In the foregoing lecture I ventured an attempt to investigate the
constant qualities of the poetical mind; in this I wish to consider
what are, speaking generally, the means at the poet’s disposal for
conveying his passion and his imaginative vision to his hearers. For of
poets, as of the rest of us, it may be said that--
“if our virtues
Did not go forth of us, ’twere all alike
As if we had them not.”
A “mute” Milton would certainly be “inglorious”; he would also be
useless: would he be conceivable? Undoubtedly we can distinguish in
thought the divine vision from the divine faculty which gives it
expression, but is this distinction anything more than logical?
May not the truth be that a poet expresses more than the rest of
the world because he sees more, and like the rest of the world can
express up to the limit of his vision? Our tutors and governors, when
we were children, used to receive with well-grounded suspicion our
not infrequent excuse for muteness, “I know, but I can’t explain”;
and it is equally probable that in poets the vision brings its own
interpretative faculty. It is beyond dispute that the poets who have
had the finest things to say are those who have said them most finely.
If we take those passages which Matthew Arnold once suggested as
touchstones of high poetic quality, and attempt to distinguish in them
what is form from what is substance, we shall find the task impossible.
“Wilt thou upon the high and giddy mast
Seal up the ship boy’s eyes, and rock his brains
In cradle of the rude, imperious surge?...”
Is there here one word not necessary for the picture it presents, one
epithet we could obelize as inserted in the interests of mere style?
“High” is not enough without “giddy,” because the poet wishes to
suggest the incredibleness, from a landsman’s point of view, of sleep
under such conditions; “rude” and “imperious” are both required to
suggest the power of sleep which can ignore so savage a tyrant, nay,
use him for her purposes, for it is the tossing that rocks the boy to
sleep. We may then lay it down that, just as when we have reached our
maturity and have something to say, the contents of our mind are, as a
matter of fact, conveyed into our language with no appreciable loss, so
that what we say is a faithful transcription of what we think, and our
friends are seldom at a loss for our meaning; so the poet’s mood, by
an even surer instinct, chooses for itself language which effectually
conveys his passion or imaginative vision. The mystery in the relation
of poetical vision to poetical expression is the prime mystery of
all human speech; it is a mystery, and we cannot get behind it; but
it is not greater in the case of poets than with ordinary men and
women. The great difference, from which all else depends, lies behind
expression, in the texture of the poet’s thought and feeling. I know
that it is the fashion of the moment to make more of the distinction
between artist and amateur than of that between poet and poetaster.
I am, however, not denying that the poet is an artist. The instinct
I speak of is an artistic instinct. Nor would I deny that every poet
must serve an apprenticeship to his art, and improve by practice his
gift of expression. It is to be hoped that even those of us who talk
prose improve by practice. My contention is merely that when the poem
is written and before us, it will take rank, supposing it to be a
true poem, by the thing said, and that it will be found impossible to
distinguish the substance from the form. A very simple consideration
will show the truth of this position. Why is it that the _Idylls of
the King_ and the _In Memoriam_ contain so many passages that the
world will quite willingly let die? If the chief thing in poetry were
the style, one part of these poems would be as good as another, for
the style is uniform throughout. The answer, in all such cases, is
that “soul is form and doth the body make.” What is wanting in the
weak places of these great poems is the soul, the poetic vision and
enthusiasm, the absence of which no style can compensate.
That being premised, we may go on to consider the most general means
which the poet does, as a matter of fact, employ to convey to us his
emotion.
1. Poetry is essentially passionate, and its passion requires a
heightened mode of expression. In our literature this is supplied by
metre. At its lowest, metre is, what Coleridge called it, “a stimulant
of the attention.” At the very least, it cuts off what is said from
ordinary surroundings and raises it to an ideal plane; so that if what
is said in metre be commonplace, its commonplaceness becomes at once
more apparent. Hence bad verse is more intolerable than bad prose.
