CHAPTER I

Produced by Eric Eldred, Charles Bidwell

and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team

A STUDY OF POETRY

by

BLISS PERRY

_Professor of English Literature in Harvard University_

Author of "A STUDY OF PROSE FICTION," "WALT WHITMAN,"

"THE AMERICAN MIND," etc.

TO

M. S. P.

PREFACE

The method of studying poetry which I have followed in this book was

sketched some years ago in my chapter on "Poetry" in _Counsel Upon the

Reading of Books_. My confidence that the genetic method is the natural

way of approaching the subject has been shared by many lovers of poetry.

I hope, however, that I have not allowed my insistence upon the threefold

process of "impression, transforming imagination, and expression" to

harden into a set formula. Formulas have a certain dangerous usefulness

for critics and teachers, but they are a very small part of one's training

in the appreciation of poetry.

I have allotted little or no space to the specific discussion of epic and

drama, as these types are adequately treated in many books. Our own

generation is peculiarly attracted by various forms of the lyric, and in

Part Two I have devoted especial attention to that field.

While I hope that the book may attract the traditional "general reader,"

I have also tried to arrange it in such a fashion that it may be utilized

in the classroom. I have therefore ventured, in the Notes and

Illustrations and Appendix, to suggest some methods and material for the

use of students.

I wish to express my obligations to Professor R. M. Alden, whose

_Introduction to Poetry_ and _English Verse_ I have used in my own Harvard

courses in poetry. His views of metre have probably influenced mine even

more than I am aware. The last decade, which has witnessed such an

extraordinary revival of interest in poetry, has produced many valuable

contributions to poetic theory. I have found Professor Fairchild's _Making

of Poetry_ particularly suggestive. Attention is called, in the Notes and

Bibliography, to many other recent books on the subject.

Professors A. S. Cook of Yale and F. B. Snyder of Northwestern University

have been kind enough to read in manuscript certain chapters of this book,

and Dr. P. F. Baum of Harvard has assisted me most courteously. I am

indebted to several fellow-writers for their consent to the use of

extracts from their books, particularly to Brander Matthews for a passage

from _These Many Years_ and to Henry Osborn Taylor for a passage from his

_Classical Heritage of the Middle Ages_.

I wish also to thank the publishers who have generously allowed me to use

brief quotations from copyrighted books, especially Henry Holt & Co. for

permission to use a quotation and drawing from William James's

_Psychology_, and The Macmillan Company for permission to borrow from John

La Farge's delightful _Considerations on Painting_.

B. P.

CONTENTS

PART I

POETRY IN GENERAL

I. A GLANCE AT THE BACKGROUND

II. THE PROVINCE OF POETRY

III. THE POET'S IMAGINATION

IV. THE POET'S WORDS

V. RHYTHM AND METRE

VI. RHYME, STANZA AND FREE VERSE

PART II

THE LYRIC IN PARTICULAR

VII. THE FIELD OF LYRIC POETRY

VIII. RELATIONSHIPS AND TYPES OF THE LYRIC

IX. RACE, EPOCH AND INDIVIDUAL

X. THE PRESENT STATUS OF THE LYRIC

NOTES AND ILLUSTRATIONS

APPENDIX

BIBLIOGRAPHY

INDEX

A STUDY OF POETRY

PART I

POETRY IN GENERAL

"Sidney and Shelley pleaded this cause.

Because they spoke, must we be dumb?"

GEORGE E. WOODBERRY, _A New Defense of Poetry_

A STUDY OF POETRY

CHAPTER I

A GLANCE AT THE BACKGROUND

It is a gray day in autumn. I am sitting at my desk, wondering how to

begin the first chapter of this book about poetry. Outside the window

a woman is contentedly kneeling on the upturned brown earth of her

tulip-bed, patting lovingly with her trowel as she covers the bulbs

for next spring's blossoming. Does she know Katharine Tynan's verses

about "Planting Bulbs"? Probably not. But I find myself dropping the

procrastinating pen, and murmuring some of the lines:

"Setting my bulbs a-row

In cold earth under the grasses,

Till the frost and the snow

Are gone and the Winter passes--

* * * * *

"Turning the sods and the clay

I think on the poor sad people

Hiding their dead away

In the churchyard, under the steeple.

"All poor women and men,

Broken-hearted and weeping,

Their dead they call on in vain,

Quietly smiling and sleeping.

"Friends, now listen and hear,

Give over crying and grieving,

There shall come a day and a year

When the dead shall be as the living.

"There shall come a call, a foot-fall,

And the golden trumpeters blowing

Shall stir the dead with their call,

Bid them be rising and going.

"Then in the daffodil weather,

Lover shall run to lover;

Friends all trooping together;

Death and Winter be over.

"Laying my bulbs in the dark,

Visions have I of hereafter.

Lip to lip, breast to breast, hark!

No more weeping, but laughter!"

Yet this is no way to start your chapter, suggests Conscience. Why do you

not write an opening paragraph, for better for worse, instead of looking

out of the window and quoting Katharine Tynan? And then it flashes over

me, in lieu of answer, that I have just discovered one way of beginning

the chapter, after all! For what I should like to do in this book is to

set forth in decent prose some of the strange potencies of verse: its

power, for instance, to seize upon a physical image like that of a woman

planting bulbs, and transmute it into a symbol of the resurrection of the

dead; its capacity for turning fact into truth and brown earth into

beauty; for remoulding the broken syllables of human speech into sheer

music; for lifting the mind, bowed down by wearying thought and haunting

fear, into a brooding ecstasy wherein weeping is changed into laughter and

autumnal premonitions of death into assurance of life, and the narrow

paths of individual experience are widened into those illimitable spaces

where the imagination rules. Poetry does all this, assuredly. But how? And

why? That is our problem.

"The future of poetry is immense," declared Matthew Arnold, and there are

few lovers of literature who doubt his triumphant assertion. But the past

of poetry is immense also: impressive in its sheer bulk and in its

immemorial duration. At a period earlier than any recorded history, poetry

seems to have occupied the attention of men, and some of the finest

spirits in every race that has attained to civilization have devoted

themselves to its production, or at least given themselves freely to the

enjoyment of reciting and reading verse, and of meditating upon its

significance. A consciousness of this rich human background should

accompany each new endeavor to examine the facts about poetry and to

determine its essential nature. The facts are indeed somewhat complicated,

and the nature of poetry, in certain aspects of it, at least, will remain

as always a mystery. Yet in that very complication and touch of mystery

there is a fascination which has laid its spell upon countless generations

of men, and which has been deepened rather than destroyed by the advance

of science and the results of scholarship. The study of folklore and

comparative literature has helped to explain some of the secrets of

poetry; the psychological laboratory, the history of criticism, the

investigation of linguistics, the modern developments in music and the

other arts, have all contributed something to our intelligent enjoyment of

the art of poetry and to our sense of its importance in the life of

humanity. There is no field of inquiry where the interrelations of

knowledge are more acutely to be perceived. The beginner in the study of

poetry may at once comfort himself and increase his zest by remembering

that any real training which he has already had in scientific observation,

in the habit of analysis, in the study of races and historic periods, in

the use of languages, in the practice or interpretation of any of the fine

arts, or even in any bodily exercise that has developed his sense of

rhythm, will be of ascertainable value to him in this new study.

But before attempting to apply his specific knowledge or aptitude to the

new field for investigation, he should be made aware of some of the wider

questions which the study of poetry involves. The first of these questions

has to do with the relations of the study of poetry to the general field

of Aesthetics.

_1. The Study of Poetry and the Study of Aesthetics_

The Greeks invented a convenient word to describe the study of poetry:

"Poetics." Aristotle's famous fragmentary treatise bore that title, and it

was concerned with the nature and laws of certain types of poetry and with

the relations of poetry to the other arts. For the Greeks assumed, as we

do, that poetry is an art: that it expresses emotion through words

rhythmically arranged. But as soon as they began to inquire into the

particular kind of emotion which is utilized in poetry and the various

rhythmical arrangements employed by poets, they found themselves compelled

to ask further questions. How do the other arts convey feeling? What

arrangement or rhythmic ordering of facts do they use in this process?

What takes place in us as we confront the work of art, or, in other words,

what is our reaction to an artistic stimulus?

For an answer to such wider questions as these, we moderns turn to the

so-called science of Aesthetics. This word, derived from the Greek

_aisthanomai_ (to perceive), has been defined as "anything having to do

with perception by the senses." But it was first used in its present sense

by the German thinker Baumgarten in the middle of the eighteenth century.

He meant by it "the theory of the fine arts." It has proved a convenient

term to describe both "The Science of the Beautiful" and "The Philosophy

of Beauty"; that is, both the analysis and classification of beautiful

things as well as speculation as to the origin and nature of Beauty

itself. But it should be borne in mind that aesthetic inquiry and answer

may precede by thousands of years the use of the formal language of

aesthetic theory. Mr. Kipling's "Story of Ung" cleverly represents the

cave-men as discussing the very topics which the contemporary studio and

classroom strive in vain to settle,--in vain, because they are the eternal

problems of art. Here are two faces, two trees, two colors, one of which

seems preferable to the other. Wherein lies the difference, as far as the

objects themselves are concerned? And what is it which the preferable face

or tree or color stirs or awakens within us as we look at it? These are

what we call aesthetic questions, but a man or a race may have a delicate

and sure sense of beauty without consciously asking such questions at all.

The awareness of beautiful objects in nature, and even the ability to

create a beautiful work of art, may not be accompanied by any gift for

aesthetic speculation. Conversely, many a Professor of aesthetics has

contentedly lived in an ugly house and you would not think that he had

ever looked at river or sky or had his pulses quickened by a tune.

Nevertheless, no one can turn the pages of a formal History of Aesthetics

without being reminded that the oldest and apparently the most simple

inquiries in this field may also be the subtlest and in a sense the most

modern. For illustration, take the three philosophical contributions of

the Greeks to aesthetic theory, as they are stated by Bosanquet:

[Footnote: Bosanquet, _History of Aesthetic_, chap. 3.]

(1) the conception that art deals with images, not realities, i.e. with

aesthetic "semblance" or things as they appear to the artist;

(2) the conception that art consists in "imitation," which they carried to

an absurdity, indeed, by arguing that an imitation must be less "valuable"

than the thing imitated;

(3) the conception that beauty consists in certain formal relations, such

as symmetry, harmony of parts--in a word, "unity in variety."

Now no one can snap a Kodak effectively without putting into practice the

first of these conceptions: nor understand the "new music" and "free

verse" without reckoning with both the second and the third. The value to

the student of poetry of some acquaintance with aesthetic theory is

sometimes direct, as in the really invaluable discussion contained in

Aristotle's _Poetics_, but more often, perhaps, it will be found in the

indirect stimulus to his sympathy and taste. For he must survey the

widespread sense of beauty in the ancient world, the splendid periods of

artistic creation in the Middle Ages, the growth of a new feeling for

landscape and for the richer and deeper human emotions, and the emergence

of the sense of the "significant" or individually "characteristic" in

the work of art. Finally he may come to lose himself with Kant or Hegel or

Coleridge in philosophical theories about the nature of beauty, or to

follow the curious analyses of experimental aesthetics in modern

laboratories, where the psycho-physical reactions to aesthetic stimuli are

cunningly registered and the effects of lines and colors and tones upon

the human organism are set forth with mathematical precision. He need not

trouble himself overmuch at the outset with definitions of Beauty. The

chief thing is to become aware of the long and intimate preoccupation of

men with beautiful objects and to remember that any inquiry into the

nature and laws of poetry will surely lead him into a deeper curiosity as

to the nature and manifestations of aesthetic feeling in general.

_2. The Impulse to Artistic Production_

Furthermore, no one can ask himself how it is that a poem comes into being

unless he also raises the wider question as to the origin and working of

the creative impulse in the other arts. It is clear that there is a gulf

between the mere sense of beauty--such as is possessed by primitive man,

or, in later stages of civilization, by the connoisseur in the fine

arts--and the concrete work of art. Thousands enjoy the statue, the

symphony, the ode; not one in a thousand can produce these objects.

Mere connoisseurship is sterile. "The ability to produce one fine line,"

said Edward FitzGerald, "transcends all the Able-Editor ability in this

ably-edited universe." What is the impulse which urges certain persons to

create beautiful objects? How is it that they cross the gulf which

separates the enjoyer from the producer?

It is easier to ask this question than to find a wholly satisfactory

answer to it. Plato's explanation, in the case of the poet, is simple

enough: it is the direct inspiration of the divinity,--the "god" takes

possession of the poet. Perhaps this may be true, in a sense, and we shall

revert to it later, but first let us look at some of the conditions for

the exercise of the creative impulse, as contemporary theorists have

endeavored to explain them.

Social relations, surely, afford one of the obvious conditions for the

impulse to art. The hand-clapping and thigh-smiting of primitive savages

in a state of crowd-excitement, the song-and-dance before admiring

spectators, the chorus of primitive ballads,--the crowd repeating and

altering the refrains,--the rhythmic song of laboring men and of women at

their weaving, sailors' "chanties," the celebration of funeral rites,

religious processional and pageant, are all expressions of communal

feeling, and it is this communal feeling--"the sense of joy in widest

commonalty spread"--which has inspired, in Greece and Italy, some of the

greatest artistic epochs. It is true that as civilization has proceeded,

this communal emotion has often seemed to fade away and leave us in the

presence of the individual artist only. We see Keats sitting at his garden

table writing the "Ode to Autumn," the lonely Shelley in the Cascine at

Florence composing the "West Wind," Wordsworth pacing the narrow walk

behind Dove Cottage and mumbling verses, Beethoven in his garret writing

music. But the creative act thus performed in solitude has a singular

potency, after all, for arousing that communal feeling which in the moment

of creation the artist seems to escape. What he produces in his loneliness

the world does not willingly let die. His work, as far as it becomes

known, really unites mankind. It fulfills a social purpose. "Its function

is social consolidation."

Tolstoy made so much of this "transmission of emotion," this "infectious"

quality of art as a means of union among men, that he reduced a good case

to an absurdity, for he argued himself into thinking that if a given work

of art does not infect the spectator--and preferably the uneducated

"peasant" spectator--with emotion, it is therefore not art at all. He

overlooked the obvious truth that there are certain types of difficult

or intricate beauty--in music, in architecture, and certainly in

poetry--which so tax the attention and the analytical and reflective

powers of the spectator as to make the inexperienced, uncultured spectator

or hearer simply unaware of the presence of beauty. Debussy's music,

Browning's dramatic monologues, Henry James's short stories, were not

written for Tolstoy's typical peasant. They would "transmit" to him

nothing at all. But although Tolstoy, a man of genius, overstated his case

with childlike perversity, he did valuable service in insisting upon

emotion as a basis for the art-impulse. The creative instinct is

undeniably accompanied by strong feeling, by pleasure in the actual work

of production and in the resultant object, and something of this pleasure

in the harmonious expression of emotion is shared by the competent

observer. The permanent vitality of a work of art does consist in its

capacity for stimulating and transmitting pleasure. One has only to think

of Gray's "Elegy" and the delight which it has afforded to generations of

men.

Another conception of the artistic impulse seeks to ally it with the

"play-instinct." According to Kant and Schiller there is a free "kingdom

of play" between the urgencies of necessity and of duty, and in this

sphere of freedom a man's whole nature has the chance to manifest itself.

He is wholly man only when he "plays," that is, when he is free to create.

Herbert Spencer and many subsequent theorists have pointed out the analogy

between the play of young animals, the free expression of their surplus

energy, their organic delight in the exercise of their muscles, and that

"playful" expenditure of a surplus of vitality which seems to characterize

the artist. This analogy is curiously suggestive, though it is

insufficient to account for all the phenomena concerned in human artistic

production.

The play theory, again, suggests that old and clairvoyant perception of

the Greeks that the art-impulse deals with aesthetic appearances rather

than with realities as such. The artist has to do with the semblance of

things; not with things as they "are in themselves" either physically or

logically, but with things as they appear to him. The work of the

impressionist painter or the imagist poet illustrates this conception. The

conventions of the stage are likewise a case in point. Stage settings,

conversations, actions, are all affected by the "_optique du théâtre_"

they are composed in a certain "key" which seeks to give a harmonious

impression, but which conveys frankly semblance and not reality. The

craving for "real" effects upon the stage is anti-aesthetic, like those

gladiatorial shows where persons were actually killed. I once saw an

unskilful fencer, acting the part of Romeo, really wound Tybalt: the

effect was lifelike, beyond question, but it was shocking.

From this doctrine of aesthetic semblance or "appearance" many thinkers

have drawn the conclusion that the pleasures afforded by art must in their

very nature be disinterested and sharable. Disinterested, because they

consist so largely in delighted contemplation merely. Women on the stage,

said Coquelin, should afford to the spectator "a theatrical pleasure only,

and not the pleasure of a lover." Compare with this the sprightly egotism

of the lyric poet's

"If she be not so to me,

What care I how fair she be?"

A certain aloofness is often felt to characterize great art: it is

perceived in the austerity and reserve of the Psyche of Naples and the

Venus of Melos:

"And music pours on mortals

Its beautiful disdain."

The lower pleasures of the senses of taste and touch, it is often pointed

out, are less pleasurable than the other senses when revived by memory.

Your dinner is _your_ dinner--your exclusive proprietorship of lower

pleasure--in a sense in which the snowy linen and gleaming silver and

radiant flowers upon the table are not yours only because they are

sharable. If music follows the dinner, though it be your favorite tune, it

is nevertheless not yours as what you have eaten is yours. Acute observers

like Santayana have denied or minimized this distinction, but the general

instinct of men persists in calling the pleasures of color and form and

sound "sharable," because they exist for all who can appreciate them.

The individual's happiness in these pleasures is not lessened, but rather

increased, by the coexistent happiness of others in the same object.

There is one other aspect of the artistic impulse which is of peculiar

importance to the student of poetry. It is this: the impulse toward

artistic creation always works along lines of order. The creative impulse

may remain a mystery in its essence, the play of blind instinct, as many

philosophers have supposed; a portion of the divine energy which is

somehow given to men. All sorts of men, good and bad, cultured and savage,

have now and again possessed this vital creative power. They have been

able to say with Thomas Lovell Beddoes:

"I have a bit of fiat in my soul,

And can myself create my little world."

The little world which their imagination has created may be represented

only by a totem pole or a colored basket or a few scratches on a piece of

bone; or it may be a temple or a symphony. But if it be anything more than

the mere whittling of a stick to exercise surplus energy, it is ordered

play or labor. It follows a method. It betrays remeditation. It is the

expression of something in the mind. And even the mere whittler usually

whittles his stick to a point: that is, he is "making" something.

His knife, almost before he is aware of what he is doing, follows a

pattern--invented in his brain on the instant or remembered from other

patterns. He gets pleasure from the sheer muscular activity, and from

his tactile sense of the bronze or steel as it penetrates the softer wood.

