Our noun rhythm derives from a Greek verb meaning to flow. In literature, we most often associate the idea of rhythm with poetry, whose language is traditionally (but not always) set up in lines of measured cadences which create sound patterns we respond to emotionally—ideally to carry with that emotion its meaning, if not even its wisdom. There is, though, also something called prose rhythm, which appears when a writer writing unpoetically tries to regulate the flow of a sentence with structural patterns.
Thomas Kane, in his very useful textbook The New Oxford Guide to Writing, makes this point: “When things that we see or hear are repeated in identical or similar patterns the result is rhythm.” To illustrate this, let’s look at a short passage from Karl Vossler’s Mediaeval Culture (as translated from the original German by William Cranston Lawton). The second volume of Vossler’s masterly work begins its introduction of the Italian poet Dante and the Divine Comedy by pointing out how other cultures in the Middle Ages had much earlier begun to create literatures of their own. Vossler continues:
The striking feature is the relatively late and dull beginning and then the sudden and unrivalled blossoming of Italian literature. A long-hidden and quietly accumulated force suddenly released itself in the poetry of Dante—not a growth, but an outbreak. Mighty forces, therefore, must have been pressing against strong obstacles.
Let’s consider these three sentences as a set piece in its own right. Not so much strict argument as historical description, the passage can be said to have an energy beneath it because its central idea, the blossoming of Italian literature, works itself out, according to Vossler, from its dull beginning to a sudden release by virtue of a force against obstacles. That, we might say, is the logical paraphrase of the assertion the three sentences of the passage are together making. To paraphrase a passage is to restate the bare bones of its meaning in the most indicative of forms in order to reveal just its ideas.
To launch and carry those ideas from the mind to the heart, however, the author has written grammatical structures which in their repetition generate an energy we as careful readers should both notice and feel. The subject of the second sentence, for example, the noun force, has been augmented by two adjectives, each of which has itself been augmented by an adverb: long-hidden and quietly accumulated. This parallelism has us step and sit solidly into this subject phrase, and no sooner are we there than are we launched into a predicate which, importantly, leaves all its nouns unmodified: the poetry of Dante, not the grand poetry of the great Dante; a growth, not a lush growth; an outbreak, not a dramatic outbreak. In this absence of qualifiers in the predicate, the linguistic energy gathered in the compounded subject phrase, in other words, has released itself into open waters. Vossler’s sentence mimics his contention.
We should see, too, that the wave strength of this adverb-adjective-noun pattern in the subject of the second sentence had been building from the first sentence. There, every noun is qualified—striking feature, relatively late and dull beginning, unrivalled blossoming—and that sets up an expectation and an awareness in us of an exactitude on the writer’s part which requires us to think hard about the niceties of the ideas he is framing. This pushes back against us to read closely, slowing us down to think about the implications of all those adjectives; we find ourselves reading a compositional analogue to the mighty forces and strong obstacles named in the third sentence. This first sentence, then, has already established the structure which the subject phrase of the second sentence continues.
And we could find other homologues. The dash in the second sentence depicts the suddenness of the release, or outbreak, which Vossler is positing. And much could be said about just how we accent the adverb not, again in the second sentence: without any peculiar stress, the phrase not a growth would seem to conflict with the blossoming referred to in the first sentence. But if we stress the adverb slightly, whether aloud or innerly, the phrase suggests a sudden awareness on the part of the writer while in the act of writing—an unexpected, contemporaneous discovery that in fact, no, it was not a blossoming, but an outburst. Again, Vossler’s linguist structures follow his very thesis.
A classical style requires form to conform, that is, what is perceptible to us as art must try in its best places imaginatively to suggest in composition what it means in logic. The assumption in the classical vision of things is that everything—every last thing, now, then, and everywhen—is related to something else, that reality is an undulating, woven fabric whose every shudder is felt everywhere else. Such rhythmic movement implies intelligent energy; and so an artistic work must try to follow that metaphysical assumption about reality by depicting an idea in a form which harmonizes with the idea it is representing: if an outbreak after accumulated force, then repeated compound patterns breaking open into a simple predicate, then just the right word, then just the right punctuation—all together to conform in form with the idea being thought. Observing such an accord between grammar and meaning can be an education in itself—and a delight, as well, to find in practice what we have learned in theory.
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