But further, metre being not only rhythm but regulated rhythm, it is
excellently adapted as a medium for poetry, which is not only emotion
but, as Wordsworth said, “recollected emotion”; not wild passion, but
passion conceived of as something in itself precious, which the poet
wishes to impart to others. The poet desires to rouse not any emotion,
but some one emotion in particular. Hence various emotions find their
fit expression in appropriate metres. It is not by idle chance or mere
caprice that _Paradise Lost_ is written in iambic verse and Shelley’s
_Ode to a Skylark_ in trochaics. Even in metres which appear to be
least bound by rule, such as the choruses in _Samson Agonistes_, it
will be found on investigation that a reason underlies the apparent
vagary. It is with these rhythms as with the wheels in Ezekiel’s
vision: “To the place whither the head looked they followed it, for
the spirit of a living creature was in them.”
But although every poem must be written not in rhythm only, but in
metre, it is possible while preserving the framework of metre to vary
the rhythm by changes in pause and accent. Hood’s _Eugene Aram_ and
Rossetti’s _Blessed Damosel_ are written in the same metre, but the
differences in rhythm are so great that the one poem never for a moment
suggests the other. Similarly Tennyson’s blank verse does not recall
Milton’s. And within the same poem a writer will vary his rhythm,
partly for the sake of the variety, but also in order to produce
special effects. Some such effects are fairly obvious and will be
found generalised in ancient and modern treatises, like Horace’s _Ars
Poetica_ and Pope’s _Essay on Criticism_:--
“When Ajax strives some rock’s vast weight to throw
The line too labours and the words move slow, &c.”
Other effects can only be recognized when the poet’s artistic sense has
achieved them. Thus in Tennyson’s _Idylls of the King_, we have, on
the ground-plan of his unrhymed five-accent line, effects as markedly
different as the following, in each of which the rhythm helps to
express the action described:--
“So dark a forethought roll’d about his brain,
As on a dull day in an Ocean cave
The blind wave feeling round his long sea-hall
In silence.”
“Gareth loosed the stone
From off his neck; then in the mere beside
Tumbled it; oilily bubbled up the mere.”
Almost any page of _Paradise Lost_ will supply examples of greater
or less subtlety. There is an easy contrast for instance between the
description of Satan’s mounting to the roof of Hell, where the rhythm
is almost dactylic:--
“Some times
He scours the right-hand coast, some times the left,
Now shaves with level wing the deep, then soars
_Up to the fiery concave, towering high_.”
and the succession of strong accents in the description of his flight
down to the earth from heaven:--
“_Down right into the world’s first region throws
His flight precipitant_ and winds with ease
Through the pure marble air his oblique ray
Amongst innumerable stars,”
while the rhythm follows with even more delicate faithfulness the other
motions described.
2. A second great means employed by English poetry to express emotion
is rhyme. Rhyme, as much as metre, is a mode of heightening expression,
a stimulant to the attention. Attempts have been made from time to
time to abandon the use of rhyme altogether, as a relic of barbarism.
Campion, who himself used rhyme to delightful effect, wrote a treatise
to prove its “unaptness for poesy”; and even Milton in his old age
wrote a preface to his epic in which he disparaged it, not only as a
“troublesome bondage in heroic poem,” which no doubt it is; and not
only as “the invention of a barbarous age to set off wretched matter
and lame metre,” as perhaps it was; but as “a thing of itself to all
judicious ears trivial, and of no true musical delight.” Thus the
author of _Paradise Lost_ turned his back on the author of _Lycidas_.
And yet still later in his life Milton’s true poetic instinct once more
vindicated rhyme against this critical judgment by using it to “set off
metre,” that was far from lame, in the choruses of _Samson_.
“All is best, though we oft doubt
What th’ unsearchable dispose
Of highest wisdom brings about
And ever best found in the close.