But he gets a higher pleasure still from his pattern, from his sense of

making something, no matter how idly. And as soon as the pattern or

purpose or "design" is recognized by others the maker's pleasure is

heightened, sharable. For he has accomplished the miracle: he has thrown

the raw material of feeling into form--and that form itself yields

pleasure. His "bit of fiat" has taken a piece of wood and transformed it:

made it expressive of something. All the "arts of design" among primitive

races show this pattern-instinct.

But the impulse toward an ordered expression of feeling is equally

apparent in the rudimentary stages of music and poetry. The striking of

hands or feet in unison, the rhythmic shout of many voices, the regular

beat of the tom-tom, the excited spectators of a college athletic contest

as they break spontaneously from individual shouting into waves of

cheering and of song, the quickened feet of negro stevedores as some one

starts a tune, the children's delight in joining hands and moving in a

circle, all serve to illustrate the law that as feeling gains in intensity

it tends toward ordered expression. Poetry, said Coleridge, in one of his

marvelous moments of insight, is the result of "a more than usual state of

emotion" combined "with more than usual order."

What has been said about play and sharable pleasure and the beginning of

design has been well summarized by Sidney Colvin:

[Footnote: Article on "The Fine Arts" in _Encyclopaedia Britannica_.]

"There are some things which we do because we must; these are our

necessities. There are other things which we do because we ought; these

are our duties. There are other things which we do because we like; these

are our play. Among the various kinds of things done by men only because

they like, the fine arts are those of which the results afford to many

permanent and disinterested delight, and of which the performance, calling

for premeditated skill, is capable of regulation up to a certain point,

but that point passed, has secrets beyond the reach and a freedom beyond

the restraint of rules."

_3. "Form" and "Significance" in the Arts_

If the fine arts, then, deal with the ordered or harmonious expression of

feeling, it is clear that any specific work of art may be regarded, at

least theoretically, from two points of view. We may look at its "outside"

or its "inside"; that is to say at its ordering of parts, its pattern, its

"form," or else at the feeling or idea which it conveys. This distinction

between form and content, between expression and that which is expressed,

is temptingly convenient. It is a useful tool of analysis, but it is

dangerous to try to make it anything more than that. If we were looking at

a water-pipe and the water which flows through it, it would be easy to

keep a clear distinction between the form of the iron pipe, and its

content of water. But in certain of the fine arts very noticeably, such as

music, and in a diminished degree, poetry, and more or less in all of

them, the form is the expression or content. A clear-cut dissection of the

component elements of outside and inside, of water-pipe and water within

it, becomes impossible. Listening to music is like looking at a brook;

there is no inside and outside, it is all one intricately blended complex

of sensation. Music is a perfect example of "embodied feeling," as

students of aesthetics term it, and the body is here inseparable from the

feeling. But in poetry, which is likewise embodied feeling, it is somewhat

easier to attempt, for purposes of logical analysis, a separation of the

component elements of thought (i.e. "content") and form. We speak

constantly of the "idea" of a poem as being more or less adequately

"expressed," that is, rendered in terms of form. The actual form of a

given lyric may or may not be suited to its mood,

[Footnote: Certainly not, for instance, in Wordsworth's "Reverie of Poor

Susan."]

or the poet may not have been a sufficiently skilful workman to achieve

success in the form or "pattern" which he has rightly chosen.

Even in poetry, then, the distinction between inside and outside,

content and form, has sometimes its value, and in other arts, like

painting and sculpture, it often becomes highly interesting and

instructive to attempt the separation of the two elements. The French

painter Millet, for instance, is said to have remarked to a pupil who

showed him a well-executed sketch: "You can paint. But what have you to

say?" The pupil's work had in Millet's eyes no "significance." The English

painter G. F. Watts often expressed himself in the same fashion: "I paint

first of all because I have something to say.... My intention has not been

so much to paint pictures that will charm the eye as to suggest great

thoughts that will appeal to the imagination and the heart and kindle all

that is best and noblest in humanity.... My work is a protest against the

modern opinion that Art should have nothing to say intellectually."

On the other hand, many distinguished artists and critics have given

assent to what has been called the "Persian carpet" theory of painting.

According to them a picture should be judged precisely as one judges a

Persian rug--by the perfection of its formal beauty, its harmonies of

line, color and texture, its "unity in variety." It is evident that the

men who hold this opinion are emphasizing form in the work of art, and

that Millet and Watts emphasized significance. One school is thinking

primarily of expression, and the other of that which is expressed. The

important point for the student of poetry to grasp is that this divergence

of opinion turns upon the question of relative emphasis. Even pure form,

or "a-priori form" as it has sometimes been called,--such as a

rectangle, a square, a cube,--carries a certain element of association

which gives it a degree of significance. There is no absolutely bare or

blank pattern. "Four-square" means something to the mind, because it is

intimately connected with our experience.

[Footnote: See Bosanquet, _Three Lectures on Aesthetic_, pp. 19, 29, 39,

and Santayana, _The Sense of Beauty_, p. 83.]

It cannot be a mere question of balance, parallelism and abstract "unity

in variety." The acanthus design in architectural ornament, the Saracenic

decoration on a sword-blade, aim indeed primarily at formal beauty and

little more. The Chinese laundryman hands you a red slip of paper covered

with strokes of black ink in strange characters. It is undecipherable to

you, yet it possesses in its sheer charm of color and line, something of

beauty, and the freedom and vigor of the strokes are expressive of

vitality. It is impossible that Maud's face should really have been

"Faultily faultless, icily regular, splendidly null,

Dead perfection, no more."

Nevertheless, though absolutely pure decorative beauty does not exist, the

artist may push the decorative principle very far, so far, indeed, that

his product lacks interest and proves tedious or nonsensical. There is

"nonsense-verse," as we shall see later, which fulfills every condition

for pure formal beauty in poetry. Yet it is not poetry, but only

nonsense-verse.

Now shift the interest from the form to the meaning contained in the work

of art, that is, to its significance. An expressive face is one that

reveals character. Its lines are suggestive of something. They are

associated, like the lines of purely decorative beauty, with more or less

obscure tracts of our experience, but they arouse a keen mental interest.

They stimulate, they are packed closely with meaning, with fact, with

representative quality. The same thing is true of certain landscapes.

Witness Thomas Hardy's famous description of Egdon Heath in _The Return of

the Native_. It is true of music. Certain modern music almost breaks down,

as music, under the weight of meaning, of fact, of thought, which the

composer has striven to make it carry.

There is no question that the principle of significance may be pushed too

far, just as the principle of decorative or purely formal beauty may be

emphasized too exclusively. But is there any real antagonism between the

elements of form and significance, beauty and expressiveness? This

question has been debated ever since the time of Winckelmann and Lessing.

The controversy over the work of such artists as Wagner, Browning,

Whitman, Rodin has turned largely upon it.

Browning himself strove to cut the difficult aesthetic knot with a rough

stroke of common sense:

"Is it so pretty

You can't discover if it means hope, fear,

Sorrow or joy? Won't beauty go with these?"

[Footnote: "Fra Lippo Lippi."]

He tried again in the well-known passage from _The Ring and the Book_:

"So may you paint your picture, twice show truth,

Beyond mere imagery on the wall,--

So note by note bring music from your mind

Deeper than ever e'en Beethoven dived,--

So write a book shall mean beyond the facts,

Suffice the eye and save the soul beside."

How Whistler, the author of _Ten O'Clock_ and the creator of exquisitely

lovely things, must have loathed that final line! But Bosanquet's

carefully framed definition of the beautiful, in his _History of

Aesthetic_, endeavors, like Browning, to adjust the different claims of

form and significance: "The beautiful is that which has characteristic or

individual expressiveness for sense-perception or imagination, subject to

the conditions of general or abstract expressiveness in the same medium."

That is to say, in less philosophical language, that as long as you

observe the laws of formal beauty which belong to the medium in which you

are working, you may be as expressive or significant as you like. But the

artist must be obedient to the terms of his chosen medium of expression;

if he is composing music or poetry he must not break the general laws of

music or poetry in order to attempt that valiant enterprise of saving a

soul.

_4. The Man in the Work of Art_

Though there is much in this matter of content and form which is baffling

to the student of general aesthetic theory, there is at least one aspect

of the question which the student of poetry must grasp clearly. It is

this: there is nothing in any work of art except what some man has put

there. _What he has put in_ is our content question; _what shape he has

put it into_ is our form question. In Bosanquet's more technical language:

"A man is the middle term between content and expression." There is

doubtless some element of mystery in what we call creative power, but this

is a part of man's mystery. There is no mystery in the artist's material

as such: he is working in pigments or clay or vibrating sound or whatever

other medium he has chosen. The qualities and possibilities of this

particular medium fascinate him, preoccupy him. He comes, as we say, to

think in terms of color or line or sound. He learns or may learn in time,

as Whistler bade him, "never to push a medium further than it will go."

The chief value of Lessing's epoch-making discussion of "time-arts" and

"space-arts" in his _Laokoon_ consisted in the emphasis laid upon the

specific material of the different arts, and hence upon the varying

opportunities which one medium or another affords to the artist. But

though human curiosity never wearies of examining the inexhaustible

possibilities of this or that material, it is chiefly concerned, after

all, in the use of material as it has been moulded by the fingers and the

brain of a particular artist. The material becomes transformed as it

passes through his "shop," in some such way as iron is transformed into

steel in a blast furnace. An apparatus called a "transformer" alters the

wave-length of an electrical current and reduces high pressure to low

pressure, or the reverse. The brain of the artist seems to function in a

somewhat similar manner as it reshapes the material furnished it by the

senses, and expresses it in new forms. Poetry furnishes striking

illustrations of the transformations wrought in the crucible of the

imagination, and we must look at these in detail in a subsequent chapter.

But it may be helpful here to quote the testimony of two or three artists

and then to examine the psychological basis of this central function of

the artist's mind.

"Painting is the expression of certain sensations," said Carolus Duran.

"You should not seek merely to copy the model that is posed before you,

but rather to take into account the impression that is made upon the

mind.... Take careful account of the substances that you must

render--wood, metal, textures, for instance. When you fail to reproduce

nature _as you feel it_, then you falsify it. _Painting is not done with

the eyes, but with the brain_."

W. W. Story, the sculptor, wrote: "Art is art because it is not nature....

The most perfect imitation of nature is therefore not art. _It must pass

through the mind of the artist and be changed_. Art is nature reflected

through the spiritual mirror, and tinged with all the sentiment, feeling,

passion of the spirit that reflects it."

In John La Farge's _Considerations on Painting_, a little book which is

full of suggestiveness to the student of literature, there are many

passages illustrating the conception of art as "the representation of the

artist's view of the world." La Farge points out that "drawing from life

is an exercise of memory. It might be said that the sight of the moment is

merely a theme upon which we embroider the memories of former likings,

former aspirations, former habits, images that we have cared for, and

through which we indicate to others our training, our race, the entire

educated part of our nature."

One of La Farge's concrete examples must be quoted at length:

[Footnote: _Considerations on Painting_, pp. 71-73. Macmillan.]

"I remember myself, years ago, sketching with two well-known men,

artists who were great friends, great cronies, asking each other all

the time, how to do this and how to do that; but absolutely

different in the texture of their minds and in the result that they

wished to obtain, so far as the pictures and drawings by which they

were well known to the public are concerned.

"What we made, or rather, I should say, what we wished to note, was

merely a memorandum of a passing effect upon the hills that lay

before us. We had no idea of expressing ourselves, or of studying in

any way the subject for any future use. We merely had the intention

to note this affair rapidly, and we had all used the same words to

express to each other what we liked in it. There were big clouds

rolling over hills, sky clearing above, dots of trees and water and

meadow-land below us, and the ground fell away suddenly before us.

Well, our three sketches were, in the first place, different in

shape; either from our physical differences, or from a habit of

drawing certain shapes of a picture, which itself usually

indicates--as you know, or ought to know--whether we are looking far

or near. Two were oblong, but of different proportions; one was more

nearly a square; the distance taken in to the right and left was

smaller in the latter case, and, on the contrary, the height up and

down--that is to say, the portion of land beneath and the portion of

sky above--was greater. In each picture the clouds were treated with

different precision and different attention. In one picture the open

sky above was the main intention of the picture. In two pictures the

upper sky was of no consequence--it was the clouds and the mountains

that were insisted upon. The drawing was the same, that is to say,

the general make of things; but each man had involuntarily looked

upon what was most interesting to him in the whole sight; and though

the whole sight was what he meant to represent, he had unconsciously

preferred a beauty or an interest of things different from what his

neighbour liked.

"The colour of each painting was different--the vivacity of colour

and tone, the distinctness of each part in relation to the whole;

and each picture would have been recognized anywhere as a specimen

of work by each one of us, characteristic of our names. And we spent

on the whole affair perhaps twenty minutes.

"I wish you to understand, again, that we each thought and felt as if

we had been photographing the matter before us. We had not the first

desire of expressing _ourselves_, and I think would have been very

much worried had we not felt that each one was true to nature. And

we were each one true to nature.... If you ever know how to paint

somewhat well, and pass beyond the position of the student who has

not yet learned to use his hands as an expression of the memories of

his brain, you will always give to nature, that is to say, what is

outside of you, the character of the lens through which you see

it--which is yourself."

Such bits of testimony from painters help us to understand the brief

sayings of the critics, like Taine's well-known "Art is nature seen

through a temperament," G. L. Raymond's "Art is nature made human," and

Croce's "Art is the expression of impressions." These painters and critics

agree, evidently, that the mind of the artist is an organism which acts as

a "transformer." It receives the reports of the senses, but alters these

reports in transmission and it is precisely in this alteration that the

most personal and essential function of the artist's brain is to be

found.

Remembering this, let the student of poetry now recall the diagram used in

handbooks of psychology to illustrate the process of sensory stimulus of a

nerve-centre and the succeeding motor reaction. The diagram is usually

drawn after this fashion:

Sensory stimulus Nerve-centre Motor Reaction

________________________________O______________________________

--------------------> -------------------->

The process is thus described by William James:

[Footnote: _Psychology, Briefer Course_, American Science Series, p. 91.

Henry Holt.]

"The afferent nerves, when excited by some physical irritant, be this as

gross in its mode of operation as a chopping axe or as subtle as the

waves of light, convey the excitement to the nervous centres. The

commotion set up in the centres does not stop there, but discharges

through the efferent nerves, exciting movements which vary with the

animal and with the irritant applied."

The familiar laboratory experiment irritates with a drop of acid the hind

leg of a frog. Even if the frog's brain has been removed, leaving the

spinal cord alone to represent the nervous system, the stimulus of the

acid results in an instant movement of the leg. Sensory stimulus,

consequent excitement of the nerve centre and then motor reaction is the

law. Thus an alarmed cuttlefish secretes an inky fluid which colors the

sea-water and serves as his protection. Such illustrations may be

multiplied indefinitely.

[Footnote: See the extremely interesting statement by Sara Teasdale,

quoted in Miss Wilkinson's _New Voices_, p. 199. Macmillan, 1919.]

It may seem fanciful to insist upon the analogy between a frightened

cuttlefish squirting ink into sea-water and an agitated poet spreading ink

upon paper, but in both cases, as I have said elsewhere, "it is a question

of an organism, a stimulus and a reaction. The image of the solitary

reaper stirs a Wordsworth, and the result is a poem; a profound sorrow

comes to Alfred Tennyson, and he produces _In Memoriam_."

[Footnote: _Counsel upon the Reading of Books_, p. 219. Houghton Mifflin

Company.]

In the next chapter we must examine this process with more detail. But the

person who asks himself how poetry comes into being will find a

preliminary answer by reflecting upon the relation of "impression" to

"expression" in every nerve-organism, and in all the arts. Everywhere he

must reckon with this ceaseless current of impressions, "the stream of

consciousness," sweeping inward to the brain; everywhere he will detect

modification, selections, alterations in the stream as it passes through

the higher nervous centres; everywhere he will find these transformed

"impressions" expressed in the terms of some specific medium. Thus the

temple of Karnak expresses in huge blocks of stone an imagination which

has brooded over the idea of the divine permanence. The Greek

"discus-thrower" is the idealized embodiment of a typical kind of athlete,

a conception resulting from countless visual and tactile sensations. An

American millionaire buys a "Corot" or a "Monet," that is to say, a piece

of colored canvas upon which a highly individualized artistic temperament

has recorded its vision or impression of some aspect of the world as it

has been interpreted by Corot's or Monet's eye and brain and hand. A

certain stimulus or "impression," an organism which reshapes impressions,

and then an "expression" of these transformed impressions into the terms

permitted by some specific material: that is the threefold process which

seems to be valid in all of the fine arts. It is nowhere more intricately

fascinating than in poetry.

CHAPTER II

THE PROVINCE OF POETRY

"The more I read and re-read the works of the great poets,

and the more I study the writings of those who have some

Theory of Poetry to set forth, the more am I convinced that

the question _What is Poetry?_ can be properly answered only if

we make _What it does_ take precedence of _How it does it_."

J. A. STEWART, _The Myths of Plato_

In the previous chapter we have attempted a brief survey of some of the

general aesthetic questions which arise whenever we consider the form and

meaning of the fine arts. We must now try to look more narrowly at the

special field of poetry, asking ourselves how it comes into being, what

material it employs, and how it uses this material to secure those

specific effects which we all agree in calling "poetical," however widely

we may differ from one another in our analysis of the means by which the

effect is produced.

Let us begin with a truism. It is universally admitted that poetry, like

each of the fine arts, has a field of its own. To run a surveyor's

line accurately around the borders of this field, determining what belongs

to it rather than to the neighboring arts, is always difficult and

sometimes impossible. But the field itself is admittedly "there," in all

its richness and beauty, however bitterly the surveyors may quarrel about

the boundary lines. (It is well to remember that professional surveyors do

not themselves own these fields or raise any crops upon them!) How much

map-making ingenuity has been devoted to this task of grouping and

classifying the arts: distinguishing between art and fine art, between

artist, artificer and artisan; seeking to arrange a hierarchy of the arts

on the basis of their relative freedom from fixed ends, their relative

complexity or comprehensiveness of effect, their relative obligation to

imitate or represent something that exists in nature! No one cares

particularly to-day about such matters of precedence--as if the arts were

walking in a carefully ordered ecclesiastical procession. On the other

hand, there is ever-increasing recognition of the soundness of the

distinction made by Lessing in his _Laokoon: or the Limits of Painting and

Poetry_; namely, that the fine arts differ, as media of expression,

according to the nature of the material which they employ. That is to say,

the "time-arts"--like poetry and music--deal primarily with actions that

succeed one another in time. The space-arts--painting, sculpture,

architecture--deal primarily with bodies that coexist in space. Hence

there are some subjects that belong naturally in the "painting" group, and

others that belong as naturally in the "poetry" group. The artist should

not "confuse the genres," or, to quote Whistler again, he should not push

a medium further than it will go. Recent psychology has more or less upset

Lessing's technical theory of vision,

[Footnote: F. E. Bryant, _The Limits of Descriptive Writing_, etc. Ann

Arbor, 1906.]

but it has confirmed the value of his main contention as to the fields

of the various arts.

