisely to Dryden in making such a case for the heroic couplet against its strongest possible antagonist, blank verse, even though he thinks it just can't get any better than the more regular, consistent Pope:
Pope through the concentration of his entire forces upon a single method achieves a greater range in certain individual poems than Dryden ever achieves in a single poem. [...] Pope, in combining a comparable diversity into a single complexity, varies the couplet noticeably less than does Dryden; yet he is successful, and to the reader familiar with his sensibility he is one of the most exquisitely finished, as well as one of the most profoundly moving, poets in English.
-In Defense of Reason, 138
Given this, even though we might wonder why Pope couldn't be used to make the argument against blank verse, it's no surprise that after saying heroic couplets can contain"the effects of nearly any other technique conceivable [...] if need be, in a single poem," above, he gives up Dryden, and goes on to make the case for the intrinsic virtues of the couplet by hitting the point home with reference to "Popian balance":
What, then, makes the couplet so flexible? The answer can be given briefly: its seeming inflexibility. That is, the identity of the line is stronger in rhymed verse than in unrhymed, because a bell is rung at the end of every second line; the identity of the line will be stronger in the couplet than in any other stanza because the couplet is the simplest and most obvious form of stanza possible. [...] The poet may move in any direction whatever, and his movement will be almost automatically graduated by the metronomic undercurrent of regularity; and if he chooses at certain times to devote himself to prosaic explanation, the metronome and the Popian balance, emerging naked, are capable of giving his prose an incisiveness possible in no other form, and of maintaining the relationship of the didacticism to the rest of the poem--the relationship in regard to feeling, I mean, for a didactic passage would of necessity represent by explicit statement the rational relationships within the poem.
-In Defense of Reason, 142
This I think is a little too far, and is redolent of the minimalist excesses of Paul de Man, fascinated as both are with the automatic and mechanical. The bell is important, though, and even if things seem forced, Winters makes a lot of sense of it--if, that is, we read him a little against the grain and really understand that by the bell, he means not only rhyme but everything epigrammatic or everything involved in a concentrated turn in poetry, which rhyme so wonderfully helps out. This is what connects the bell to the argument about the identity of the line, more than the fact that this is the smallest stanza form.
Focusing on size and issues of regularity and automaticity instead leads him to say something which has to be one of the greatest little phrases I've read in criticism, but which seems a bit ridiculous:
A longer stanza is likely to be tyrannical.
-In Defense of Reason, 142
What follows is an interesting discussion of Spenser which justifies the statement more, so don't think it too ridiculous: my aim is only to show how committed Winters is to certain strands of his argument, rather than the one he should be following. He could have made a better case if he would have simply continued the argument against blank verse, for some people would say it is in blank verse that the identity of the line is strongest: shorn of all rhyme, it simply sits there, and rather than seeming like a part of the whole, it stands out all the more for remaining taut and internally unified. The argument here, if it would have admitted more of a role for the turn that rhyme itself gives verse, would have revealed this as a weak attempt to cover up the fact that the blank verse line is, essentially, not even a part, but a fragment, relying too much on meter. But that also would take Winters beyond the rigorous couplet of Pope back to the looser, more fanciful couplet of Dryden, who is willing often to extend a couplet into a triplet, or use amazing and absolutely unexpected rhymes and variations between rhymes. The form wouldn't be as pure.
But this, I think, should recommend Dryden all the more as the true hero of the heroic couplet, saving the form from the most vicious attacks: indeed, if we wanted to extend the argument more, we'd cite the fact that Dryden watched Milton very closely, and clearly thought his translations were a way of rivalling Milton, though they couldn't be original works of his own genius in the same sense. There's just nothing like the relaxed nimbleness of Dryden, the combination of a confident, strong line with the ability to make it fold and reform around the most playful thought. And if this isn't accomplished always by the most taut, tensed, controlled version of the form, the form in Dryden provokes it, which I think is more important than whether it is pure or not. The thing is just sheer fun, in a sense which the work and even play of Pope can't approach.