Oft he seems to hide his face
But unexpectedly returns,
And to his faithful champion hath in place
Bore witness gloriously whence Gaza mourns,
And all that band them to resist
His uncontrollable intent.
His servants he with new acquist
Of true experience from this great event
With peace and consolation hath dismist
And calm of mind, all passion spent.”
Is the rhyme in this fine passage otiose and trivial? No one can fail
to observe what variety it lends to the chorus by ringing the changes
on all the chief vowel sounds, or how it marks sections of the thought;
first the text, then the illustration, then the moral. The second
section, indeed, runs on into the third quatrain of rhymes; but by
that slight irregularity the ode is bound together, and the ear kept on
the alert, until the full close, for the chime that is sure to come.
3. These things, then, metre and rhyme, being granted to the poet as
two ingredients of his magic cauldron, by means of which he is to
conjure up the mood or scene that he desires to set before us, we come
to the third, his use of words, and proceed to enquire whether there
are any principles governing the use of language peculiar to poetry.
Here it must be remembered that all a critic can do is to analyse more
or less successfully what methods have actually been employed by this
poet and that for the production of their effects. There is no one
poetic method, just as there is no separate poetic vocabulary. Every
new poet will achieve his new result in a new way, which he will find
the easier and also the harder for the enterprise of his predecessors.
There are, however, two or three artistic principles of universal
application which call for notice. The first is, that the poem must
have an atmosphere of its own; or, to change the metaphor, the words
must be all in the same key. Now, no mere poetical joinery can achieve
such a result as this. Unless the words are generated by “thoughts that
breathe,” they will have no life in them, and no natural and inevitable
relation to each other. For an example, take a quatrain from Gray’s
beautiful sonnet upon his friend West:--
“These ears, alas! for other notes repine;
A different object do these eyes require;
My lonely anguish melts no heart but mine,
And in my breast the imperfect joys expire.”
These lines were chosen by Wordsworth in his famous Preface to point
the moral that the language of poetry differs in no respect from that
of prose when it is well written. The moral they really point is a
different one. Their tone is unique; it is unlike that of any other
elegy in the language. The poet’s instinct has guided him securely to
express his own special emotion, and to avoid any word “of dissonant
mood from his complaint.” Whether the words might be classed as prosaic
or poetical he has not stopped to enquire. If a poetaster had been
writing the sonnet, he would have avoided what would have seemed to
him so tame an expression as “the imperfect joys expire.” But how
absolutely right it is, in its place and for its purpose. Again, what
but genius could have conceived the reticence of the two epithets
“other” and “different”? It should be clear, then, that one principle
governing the use of words in poetry is that every poem must have an
atmosphere of its own; it must be in a definite mode, to which the
poet’s emotion will guide him surely. The poet’s passion may be any one
of a myriad moods, for the heart of man is infinite, and the special
quality of the particular passion will show itself in the quality of
the words. We shall feel it in them, even though we are not able to
describe it. When people say “this is genuine poetry,” what they
often mean is that a passionate mood has succeeded, by the poet’s
instinct, in condensing itself into words, and in reading the words
they distinguish the passion. Consider, for a second example, a stanza
in Wordsworth’s _Solitary Reaper_:--
“Will no one tell me what she sings?
Perhaps the plaintive numbers flow
For old, unhappy, far-off things,
And battles long ago.”
If we take these lines to pieces, we may be tempted to say it is the
prosiest verse ever written; “old,” “unhappy,” “far-off,” are words of
an everyday vocabulary, and “Will no one tell me what she sings?” might
almost occur in any drawing-room conversation. But if we are content
not to take the passage to pieces, if we are content to receive it and
let it make its own impression as a whole, we must acknowledge it to
be a perfect rendering of the effect on the poet’s mind of the wild,
vague, sad Highland music. A good proof of poetical adequacy is that
such lines cannot be paraphrased.