_1. The Myth of Orpheus and Eurydice_

An illustration will make this matter clear. Let us take the Greek myth of

Orpheus and Eurydice, which has been utilized by many artists during more

than two thousand years assuredly, and how much longer no one knows.

Virgil told it in the _Georgics_ and Ovid in the _Metamorphoses_. It

became a favorite theme of medieval romance, and whether told in a French

_lai_ or Scottish ballad like "King Orfeo," it still keeps, among all the

strange transformations which it has undergone, "the freshness of the

early world." Let us condense the story from King Alfred's Anglo-Saxon

version of Boethius's _De Consolatione Philosophiae_: "There was once a

famous Thracian harper named Orpheus who had a beautiful wife named

Eurydice. She died and went to hell. Orpheus longed sorrowfully for her,

harping so sweetly that the very woods and wild beasts listened to his

woe. Finally, he resolved to seek her in hell and win her back by his

skill. And he played so marvelously there that the King of Hell to reward

him gave him back his wife again, only upon the condition that he should

not turn back to look at her as he led her forth. But, alas, who can

constrain love? When Orpheus came to the boundary of darkness and light,

he turned round to see if his wife was following--and she vanished."

Such was the myth in one of its manifold European forms. It deals

obviously with a succession of events, with actions easily narratable by

means of a "time-art" like poetry. The myth itself is one of fascinating

human interest, and if a prose writer like Hawthorne had chosen to tell it

in his _Wonder-Book_, we should doubtless speak of it as a "poetic" story.

We should mean, in using that adjective, that the myth contained

sentiment, imagination, passion, dramatic climax, pathos--the qualities

which we commonly associate with poetry--and that Hawthorne, although a

prose writer, had such an exquisite sympathy for Greek stories that his

handling of the material would be as delicate, and the result possibly as

lovely, as if the tale had been told in verse. But if we would realize the

full value of Lessing's distinction, we must turn to one of the countless

verse renderings of the myth. Here we have a succession of actions,

indeed, quite corresponding to those of the prose story. But these images

of action, succeeding one another in time, are now evoked by successive

musical sounds,--the sounds being, as in prose, arbitrary word-symbols of

image and idea,--only that in poetry the sounds have a certain ordered

arrangement which heightens the emotional effect of the images evoked.

Prose writer and poet might mean to tell precisely the same tale, but in

reality they cannot, for one is composing, no matter how cunningly, in the

tunes of prose and the other in the tunes of verse. The change in the

instrument means an alteration in the mental effect.

Now turn to Lessing's other exemplar of the time-arts, the musician--for

musicians as well as poets, painters and sculptors have utilized the myth

of Orpheus and Eurydice. What can the musician do with the theme? Gluck's

opera may serve for answer. He cannot, by the aid of music alone, call up

very definite ideas or images. He cannot tell the Orpheus story clearly to

one who has never heard it. But to one who already knows the tale, a

composer's overture--without stage accessories or singing actors or any

"operatic" devices as such--furnishes in its successions and combinations

of musical sound, without the use of verbal symbols, a unique pleasurable

emotion which strongly and powerfully reinforces the emotions suggested by

the Orpheus myth itself. Certain portions of the story, such as those

relating to the wondrous harping, can obviously be interpreted better

through music than through the medium of any other art.

What can Lessing's "space-arts," sculpture and painting, do with the

material furnished by the Orpheus myth? It is clear that they cannot tell

the whole story, since they are dealing with "bodies that coexist" rather

than with successive actions. They must select some one instant of action

only, and preferably the most significant moment of the whole, the parting

of husband and wife. In the museum at Naples there is the wonderful Greek

treatment of this theme, in sculptured high relief. The sculptor has

chosen the moment of parting. Hermes, the messenger of the gods to recall

Eurydice, has twined his hand gently around the left hand of the woman.

With her right hand she still touches her husband, but the dread instant

is upon them all. The sculptor, representing the persons in three

dimensions, as far as high relief allows, has sufficiently

characterized their faces and figures, and with exquisite sense of rhythm

and balance in his composition has fulfilled every requirement of formal

beauty that marble affords.

In Sir Frederick Leighton's painting of Orpheus and Eurydice and in many

another less famous painter's rendering of the theme, there is likewise

the portrayal of an arrested moment. But the painter represents the

personages and the background in two dimensions. He can separate his

figures more completely than the sculptor, can make their instant of

action more "dramatic," can portray certain objects, such as the

diaphanous robe of Eurydice as she vanishes into mist, which are beyond

the power of the sculptor to represent, and above all he can suggest the

color of the objects themselves, the degree of light and shade, the

"atmosphere" of the whole, in a fashion unapproachable by the rival arts.

The illustration need not be worked out more elaborately here, though the

student may profitably reflect upon the resources of the modern moving

picture--which is a novel combination of the "time" and "space" arts--and

of the mimetic dance, as affording still further opportunities for

expressing the artistic possibilities of the Orpheus story. But the chief

lesson to be learned by one who is attempting in this way to survey the

provinces of the different arts is this: no two of all the artists who

have availed themselves of the Orpheus material have _really had the same

subject_, although the title of each of their productions, if catalogued,

might conveniently be called "Orpheus and Eurydice." Each has had his own

conception of the theme, each his own professional technique in handling

his chosen medium, each his own habits of brain, each, in a word, has

found his own subject. "Are these children who are playing in the

sunlight," said Fromentin, "or is it a place in the sunlight in

which children are playing?" One is a "figure" subject, that is to say,

while the other is a landscape subject.

The whole topic of the "provinces" of the arts becomes hopelessly academic

and sterile if one fails to keep his eye upon the individual artist, whose

free choice of a subject is conditioned solely by his own artistic

interest in rendering such aspects of any theme as his own medium of

expression will allow him to represent. Take one of the most beautiful

objects in nature, a quiet sea. Is this a "painter-like" subject?

Assuredly, yet the etcher has often rendered the effect of a quiet sea in

terms of line, as a pastellist has rendered it in terms of color, and a

musician in terms of tone-feeling, and a poet in terms of tone-feeling

plus thought. Each one of them finds something for himself, selects

his own "subject," from the material presented by the quiet sea, and

whatever he may find belongs to him. We declaim against the confusion of

the genres, the attempt to render in the terms of one art what belongs, as

we had supposed, to another art, and we are often right in our protest.

Yet artists have always been jumping each other's claims, and the sole

test of the lawfulness of the procedure is the success of the result. If

the border-foray of the impressionist or imagist proves successful, well

and good, but a triumphant raid should not be mistaken for the steady

lines of the main campaign.

_2. The Special Field_

What then do we mean by the province of poetry? Simply that there is a

special field in which, for uncounted centuries, poets have produced a

certain kind of artistic effect. Strictly speaking, it is better to say

"poets" rather than "the poet," just as William James confesses that

strictly speaking there is no such thing as "the Imagination," there are

only imaginations. But "the poet" is a convenient expression to indicate a

man functioning _qua_ poet--i.e. a man poetizing; and we shall continue to

use it. When we say that "the poet" in Sir Walter Scott inspires this or

that utterance, while "the novelist" or "the historian" or "the critic" in

him has prompted this or that other utterance, we are within our rights.

The field of poetry, as commonly understood, is that portion of human

feeling which expresses itself through rhythmical and preferably metrical

language. In this field "the poet" labors. The human feeling which he

embodies in verse comes to him originally, as feeling comes to all men, in

connection with a series of mental images. These visual, auditory, motor

or tactile images crowd the stream of consciousness as it sweeps inward to

the brain. There the images are subjected to a process of selection,

modification, transformation.

[Footnote: "The finest poetry was first experience; but the thought

has suffered a transformation since it was an experience." Emerson,

_Shakespeare: The Poet_.]

At some point in the process the poet's images tend to become verbal,--as

the painter's or the musician's do not,--and these verbal images are then

discharged in rhythmical patterns. It is one type of the threefold process

roughly described at the close of Chapter I. What is peculiar to the poet

as compared with other men or other artists is to be traced not so much in

the peculiar nature of his visual, auditory, motor or tactile images--for

in this respect poets differ enormously among one another--as in the

increasingly verbal form of these images as they are reshaped by his

imagination, and in the strongly rhythmical or metrical character of the

final expression.

Let carbon represent the first of the stages, the excited feeling

resulting from sensory stimulus. That is the raw material of poetic

emotion. Let the diamond represent the second stage, the chemical change,

as it were, produced in the mental images under the heat and pressure of

the imagination. The final stage would be represented by the cutting,

polishing and setting of the diamond, by the arrangement of the

transformed and now purely verbal images into effective rhythmical or

metrical designs.

Wordsworth once wrote of true poets who possessed

"The vision and the faculty divine,

Though wanting the accomplishment of verse."

Let us venture to apply Wordsworth's terminology to the process already

described. The "vision" of the poet would mean his sense-impressions of

every kind, his experience, as Goethe said, of "the outer world, the inner

world and the other world." The "faculty divine," into which vision blends

insensibly, would mean the mysterious change of these sense-impressions--

as they become subjected to reflection, comparison, memory, "passion

recollected in tranquillity,"--into words possessing a peculiar life and

power. The "accomplishment of verse" is easier to understand. It is the

expression, by means of these words now pulsating with rhythm--the natural

language of excitement--of whatever the poet has seen and felt, modified

by his imagination. The result is a poem: "embodied feeling."

Browning says to his imaginary poet:

"Your brains beat into rhythm--you tell

What we felt only."

There is much virtue, for us, in this rudely vigorous description of "the

poet." Certainly all of us feel, and thus far we are all potential poets.

But according to Browning there is, so to speak, a physiological

difference between the poet's brain and ours. His brain beats into rhythm;

that is the simple but enormous difference in function, and hence it is

that he can tell what we only feel. That is, he becomes a "singer" as well

as "maker," while we, conscious though we may be of the capacity for

intense feeling, cannot embody our feelings in the forms of verse. We may

indeed go so far as to reshape mental images in our heated brains--for all

men do this under excitement, but to sing what we have thus made is denied

to us.

_3. An Illustration from William James_

No one can be more conscious than the present writer of the impossibility

of describing in plain prose the admittedly complicated and mysterious

series of changes by which poetry comes into being. Those readers who find

that even the lines just quoted from Wordsworth and Browning throw little

new light upon the old difficulties, may nevertheless get a bit of help

here by turning back to William James's diagram of the working of the

brain. It will be remembered that in Chapter I we used the simplest

possible chart to represent the sensory stimulus of a nerve-centre and the

succeeding motor reaction, and we compared the "in-coming" and "out-going"

nerve processes with the function of Impression and Expression in the

arts. But to understand something of what takes place in the making of

poetry we must now substitute for our first diagram the slightly more

complicated one which William James employs to represent, not those lower

nerve-centres which "act from present sensational stimuli alone," but the

hemispheres of the human brain which "act from considerations."

[Footnote: _Psychology, Briefer Course_, pp. 97, 98. Henry Holt.]

Considerations are images constructed out of past experience, they are

reproductions of what has been felt or witnessed.

"They are, in short, _remote_ sensations; and the main difference

between the hemisphereless animal and the whole one may be concisely

expressed by saying that _the one obeys absent, the other only present,

objects. The hemispheres would then seem to be the chief seat of

memory._"

Then follows the accompanying diagram and illustration.

"If we liken the nervous currents to electric currents, we can compare

the nervous system, _C_, below the hemispheres to a direct circuit from

sense-organ to muscle along the line _S... C... M_. The hemisphere, _H_,

adds the long circuit or loop-line through which the current may pass

when for any reason the direct line is not used.

[Illustration: M ?----- C ?----- H ?----- C ?---- S ]

"Thus, a tired wayfarer on a hot day throws himself on the damp earth

beneath a maple-tree. The sensations of delicious rest and coolness

pouring themselves through the direct line would naturally discharge

into the muscles of complete extension: he would abandon himself to the

dangerous repose. But the loop-line being open, part of the current is

drafted along it, and awakens rheumatic or catarrhal reminiscences,

which prevail over the instigations of sense, and make the man arise and

pursue his way to where he may enjoy his rest more safely."

William James's entire discussion of the value of the hemisphere

"loop-line" as a reservoir of reminiscences is of peculiar suggestiveness

to the student of poetry. For it is along this loop-line of "memories and

ideas of the distant" that poetry wins its generalizing or universalizing

power. It is here that the life of reason enters into the life of mere

sensation, transforming the reports of the nerves into ideas and thoughts

that have coherence and general human significance. It is possible,

certainly, as the experiments of contemporary "imagists" prove, to write

poetry of a certain type without employing the "loop-line." But this is

pure sensorium verse, the report of retinal, auditory or tactile images,

and nothing more. "Response to impressions and representation of those

impressions in their _original isolation_ are the marks of the new poetry.

Response to impressions, _correlation of those impressions into a

connected body of phenomena_, and final interpretation of them as a whole

are, have been, and always will be the marks of the enduring in all

literature, whether poetry or prose."

[Footnote: Lewis Worthington Smith, "The New Naiveté," _Atlantic_, April,

1916.]

To quote another critic: "A rock, a star, a lyre, a cataract, do not,

except incidentally and indirectly, owe their command of our sympathies to

the bare power of evoking reactions in a series of ocular envelopes or

auditory canals. Their power lies in their freightage of association,

in their tactical position at the focus of converging experience, in

the number and vigor of the occasions in which they have crossed and

re-crossed the palpitating thoroughfares of life. ... Sense-impressions

are poetically valuable only in the measure of their power to procreate or

re-create experience."

[Footnote: O. W. Firkins, "The New Movement in Poetry," _Nation_, October

14, 1915.]

One may give the fullest recognition to the delicacy and sincerity of

imagist verse, to its magical skill in seeming to open new doors of sense

experience by merely shutting the old doors of memory, to its naive

courage in rediscovering the formula of "Back to Nature."

[Footnote: See the discussion of imagist verse in chap. III.]

Like "free verse," it has widened the field of expression, although its

advocates have sometimes forgotten that thousands of "imagist" poems lie

embedded in the verse of Browning and even in the prose of George

Meredith.

[Footnote: J. L. Lowes, "An Unacknowledged Imagist," _Nation_, February

24, 1916.]

We shall discuss some of its tenets later, but it should be noted at this

point that the radical deficiency of imagist verse, as such, is in its

lack of general ideas. Much of it might have been written by an infinitely

sensitive decapitated frog. It is "hemisphereless" poetry.

_4. The Poet and Other Men_

The mere physical vision of the poet may or may not be any keener than the

vision of other men. There is an infinite variety in the bodily endowments

of habitual verse-makers: there have been near-sighted poets like

Tennyson, far-sighted poets like Wordsworth, and, in the well-known

case of Robert Browning, a poet conveniently far-sighted in one eye and

near-sighted in the other! No doubt the life-long practice of observing

and recording natural phenomena sharpens the sense of poets, as it does

the senses of Indians, naturalists, sailors and all outdoors men. The

quick eye for costume and character possessed by a Chaucer or a Shakspere

is remarkable, but equally so is the observation of a Dickens or a Balzac.

It is rather in what we call psychical vision that the poet is wont to

excel, that is, in his ability to perceive the meaning of visual

phenomena. Here he ceases to be a mere reporter of retinal images, and

takes upon himself the higher and harder function of an interpreter of the

visible world. He has no immunity from the universal human experiences: he

loves and he is angry and he sees men born and die. He becomes according

to the measure of his intellectual capacity a thinker. He strives to see

into the human heart, to comprehend the working of the human mind. He

reads the divine justice in the tragic fall of Kings. He penetrates

beneath the external forms of Nature and perceives her as a "living

presence." Yet the faculty of vision which the poet possesses in so

eminent a degree is shared by many who are not poets. Darwin's outward eye

was as keen as Wordsworth's; St. Paul's sense of the reality of the

invisible world is more wonderful than Shakspere's. The poet is indeed

first of all a seer, but he must be something more than a seer before he

is wholly poet.

Another mark of the poetic mind is its vivid sense of relations. The part

suggests the whole. In the single instance there is a hint of the general

law. The self-same Power that brings the fresh rhodora to the woods brings

the poet there also. In the field-mouse, the daisy, the water-fowl, he

beholds types and symbols. His own experience stands for all men's. The

conscience-stricken Macbeth is a poet when he cries, "Life is a walking

shadow," and King Lear makes the same pathetic generalization when he

exclaims, "What, have his daughters brought him to this pass?" Through the

shifting phenomena of the present the poet feels the sweep of the

universe; his mimic play and "the great globe itself" are alike an

"insubstantial pageant," though it may happen, as Tennyson said of

Wordsworth, that even in the transient he gives the sense of the

abiding, "whose dwelling is the light of setting suns."

But this perception of relations, characteristic as it is of the poetic

temper, is also an attribute of the philosopher. The intellect of a

Newton, too, leaps from the specific instance to the general law; every

man, in proportion to his intelligence and insight, feels that the world

is one; while Plato and Descartes play with the time and space world with

all the grave sportiveness of Prospero.

Again, the poets have always been the "genus irritabile"--the irritable

tribe. They not only see deeply, but feel acutely. Often they are too

highly sensitized for their own happiness. If they receive a pleasure more

exquisite than ours from a flower, a glimpse of the sea, a gracious

action, they are correspondingly quick to feel dissonances, imperfections,

slights. Like Lamb, they are "rather squeamish about their women and

children." Like Keats, they are "snuffed out by an article." Keener

pleasures, keener pains, this is the law of their life; but it is

applicable to all persons of the so-called artistic temperament. It is one

of the penalties of a fine organism. It does not of itself describe a

poet.

[Footnote: I have here utilized a few paragraphs from my chapter on

"Poetry" in _Counsel upon the Reading of Books_, Houghton Mifflin

Company.]

The real difference between "the poet" and other men is rather to be

traced, as the present chapter has tried to indicate, in his capacity for

making and employing verbal images of a certain kind, and combining these

images into rhythmical and metrical designs. In each of his functions--as

"seer," as "maker," and as "singer"--he shows himself a true creator.

Criticism no longer attempts to act as his "law-giver," to assert what he

may or may not do. The poet is free, like every creative artist, to make a

beautiful object in any way he can. And nevertheless criticism--watching

countless poets lovingly for many a century, observing their various

endowments, their manifest endeavors, their victories and defeats,

observing likewise the nature of language, that strange medium (so much

stranger than any clay or bronze!) through which poets are compelled to

express their conceptions--criticism believes that poetry, like

each of the sister arts, has its natural province, its own field of the

beautiful. We have tried in this chapter to suggest the general direction

of that field, without looking too narrowly for its precise boundaries. In

W. H. Hudson's _Green Mansions_ the reader will remember how a few sticks

and stones, laid upon a hilltop, were used as markers to indicate the

outlines of a continent. Criticism, likewise, needs its poor sticks and

stones of commonplace, if it is to point out any roadway. Our own road

leads first into the difficult territory of the poet's imaginings, and

then into the more familiar world of the poet's words.

CHAPTER III

THE POET'S IMAGINATION

"The essence of poetry is _invention_; such invention as, by producing

something unexpected, surprises and delights."

SAMUEL JOHNSON

"The singers do not beget, only the Poet begets."