Especially when Pope is are understood as automatic, and this is the point at which we have to remember that, unlike Winters, the fact that Pope doesn't approach Dryden in this particular respect doesn't actually argue against him. For if I think that Dryden's example can defend the couplet better than Pope's, I mean only that: it does not imply that Dryden actually has a purer couplet, as Winters does with Pope. The idea that the purest form makes the best, least vulnerable model presupposes a lot about form itself that is pretty dubious, and shows us that questions about the vitality of a particular form in the end need to be posed differently and in a more historical manner: concerned with vitality, we can easily go beyond passionately delineating what a form can do when compared to another form, and, like Winters, start comparing versions of the same thing in some weird search to find the form itself. Such an effort ultimately to make us feel the weight of the form's accessibility--or, more likely, its inaccessibility--as if we ourselves could simply take it up again. Not that we can't: it's just that this will be more complex, more social and more historical venture than the effort (even given that Winters pursues it with more consciousness of the social and historical role of poetry than most) would make it seem.
In short, we shouldn't think of Pope as purer than Dryden, or Dryden as purer than Pope. Rather, we should say that Pope just has a certain inventiveness that works on a different level than Dryden, and accomplishes different things. Dryden seems to me to indeed remain more committed to the individual line, and experiments more than Pope with metrical possibilities--in the sense that Pope has too capatious an understanding of them all not to explore one without a point, just for sheer fun, and never with that happy sort of ignorance as to how it will come out. He thus actually works at the expense of the heroic couplet as a couplet sometimes. Pope, on the other hand works continually to display and reinforce masterfully chosen diction, to hit home something almost too clearly. And so when he uses the couplet, he is much more within it, exploring its ability to vary and indeed balance: one might say he thinks more in the couplet, distributing ideas and words with precision. It is from this that Pope's poise and balance comes, not from regularity.
The heroic couplet must have certain qualities which enable the poet employing it to pass easily from description, to lyricism, to didacticism, to satire, and so on, or even at times to combine several of these qualities at a single stroke. It is doubtful whether so much freedom is possible in blank verse; the only satirical poet who has employed blank verse with major success is Ben Jonson, and much of his satire depends upon significance derived from the structure of the play--the details from line to line are usually variations upon an anterior theme rather than autonomous summaries.
-In Defense of Reason, 141
You have to appreciate that poet-critic sense of there being a stake in various verse forms, such that the fate of poetry itself seems to be in the triumph of one form over another. Though I've expressed annoyance with the sort of overzealousness of poet-critics when they get on such a track as this in the past, you can't at all blame them here, when the issue is form; and critics actually can only benefit from trying to feel things more intensely in this way (as long as they don't, like poet-critics, start turning the focus of criticism away from interpretation and towards manifesto-writing: that's how you get theory). But I say this as if critics weren't this impassioned already: most good ones are, because they have a deep, nuanced sense of form and know the significance of shifts in form throughout literary history.
Of course, everything about Winters' argument turns on his equivocating about "freedom" when he says: "It is doubtful whether so much freedom is possible in blank verse." Later, he will say that he means by freedom what we usually take to be its opposite. But if we agree that there is some sense in which freedom in general includes ease in passing between the functions Winters enumerates (description, lyricism, didacticism, satire, etc.), it's very true that the heroic couplet actually has more freedom here than blank verse.
This is because what matters in blank verse is argument. Now, argument means much more than we tend to think it does in all sorts of verse forms, or subordinates more elements to its elaboration than we--who have a very un- or anti-didactic sense of the role of literature--are usually willing to grant. But blank verse takes this to the max, because without the unity of the line, it needs higher semantic connection or a tighter syntactic arrangement. At the same time, this grammatical demand actually allows nearly any rhetorical possibility to be deployed: rather than fall back on just a few--heroic verse notably squeezes everything it can get out of parallelism, chiasmus, zeugma, and the simile, because it isn't quite capacious enough to admit any other figures--the whole canon of rhetoric is open to blank verse, and can vary them with ease. Also, because the line is stable, but not confining, new areas of interplay between meter and sense open up that are less concerned with reinforcement and more with pure rhythm. All of this explains why Milton is so much better at blank verse than Wordsworth, though the latter has more nuanced sense of the line itself and everything it can do: each speech, each narrative bit of Paradise Lost is masterfully put together as an argument and advances the argument of the whole, and this is what drives the verse along and wins you over to its movements. In Wordsworth, the more reflective and lyric turn of the verse does not lend itself to such clarity of argument, and the principled resistance of Wordsworth to the classical canon of rhetoric--his immense privileging of certain tropes over others, which reorients rhetoric immensely--does not allow such full-on deployment of all linguistic possibilities. Only in meter does Wordsworth perhaps excel Milton as far as blank verse goes: whenever he wants to, he can easily pull off the contrapuntal effects which are the most spectacular sign of Milton's utter mastery of prosody, and complete exploitation of all the freedom of the open line--but he has such a nuanced sense of the role of rhythm (despite his rather flat theoretical presentation of it) that he can subordinate it to a timing which works on scales Milton (if only because of the novelty of his work) could not go down.
