10 Extraordinary Musical Gift. No poet has succeeded so perfectly in welding music and thought– of synchronizing, as it were the vibration of rhythm and emotion. “He changes the rhythm, not only from stanza to stanza and line to line, but from word to word, with every slightest variation of feeling.” “Shelley has the gift of lending poetry the sweetest and most liquid harmonies, not the most sonorous and sensual, but pure in their vehement intensity. The flowing ease with which the words merge into one another, at the same time as the ideas they call forth join up together, goes to prove that for Shelley, the most poetical of poets, the psychological melody and the cadence of syllables, as spontaneous the one as the other, naturally formed but one music. He has experimented with all rhythms: the suppleness and variety of his prosody are extraordinary; the Spenserian stanza of Adonais, the “terza rima” of the Triumph of Life, the metrical combinations of Prometheus, are the variations of a master upon accepted themes, or the inventions of an original genius, even when the form testifies to the poet’s
negligence, and as it were to his impatience. When it lacks the finish only to be acquired from an industrious art, it retains the felicity of inspired expression; and that language, like that measure, so individual, through their characteristic turn, their liquid but ever undulating flow, which is a continual creation, and not the forced adaptation of a rhythmic utterance to a preconceived framework, convey to us the poignant impression of contact with the innermost pulsations of the artist’s heart.” “In Shelley’s rhythm there is natural magic, and the Skylark poem is a very happy example of this.” The beauty and variety of his rhythm is remarkable (for example,’ Swifter far than summer’s flight’ the ‘Ode to the West Wind,’ ‘Rarely, rarely comest thou,’ the ‘snatches and fragments,’ The Sensitive Plant, etc) Word-music as well as the music of sound are noted characteristics of Shelley’s verse.