WALT WHITMAN

We must not at the outset insist too strongly upon the radical

distinction between "the poet"--as we have called him for

convenience--and other men. The common sense of mankind asserts that this

distinction exists, yet it also asserts that all children are poets after

a certain fashion, and that the vast majority of adult persons are, at

some moment or other, susceptible to poetic feeling. A small girl, the

other day, spoke of a telegraph wire as "that message-vine." Her father

and mother smiled at this naive renaming of the world of fact. It was a

child's instinctive "poetizing" imagination, but the father and mother,

while no longer capable, perhaps, of such daring verbal magic, were

conscious that they had too often played with the world of fact, and, for

the instant at least, remoulded it into something nearer the heart's

desire. That is to say, they could still feel "poetically," though their

wonderful chance of making up new names for everything had gone as soon as

the gates were shut upon the Paradise of childhood.

All readers of poetry agree that it originates somehow in feeling, and

that if it be true poetry, it stimulates feeling in the hearer. And all

readers agree likewise that feeling is transmitted from the maker of

poetry to the enjoyer of poetry by means of the imagination. But the

moment we pass beyond these accepted truisms, difficulties begin.

_1. Feeling and Imagination_

What is feeling, and exactly how is it bound up with the imagination? The

psychology of feeling remains obscure, even after the labors of

generations of specialists; and it is obvious that the general theories

about the nature of imagination have shifted greatly, even within the

memory of living men. Nevertheless there are some facts, in this

constantly contested territory, which now seem indisputable. One of them,

and of peculiar significance to students of poetry, is this: in the stream

of objects immediately present to consciousness there are no images of

feeling itself.

[Footnote: This point has been elaborated with great care in Professor A.

H. R. Fairchild's _Making of Poetry_. Putnam's, 1912.]

"If I am asked to call up an image of a rose, of a tree, of a cloud, or of

a skylark, I can readily do it; but if I am asked to feel loneliness or

sorrow, to feel hatred or jealousy, or to feel joy on the return of

spring, I cannot readily do it. And the reason why I cannot do it is

because I can call up no image of any one of these feelings. For

everything I come to know through my senses, for everything in connection

with what I do or feel I can call up some kind of mental image; but for no

kind of feeling itself can I ever possibly have a direct image. The only

effective way of arousing any particular feeling that is more than mere

bodily feeling is to call up the images that are naturally connected with

that feeling."

[Footnote: Fairchild, pp. 24, 25.]

If then, "the raw material of poetry," as Professor Fairchild insists,

is "the mental image," we must try to see how these images are presented

to the mind of the poet and in turn communicated to us. Instead of

asserting, as our grandfathers did, that the imagination is a "faculty"

of the mind, like "judgment," or accepting the theory of our fathers that

imagination "is the whole mind thrown into the process of imagining," the

present generation has been taught by psychologists like Charcot, James

and Ribot that we are chiefly concerned with "imaginations," that is, a

series of visual, auditory, motor or tactile images flooding in upon the

mind, and that it is safer to talk about these "imaginations" than about

"the Imagination." Literary critics will continue to use this last

expression--as we are doing in the present chapter--because it is too

convenient to be given up. But they mean by it something fairly definite:

namely, the images swarming in the stream of consciousness, and their

integration into wholes that satisfy the human desire for beauty. It is

in its ultimate aim rather than in its immediate processes that the

"artistic" imagination differs from the inventor's or scientist's or

philosopher's imagination. We no longer assert, as did Stopford Brooke

some forty years ago, that "the highest scientific intellect is a joke

compared with the power displayed by a Shakespeare, a Homer, a Dante." We

are inclined rather to believe that in its highest exercise of power the

scientific mind is attempting much the same feat as the highest type of

poetic mind, and that in both cases it is a feat of imaginative energy.

_2. Creative and Artistic Imagination_

The reader who has hitherto allowed himself to think of a poet as a sort

of freak of nature, abnormal in the very constitution of his mind, and

achieving his results by methods so obscure that "inspiration" is our

helpless name for indicating them, cannot do better than master such a

book as Ribot's _Essay on the Creative Imagination_.

[Footnote: Th. Ribot, _Essai sur l'Imagination créatrice_. Paris, 1900.

English translation by Open Court Co., Chicago, 1906.]

This famous psychologist, starting with the conception that the raw

material for the creative imagination is images, and that its basis lies

in a motor impulse, examines first the emotional factor involved in every

act of the creative imagination. Then he passes to the unconscious factor,

the involuntary "coming" of the idea, that "moment of genius," as Buffon

called it, which often marks the end of an unconscious elaboration of the

idea or the beginning of conscious elaboration.

[Footnote: See the quotation from Sir William Rowan Hamilton, the

mathematician, in the "Notes and Illustrations" for this chapter.]

Ribot points out that certain organic changes, as in blood circulation--

the familiar rush of blood to the head--accompany imaginative activity.

Then he discusses the inventor's and artist's "fixed idea," their "will

that it shall be so," "the motor tendency of images engendering the

ideal." Ribot's distinction between the animal's revival of images and the

true creative combination of images in the mental life of children and of

primitive man bears directly upon poetry, but even more suggestive to us

is his diagram of the successive stages by which inventions come into

being. There are two types of this process, and three stages of each: (A)

the "idea," the "discovery" or invention, and then the verification or

application; or else (B) the unconscious preparation, followed

by the "idea" or "inspiration," and then by the "development" or

construction. Whether a man is inventing a safety-pin or a sonnet, the

series of imaginative processes seems to be much the same. There is of

course a typical difference between the "plastic" imagination, dealing

with clear images, objective relations, and seen at its best in the arts

of form like sculpture and architecture, and that "diffluent" imagination

which prefers vaguely outlined images, which is markedly subjective and

emotional, and of which modern music like Debussy's is a good example. But

whatever may be the specific type of imagination involved, we find alike

in inventor, scientist and artist the same general sequence of "germ,

incubation, flowering and completion," and the same fundamental motor

impulse as the driving power.

Holding in mind these general characteristics of the creative imagination,

as traced by Ribot, let us now test our conception of the distinctively

artistic imagination. Countless are the attempts to define or describe it,

and it would be unwise for the student, at this point, to rest satisfied

with any single formulation of its functions. But it may be helpful to

quote a paragraph from Hartley B. Alexander's brilliant and subtle book,

_Poetry and the Individual_:

[Footnote: Putnam's, 1906.]

"The energy of the mind or of the soul--for it welds all psychical

activities--which is the agent of our world-winnings and the

procreator of our growing life, we term imagination. It is

distinguished from perception by its relative freedom from the

dictation of sense; it is distinguished from memory by its power to

acquire--memory only retains; it is distinguished from emotion in

being a force rather than a motive; from the understanding in being

an assimilator rather than the mere weigher of what is set before it;

from the will, because the will is but the wielder of the reins--the

will is but the charioteer, the imagination is the Pharaoh in

command. It is distinguished from all these, yet it includes them

all, for it is the full functioning of the whole mind and in the

total activity drives all mental faculties to its one supreme

end--the widening of the world wherein we dwell. Through beauty the

world grows, and it is the business of the imagination to create the

beautiful. The imagination synthesises, humanises, personalises,

illumines reality with the soul's most intimate moods, and so exalts

with spiritual understandings."

The value of such a description, presented without any context, will vary

with the training of the individual reader, but its quickening power will

be recognized even by those who are incapable of grasping all the

intellectual distinctions involved.

_3. Poetic Imagination in Particular_

We are now ready, after this consideration of the creative and artistic

imagination, to look more closely at some of the qualities of the poetic

imagination in particular. The specific formal features of that

imagination lie, as we have seen, in its use of verbal imagery, and in the

combination of verbal images into rhythmical patterns. But are there not

functions of the poet's mind preceding the formation of verbal images? The

psychology of language is still unsettled, and whether a man can think

without the use of words is often doubted. But a painter can certainly

"think" in terms of color, as an architect or mathematician can "think" in

terms of form and space, or a musician in terms of sound, without

employing verbal symbols at all. And are there not characteristic

activities of the poetic imagination which antedate the fixation and

expression of images in words? Apparently there are.

The reader will find, in the "Notes and Illustrations" for this chapter, a

quotation from Mr. Lascelles-Abercrombie, in which he refers to the

"region where the outward radiations of man's nature combine with the

irradiations of the world." That is to say, the inward-sweeping stream of

consciousness is instantly met by an outward-moving activity of the brain

which recognizes relationships between the objects proffered to the senses

and the personality itself. The "I" projects itself into these objects,

claims them, appropriates them as a part of its own nature. Professor

Fairchild, who calls this self-projecting process by the somewhat

ambiguous name of "personalizing," rightly insists, I believe, that poets

make a more distinctive use of this activity than other men. He quotes

some of the classic confidences of poets themselves: Keats's "If a sparrow

come before my window I take part in its existence and pick about the

gravel"; and Goethe on the sheep pictured by the artist Roos, "I always

feel uneasy when I look at these beasts. Their state, so limited, dull,

gaping, and dreaming, excites in me such sympathy that I fear I shall

become a sheep, and almost think the artist must have been one." I can

match this Goethe story with the prayer of little Larry H., son of an

eminent Harvard biologist. Larry, at the age of six, was taken by his

mother to the top of a Vermont hill-pasture, where, for the first time in

his life, he saw a herd of cows and was thrilled by their glorious bigness

and nearness and novelty. When he said his prayers that night, he was

enough of a poet to change his usual formula into this:

"Jesus, tender Shepherd, hear me,

Bless thy little _cow_ to-night"--

_Larry being the cow._

"There was a child went forth every day,"

records Walt Whitman,

"And the first object he look'd upon that object

he became."

Professor Fairchild quotes these lines from Whitman, and a few of the many

passages of the same purport from Coleridge and Wordsworth. They are all

summed up in Coleridge's heart-broken

"Oh, Lady, we receive but what we give,

And in our life alone does Nature live."

This "animism," or identifying imagination, by means of which the child or

the primitive man or the poet transfers his own life into the unorganic or

organic world, is one of the oldest and surest indications of poetic

faculty, and as far as we can see, it is antecedent to the use of verbal

images or symbols.

Another characteristic of the poetic temperament, allied with the

preceding, likewise seems to belong in the region where words are not as

yet emerging above the threshold of consciousness. I mean the strange

feeling, witnessed to by many poets, of the fluidity, fusibility,

transparency--the infinitely changing and interchangeable aspects--of the

world as it appears to the senses. It is evident that poets are not

looking--at least when in this mood--at our "logical" world of hard, clear

fact and law. They are gazing rather at what Whitman called "the eternal

float of solution," the "flowing of all things" of the Greeks, the

"river within the river" of Emerson. This tendency is peculiarly marked,

of course, in artists possessing the "diffluent" type of imagination, and

Romantic poets and critics have had much to say about it. The imagination,

said Wordsworth, "recoils from everything but the plastic, the pliant, the

indefinite."

[Footnote: Preface to 1815 edition of his _Poems_.]

"Shakespeare, too," says Carlye,

[Footnote: Essay on Goethe's Works.]

"does not look _at_ a thing, but into it, through it; so that he

constructively comprehends it, can take it asunder and put it together

again; _the thing melts as it were, into light under his eye, and anew

creates itself before him_. That is to say, he is a Poet. For Goethe, as

for Shakespeare, _the world lies all translucent, all fusible_ we might

call it, encircled with _Wonder_; the Natural in reality the Supernatural,

for to the seer's eyes both become one."

In his essay on Tieck Carlyle remarks again upon this characteristic of

the mind of the typical poet: "He is no mere observer and compiler;

rendering back to us, with additions or subtractions, the Beauty which

existing things have of themselves presented to him; but a true Maker, to

whom the actual and external is but the excitement for ideal creations

representing and ennobling its effects."

Coleridge's formula is briefer still; the imagination "dissolves,

diffuses, dissipates, in order to re-create."

[Footnote: _Biographia Literaria_.]

Such passages help us to understand the mystical moments which many poets

have recorded, in which their feeling of "diffusion" has led them to doubt

the existence of the external world. Wordsworth grasping "at a wall or

tree to recall myself from this abyss of idealism to the reality," and

Tennyson's "weird seizures" which he transferred from his own experience

to his imaginary Prince in _The Princess_, are familiar examples of this

type of mysticism. But the sense of the infinite fusibility and change in

the objective world is deeper than that revealed in any one type of

diffluent imagination. It is a profound characteristic of the poetic

mind as such. Yet it should be remembered that the philosopher and

the scientist likewise assert that ours is a vital, ever-flowing,

onward-urging world, in the process of "becoming" rather than merely

"being." "We are far from the noon of man" sang Tennyson, in a

late-Victorian and evolutionary version of St. John's "It doth not

yet appear what we shall be." "The primary imagination," asserted

Coleridge, "is a repetition in the finite mind of the eternal act of

creation in the infinite _I am_."

[Footnote: _Biographia Literaria_, chap. 13.]

Here, evidently, unless the "God-intoxicated" Coleridge is talking

nonsense, we are in the presence of powers that do not need as yet any use

of verbal symbols.

_4. Verbal Images_

The plasticity of the world as it appears to the mind of the poet is

clearly evidenced by the swarm of images which present themselves to the

poet's consciousness. In the re-presentation of these pictures to us the

poet is forced, of course, to use verbal images. The precise point at

which he becomes conscious of employing words no doubt varies with the

individual, and depends upon the relative balance of auditory, visual or

tactile images in his mind. Swinburne often impresses us as working

primarily with the "stuff" of word-sounds, as Browning with the stuff of

sharp-cut tactile or motor images, and Victor Hugo with the stuff of

visual impressions. But in each case the poet's sole medium of _expression

to us_ is through verbal symbols, and it is hard to get behind these into

the real workshop of the brain where each poet is busily minting his own

peculiar raw material into the current coin of human speech.

Nevertheless, many poets have been sufficiently conscious of what is going

on within their workshop to tell us something about it. Professor

Fairchild has made an interesting collection

[Footnote: _The Making of Poetry_, pp. 78, 79.]

of testimony relating to the tumultuous crowding of images, each

clamoring, as it were, for recognition and crying "take me!" He instances,

as other critics have done, the extraordinary succession of images by

which Shelley strives to portray the spirit of the skylark. The similes

actually chosen by Shelley seem to have been merely the lucky candidates

selected from an infinitely greater number. In Francis Thompson's

captivating description of Shelley as a glorious child the reader is

conscious of the same initial rush of images, although the medium of

expression here is heightened prose instead of verse:

[Footnote: _Dublin Review_, July, 1908.]

"Coming to Shelley's poetry, we peep over the wild mask of

revolutionary metaphysics, and we see the winsome face of the child.

Perhaps none of his poems is more purely and typically Shelleian than

The Cloud, and it is interesting to note how essentially it springs

from the faculty of make-believe. The same thing is conspicuous,

though less purely conspicuous, throughout his singing; it is the

child's faculty of make-believe raised to the nth power. He is still

at play, save only that his play is such as manhood stops to watch,

and his playthings are those which the gods give their children. The

universe is his box of toys. He dabbles his fingers in the day-fall.

He is gold-dusty with tumbling amidst the stars. He makes bright

mischief with the moon. The meteors nuzzle their noses in his hand.

He teases into growling the kennelled thunder, and laughs at the

shaking of its fiery chain. He dances in and out of the gates of

heaven: its floor is littered with his broken fancies. He runs wild

over the fields of ether. He chases the rolling world. He gets

between the feet of the horses of the sun. He stands in the lap of

patient Nature, and twines her loosened tresses after a hundred

wilful fashions, to see how she will look nicest in his song."

_5. The Selection and Control of Images_

It is easier, no doubt, to realize something of the swarming of images in

the stream of consciousness than it is to understand how these images are

selected, combined and controlled. Some principle of association, some law

governing the synthesis, there must be; and English criticism has long

treasured some of the clairvoyant words of Coleridge and Wordsworth upon

this matter. The essential problem is suggested by Wordsworth's phrase

"the manner in which we associate ideas in a state of excitement." Is the

"excitement," then, the chief factor in the selection and combination of

images, and do the "feelings," as if with delicate tentacles,

instinctively choose and reject and integrate such images as blend with

the poet's mood?

Coleridge, with his subtle builder's instinct, uses his favorite word

"synthesis" not merely as applied to images as such, but to all the

faculties of the soul:

"The poet, described in ideal perfection, brings the whole soul of man

into activity, with the subordination of its faculties to each other

according to their relative worth and dignity. He diffuses a tone and a

spirit of unity, that blends, and as it were fuses, each into each, by

that synthetic and magical power to which I would exclusively appropriate

the name of Imagination." "Synthetic and magical power," indeed, with a

Coleridge as Master of the Mysteries! But the perplexed student of poetry

may well wish a more exact description of what really takes place.

An American critic, after much searching in recent psychological

explanations of artistic creation, attempts to describe the genesis of a

poem in these words:

[Footnote: Lewis E. Gates, _Studies and Appreciations_, p. 215. Macmillan,

1900.]

"The poet concentrates his thought on some concrete piece of life, on

some incident, character, or bit of personal experience; because of

his emotional temperament, this concentration of interest stirs in

him a quick play of feeling and prompts the swift concurrence of many

images. Under the incitement of these feelings, and in accordance

with laws of association that may at least in part be described,

these images grow bright and clear, take definite shapes, fall into

significant groupings, branch and ramify, and break into sparkling

mimicry of the actual world of the senses--all the time delicately

controlled by the poet's conscious purpose and so growing

intellectually significant, but all the time, if the work of art is

to be vital, impelled also in their alert weaving of patterns by the

moods of the poet, by his fine instinctive sense of the emotional

expressiveness of this or that image that lurks in the background of

his consciousness. For this intricate web of images, tinged with his

most intimate moods, the poet through his intuitive command of words

finds an apt series of sound-symbols and records them with written

characters. And so a poem arises through an exquisite distillation of

personal moods into imagery and into language, and is ready to offer

to all future generations its undiminishing store of spiritual joy

and strength."

A better description than this we are not likely to find, although some

critics would question the phrase, "all the time delicately controlled by

the poet's conscious purpose."

[Footnote: "Poetry is not like reasoning, a power to be exerted according

to the determination of the will. A man cannot say, 'I will compose

poetry.'. . . It is not subject to the control of the active powers of the

mind. ... Its birth and recurrence have no necessary connection with the

consciousness or will." Shelley, _A Defense of Poetry_.]

For sometimes, assuredly, the synthesis of images seems to take place

without the volition of the poet. The hypnotic trance, the narcotic dream

or revery, and even our experience of ordinary dreams, provide abundant

examples. One dreams, for instance, of a tidal river, flowing in with a

gentle full current which bends in one direction all the water-weeds and

the long grasses trailing from the banks; then somehow the tide seems to

change, and all the water and the weeds and grasses, even the fishes in

the stream, turn slowly and flow out to sea. The current synthesizes,

harmonizes, moves onward like music,--and we are aware that it is all a

dream. Coleridge's "Kubla Khan," composed in a deep opium slumber, moves

like that, one train of images melting into another like the interwoven

figures of a dance led by the "damsel with a dulcimer." There is no

"conscious purpose" whatever, and no "meaning" in the ordinary

interpretation of that word. Nevertheless it is perfect integration of

imagery, pure beauty to the senses. Something of this rapture in the sheer

release of control must have been in Charles Lamb's mind when he wrote to

Coleridge about the "pure happiness" of being insane. "Dream not,

Coleridge, of having tasted all the grandeur and wildness of fancy till

you have gone mad! All now seems to me vapid, comparatively so." (June 10,

1796.)