It is an interesting experience to take up a Shakespeare and remark
how the speeches, apart from their merely grammatical sense, are all
pitched in a certain key, and make on us the impression of a definite
mood. Take, for an instance, the familiar lines of Demetrius in _A
Midsummer Night’s Dream_, after the troubles and misunderstandings of
the night are over and he is looking back upon them:--
“These things seem small and undistinguishable,
Like far-off mountains turned into clouds.”
The mere grammatical sense, if the words were paraphrased, would not
be striking, but the words themselves convey--who can tell how?--the
wondering reverie of a man still only half awake[3]. It is even more
interesting to study with the same view the pictures of landscape in
the works of the great masters. Landscape, of course, is far from being
a fixed quantity. The poet, indeed, paints what he _sees_; but that
means he paints what _he_ sees; and in painting he paints his own mood,
even though he does not necessarily mean to do so. How definite is the
mood of the concluding passage of Keats’ _Ode to Autumn_:--
“Hedge-crickets sing, and now, with treble soft,
The redbreast whistles from a garden croft,
And gathering swallows twitter in the skies.”
The tone of the words is of a somewhat meagre joy. All the verbs
contain the vowel _i_, the thinnest of vowels. The poet seems to say:
“The glory of the year is departing, but it is not yet gone, let us
make the best of what remains.” He does not say that; he gives but a
hint of it in the gathering of the swallows, and for the rest sings the
best _Jubilate_ he can. But the mood is unmistakable. Contrast with it
as celebrated a picture of Autumn, that by Crabbe, at the end of _Delay
has Danger_:--
“He saw the wind upon the water blow;
Far to the left he saw the huts of men,
Half hid in mist that hung upon the fen;
Before him swallows, gathering for the sea,
Took their short flights, and twittered on the lea;
And near the bean-sheaf stood, the harvest done,
And slowly blackened in the sickly sun.”
There is only one epithet there which very definitely fixes the key of
the passage, the epithet “sickly”; and I am not sure that it does not
a little force the note, and spoil the harmony. Apart from that there
is nothing; and yet the mood is unmistakable. It is a mood of deep
dejection. You can hear it in every line, even in such a line as
“He saw the wind upon the water blow,”
which contains no epithet, and yet makes you shiver. I need not,
perhaps, further illustrate this first principle, that given a mood of
emotion, it can and will find means of expressing itself unmistakably.
It may, however, be well to illustrate the fact that the poet’s
instinct may not always secure the most adequate expression at the
first attempt. In Trinity College, Cambridge, there is preserved
a manuscript of certain of Milton’s minor poems which shows that
he achieved some of his most consummate results by a series of
experiments, each bringing him nearer to his goal. One of the most
marvellous lines in the _Comus_ comes in a passage where the Lady lost
in the dark wood falls a prey to vague midnight fancies, and says:--
“A thousand fantasies
Begin to throng into my memory
Of calling shapes, and beckoning shadows dire,
_And airy tongues that syllable men’s names_
On sands and shores and desert wildernesses.”
For the line in italics Milton had originally written “And airy
tongues that lure night-wanderers”; but how vastly better did his
second thoughts convey his sense. “Syllable” is a word exquisitely
fitted for his purpose. Being pure sound, it suggests the idea of
words being uttered that are mere sounds, words said by “airy tongues”
with no intelligence behind them, words said clearly and carefully as
by a child who does not know the meaning of what he is saying. The
manuscripts of Shelley and Coleridge tell a like tale. And even where
manuscripts are not to be had, it is often possible, by comparing the
several editions of a poem, to see how, by a slight touch here and
there, the poet has succeeded in conveying his meaning to us more
perfectly. Let me give two examples from Tennyson. In the first edition
of the _Princess_, the first line of that exquisite song, “Home they
brought her warrior dead,” appeared as “Home they brought him, slain
with spears.” Clearly the poet perceived that he had been trying to
convey too much: the kind of battle in which the warrior fell was
really unimportant for his purpose; the important fact was the fact of
death. So he moved the word _dead_ to the most emphatic place in the
line, and implied the death in battle by the word _warrior_. The other
example I would adduce is the first line of _Tithonus_, which, when it
first appeared in the _Cornhill Magazine_, ran:--
“Ay me, ay me, the woods decay and fall.”
