326 The N.Z. Journal of Science and Technology. [July 
the second and third units now contain three instead of one or two 
syllables, yet the total time-value of the unit is unaltered : what has been 
altered is the time-value of the individual words. 
It is not necessary to mention the many theories that have been put 
forward from time to time : it may suffice to say that one after another 
they have been shown by later prosodists to be faulty. When, however, 
a prosodist advances a new theory, pointing out at the same time that all 
his predecessors have been wrong, we may be sure that before long another 
will come to point out that he too was wrong. I wish to say, however, that 
the prosodists my predecessors were all right—so far as their analysis was 
carried by them : the trouble is they were not agreed as to the nature of 
the thing they set out to analyse ; each has analysed a different part of 
the subject, or the same part from a different point of view. The two 
that I consider to have come nearest the truth are the poet Patmore and 
the present-day prosodist T. S. Omond. Patmore does but touch the truth 
and leave it in a short essay, whilst Omond has dealt with it at some 
length in his various books on the subject. 
The more minute analysis of the stress-unit may be left for the present 
—it is a very wide subject—and it may suffice.to note that by far the 
most common unit in British poetry is that containing two syllables. This 
unit has two kinds—that accented on the second syllable and unaccented 
on the first, and that accented on the first and unaccented on the second ; 
and of these two the former, usually called iambic, is again by far the more 
common. When it is noted that it forms the basic metre of dramatic 
blank verse, epic blank, heroic couplet, Spenserian stanza, sonnet, and of 
more than half of the lyric metres, it will be realized that it is really the 
fundamental unit. 
Is there any indication to suggest why this is so—why the two-syllabled 
unit, ordinary or abrupt, iambic or trochaic, forms the basic unit of all 
poetry ? Verse af its highest is a pure expression of the emotions, of such 
emotions as may be expressed in speech. In ordinary speech 120 words 
is the average spoken in one minute—say, 190 syllables. In reading aloud 
or reciting it will be found that an average of from 140 to 160 syllables 
are uttered in a minute—for no one reads aloud or recites as quickly as 
he speaks, more especially verse, where every beat must be regarded or 
the metre will be lost. The heart makes, normally, an average of slightly 
over 70 pulsations a minute ; so that in reading aloud or reciting, two 
syllables approximately are uttered to every pulsation. In every pulsation 
there are two beats ; and the French physician Laennec, in describing the 
sound and action of the pulsation, says, “ The relative duration . . . 
appears to me to be as follows : a third or a fourth is occupied by the 
systole of the auricles ; a fourth or a little less, by the state of quiescence ; 
and the half, or nearly so, by the systole of the ventricles. . . . Each 
beat of the arterial pulse corresponds to this double sound—in other words, to 
two sounds. One of these is clear and rapid . . . the other is more 
dull and prolonged.” So that the pulsation may evidently be represented 
by the signs usually adopted in prosody for short-long. The heart beats, 
in fact, in ordinary or iambic measure ; and as in listening to the ticking 
of a clock an accent may be heard on either beat at will, so an accent may 
be imagined on either the short or the long of the heart-beat; and in 
accordance as the accent is imagined so is the beating unit trochaic or 
iambic, abrupt or ordinary. 
This may, of course, be no more than an approximation ; but it is 
significant that such an approximation is even possible. The beat of the 
human pulse certainly seems to have been regarded as the measure of the 