If "Kubla Khan" represents one extreme, Poe's account of how he wrote "The

Raven"

[Footnote: _The Philosophy of Composition_.]

--incredible as the story appears to most of us--may serve to illustrate

the other, namely, a cool, conscious, workmanlike control of every element

in the selection and combination of imagery. Wordsworth's naive

explanation of the task performed by the imagination in his "Cuckoo" and

"Leech-Gatherer"

[Footnote: Preface to poems of 1815-1845.]

occupies a middle ground. We are at least certain of his entire

honesty--and incidentally of his total lack of humor!

"'Shall I call thee Bird,

Or but a wandering Voice?'

"This concise interrogation characterizes the seeming ubiquity of the

voice of the cuckoo, and dispossesses the creature almost of a corporeal

existence; the Imagination being tempted to this exertion of her power by

a consciousness in the memory that the cuckoo is almost perpetually heard

throughout the season of spring, but seldom becomes an object of sight....

"'As a huge stone is sometimes seen to lie

Couched on the bald top of an eminence,

Wonder to all who do the same espy

By what means it could thither come, and whence,

So that it seems a thing endued with sense,

Like a sea-beast crawled forth, which on a shelf

Of rock or sand reposeth, there to sun himself.

Such seemed this Man; not all alive or dead.

Nor all asleep, in his extreme old age.

* * * * *

Motionless as a cloud the old Man stood,

That heareth not the loud winds when they call,

And moveth altogether if it move at all.'

"In these images, the conferring, the abstracting, and the modifying

powers of the Imagination, immediately and mediately acting, are all

brought into conjunction. The stone is endowed with something of the power

of life to approximate it to the sea-beast; and the sea-beast stripped of

some of its vital qualities to assimilate it to the stone; which

intermediate image is thus treated for the purpose of bringing the

original image, that of the stone, to a nearer resemblance to the figure

and condition of the aged man; who is divested of so much of the

indications of life and motion as to bring him to the point

where the two objects unite and coalesce in just comparison."

Wordsworth's analysis of the processes of his own imagination, like Poe's

story of the composition of "The Raven," is an analysis made after the

imagination had functioned. There can be no absolute proof of its

correctness in every detail. It is evident that we have to deal with an

infinite variety of normal and abnormal minds. Some of these defy

classification; others fall into easily recognized types, such as "the

lunatic, the lover and the poet," as sketched by Theseus, Duke of Athens.

How modern, after all, is the Duke's little lecture on the psychology of

imagination!

"The lunatic, the lover and the poet

Are of imagination all compact;

One sees more devils than vast hell can hold,

That is, the madman: the lover, all as frantic,

Sees Helen's beauty in a brow of Egypt:

The poet's eye, in a fine frenzy rolling,

Doth glance from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven;

And as imagination bodies forth

The forms of things unknown, the poet's pen

Turns them to shapes and gives to airy nothing

A local habitation and a name.

Such tricks hath strong imagination,

That, if it would but apprehend some joy,

It comprehends some bringer of that joy;

Or in the night, imagining some fear,

How easy is a bush supposed a bear!"

[Footnote: _Midsummer Night's Dream_, v, i, 7-22.]

Shakspere, it will be observed, does not hesitate to use that dangerous

term "the poet!" Yet as students of poetry we must constantly bring

ourselves back to the recorded experience of individual men, and from

these make our comparisons and generalizations. It may even happen that

some readers will get a clearer conception of the selection and synthesis

of images if they turn for the moment away from poetry and endeavor to

realize something of the same processes as they take place in imaginative

prose. In Hawthorne's _Scarlet Letter_, for example, the dominant image,

which becomes the symbol of his entire theme, is the piece of scarlet

cloth which originally caught his attention. This physical object

becomes, after long brooding, subtly changed into a moral symbol of sin

and its concealment. It permeates the book, it is borne openly upon the

breast of one sufferer, it is written terribly in the flesh of another, it

flames at last in the very sky. All the lesser images and symbols of the

romance are mastered by it, subordinated to it; it becomes the dominant

note in the composition. The romance of _The Scarlet Letter_ is, as we say

of any great poem or drama, an "ideal synthesis"; i.e. a putting together

of images in accordance with some central idea. The more significant the

idea or theme or master image, the richer and fuller are the possibilities

of beauty in detail. Apply this familiar law of complexity to a poet's

conscious or unconscious choice of images. In the essay which we have

already quoted

[Footnote: _Studies and Appreciations_, p. 216.]

Lewis Gates remarks:

"In every artist there is a definite mental bias, a definite spiritual

organization and play of instincts, which results in large measure from

the common life of his day and generation, and which represents this

life--makes it potent--within the individuality of the artist. This

so-called 'acquired constitution of the life of the soul'--it has been

described by Professor Dilthey with noteworthy acuteness and

thoroughness--determines in some measure the contents of the artist's

mind, for it determines his interests, and therefore the sensations and

perceptions that he captures and automatically stores up. It guides him in

his judgments of worth, in his instinctive likes and dislikes as regards

conduct and character, and controls in large measure the play of his

imagination as he shapes the action of his drama or epic and the destinies

of his heroes. Its prejudices interfiltrate throughout the molecules of

his entire moral and mental life, and give to each image and idea some

slight shade of attractiveness or repulsiveness, so that when the artist's

spirit is at work under the stress of feeling, weaving into the fabric of

a poem the competing images and ideas in his consciousness, certain ideas

and images come more readily and others lag behind, and the resulting work

of art gets a colour and an emotional tone and suggestions of value that

subtly reflect the genius of the age."

_6. "Imagist" Verse_

Such a conception of the association of images as reflecting not only this

"acquired constitution of the soul" of the poet but also the genius of the

age is in marked contrast to some of the theories held by contemporary

"imagists." As we have already noted, in Chapter II, they stress the

individual reaction to phenomena, at some tense moment. They discard, as

far as possible, the long "loop-line" of previous experience. As for

diction, they have, like all true artists, a horror of the _cliché_--the

rubber-stamp word, blurred by use. As for rhythm, they fear any

conventionality of pattern. In subsequent chapters we must look more

closely at these matters of diction and of rhythm, but they are both

involved in any statement of the principles of Imagist verse. Richard

Aldington sums up his article on "The Imagists"

[Footnote: "Greenwich Village," July 15, 1915.]

in these words:

"Let me resume the cardinal points of the Imagist style:

1. Direct treatment of the subject. 2. A hardness and economy of speech.

3. Individuality of rhythm; vers libre. 4. The exact word. The Imagists

would like to possess 'le mot qui fait image, l'adjectif inattendu et

précis qui dessine de pied en cap et donne la senteur de la chose qu'il

est chargé de rendre, la touche juste, la couleur qui chatoie et vibre.'"

In the preface to _Imagist Poets_ (1915), and in Miss Amy Lowell's

_Tendencies in Modern American Poetry_ (1917) the tenets of imagism are

stated briefly and clearly. Imagism, we are told, aims to use always the

language of common speech, but to employ always the exact word, not the

nearly-exact nor the merely decorative word; to create new rhythms--as the

expression of new moods--and not to copy old rhythms, which merely echo

old moods; to allow absolute freedom in the choice of a subject; to

present an image, rendering particulars exactly; to produce poetry that is

hard and clear, never blurred or indefinite; to secure condensation.

It will be observed that in the special sort of picture-making which

Imagist poetry achieves, the question of free verse is merely incidental.

"We fight for it as a principle of liberty," says Miss Lowell, but she

does not insist upon it as the only method of writing poetry. Mr.

Aldington admits frankly that about forty per cent of _vers libre_ is

prose. Mr. Lowes, as we have already remarked, has printed dozens of

passages from Meredith's novels in the typographical arrangement of free

verse so as to emphasize their "imagist" character. One of the most

effective is this:

"He was like a Tartar

Modelled by a Greek:

Supple

As the Scythian's bow,

Braced

As the string!"

Suppose, however, that we agree to defer for the moment the vexed question

as to whether images of this kind are to be considered prose or verse.

Examine simply for their vivid picture-making quality the collections

entitled _Imagist Poets_ (1915,1916,1917), or, in the _Anthology of

Magazine Verse_ for 1915, such poems as J. G. Fletcher's "Green Symphony"

or "H. D.'s" "Sea-Iris" or Miss Lowell's "The Fruit Shop." Read Miss

Lowell's extraordinarily brilliant volume _Men, Women and Ghosts_ (1916),

particularly the series of poems entitled "Towns in Colour." Then read the

author's preface, in which her artistic purpose in writing "Towns in

Colour" is set forth: "In these poems, I have endeavoured to give the

colour, and light, and shade, of certain places and hours, stressing _the

purely pictorial effect_, and with little or no reference to any other

aspect of the places described. It is an enchanting thing to wander

through a city looking for its _unrelated beauty_, the beauty by which it

captivates the sensuous sense of seeing." [Footnote: Italics mine.]

Nothing could be more gallantly frank than the phrase "unrelated beauty."

For it serves as a touchstone to distinguish between those imagist poems

which leave us satisfied and those which do not. Sometimes, assuredly, the

insulated, unrelated beauty is enough. What delicate reticence there is in

Richard Aldington's "Summer":

"A butterfly,

Black and scarlet,

Spotted with white,

Fans its wings

Over a privet flower.

"A thousand crimson foxgloves,

Tall bloody pikes,

Stand motionless in the gravel quarry;

The wind runs over them.

"A rose film over a pale sky

Fantastically cut by dark chimneys;

Across an old city garden."

The imagination asks no more.

Now read my friend Baker Brownell's "Sunday Afternoon":

"The wind pushes huge bundles

Of itself in warm motion

Through the barrack windows;

It rattles a sheet of flypaper

Tacked in a smear of sunshine on the sill.

A voice and other voices squirt

A slow path among the room's tumbled sounds.

A ukelele somewhere clanks

In accidental jets

Up from the room's background."

Here the stark truthfulness of the images does not prevent an instinctive

"Well, what of it?" "And afterward, what else?" Unless we adopt the

Japanese theory of "stop poems," where the implied continuation of the

mood, the suggested application of the symbol or allegory, is the sole

justification of the actual words given, a great deal of imagist verse, in

my opinion, serves merely to sharpen the senses without utilizing the full

imaginative powers of the mind. The making of images is an essential

portion of the poet's task, but in memorably great poetry it is only a

detail in a larger whole. Miss Lowell's "Patterns" is one of the most

effective of contemporary poems, but it is far more than a document of

imagism. It is a triumph of structural imagination.

_7. Genius and Inspiration_

Whatever may be the value, for students, of trying to analyse the

image-making and image-combining faculty, every one admits that it is a

necessary element in the production of poetry. Let Coleridge have the

final statement of this mystery of his art: "The power of reducing

multitude into unity of effect, and modifying a series of thoughts by some

one predominant thought or feeling, may be cultivated and improved, but

can never be learnt. It is in this that _Poeta nascitur non fit_." We

cannot avoid the difficulties of the question by attributing the poet's

imagination to "genius." Whether genius is a neurosis, as some think, or

whether it is sanity at perfection, makes little difference here.

Both a Poe and a Sophocles are equally capable of producing ideal

syntheses. Nor does the old word "inspiration" help much either.

Whatever we mean by inspiration--a something not ourselves, supernatural

or sub-liminal--a "vision" of Blake, the "voices" of Joan of Arc, the

"god" that moved within the Corybantian revelers--it is an excitement of

the image-making faculty, and not that faculty itself. Disordered "genius"

and inspiration undisciplined by reason are alike powerless to produce

images that permanently satisfy the sense of beauty. Tolstoy's common-

sense remark is surely sound: "One's writing is good only where the

intelligence and the imagination are in equilibrium. As soon as one of

them over-balances the other, it's all up."

[Footnote: Compare W. A. Neilson's chapter on "The Balance of Qualities"

in _Essentials of Poetry_. Houghton Mifflin Company, 1912.]

_8. A Summary_

Let us now endeavor to summarize this testimony which we have taken

from poets and critics. Though they do not agree in all details, and

though they often use words that are either too vague or too highly

specialized, the general drift of the testimony is fairly clear. Poets

and critics agree that the imagination is something different from the

mere memory-image; that by a process of selection and combination and

re-presentation of images something really new comes into being, and that

we are therefore justified in using the term _constructive_, or _creative_

imagination. This imagination embodies, as we say, or "bodies forth," as

Duke Theseus said, "the forms of things unknown." It ultimately becomes

the poet's task to "shape" these forms with his "pen," that is to say, to

suggest them through word-symbols, arranged in a certain fashion. The

selection of these word-symbols will be discussed in Chapter IV, and their

rhythmical arrangement in Chapter V. But we have tried in the present

chapter to trace the functioning of the poetic imagination in those stages

of its activity which precede the definite shaping of poems with the pen.

If we say, with Professor Fairchild,

[Footnote: _Making of Poetry_, p. 34.]

that "the central processes or kinds of activity involved in the making of

poetry are three: personalizing, combining and versifying," it is obvious

that we have been dealing with the first two. If we prefer to use the

famous terms employed by Ruskin in _Modern Painters_, we have been

considering the penetrative, associative and contemplative types of

imagination. But these Ruskinian names, however brilliantly and

suggestively employed by the master, are dangerous tools for the beginner

in the study of poetry.

If the beginner desires to review, at this point, the chief matters

brought to his attention in the present chapter, he may make a real test

of their validity by opening his senses to the imagery of a few lines of

poetry. Remember that poets are endeavoring to convey the "sense" of

things rather than the knowledge of things. Disregard for the moment the

precise words employed in the following lines, and concentrate the

attention upon the images, as if the image were not made of words at all,

but were mere naked sense-stimulus.

In this line the poet is trying to make us _see_ something ("visual"

image):

"The bride hath paced into the hall,

_Red as a rose_ is she."

Can you see her?

In these lines the poet is trying to make us _hear_ something ("auditory"

image):

"A _noise like of a hidden brook_

In the leafy month of June

That to the _sleeping woods all night

Singeth a quiet tune_."

Do you hear the tune? Do you hear it as clearly as you can hear

"_The tambourines

Jing-jing-jingled in the hands of Queens_"?

In these lines the poet is trying to make us feel certain bodily

sensations ("tactile" image):

"I closed my lids and kept them close,

_And the balls like pulses beat_;

For the sky and the sea and the sea and the sky,

_Lay like a load on my weary eye_,

And the dead were at my feet."

Do your eyes feel that pressure?

You are sitting quite motionless in your chair as you read these lines

("motor" image):

"I _sprang_ to the stirrup, and Joris, and he;

I _galloped_, Dirck _galloped_, we _galloped_ all three!"

Are you instantly on horseback? If you are, the poet has put you there by

conveying from his mind to yours, through the use of verbal imagery and

rhythm, his "sense" of riding, which has now become _your_ sense of

riding.

If the reader can meet this test of realizing simple images through his

own body-and-mind reaction to their stimulus, the door of poetry is open

to him. He can enter into its limitless enjoyments. If he wishes to

analyse more closely the nature of the pleasure which poetry affords, he

may select any lines he happens to like, and ask himself how the various

functions of the imagination are illustrated by them. Suppose the lines

are Coleridge's description of the bridal procession, already quoted in

part:

"The bride hath paced into the hall,

Red as a rose is she;

Nodding their heads before her goes

The merry minstrelsy."

Here surely is imagination penetrative; the selection of some one

characteristic trait of the object; that trait (the "redness" or the

"nodding") re-presented to us, and emphasized by conferring, modifying or

abstracting whatever elements the poet wishes to stress or to suppress.

The result is a combination of imagery which forms an idealized picture,

presenting the shows of things as the mind would like to see them and thus

satisfying our sense of beauty. For there is no question that the mind

takes a supreme satisfaction in such an idealization of reality as

Coleridge's picture of the swift tropical sunset,

"At one stride comes the dark,"

or Emerson's picture of the slow New England sunrise,

"O tenderly the haughty day

Fills his blue urn with fire."

Little has been said about beauty in this chapter, but no one doubts that

a sense of beauty guides the "shaping spirit of imagination" in that dim

region through which the poet feels his way before he comes to the

conscious choice of expressive words and to the ordering of those words

into beautiful rhythmical designs.

CHAPTER IV

THE POET'S WORDS

"Words are sensible signs necessary for communication."

JOHN LOCKE, _Human Understanding_, 3, 2, 1.

"As conceptions are the images of things to the mind within itself, so

are words or names the marks of those conceptions to the minds of them

we converse with."

SOUTH, quoted in Johnson's _Dictionary_.

"Word: a sound, or combination of sounds, used in any language as the

sign of a conception, or of a conception together with its grammatical

relations.... A word is a spoken sign that has arrived at its value as

used in any language by a series of historical changes, and that holds

its value by virtue of usage, being exposed to such further changes, of

form and of meaning, as usage may prescribe...."

_Century Dictionary_.

"A word is not a crystal--transparent and unchanged; it is the skin of a

living thought, and may vary greatly in color and content according to

the circumstances and the time in which it is used."

Justice OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES, _Towne vs. Eisner_.

"I wish our clever young poets would remember my homely definitions of

prose and poetry; that is, prose = words in their best order;--poetry =

the _best_ words in the best order."

COLERIDGE, _Table Talk_.

_1. The Eye and the Ear_

"Literary" language is commonly distinguished from the language of

ordinary life by certain heightenings or suppressions. The novelist or

essayist, let us say, fashions his language more or less in accordance

with his own mood, with his immediate aim in writing, with the capacity of

his expected readers. He is discoursing with a certain real or imaginary

audience. He may put himself on paper, as Montaigne said, as if he were

talking to the first man he happens to meet; or he may choose to address

himself to the few chosen spirits of his generation and of succeeding

generations. He trusts the arbitrary written or printed symbols of

word-sounds to carry his thoughts safely into the minds of other men.

The "literary" user of language in modern times comes to depend upon

the written or printed page; he tends to become more or less "eye-minded";

whereas the typical orator remains "ear-minded"--i.e. peculiarly sensitive

to a series of sounds, and composing for the ear of listeners rather than

for the eye of readers.

Now as compared with the typical novelist, the poet is surely, like the

orator, "ear-minded." Tonal symbols of ideas and emotions, rather than

visual symbols of ideas and emotions, are the primary stuff with which he

is working, although as soon as the advancing civilization of his race

brings an end to the primitive reciting of poetry and its transmission

through oral repetition alone, it is obvious that he must depend, like

other literary artists, or like the modern musicians, upon the written or

printed signs for the sounds which he has composed. But so stubborn are

the habits of our eyes that we tend always to confuse the look of the

poet's words upon the printed page with the sound of those words as they

are perceived by the ear. We are seldom guilty of this confusion in the

case of the musician. His "music" is not identified with the arbitrary

black marks which make up his printed score. For most of us there is

no music until those marks are actually translated into terms of tone--

although it is true that the trained reader of music can easily translate

to his inner ear without any audible rendering of the indicated sounds.