The point though, is that all of this can't happen in the heroic couplet--and that, really, this isn't a problem. For there are downsides to having the argument so much at the fore, and upsides to having a less strained relation between it and the verse form. Since in blank verse we are suddenly dealing with structures that extend over huge amounts of lines, and that suddenly become juxtaposed to the slightest variation in meter, the turns in the language, the points of pressure, become at once larger in scale and smaller than they were. This is wonderful if everything is connected via argument--we've seen what Wordsworth can do when these larger scales are exploited, and Milton most definitely plays with the smaller ones--but where argument now fills things in and connects, there was a very tight, well-fitting scale already established. And the heroic couplet takes advantage of nearly everything at this scale--which is, if not all of rhetoric, certainly most of rhetoric as well as all the tightest relations between rhyme, sense, and meter. So if we start to think of freedom in terms of a certain right-sizedness, being in the sweet spot which allows one to deftly switch between all these techniques of versification, we can see heroic couplet doesn't seem rigid or inflexible at all. Thus, Winters continues:
Ben Jonson himself employed the heroic couplet in some of his shorter poems, when he wished to indulge in a more direct and concentrated attack, and with remarkable vigor, in spite of the roughness of his versification. As a didactic instrument, blank verse is comparatively heavy and comparatively incapable of epigrammatic point; as a lyrical instrument, the range of blank verse, though wide, tends to be more closely limited to the grandiloquent and is less capable (in spite of charming passages in Fletcher and of Tears Idle Tears) of approaching the flexibility and variety of song. The heroic couplet, all things considered, appears to be the most flexible of forms: it can suggest by discreet imitation, the effects of nearly any other technique conceivable; it can contain all of these effects, if need be, in a single poem.
-In Defense of Reason, 141
You see, that's a bit strained, since whenever you read a heroic couplet you find it can very, very easily become monotonous (too regular) or, when it turns epigrammatic, too forced (too irregular). And then the comparison to blank verse becomes comical, since you'll find none of that there (the threat in blank verse, of course, is the prosaic, and even Milton falls into this sometimes). But Winters has certain very amazing possibilities of the couplet in mind, like the following, which he quotes:
No, no, poor suff’ring Heart, no Change endeavour,
Choose to sustain the smart, rather than leave her;
My ravish’d eyes behold such charms about her,
I can die with her, but not live without her:
One tender Sigh of hers to see me languish,
Will more than pay the price of my past anguish:
Beware, O cruel Fair, how you smile on me,
’Twas a kind look of yours that has undone me.
This is Dryden's very famous "One Happy Moment," and Winters is thinking about how, with the feminine ending here and the internal rhyme at the caesura, the thing turns into a song meter (see In Defense of Reason, 135-6).
But what's more telling to me is that he turns precisely to Dryden in making such a case for the heroic couplet against its strongest possible antagonist, blank verse, even though he thinks it just can't get any better than the more regular, consistent Pope:
Pope through the concentration of his entire forces upon a single method achieves a greater range in certain individual poems than Dryden ever achieves in a single poem. [...] Pope, in combining a comparable diversity into a single complexity, varies the couplet noticeably less than does Dryden; yet he is successful, and to the reader familiar with his sensibility he is one of the most exquisitely finished, as well as one of the most profoundly moving, poets in English.
-In Defense of Reason, 138
Given this, even though we might wonder why Pope couldn't be used to make the argument against blank verse, it's no surprise that after saying heroic couplets can contain"the effects of nearly any other technique conceivable [...] if need be, in a single poem," above, he gives up Dryden, and goes on to make the case for the intrinsic virtues of the couplet by hitting the point home with reference to "Popian balance":
What, then, makes the couplet so flexible? The answer can be given briefly: its seeming inflexibility. That is, the identity of the line is stronger in rhymed verse than in unrhymed, because a bell is rung at the end of every second line; the identity of the line will be stronger in the couplet than in any other stanza because the couplet is the simplest and most obvious form of stanza possible. [...] The poet may move in any direction whatever, and his movement will be almost automatically graduated by the metronomic undercurrent of regularity; and if he chooses at certain times to devote himself to prosaic explanation, the metronome and the Popian balance, emerging naked, are capable of giving his prose an incisiveness possible in no other form, and of maintaining the relationship of the didacticism to the rest of the poem--the relationship in regard to feeling, I mean, for a didactic passage would of necessity represent by explicit statement the rational relationships within the poem.
