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Auden is right, I feel, in saying that an Englishman can nearly
always spot an American poem because "the fingering is quite different."
He quotes Frost:
But no, I was out for stars:
I would not come in.
I meant not even
if
asked:
And I hadn't been.
It is not only that "been" rhymes with "in"-not with "green"-as in
Elizabethan English. It is not only the informal "hadn't." It is some–
thing in the way the thing moves, ruminatively yet taciturnly, easy-paced
yet with an effect of dour strength in reserve; there is no exact equivalent
even in the work of Frost's close English disciple, Edward Thomas. It
comes down, I think, to rhythm and pitch and vowel colors in speech.
English vowels, many of them like the long
a's
and
a's
drawled out
into diphthongs, are extraordinarily various; there is a tendency in
American speech for vowels to shorten and simplify toward the short
u
or the short
a.
American speech is, again, much slower and more
even in pace than English speech; it does not hesitate and then hurry.
It has a less various pitch, fewer personal tunes; it does not pounce at
a higher pitch on key words, and then slither away from them down the
scale, as cultivated English speech tends to do. At levels where one
must be more subjective than that, one might say that American spoken
speech is friendlier than English spoken speech but shyer of intimacy:
more homely and familiar, but also less afraid of rhetoric. All these
national differences come out, for English readers, in American poets
of very different sorts. Let us take Frost, again, as an example, a very
fine short poem included by Auden, "The Middleness of the Road":
The road at the top of the rzse
Seems to come to an end
And take oft into the skies.
So at the distant bend
It seems to go into a wood,
The place of standing still
A s long the trees have stood.
But say what Fancy will,
The mineral drops that explode
To drive my ton of car
Are limited to the road.
They deal with near and far,