This distinction is essential to the understanding of poetry. A poem is

not primarily a series of printed word-signs addressed to the eye; it is a

series of sounds addressed to the ear, and the arbitrary symbols for these

sounds do not convey the poem unless they are audibly rendered--except to

those readers who, like the skilled readers of printed music, can

instantly hear the indicated sounds without any actual rendition of them

into physical tone. Many professed lovers of poetry have no real ear for

it. They are hopelessly "eye-minded." They try to decide questions of

metre and stanza, of free verse and of emotionally patterned prose by the

appearance of the printed page instead of by the nerves of hearing. Poets

like Mr. Vachel Lindsay--who recites or chants his own verses after the

manner of the primitive bard--have rendered a true service by leading

us away from the confusions wrought by typography, and back to that sheer

delight in rhythmic oral utterance in which poetry originates.

_2. How Words convey Feeling_

For it must never be forgotten that poetry begins in excitement, in some

body-and-mind experience; that it is capable, through its rhythmic

utterance of words which suggest this experience, of transmitting emotion

to the hearer; and that the nature of language allows the emotion to be

embodied in more or less permanent form. Let us look more closely at some

of the questions involved in the origin, the transmission and embodiment

of poetic feeling, remembering that we are now trying to trace these

processes in so far as they are revealed by the poet's use of words.

Rhythm will be discussed in the next chapter.

We have already noted that there are no mental images of feeling itself.

The images recognized by the consciousness of poets are those of

experiences and objects associated with feeling. The words employed to

revive and transmit these images are usually described as "concrete" or

"sensuous" in distinction from abstract or purely conceptual. They are

"experiential" words, arising out of bodily or spiritual contact with

objects or ideas that have been personalized, colored with individual

feeling. Such words have a "fringe," as psychologists say. They are rich

in overtones of meaning; not bare, like words addressed to the sheer

intelligence, but covered with veils of association, with tokens of past

experience. They are like ships laden with cargoes, although the cargo

varies with the texture and the history of each mind. It is probable that

this very word "ship," just now employed, calls up as many different

mental images as there are readers of this page. Brander Matthews has

recorded a curious divergence of imagery aroused by the familiar word

"forest." Half a dozen well-known men of letters, chatting together in a

London club, tried to tell one another what "forest" suggested to each:

"Until that evening I had never thought of forest as clothing itself

in different colors and taking on different forms in the eyes of

different men; but I then discovered that even the most innocent

word may don strange disguises. To Hardy forest suggested the sturdy

oaks to be assaulted by the woodlanders of Wessex; and to Du Maurier

it evoked the trim and tidy avenues of the national domain of France.

To Black the word naturally brought to mind the low scrub of the

so-called deer-forests of Scotland; and to Gosse it summoned up a

view of the green-clad mountains that towered up from the

Scandinavian fiords. To Howells forest recalled the thick woods that

in his youth fringed the rivers of Ohio; and to me there came back

swiftly the memory of the wild growths, bristling unrestrained by

man, in the Chippewa Reservation which I had crossed fourteen years

before in my canoe trip from Lake Superior to the Mississippi. Simple

as the word seemed, it was interpreted by each of us in accord with

his previous personal experience. And these divergent experiences

exchanged that evening brought home to me as never before the

inherent and inevitable inadequacy of the vocabulary of every

language, since there must always be two partners in any communication

by means of words, and the verbal currency passing from one to the other

has no fixed value necessarily the same to both of them."

[Footnote: Brander Matthews, _These Many Years_. Scribner's, New York,

1917.]

But one need not journey to London town in order to test this matter. Let

half a dozen healthy young Americans stop before the window of a shop

where sporting goods are exhibited. Here are fishing-rods, tennis

racquets, riding-whips, golf-balls, running-shoes, baseball bats,

footballs, oars, paddles, snow-shoes, goggles for motorists, Indian clubs

and rifles. Each of these physical objects focuses the attention of the

observer in more or less exact proportion to his interest in the

particular sport suggested by the implement. If he is a passionate tennis

player, a thousand motor-tactile memories are stirred by the sight of the

racquet. He is already balancing it in his fingers, playing his favorite

strokes with it, winning tournaments with it--though he seems to be

standing quietly in front of the window. The man next him is already

snowshoeing over the frozen hills. But if a man has never played lacrosse,

or been on horseback, or mastered a canoe, the lacrosse racquet or

riding-whip or paddle mean little to him emotionally, except that they may

stir his imaginative curiosity about a sport whose pleasures he has never

experienced. His eye is likely to pass them over as indifferently as if he

were glancing at the window of a druggist or a grocer. These varying

responses of the individual to the visual stimulus of this or that

physical object in a heterogeneous collection may serve to illustrate his

capacity for feeling. Our chance group before the shop window thus becomes

a symbol of all human minds as they confront the actual visible universe.

They hunger and thirst for this or that particular thing, while another

object leaves them cold.

Now suppose that our half-dozen young men are sitting in the dark,

talking--evoking body-and-mind memories by means of words alone. No two

can possibly have the same memories, the same series of mental pictures.

Not even the most vivid and picturesque word chosen by the best talker of

the company has the same meaning for them all. They all understand the

word, approximately, but each _feels_ it in a way unexperienced by his

friend. The freightage of significance carried by each concrete, sensuous,

picture-making word is bound to vary according to the entire physical and

mental history of the man who hears it. Even the commonest and most

universal words for things and sensations--such as "hand," "foot," "dark,"

"fear," "fire," "warm," "home"--are suffused with personal emotions,

faintly or clearly felt; they have been or are _my_ hand, foot, fear,

darkness, warmth, happiness. Now the poet is like a man talking or singing

in the dark to a circle of friends. He cannot say to them "See this" or

"Feel that" in the literal sense of "see" and "feel"; he can only call up

by means of words and tunes what his friends have seen and felt already,

and then under the excitement of such memories suggest new combinations,

new weavings of the infinitely varied web of human experience, new voyages

with fresh sails upon seas untried.

It is true that we may picture the poet as singing or talking to himself

in solitude and darkness, obeying primarily the impulse of expression

rather than of communication. Hence John Stuart Mill's distinction between

the orator and the poet: "Eloquence is _heard_; poetry is _over_heard.

Eloquence supposes an audience. The peculiarity of poetry appears to us to

lie in the poet's utter unconsciousness of a listener. Poetry is feeling

confessing itself to itself in moments of solitude, and embodying itself

in symbols which are the nearest possible representations of the feeling

in the exact shape in which it exists in the poet's mind."

[Footnote: J. S. Mill, "Thoughts on Poetry," in _Dissertations_, vol. 1.

See also F. N. Scott, "The Most Fundamental Differentia of Poetry and

Prose." Published by Modern Language Association, 19, 2.]

But whether his primary aim be the relief of his own feelings (for a man

swears even when he is alone!) or the communication of his feelings to

other persons, it remains true that a poet's language betrays his bodily

and mental history. "The poet," said Thoreau, "writes the history of his

own body."

For example, a study of Browning's vocabulary made by Professor C. H.

Herford

[Footnote: _Robert Browning_, Modern English Writers, pp. 244-66.

Blackwood & Sons. 1905.]

emphasizes that poet's acute tactual and muscular sensibilities, his quick

and eager apprehension of space-relations:

"He gloried in the strong sensory-stimulus of glowing color, of

dazzling light; in the more complex _motory_-stimulus of intricate,

abrupt and plastic form.... He delighted in the angular, indented,

intertwining, labyrinthine varieties of line and surface which call

for the most delicate, and at the same time most agile, adjustments

of the eye. He caught at the edges of things.... _Spikes_ and

_wedges_ and _swords_ run riot in his work.... He loved the grinding,

clashing and rending sibilants and explosives as Tennyson the

tender-hefted liquids.... He is the poet of sudden surprises,

unforseen transformations.... The simple joy in abrupt changes of

sensation which belonged to his riotous energy of nerve lent support

to his peremptory way of imagining all change and especially all

vital and significant becoming."

The same truth is apparent as we pass from the individual poet to the

poetic literature of his race. Here too is the stamp of bodily history.

Hebrew poetry, as is well known, is always expressing emotion in terms of

bodily sensation.

"_Anger_," says Renan,

[Footnote: Quoted by J. H. Gardiner, _The Bible as Literature_, p.

114.]

"is expressed in Hebrew in a throng of ways, each picturesque, and

each borrowed from physiological facts. Now the metaphor is taken

from the rapid and animated breathing which accompanies the passion,

now from heat or from boiling, now from the act of a noisy breaking,

now from shivering. _Discouragement_ and _despair_ are expressed by

the melting of the heart, _fear_ by the loosening of the reins.

_Pride_ is portrayed by the holding high of the head, with the figure

straight and stiff. _Patience_ is a long breathing, _impatience_

short breathing, _desire_ is thirst or paleness. Pardon is expressed

by a throng of metaphors borrowed from the idea of covering, of

hiding, of coating over the fault. In _Job_ God sews up sins in a

sack, seals it, then throws it behind him: all to signify that he

forgets them....

"My soul longeth, yea, even fainteth for the courts of the Lord; my

heart and my flesh crieth out for the living God.

"Save me, O God; for the waters are come in unto my soul.

"I sink in deep mire, where there is no standing: I am come into deep

waters, where the floods overflow me.

"I am weary of my crying: my throat is dried: mine eyes fail while I

wait for my God."

Greek poetry, likewise, is made out of "warm, swift, vibrating" words,

thrilling with bodily sensation. Gilbert Murray

[Footnote: "What English Poetry may Learn from Greek," _Atlantic Monthly_,

November, 1912.]

has described the weaving of these beautiful single words into patterns:

"The whole essence of lyric is rhythm. It is the weaving of words

into a song-pattern, so that the mere arrangement of the syllables

produces a kind of dancing joy.... Greek lyric is derived directly

from the religious dance; that is, not merely the pattering of the

feet, _but the yearning movement of the whole body_, the ultimate

expression of emotion that cannot be pressed into articulate speech,

compact of intense rhythm and intense feeling."

Nor should it be forgotten that Milton, while praising "a graceful and

ornate rhetoric," declares that poetry, compared with this, is "more

simple, sensuous and passionate."

[Footnote: _Tract on Education._ ]

These words "sensuous" and "passionate," dulled as they have become by

repetition, should be interpreted in their full literal sense. While

language is unquestionably a social device for the exchange of ideas and

feelings, it is also true that poetic diction is a revelation of

individual experience, of body-and-mind contacts with reality. Every poet

is still an Adam in the Garden, inventing new names as fast as the new

wonderful Beasts---so terrible, so delightful!--come marching by.

_3. Words as Current Coin_

But the poet's words, stamped and colored as they are by unique individual

experience, must also have a general _transmission value_ which renders

them current coin. If words were merely representations of private

experience, merely our own nicknames for things, they would not pass the

walls of the Garden inhabited by each man's imagination. "Expression"

would be possible, but "communication" would be impossible, and indeed

there would be no recognizable terms of expression except the "bow-wow" or

"pooh-pooh" or "ding-dong" of the individual Adam----and even these

expressive syllables might not be the ones acceptable to Eve!

The truth is that though the impulse to expression is individual, and that

in highly developed languages a single man can give his personal stamp to

words, making them say what he wishes them to say, as Dante puts it,

speech is nevertheless primarily a social function. A word is a social

instrument. "It belongs," says Professor Whitney,

[Footnote: W. D. Whitney, _Language and the Study of Language_, p. 404.]

"not to the individual, but to the member of society.... What we may

severally choose to say is not language until it be accepted and employed

by our fellows. The whole development of speech, though initiated by the

acts of individuals, is wrought out by the community."

... A solitary man would never frame a language. Let a child grow up in

utter seclusion, and, however rich and suggestive might be the nature

around him, however full and appreciative his sense of that which lay

without, and his consciousness of that which went on within him, he would

all his life remain a mute."

What is more, the individual's mastery of language is due solely to his

social effort in employing it. Speech materials are not inherited; they

are painfully acquired. It is well known that an English child brought up

in China and hearing no word of English will speak Chinese without a trace

of his English parentage in form or idiom.

[Footnote: See Baldwin's _Dictionary of Philosophy and Psychology_,

article "Language."]

His own body-and-mind experiences will be communicated in the medium

already established by the body-and-mind experiences of the Chinese race.

In that medium only can the thoughts of this English-born child have any

transmission value. His father and mother spoke a tongue moulded by

Chaucer and Shakspere, but to the boy whom we have imagined all that

age-long labor of perfecting a social instrument of speech is lost

without a trace. As far as language is concerned, he is a Chinaman and

nothing else.

Now take the case of a Chinese boy who has come to an American school and

college. Just before writing this paragraph I have read the blue-book of

such a boy, written in a Harvard examination on Tennyson. It was an

exceptionally well-expressed blue-book, in idiomatic English, and it

revealed an unusual appreciation of Tennyson's delicate and sure

felicities of speech. The Chinese boy, by dint of an intellectual effort

of which most of his American classmates were incapable, had mastered many

of the secrets of an alien tongue, and had taken possession of the rich

treasures of English poetry. If he had been composing verse himself,

instead of writing a college blue-book, it is likely that he would have

preferred to use his own mother-tongue, as the more natural medium for the

expression of his intimate thoughts and feelings. But that expression, no

matter how artistic, would have "communicated" nothing whatever to an

American professor ignorant of the Chinese language. It is clear that the

power of any person to convey his ideas and emotions to others is

conditioned upon the common possession of some medium of exchange.

4. _Words an Imperfect Medium_

And it is precisely here that we face one of the fundamental difficulties

of the poet's task; a difficulty that affects, indeed, all human

intercourse. For words are notoriously an imperfect medium of

communication. They "were not invented at first," says Professor Walter

Raleigh in his book on Wordsworth, "and are very imperfectly adapted at

best, for the severer purposes of truth. They bear upon them all the

weaknesses of their origin, and all the maims inflicted by the

prejudices and fanaticisms of generations of their employers. They

perpetuate the memory or prolong the life of many noble forms of human

extravagance, and they are the monuments of many splendid virtues. But

with all their abilities and dignities they are seldom well fitted for the

quiet and accurate statement of the thing that is.... Beasts fight with

horns, and men, when the guns are silent, with words. The changes of

meaning in words from good to bad and from bad to good senses, which are

quite independent of their root meaning, is proof enough, without detailed

illustration, of the incessant nature of the strife. The question is not

what a word means, but what it imputes."

[Footnote: Raleigh's _Wordsworth_. London, 1903.]

Now if the quiet and accurate statement of things as they are is the ideal

language of prose, it is obvious that the characteristic diction of poetry

is unquiet, inaccurate, incurably emotional. Herein lie its dangers and

its glories. No poet can keep for very long to the "neutral style," to the

cool gray wallpaper words, so to speak; he wants more color---passionate

words that will "stick fiery off" against the neutral background of

conventional diction. In vain does Horace warn him against "purple

patches"; for he knows that the tolerant Horace allowed himself to use

purple patches whenever he wished. All employers of language for emotional

effect--orators, novelists, essayists, writers of editorials--utilize in

certain passages these colored, heightened, figured words. It is as if

they ordered their printers to set individual words or whole groups of

words in upper-case type.

And yet these "upper-case words" of heightened emotional value are not

really isolated from their context. Their values are relative and not

absolute. Like the high lights of a picture, their effectiveness depends

upon the tone of the composition as a whole. To insert a big or violent

word for its own potency is like sewing the purple patch upon a faded

garment. The predominant thought and feeling of a passage give the

richest individual words their penetrating power, just as the weight of

the axe-head sinks the blade into the wood. "Futurist" poets like

Marinetti have protested against the bonds of syntax, the necessity of

logical subject and predicate, and have experimented with nouns alone.

"Words delivered from the fetters of punctuation," says Marinetti, "will

flash against one another, will interlace their various forms of

magnetism, and follow the uninterrupted dynamics of force."

[Footnote: There is an interesting discussion of Futurism in Sir Henry

Newbolt's _New Study of English Poetry_. Dutton, 1919.]

But do they? The reader may judge for himself in reading Marinetti's poem

on the siege of a Turkish fort:

"Towers guns virility flights erection telemetre exstacy toumbtoumb 3

seconds toumbtoumb waves smiles laughs plaff poaff glouglouglouglou

hide-and-seek crystals virgins flesh jewels pearls iodine salts

bromide skirts gas liqueurs bubbles 3 seconds toumbtoumb officer

whiteness telemetre cross fire megaphone sight-at-thousand-metres

all-men-to-left enough every-man-to-his post incline-7-degrees

splendour jet pierce immensity azure deflowering onslaught alleys

cries labyrinth mattress sobs ploughing desert bed precision

telemetre monoplane cackling theatre applause monoplane equals

balcony rose wheel drum trepan gad-fly rout arabs oxen blood-colour

shambles wounds refuge oasis."

In these vivid nouns there is certainly some raw material for a poem, just

as a heap of bits of colored glass might make material for a rose-window.

But both poem and window must be built by somebody: the shining fragments

will never fashion themselves into a whole.

5. _Predominant Tone-Feeling_

If each poem is composed in its own "key," as we say of music, with its

own scale of "values," as we say of pictures, it is obvious that the

separate words tend to take on tones and hues from the predominant

tone-feeling of the poem. It is a sort of protective coloration, like

Nature's devices for blending birds and insects into their background; or,

to choose a more prosaic illustration, like dipping a lump of sugar into a

cup of coffee. The white sugar and the yellowish cream and the black

coffee blend into something unlike any of the separate ingredients, yet

the presence of each is felt. It is true that some words refuse to be

absorbed into the texture of the poem: they remain as it were foreign

substances in the stream of imagery, something alien, stubborn, jarring,

although expressive enough in themselves. All the pioneers in poetic

diction assume this risk of using "un-poetic" words in their desire to

employ expressive words. Classic examples are Wordsworth's homely "tubs"

and "porringers," and Walt Whitman's catalogues of everyday implements

used in various trades. _Othello_ was hissed upon its first appearance on

the Paris stage because of that "vulgar" word handkerchief. Thus "fork"

and "spoon" have almost purely utilitarian associations and are

consequently difficult terms for the service of poetry, but "knife" has a

wider range of suggestion. Did not the peaceful Robert Louis Stevenson

confess his romantic longing to "knife a man"?