This was subsequently altered into its present form,
“The woods decay, the woods decay, and fall,”
a much better line under the circumstances; because the repetition of
the clause “the woods decay” creates a pause before the words “and
fall,” which are the words of most emphasis, and are thus thrown into
greater prominence. Tithonus, too, had decayed, like the leaves; unlike
them, he could not come altogether to an end. It is interesting also to
notice that while some poets are thus able to recollect their emotion
and improve by revision the expression of it, others totally lack this
power. A striking instance was William Morris.
A second great artistic principle in the poetical use of language
is the axiom laid down by Coleridge that a poet should “paint to
the imagination”; by which is meant that the poet should never, in
describing objects, labour to accumulate detail, but find some way of
summoning up his picture before our eyes at a stroke. This principle,
coming from a poet, reminds one, to compare great things with small,
of the explanations given by conjurors of their tricks. “That,” they
say, “is how it’s done.” How to do it is a different matter. But that
it is really done so, we may convince ourselves by taking examples.
Matthew Arnold among the touchstones of poetry, to which I have already
referred, included those lines of Milton about the Rape of Proserpine,
“Which cost Ceres all that pain
To seek her through the world.”
Who but a poet of the first rank would have dared that simple touch,
“_all that_ pain”; how effective it is upon the mind of the instructed
reader, for whom alone Milton wrote; what accumulation of epithet
could produce a tenth part of the effect? Whatever we have read in old
poets at once leaps to memory.
This principle of calling in the reader’s imagination to fill out the
poet’s outline helps us to understand why poets are so ready to compare
one thing with another. The process is a kind of hypnotism; the poet
makes a suggestion and the reader at once sees the picture[4]. A simple
and very effective instance is Tennyson’s comparison of the pallor of
the wounded King’s face to the fading moon--
“All his face was white
And colourless, and like the wither’d moon
Smote by the fresh beam of the springing East.”
The painting of landscape in the poetry of this century owes a great
deal to this illustrative method. It is plain that the most painful and
literal accuracy could not give the picture of autumn leaves driven
before the wind so fully and effectively as Shelley’s fine image--
“Like ghosts from an enchanter fleeing,”
or the picture of the sudden thrusting and thronging of spring buds in
hedgerows and garden beds so well as another image in the same poem--
“Driving sweet buds like flocks to feed in air.”
In still higher poetry we may see the principle at work in such a piece
as Shakespeare’s seventy-third sonnet:--
“That time of year thou mayst in me behold,
When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang
Upon those boughs which shake against the cold,--
Bare, ruin’d choirs, where late the sweet birds sang.
In me thou see’st the twilight of such day,
As, after sunset, fadeth in the west,
Which by and by black night doth take away,
Death’s second self, that seals up all in rest.
In me thou see’st the glowing of such fire,
That on the ashes of his youth doth lie,
As the death-bed whereon it must expire,
Consum’d with that which it was nourish’d by.
This thou perceiv’st, which makes thy love more strong,
To love that well, which thou must leave ere long.”
The root-thought in this sonnet is that the coming on of age makes the
friend’s love stronger, because the time is short. The picture of age
is brought before us, however, not directly, but by three pictorial
comparisons: first, to the dying of the year, then to the dying of each
day, then to the dying down of a fire; each supplying some vivid detail
which applies with special poignancy to the lover’s case--and the first
especially reminding us by reference to the “ruined choirs” that the
aged lover is also the poet.