-In Defense of Reason, 142
This I think is a little too far, and is redolent of the minimalist excesses of Paul de Man, fascinated as both are with the automatic and mechanical. The bell is important, though, and even if things seem forced, Winters makes a lot of sense of it--if, that is, we read him a little against the grain and really understand that by the bell, he means not only rhyme but everything epigrammatic or everything involved in a concentrated turn in poetry, which rhyme so wonderfully helps out. This is what connects the bell to the argument about the identity of the line, more than the fact that this is the smallest stanza form.
Focusing on size and issues of regularity and automaticity instead leads him to say something which has to be one of the greatest little phrases I've read in criticism, but which seems a bit ridiculous:
A longer stanza is likely to be tyrannical.
-In Defense of Reason, 142
What follows is an interesting discussion of Spenser which justifies the statement more, so don't think it too ridiculous: my aim is only to show how committed Winters is to certain strands of his argument, rather than the one he should be following. He could have made a better case if he would have simply continued the argument against blank verse, for some people would say it is in blank verse that the identity of the line is strongest: shorn of all rhyme, it simply sits there, and rather than seeming like a part of the whole, it stands out all the more for remaining taut and internally unified. The argument here, if it would have admitted more of a role for the turn that rhyme itself gives verse, would have revealed this as a weak attempt to cover up the fact that the blank verse line is, essentially, not even a part, but a fragment, relying too much on meter. But that also would take Winters beyond the rigorous couplet of Pope back to the looser, more fanciful couplet of Dryden, who is willing often to extend a couplet into a triplet, or use amazing and absolutely unexpected rhymes and variations between rhymes. The form wouldn't be as pure.
But this, I think, should recommend Dryden all the more as the true hero of the heroic couplet, saving the form from the most vicious attacks: indeed, if we wanted to extend the argument more, we'd cite the fact that Dryden watched Milton very closely, and clearly thought his translations were a way of rivalling Milton, though they couldn't be original works of his own genius in the same sense. There's just nothing like the relaxed nimbleness of Dryden, the combination of a confident, strong line with the ability to make it fold and reform around the most playful thought. And if this isn't accomplished always by the most taut, tensed, controlled version of the form, the form in Dryden provokes it, which I think is more important than whether it is pure or not. The thing is just sheer fun, in a sense which the work and even play of Pope can't approach.
Especially when Pope is are understood as automatic, and this is the point at which we have to remember that, unlike Winters, the fact that Pope doesn't approach Dryden in this particular respect doesn't actually argue against him. For if I think that Dryden's example can defend the couplet better than Pope's, I mean only that: it does not imply that Dryden actually has a purer couplet, as Winters does with Pope. The idea that the purest form makes the best, least vulnerable model presupposes a lot about form itself that is pretty dubious, and shows us that questions about the vitality of a particular form in the end need to be posed differently and in a more historical manner: concerned with vitality, we can easily go beyond passionately delineating what a form can do when compared to another form, and, like Winters, start comparing versions of the same thing in some weird search to find the form itself. Such an effort ultimately to make us feel the weight of the form's accessibility--or, more likely, its inaccessibility--as if we ourselves could simply take it up again. Not that we can't: it's just that this will be more complex, more social and more historical venture than the effort (even given that Winters pursues it with more consciousness of the social and historical role of poetry than most) would make it seem.
In short, we shouldn't think of Pope as purer than Dryden, or Dryden as purer than Pope. Rather, we should say that Pope just has a certain inventiveness that works on a different level than Dryden, and accomplishes different things. Dryden seems to me to indeed remain more committed to the individual line, and experiments more than Pope with metrical possibilities--in the sense that Pope has too capatious an understanding of them all not to explore one without a point, just for sheer fun, and never with that happy sort of ignorance as to how it will come out. He thus actually works at the expense of the heroic couplet as a couplet sometimes. Pope, on the other hand works continually to display and reinforce masterfully chosen diction, to hit home something almost too clearly. And so when he uses the couplet, he is much more within it, exploring its ability to vary and indeed balance: one might say he thinks more in the couplet, distributing ideas and words with precision. It is from this that Pope's poise and balance comes, not from regularity.
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