'A Certain Organization of Normal Speech'

“The book is here for you to read.”

A librarian spoke this perfectly conventional little sentence to me Wednesday morning. The book in question was Rebecca West’s The Meaning of Treason (1947), which I’ve had an itch to read again since I recently reread “Circles of Perdition,” Whittaker Chambers’ review of it for Time magazine (collected in Ghosts on the Roof: Selected Journalism, ed. Terry Teachout, 1989). West’s volume is stored off-site in the Library Service Center. That morning I had requested it be delivered to the Fondren’s circulation desk.

I heard the librarian’s simple sentence as though it were the first line of a song, its eight little monosyllables composed in perfect iambic tetrameter. Think of the ninth line in Byron’s “She Walks in Beauty”: “One shade the more, one ray the less.” And then listen to yourself: English is heavily, naturally, unself-consciously iambic. Timothy Steele writes: “Because iambic rhythm suits English speech more naturally and flexibly than other rhythms, it has been the principal mode of English poetry from the time of Geoffrey Chaucer (14th c.) to the present day.” I’m no poet but I pay attention to rhythm in written and spoken English. I suspect if we became self-conscious about speech rhythms, our conversation would quickly turn stilted and pretentious. We would all sound like bad Shakespearean actors. Of course, most people are most eloquent in speech when not trying to be eloquent. The poet and essayist C.H. Sisson often cited Charles Maurras: “Reason may convince, but it is rhythm that persuades.” These are the reasons most free verse plods along indifferently, like a clumsy dancer.

In 1983, two years before his death, J.V. Cunningham gave a lengthy interview to Timothy Steele, who in 1997 would edit The Poems of J.V. Cunningham. Their transcribed talk was published in 1985 in The Iowa Review. Cunningham, a master of rhythm, says:

“Now it is perfectly true that meter is artificial, if you mean by that that it is a matter of art. But so is speech. What you mean by meter is a certain organization of normal speech patterns, or, to put it more accurately, a selection of the admissible ones, in a particular system, out of the total number. I once published a lecture, pointing out that a good number of our phrases and sentences are perfect iambic octosyllables or decasyllables. There are all sorts of examples: ‘Some people do, some people don’t.’ Or, one I rather like: ‘We ought to be in Cleveland in an hour.’ But, even more, I remember a friend telling me about an unhappy love affair and a long-distance conversation he had, and this stuck in his mind: the woman said, ‘How often shall I see you in a lifetime?’ I didn’t point out to him then that part of the memorability of that was that it was an iambic pentameter, absolutely regular.”