But it is not necessary to multiply illustrations of this law of

connotation. The true poetic value of a word lies partly in its history,

in its past employments, and partly also in the new vitality which it

receives from each brain which fills the word with its own life. It is

like an old violin, with its subtle overtones, the result of many

vibrations of the past, but yet each new player may coax a new tune from

it. When Wordsworth writes of

"The silence that is in the starry sky,

The sleep that is among the lonely hills,"

he is combining words that are immemorially familiar into a total effect

that is peculiarly "Wordsworthian." Diction is obviously only a part of a

greater whole in which ideas and emotions are also merged. A concordance

of all the words employed by a poet teaches us much about him, and

conversely a knowledge of the poet's personality and of his governing

ideas helps us in the study of his diction. Poets often have favorite

words--like Marlowe's "black," Shelley's "light," Tennyson's "wind,"

Swinburne's "fire." Each of these words becomes suffused with the whole

personality of the poet who employs it. It not only cannot be taken out of

its context in the particular poem in which it appears, but it cannot be

adequately _felt_ without some recognition of the particular sensational

and emotional experience which prompted its use. Many concordance-hunters

thus miss the real game, and fall into the Renaissance error of

word-grubbing for its own sake, as if mere words had a value of their own

independently of the life breathed into them by living men. I recall a

conversation at Bormes with the French poet Angellier. He was complaining

humorously of his friend L., a famous scholar whose big book was "carrying

all the treasures of French literature down to posterity like a

cold-storage transport ship." "But he published a criticism of one of my

poems," Angellier went on, "which proved that he did not understand the

poem at all. He had studied it too hard! The words of a poem are

stepping-stones across a brook. If you linger on one of them too long, you

will get your feet wet! You must cross, _vite_!" If the poets lead us from

one mood to another over a bridge of words, the words themselves are not

the goal of the journey. They are instruments used in the transmission of

emotion.

6. _Specific Tone-Color_

It is obvious, then, that the full poetic value of a word cannot be

ascertained apart from its context. The value is relative and not

absolute. And nevertheless, just as the bit of colored glass may have a

certain interest and beauty of its own, independently of its possible

place in the rose-window, it is true that separate words possess special

qualities of physical and emotional suggestiveness. Dangerous as it is to

characterize the qualities of the sound of a word apart from the sense of

that word, there is undeniably such a thing as "tone-color." A piano and a

violin, striking the same note, are easily differentiated by the quality

of the sound, and of two violins, playing the same series of notes, it is

usually possible to declare which instrument has the richer tone or

timbre. Words, likewise, differ greatly in tone-quality. A great deal of

ingenuity has been devoted to the analysis of "bright" and "dark" vowels,

smooth and harsh consonants, with the aim of showing that each sound has

its special expressive force, its peculiar adaptability to transmit a

certain kind of feeling. Says Professor A. H. Tolman:

[Footnote: "The Symbolic Value of Sounds," in _Hamlet and Other Essays_,

by A. H. Tolman. Boston, 1904.]

"Let us arrange the English vowel sounds in the following scale:

[short i] (little) [long i] (I) [short oo] (wood)

[short e] (met) [long u] (due) [long ow] (cow)

[short a] (mat) [short ah] (what) [long o] (gold)

[long e] (mete) [long ah] (father) [long oo] (gloom)

[ai] (fair) [oi] (boil) [aw] (awe)

[long a] (mate) [short u] (but)

"The sounds at the beginning of this scale are especially fitted to

express uncontrollable joy and delight, gayety, triviality, rapid

movement, brightness, delicacy, and physical littleness; the sounds

at the end are peculiarly adapted to express horror, solemnity, awe,

deep grief, slowness of motion, darkness, and extreme or oppressive

greatness of size. The scale runs, then, from the little to the

large, from the bright to the dark, from ecstatic delight to horror,

and from the trivial to the solemn and awful."

Robert Louis Stevenson in his _Some Technical Elements of Style in

Literature_, and many other curious searchers into the secrets of words,

have attempted to explain the physiological basis of these varying

"tone-qualities." Some of them are obviously imitative of sounds in

nature; some are merely suggestive of these sounds through more or less

remote analogies; some are frankly imitative of muscular effort or of

muscular relaxation. High-pitched vowels and low-pitched vowels, liquid

consonants and harsh consonants, are unquestionably associated with

muscular memories, that is to say, with individual body-and-mind

experiences. Lines like Tennyson's famous

"The moan of doves in immemorial elms

And murmuring of innumerable bees"

thus represent, in their vowel and consonantal expressiveness, the past

history of countless physical sensations, widely shared by innumerable

individuals, and it is to this fact that the "transmission value" of the

lines is due.

Imitative effects are easily recognized, and need no comment:

"Brushed with the hiss of rustling wings"

"The mellow ouzel fluting in the elm"

"The wind that'll wail like a child

and the sea that'll moan like a man."

Suggestive effects are more subtle. Sometimes they are due primarily to

those rhythmical arrangements of words which we shall discuss in the next

chapter, but poetry often employs the sound of single words to awaken dim

or bright associations. Robert Bridges's catalogue of the Greek nymphs in

"Eros and Psyche" is an extreme example of risking the total effect of a

stanza upon the mere beautiful sounds of proper names.

"Swift to her wish came swimming on the waves

His lovely ocean nymphs, her guides to be,

The Nereids all, who live among the caves

And valleys of the deep, Cymodocè,

Agavè, blue-eyed Hallia and Nesaea,

Speio, and Thoë, Glaucè and Actaea,

Iaira, Melitè and Amphinomè,

Apseudès and Nemertès, Callianassa,

Cymothoë, Thaleia, Limnorrhea,

Clymenè, Ianeira and Ianassa,

Doris and Panopè and Galatea,

Dynamenè, Dexamenè and Maira,

Ferusa, Doto, Proto, Callianeira,

Amphithoë, Oreithuia and Amathea."

Names of objects like "bobolink" and "raven" may affect us emotionally by

the quality of their tone. Through association with the sounds of the

human voice, heard under stress of various emotions, we attribute joyous

or foreboding qualities to the bird's tone, and then transfer these

associations to the bare name of the bird.

Names of places are notoriously rich in their evocation of emotion.

"He caught a chill in the lagoons of Venice,

And died in Padua."

Here the fact of illness and death may be prosaic enough, but the very

names of "Venice" and "Padua" are poetry--like "Rome," "Ireland,"

"Arabia," "California."

"Where the great Vision of the guarded mount

Looks toward Namancos and Bayona's hold."

Who knows precisely where that "guarded mount" is upon the map? And who

cares? "The sailor's heart," confesses Lincoln Colcord,

[Footnote: _The New Republic_, September 16, 1916.]

"refutes the prose of knowledge, and still believes in delectable and

sounding names. He dreams of capes and islands whose appellations are

music and a song.... The first big land sighted on the outward passage is

Java Head; beside it stands Cape Sangian Sira, with its name like a

battle-cry. We are in the Straits of Sunda: name charged with the heady

languor of the Orient, bringing to mind pictures of palm-fringed shores

and native villages, of the dark-skinned men of Java clad in bright

sarongs, clamoring from their black-painted dugouts, selling fruit and

brilliant birds. These waters are rich in names that stir the blood, like

Krakatoa, Gunong Delam, or Lambuan; or finer, more sounding than all the

rest, Telok Betong and Rajah Bassa, a town and a mountain--Telok Betong at

the head of Lampong Bay and Rajah Bassa, grand old bulwark on the Sumatra

shore, the cradle of fierce and sudden squalls."

It may be urged, of course, that in lines of true poetry the sense carries

the sound with it, and that nothing is gained by trying to analyse the

sounds apart from the sense. Professor C. M. Lewis

[Footnote: _Principles of English Verse_. New York, 1906.]

asserts bluntly: "When you say Titan you mean something big, and when you

say tittle you mean something small; but it is not the sound of either

word that means either bigness or littleness, it is the sense. If you put

together a great many similar consonants in one sentence, they will

attract special attention to the words in which they occur, and the

significance of those words, whatever it may be, is thereby intensified;

but whether the words are 'a team of little atomies' or 'a triumphant

terrible Titan,' it is not the sound of the consonants that makes the

significance. When Tennyson speaks of the shrill-edged shriek of

a mother, his words suggest with peculiar vividness the idea of a shriek;

but when you speak of stars that shyly shimmer, the same sounds only

intensify the idea of shy shimmering." This is refreshing, and yet it is

to be noted that "Titan" and "tittle" and "shrill-edged shriek" and "shyly

shimmer" are by no means identical in sound: they have merely certain

consonants in common. A fairer test of tone-color may be found if we turn

to frank nonsense-verse, where the formal elements of poetry surely exist

without any control of meaning or "sense":

"The Jabberwock, with eyes of flame,

Came whiffling through the tulgey wood,

And burbled as it came!

"'T was brillig, and the slithy toves

Did gyre and gimble in the wabe;

All mimsy were the borogoves,

And the mome raths outgrabe."

"It seems rather pretty," commented the wise Alice, "but it's rather

hard to understand! Somehow it seems to fill my head with ideas--only

I don't exactly know what they are!"

This is precisely what one feels when one listens to a poem recited in a

language of which one happens to be ignorant. The wonderful colored words

are there, and they seem somehow to fill our heads with ideas, only we do

not know what they are. Many readers who know a little Italian or German

will confess that their enjoyment of a lyric in those languages suffers

only a slight, if any, impairment through their ignorance of the precise

meaning of all the words in the poem: if they know enough to feel the

predominant mood--as when we listen to a song sung in a language of which

we are wholly ignorant--we can sacrifice the succession of exact ideas.

For words bare of meaning to the intellect may be covered with veils of

emotional association due to the sound alone. Garrick ridiculed--and

doubtless at the same time envied--George Whitefield's power to make women

weep by the rich overtones with which he pronounced "that blessed word

Mesopotamia."

The capacities and the limitations of tone-quality in itself may be seen

no less clearly in parodies. Swinburne, a master technician in words and

rhythm, occasionally delighted, as in "Nephelidia,"

[Footnote: Quoted in Carolyn Wells, _A Parody Anthology_. New York, 1904.]

to make fun of himself as well as of his poetic contemporaries:

"Surely no spirit or sense of a soul that was soft

to the spirit and soul of our senses

Sweetens the stress of surprising suspicion that

sobs in the semblance and sound of a sigh;

Only this oracle opens Olympian, in mystical

moods and triangular tenses,--

'Life is the lust of a lamp for the light that is

dark till the dawn of the day when we die.'"

Or, take Calverley's parody of Robert Browning:

"You see this pebble-stone? It's a thing I bought

Of a bit of a chit of a boy i' the mid o' the day.

I like to dock the smaller parts o' speech,

As we curtail the already cur-tail'd cur--"

The characteristic tone-quality of the vocabulary of each of these

poets--whether it be

"A soul that was soft to the spirit and soul of our senses"

or

"A bit of a chit of a boy i' the mid o' the day"--

is as perfectly conveyed by the parodist as if the lines had been written

in dead earnest. Poe's "Ulalume" is a masterly display of tone-color

technique, but exactly what it means, or whether it means anything at all,

is a matter upon which critics have never been able to agree. It is

certain, however, that a poet's words possess a kind of physical

suggestiveness, more or less closely related to their mental significance.

In nonsense-verse and parodies we have a glimpse, as it were, at the body

of poetry stripped of its soul.

7. _"Figures of Speech"_

To understand why poets habitually use figurative language, we must recall

what has been said in Chapter III about verbal images. Under the heat and

pressure of emotion, things alter their shape and size and quality, ideas

are transformed into concrete images, diction becomes impassioned, plain

speech tends to become metaphorical. The language of any excited person,

whether he is uttering himself in prose or verse, is marked by "tropes";

i.e. "turnings"--images which express one thing in the terms of another

thing. The language of feeling is characteristically "tropical," and

indeed every man who uses metaphors is for the moment talking like a

poet--unless, as too often happens both in prose and verse, the metaphor

has become conventionalized and therefore lifeless. The born poet

thinks in "figures," in "pictured" language, or, as it has been called, in

"re-presentative" language,

[Footnote: G. L. Raymond, _Poetry as a Representative Art_, chap. 19.]

since he represents, both to his own mind and to those with whom he is

communicating, the objects of poetic emotion under new forms. If he wishes

to describe an eagle, he need not say: "A rapacious bird of the falcon

family, remarkable for its strength, size, graceful figure, and

extraordinary flight." He represents these facts by making a picture:

"He clasps the crag with crooked hands;

Close to the sun in lonely lands,

Ring'd with the azure world, he stands.

"The wrinkled sea beneath him crawls;

He watches from his mountain walls,

And like a thunderbolt he falls."

[Footnote: Tennyson, "The Eagle." ]

Or suppose the poet is a woman, meditating upon the coming of old age, and

reflecting that age brings riches of its own. Observe how this thought is

"troped"; i.e. turned into figures which re-present the fundamental idea:

"Come, Captain Age,

With your great sea-chest full of treasure!

Under the yellow and wrinkled tarpaulin

Disclose the carved ivory

And the sandalwood inlaid with pearl,

Riches of wisdom and years.

Unfold the India shawl,

With the border of emerald and orange and crimson and blue,

Weave of a lifetime.

I shall be warm and splendid

With the spoils of the Indies of age."

[Footnote: Sarah N. Cleghorn, "Come, Captain Age."]

It is true, of course, that a poet may sometimes prefer to use

unornamented language, "not elevated," as Wordsworth said, "above the

level of prose." Such passages may nevertheless be marked by poetic

beauty, due to the circumstances or atmosphere in which the plain words

are spoken. The drama is full of such instances. "I loved you not," says

Hamlet; to which Ophelia replies only: "I was the more deceived." No

figure of speech could be more moving than that.

I once found in an old graveyard on Cape Cod, among the sunny, desolate

sandhills, these lines graven on a headstone:

"She died, and left to me

This heath, this calm and quiet scene;

This memory of what hath been,

And nevermore will be."

I had read the lines often enough in books, but here I realized for the

first time the perfection of their beauty.

But though a poet, for special reasons, may now and then renounce the use

of figurative language, it remains true that this is the characteristic

and habitual mode of utterance, not only of poetry but of all emotional

prose. Here are a few sentences from an English sailor's account of the

fight off Heligoland on August 28, 1915. He was on a destroyer:

"Scarcely had we started when from out the mist and across our front,

in furious pursuit, came the first cruiser squadron--the town class,

Birmingham, etc.--each unit a match for three Mainzes; and as we

looked and reduced speed they opened fire, _and the clear

'bang-bang!' of their guns was just a cooling drink_....

"The Mainz was immensely gallant. The last I saw of her, absolutely

wrecked alow and aloft, her whole midships a fuming inferno, she had

one gun forward and one aft still spitting forth fury and defiance

_like a wildcat mad with wounds_.

"Our own four-funnel friend recommenced at this juncture with a

couple of salvos, but rather half-heartedly, and we really did not

care a d----, for there, straight ahead of us, in lordly procession,

_like elephants walking through a pack of dogs_, came the Lion, Queen

Mary, Invincible, and New Zealand, our battle cruisers, great and

grim and _uncouth as some antediluvian monsters_. How solid they

looked! How utterly _earthquaking_!"

The use and the effectiveness of figures depend primarily, then, upon the

mood and intentions of the writer. Figures are figures, whether employed

in prose or verse. Mr. Kipling does not lose his capacity for employing

metaphors as he turns from writing verse to writing stories, and the

rhetorician's analysis of similes, personifications, allegories, and all

the other devices of "tropical" language is precisely the same, whether he

is studying poetry or prose. Any good textbook in rhetoric gives adequate

examples of these various classes of figures, and they need not be

repeated here.

8. _Words as Permanent Embodiment of Poetic Feeling_

We have seen that the characteristic vocabulary of poetry originates in

emotion and that it is capable of transmitting emotion to the hearer or

reader. But how far are words capable of embodying emotion in permanent

form? Poets themselves, in proud consciousness of the enduring character

of their creations, have often boasted that they were building monuments

more enduring than bronze or marble. When Shakspere asserts this in his

sonnets, he is following not only an Elizabethan convention, but a

universal instinct of the men of his craft. Is it a delusion? Here are

words--mere vibrating sounds, light and winged and evanescent things,

assuming a meaning value only through the common consent of those who

interchange them, altering that meaning more or less from year to year,

often passing wholly from the living speech of men, decaying when races

decay and civilizations change. What transiency, what waste and oblivion

like that which waits upon millions on millions of autumn leaves!

Yet nothing in human history is more indisputable than the fact that

certain passages of poetry do survive, age after age, while empires pass,

and philosophies change and science alters the mental attitude of men as

well as the outward circumstances of life upon this planet.

Some thoughts and feelings, then, eternalize themselves in human speech;

most thoughts and feelings do not. Wherein lies the difference?

If most words are perishable stuff, what is it that keeps other words from

perishing? Is it superior organization and arrangement of this fragile

material, "fame's great antiseptic, style"? Or is it by virtue of some

secret passionate quality imparted to words by the poet, so that the

apparently familiar syllables take on a life and significance which is

really not their own, but his? And is this intimate personalized quality

of words "style," also, as well as that more external "style" revealed in

clear and orderly and idiomatic arrangement? Or does the mystery of

permanence reside in the poet's generalizing power, by which he is able to

express universal, and hence permanently interesting human experience? And

therefore, was not the late Professor Courthope right when he declared, "I

take all great poetry to be not so much what Plato thought it, the

utterance of individual genius, half inspired, half insane, as the

enduring voice of the soul and conscience of man living in society"?

Answers to such questions as these depend somewhat upon the "romantic" or

"classic" bias of the critics. Romantic criticism tends to stress the

significance of the personality of the individual poet. The classic school

of criticism tends to emphasize the more general and universal qualities

revealed by the poet's work. But while the schools and fashions of

criticism shift their ground and alter their verdicts as succeeding

generations change in taste, the great poets continue as before to

particularize and also to generalize, to be "romantic" and "classic" by

turns, or even in the same poem. They defy critical augury, in their

unending quest of beauty and truth. That they succeed, now and then, in

giving a permanently lovely embodiment to their vision is surely a more

important fact than the rightness or wrongness of whatever artistic theory

they may have invoked or followed.

For many a time, surely, their triumphs are a contradiction of their

theories. To take a very familiar example, Wordsworth's theory of poetic

diction shifted like a weathercock. In the Advertisement to the _Lyrical

Ballads_ (1798) he asserted: "The following poems are to be considered as

experiments. They were written chiefly with a view to ascertain how far

the language of conversation in the middle and lower classes of society is

adapted to the purposes of poetic pleasure." In the Preface of the second

edition (1800) he announced that his purpose had been "to ascertain how

far, by fitting to metrical arrangement a selection of the real language

of men in a state of vivid sensation, that sort of pleasure and that

quantity of pleasure may be imparted, which a poet may rationally

endeavour to impart." But in the famous remarks on poetic diction which

accompanied the third edition (1802) he inserted after the words "A

selection of language really used by men" this additional statement of his

intention: "And at the same time to throw over them a certain colouring of

the imagination whereby ordinary things should be presented to the mind in

an unusual aspect." In place of the original statement about the

conversation of the middle and lower classes of society, we are now

assured that the language of poetry "if selected truly and judiciously,

must necessarily be dignified and variegated and alive with metaphors and

figures.... This selection will form a distinction ... and will entirely

separate the composition from the vulgarity and meanness of ordinary

life."

What an amazing change in theory in four years! Yet it is no more

remarkable than Wordsworth's successive emendations in the text of his

poems. In 1807 his blind Highland boy had gone voyaging in

"A Household Tub, like one of those

Which women use to wash their clothes;

This carried the blind Boy."