In conclusion, it may be noted that there are certain qualities of
individual words of which poets, above all other writers, are careful
to take advantage. The poet is alive to the associations of words. In
the line quoted above from Gray,
“A different object do these eyes require,”
it is plain that the word _require_ is used with a reminiscence of such
a Virgilian line as
“Amissos longo socios sermone _requirunt_,”
and brings with it the wistfulness of the Latin. Milton and Tennyson
are especially happy in such learned use of words. Further, the poet
can, and constantly does, take advantage of the actual sound of the
words themselves. The device of alliteration has passed in English from
being part of the mechanism of all poetry, an initial rhyme, into a
means of producing special effects; effects as various as the quality
of the several letters. It needs no enforcing that in such a phrase as
Milton’s
“Behemoth, biggest born of earth,”
the repeated effort to form the labial helps the imagination to an
impression of bigness, while in another line of his--
“The world of waters wide and deep,”
or “wallowing unwieldy,” the open effect of the three w’s helps the
all-abroadness of the idea. So liquids minister to a verse of their
liquidity, and sibilants can soothe a verse to sleep as well as a
child. What goes commonly by the name of _onomatopœia_ is a step beyond
this. Here actual sounds in nature are more or less suggested. Some
words, such as _murmuring_, are themselves onomatopœic in origin;
others have come to be so by chance, or are compelled into such service
by the poet. Examples are _drizzling_, _trickling_, _tumbling_,
_noise_, _cry_, all of which are to be found in the stanza of the
_Faerie Queene_ describing the cave of Morpheus.
“And more to lull him in his slumber soft,
A trickling stream from high rock tumbling down,
And ever-drizzling rain upon the loft,
Mixt with a murmuring wind, much like the sown
Of swarming bees, did cast him in a swoun;
No other noise, nor people’s troublous cries,
As still are wont to annoy the wallèd town,
Might here be heard; but careless Quiet lies
Wrapt in eternal silence far from enemies.”
Beyond _onomatopœia_, again, we have in certain poets, but by no means
all, the power of suggesting by words not sound only but motion. Keats
succeeds occasionally in this sort of cinematographic effect, _e.g._,
in his description of a gust of wind coming and going.
“Save for one gradual solitary gust,
Which comes upon the silence and dies off
As if the ebbing air had but one wave.”
Much of the effect of this passage is due to the emphatic monosyllable
“comes,” which gives the impression of suddenness. Keats puts it to
much the same service in his description of the moon breaking from a
cloud. And much of the effect of Tennyson’s _Crossing the Bar_, one of
his most admirable pictures of motion, depends upon the monosyllabic
verbs.
“May there be no moaning of the bar
When I put out to sea,
But such a tide as _moving_ seems asleep
Too full for sound or foam,
When that which _drew_ out of the boundless deep,
_Turns_ again home.”
I will conclude with a passage, written by one who was himself a master
of the poetic craft, analysing the suggestiveness of the sound effects
in a couplet of Coleridge’s _Christabel_:--
“The brands were flat, the brands were dying,
Amid their own white ashes lying.”
“Here the cold vowels _a_, _i_, _o_ are the only ones which are openly
sounded, and of these _a_ is repeated five times, and _i_ three times,
the _e_ in the short _the_ preceding, as it does, the long syllable
_brand_ is scarcely heard; the ear is wholly occupied with the eight
cold vowels which occur in the long syllables of the eight feet that
constitute these lines. The only effect of warmth is a very slight one,
produced by the rapid succession of the consonants _b_, _r_ and _n_,
_d_ in the word _brand_. Again, there is an effect of weight conveyed
by the word _brand_, and to this effect we are invited to attend, by
the repetition of it, and by the first juxtaposition and contrast
of this word with other words conveying the notion of softness and
lightness; finally the two ideas of lightness and weight are united,
and the effect completed by the word _amid_, in which the sound passing
through the soft _m_ and its indistinct vowels, concludes in a heavy
_d_; and completes to a delicate ear and a prepared mind, the entire
picture of the weighty and smouldering brands, sunken through the light
mass of ashes which remains after their undisturbed combustion[5].”