In 1815 the wash-tub becomes

"The shell of a green turtle, thin

And hollow--you might sit therein,

It was so wide and deep."

And in 1820 the worried and dissatisfied artist changes that unlucky

vessel once more into the final banality of

"A shell of ample size, and light

As the pearly car of Amphitrite

That sportive dolphins drew."

Sometimes, it is true, this adventurer in poetic diction had rather better

fortune in his alterations. The much-ridiculed lines of 1798 about the

child's grave--

"I've measured it from side to side,

'T is three feet long and two feet wide"--

became in 1820:

"Though but of compass small and bare

To thirsty suns and parching air."

Like his friend Coleridge, Wordsworth forsook gradually his early

experiments with matter-of-fact phrases, with quaintly grotesque figures.

Revolt against conventional eighteenth-century diction had given him a

blessed sense of freedom, but he found his real strength later in subduing

that freedom to a sense of law. Archaisms, queernesses, flatly

naturalistic turns of speech gave place to a vocabulary of simple dignity

and austere beauty. Wordsworth attained his highest originality as an

artist by disregarding singularity, by making familiar words reveal new

potencies of expression.

For after all, we must come back to what William James called the long

"loop-line," to that reservoir of ideas and feelings which stores up the

experience of individuals and of the race, and to the words which most

effectively evoke that experience. Two classes at Columbia University, a

few years ago, were asked to select fifty English words of basic

importance in the expression of human life. In choosing these words, they

were to aim at reality and strength rather than at beauty. When the two

lists were combined, they presented these seventy-eight different words,

which are here arranged alphabetically: age, ambition, beauty, bloom,

country, courage, dawn, day, death, despair, destiny, devotion, dirge,

disaster, divine, dream, earth, enchantment, eternity, fair, faith,

fantasy, flower, fortune, freedom, friendship, glory, glow, god, grief,

happiness, harmony, hate, heart, heaven, honor, hope, immortality, joy,

justice, knell, life, longing, love, man, melancholy, melody, mercy, moon,

mortal, nature, noble, night, paradise, parting, peace, pleasure, pride,

regret, sea, sigh, sleep, solitude, song, sorrow, soul, spirit, spring,

star, suffer, tears, tender, time, virtue, weep, whisper, wind and youth.

[Footnote: See Nation, February 23, 1911.]

Surely these words, selected as they were for their significance, are not

lacking in beauty of sound. On the contrary, any list of the most

beautiful words in English would include many of them. But it is the

meaning of these "long-loop" words, rather than their formal beauty alone,

which fits them for the service of poetry. And they acquire in that

service a "literary" value, which is subtly blended with their "sound"

value and logical "meaning" value. They connote so much! They suggest more

than they actually say. They unite the individual mood of the moment with

the soul of mankind.

And there is still another mode of union between the individual and the

race, which we must attempt in the next chapter to regard more closely,

but which should be mentioned here in connection with the permanent

embodiment of feeling in words,--namely, the mysterious fact of rhythm.

Single words are born and die, we learn them and forget them, they alter

their meanings, they always say less than we really intend, they are

imperfect instruments for signaling from one brain to another. Yet these

crumbling particles of speech may be miraculously held together and built

into a tune, and with the tune comes another element of law, order,

permanence. The instinct for the drumbeat lies deep down in our bodies; it

affects our mental life, the organization of our emotions, and our

response to the rhythmical arrangement of words. For mere ideas and words

are not poetry, but only part of the material for poetry. A poem does not

come into full being until the words begin to dance.

CHAPTER V

RHYTHM AND METRE

"Rhythm is the recurrence of stress at intervals; metre is the

regular, or measured, recurrence of stress."

M. H. SHACKFORD, _A First Book of Poetics_

"Metres being manifestly sections of rhythm."

ARISTOTLE, _Poetics_, 4. (Butcher's translation)

"Thoughts that voluntary move

Harmonious numbers."

MILTON

_1. The Nature of Rhythm_

And why must the words begin to dance? The answer is to be perceived in

the very nature of Rhythm, that old name for the ceaseless pulsing or

"flowing" of all living things. So deep indeed lies the instinct for

rhythm in our consciousness that we impute it even to inanimate objects.

We hear the ticking of the clock as tíck-tock, tíck-tock, or else

tick-tóck, tick-tóck, although psychologists assure us that the clock's

wheels are moving with indifferent, mechanical precision, and that it is

simply our own focusing of attention upon alternate beats which creates

the impression of rhythm. We hear a rhythm in the wheels of the train, and

in the purring of the motor-engine, knowing all the while that it

is we who impose or make-up the rhythm, in our human instinct for

organizing the units of attention. We cannot help it, as long as our own

pulses beat. No two persons catch quite the same rhythm in the sounds of

the animate and inanimate world, because no two persons have absolutely

identical pulse-beats, identical powers of attention, an identical

psycho-physical organism. We all perceive that there is a rhythm in a

racing crew, in a perfectly timed stroke of golf, in a fisherman's fly-

casting, in a violinist's bow, in a close-hauled sailboat fighting with

the wind. But we appropriate and organize these objective impressions in

subtly different ways.

When, for instance, we listen to poetry read aloud, or when we read it

aloud ourselves, some of us are instinctive "timers,"

[Footnote: See W. M. Patterson, _The Rhythm of Prose_. Columbia University

Press, 1916.]

paying primary attention to the spaced or measured intervals of time,

although in so doing we are not wholly regardless of those points of

"stress" which help to make the time-intervals plainer. Others of us are

natural "stressers," in that we pay primary attention to the "weight" of

words,--the relative loudness or pitch, by which their meaning or

importance is indicated,--and it is only secondarily that we think of

these weighted or "stressed" words as separated from one another by

approximately equal intervals of time. Standing on the rocks at Gloucester

after an easterly storm, a typical "timer" might be chiefly conscious of

the steady sequence of the waves, the measured intervals between

their summits; while the typical stresser, although subconsciously aware

of the steady iteration of the giant rollers, might watch primarily their

foaming crests, and listen chiefly to their crashing thunder. The point to

be remembered is this: that neither the "timing" instinct nor the

"stressing" instinct excludes the other, although in most individuals one

or the other predominates. Musicians, for instance, are apt to be

noticeable "timers," while many scholars who deal habitually with words in

their varied shifts of meaning, are professionally inclined to be

"stressers."

_2. The Measurement of Rhythm_

Let us apply these facts to some of the more simple of the vexed questions

of prosody, No one disputes the universality of the rhythmizing impulse;

the quarrel begins as soon as any prosodist attempts to dogmatize about

the nature and measurement of those flowing time-intervals whose

arrangement we call rhythm. No one disputes, again, that the only arbiter

in matters of prosody is the trained ear, and not the eye. Infinitely

deceptive is the printed page of verse when regarded by the eye. Verse may

be made to look like prose and prose to look like verse. Capital letters,

lines, rhymes, phrases and paragraphs may be so cunningly or

conventionally arranged by the printer as to disguise the real nature of

the rhythmical and metrical pattern. When in doubt, close your eyes!

We agree, then, that in all spoken language--and this is as true of prose

as it is of verse--there are time-intervals more or less clearly marked,

and that the ear is the final judge as to the nature of these intervals.

But can the ear really measure the intervals with any approximation to

certainty, so that prosodists, for instance, can agree that a given poem

is written in a definite metre? In one sense "yes." No one doubts that the

_Odyssey_ is written in "dactylic hexameters," i.e., in lines made up of

six "feet," each one of which is normally composed of a long syllable plus

two short syllables, or of an acceptable equivalent for that particular

combination. But when we are taught in school that Longfellow's

_Evangeline_ is also written in "dactylic hexameters," trouble begins for

the few inquisitive, since it is certain that if you close your eyes and

listen carefully to a dozen lines of Homer's Greek, and then to a

dozen lines of Longfellow's English, each written in so-called

"hexameters," you are listening to two very different arrangements of

time-intervals, so different, in fact, that the two poems are really not

in the same "measure" or "metre" at all. For the Greek poet was, as a

metrist, thinking primarily of quantity, of the relative "timing" of his

syllables, and the American of the relative "stress" of his syllables.

[Footnote: "Musically speaking--because the musical terms are exact and

not ambiguous--true dactyls are in 2-4 time and the verse of _Evangeline_

is in 3-8 time." T. D. Goodell, _Nation_, October 12, 1911.]

That illustration is drearily hackneyed, no doubt, but it has a double

value. It is perfectly clear; and furthermore, it serves to remind us of

the instinctive differences between different persons and different races

as regards the ways of arranging time-intervals so as to create the

rhythms of verse. The individual's standard of measurement--his poetic

foot-rule, so to speak--is very elastic,--"made of rubber" indeed, as the

experiments of many psychological laboratories have demonstrated beyond a

question. Furthermore, the composers of poetry build it out of very

elastic units. They are simply putting syllables of words together into a

rhythmical design, and these "airy syllables," in themselves mere symbols

of ideas and feelings, cannot be weighed by any absolutely correct

sound-scales. They cannot be measured in time by any absolutely accurate

watch-dial, or exactly estimated in their meaning, whether that be literal

or figurative, by any dictionary of words and phrases. But this is only

saying that the syllables which make up the units of verse, whether the

units be called "foot" or "line" or "phrase," are not dead, mechanical

things, but live things, moving rhythmically, entering thereby into the

pulsing, chiming life of the real world, and taking on more fullness of

life and beauty in elastic movement, in ordered but infinitely flexible

design, than they ever could possess as independent particles.

_3. Conflict and Compromise_

And everywhere in the arrangement of syllables into the patterns of rhythm

and metre we find conflict and compromise, the surrender of some values of

sound or sense for the sake of a greater unity. To revert to

considerations dealt with in an earlier chapter, we touch here upon the

old antinomy--or it may be, harmony--between "form" and "significance,"

between the "outside" and the "inside" of the work of art. For words,

surely, have one kind of value as _pure sound_, as "cadences" made up of

stresses, slides, pauses, and even of silences when the expected syllable

is artfully withheld. It is this sound-value, for instance, which you

perceive as you listen to a beautifully recited poem in Russian, a

language of which you know not a single word; and you may experience a

modification of the same pleasure in closing your mind wholly to the

"sense" of a richly musical passage in Swinburne, and delighting your ear

by its mere beauty of tone. But words have also that other value as

_meaning_, and we are aware how these meaning values shift with the stress

and turns of thought, so that a given word has a greater or less weight in

different sentences or even in different clauses of the same sentence.

"Meaning" values, like sound values, are never precisely fixed in a

mechanical and universally agreed-upon scale, they are relative, not

absolute. Sometimes meaning and sound conflict with one another, and one

must be sacrificed in part, as when the normal accent of a word

refuses to coincide with the verse-accent demanded by a certain measure,

so that we "wrench" the accent a trifle, or make it "hover" over two

syllables without really alighting upon either. And it is significant that

lovers of poetry have always found pleasure in such compromises.

[Footnote: Compare the passage about Chopin's piano-playing, quoted from

Alden in the Notes and Illustrations for this chapter.]

They enjoy minor departures from and returns to the normal, the expected

measure of both sound and sense, just as a man likes to sail a boat as

closely into the wind as he conveniently can, making his actual course a

compromise between the line as laid by the compass, and the actual facts

of wind and tide and the behavior of his particular boat. It is thus that

the sailor "makes it," triumphantly! And the poet "makes it" likewise, out

of deep, strong-running tides of rhythmic impulse, out of arbitrary words

and rebellious moods, out of

"Thoughts hardly to be packed

Into a narrow act,

Fancies that broke through language and escaped,"

until he compels rhythm and syllables to move concordantly, and blend into

that larger living whole--the dancing, singing crowd of sounds and

meanings which make up a poem.

_4. The Rhythms of Prose_

Just here it may be of help to us to turn away for a moment from verse

rhythm, and to consider what Dryden called "the other harmony" of prose.

For no one doubts that prose has rhythm, as well as verse. Vast and

learned treatises have been written on the prose rhythms of the Greeks and

Romans, and Saintsbury's _History of English Prose Rhythm_ is a monumental

collection of wonderful prose passages in English, with the scansion of

"long" and "short" syllables and of "feet" marked after a fashion that

seems to please no one but the author. But in truth the task of inventing

an adequate system for notating the rhythm of prose, and securing a

working agreement among prosodists as to a proper terminology, is almost

insuperable. Those of us who sat in our youth at the feet of German

masters were taught that the distinction between verse and prose was

simple: verse was, as the Greeks had called it, "bound speech" and prose

was "loosened speech." But a large proportion of the poetry published in

the last ten years is "free verse," which is assuredly of a "loosened"

rather than a "bound" pattern.

Apparently the old fence between prose and verse has been broken down. Or,

if one conceives of indubitable prose and indubitable verse as forming two

intersecting circles, there is a neutral zone,

[Illustration: Prose / Neutral Zone / Verse]

which some would call "prose poetry" and some "free verse," and which,

according to the experiments of Dr. Patterson

[Footnote: _The Rhythm of Prose_, already cited.]

may be appropriated as "prose experience" or "verse experience" according

to the rhythmic instinct of each individual. Indeed Mr. T. S. Omond has

admitted that "the very same words, with the very same natural stresses,

may be prose or verse according as we treat them. The difference is in

ourselves, in the mental rhythm to which we unconsciously adjust the

words."

[Footnote: Quoted in B. M. Alden, "The Mental Side of Metrical Form,"

_Modern Language Review_, July, 1914.]

Many familiar sentences from the English Bible or Prayer-Book, such as the

words from the _Te Deum_, "We, therefore, pray thee, help thy servants,

whom thou hast redeemed with thy precious blood," have a rhythm which may

be felt as prose or verse, according to the mental habit or mood or

rhythmizing impulse of the hearer.

Nevertheless it remains true in general that the rhythms of prose are more

constantly varied, broken and intricate than the rhythms of verse. They

are characterized, according to the interesting experiments of Dr.

Patterson, by syncopated time,

[Footnote: "For a 'timer' the definition of prose as distinguished from

verse experience depends upon a predominance of syncopation over

coincidence in the coordination of the accented syllables of the text with

the measuring pulses." _Rhythm of Prose_, p. 22.]

whereas in normal verse there is a fairly clean-cut coincidence between

the pulses of the hearer and the strokes of the rhythm. Every one seems to

agree that there is a certain danger in mixing these infinitely subtle and

"syncopated" tunes of prose with the easily recognized tunes of verse.

There is, unquestionably, a natural "iambic" roll in English prose, due to

the predominant alternation of stressed and unstressed syllables in our

native tongue, but when Dickens--to cite what John Wesley would call "an

eminent sinner" in this respect--inserts in his emotional prose line after

line of five-stress "iambic" verse, we feel instinctively that the

presence of the blank verse impairs the true harmony of the prose.

[Footnote: Observe, in the "Notes and Illustrations" for this chapter,

the frequency of the blank-verse lines in Robert G. Ingersoll's "Address

over a Little Boy's Grave."]

Delicate writers of English prose usually avoid this coincidence of

pattern with the more familiar patterns of verse, but it is impossible to

avoid it wholly, and some of the most beautiful cadences of English prose

might, if detached from their context, be scanned for a few syllables as

perfect verse. The free verse of Whitman, Henley and Matthew Arnold is

full of these embedded fragments of recognized "tunes of verse," mingled

with the unidentifiable tunes of prose. There has seldom been a more

curious example of accidental coincidence than in this sentence from a

prosaic textbook on "The Parallelogram of Forces": "And hence no force,

however great, can draw a cord, however fine, into a horizontal line which

shall be absolutely straight." This is precisely the "four-stressed

iambic" metre of _In Memoriam_, and it even preserves the peculiar rhyme

order of the _In Memoriam_ stanza:

"And hence no force, however great,

Can draw a cord, however fine,

Into a horizontal line

Which shall be absolutely straight."

We shall consider more closely, in the section on Free Verse in the

following chapter, this question of the coincidence and variation of

pattern as certain types of loosened verse pass in and out of the zone

which is commonly recognized as pure prose. But it is highly important

here to remember another fact, which professional psychologists in their

laboratory experiments with the notation of verse and prose have

frequently forgotten, namely, the existence of a type of ornamented prose,

which has had a marked historical influence upon the development of

English style. This ornamented prose, elaborated by Greek and Roman

rhetoricians, and constantly apparent in the pages of Cicero, heightened

its rhythm by various devices of alliteration, assonance, tone-color,

cadence, phrase and period. Greek oratory even employed rhyme in highly

colored passages, precisely as Miss Amy Lowell uses rhyme in her

polyphonic or "many-voiced" prose. Medieval Latin took over all of these

devices from Classical Latin, and in its varied oratorical, liturgical and

epistolary forms it strove to imitate the various modes of _cursus_

("running") and _clausula_ ("cadence") which had characterized the rhythms

of Isocrates and Cicero.

[Footnote: A. C. Clark, _Prose Rhythm in English_. Oxford, 1913.

Morris W. Croll, "The Cadence of English Oratorical Prose," _Studies in

Philology_. January, 1919.

Oliver W. Elton, "English Prose Numbers," in _Essays and Studies_ by

members of the English Association, 4th Series. Oxford, 1913.]

From the Medieval Latin Missal and Breviary these devices of prose rhythm,

particularly those affecting the end of sentences, were taken over into

the Collects and other parts of the liturgy of the English Prayer-Book.

They had a constant influence upon the rhythms employed by the translators

of the English Bible, and through the Bible the cadences of this ancient

ornamented prose have passed over into the familiar but intricate

harmonies of our "heightened" modern prose.

While this whole matter is too technical to be dealt with adequately here,

it may serve at least to remind the reader that an appreciation of English

prose rhythms, as they have been actually employed for many centuries,

requires a sensitiveness to the rhetorical position of phrases and

clauses, and to "the use of sonorous words in the places of rhetorical

emphasis, which cannot be indicated by the bare symbols of prosody."

[Footnote: New York _Nation_, February 27, 1913.]

For that sonority and cadence and balance which constitute a harmonious

prose sentence cannot be adequately felt by a possibly illiterate

scientist in his laboratory for acoustics; the "literary" value of words,

in all strongly emotional prose, is inextricably mingled with the bare

sound values: it is thought-units that must be delicately "balanced" as

well as stresses and slides and final clauses; it is the elevation of

ideas, the nobility and beauty of feeling, as discerned by the trained

literary sense, which makes the final difference between enduring prose

harmonies and the mere tinkling of the "musical glasses."

[Footnote: This point is suggestively discussed by C. E. Andrews,

_The Writing and Reading of Verse_, chap. 5. New York, 1918.]

The student of verse may very profitably continue to exercise himself with

the rhythms of prose. He should learn to share the unwearied enthusiasm of

Professor Saintsbury for the splendid cadences of our sixteenth-century

English, for the florid decorative period of Thomas Browne and Jeremy

Taylor, for the eloquent "prose poetry" of De Quincey and Ruskin and

Charles Kingsley, and for the strangely subtle effects wrought by Pater

and Stevenson. But he must not imagine that any laboratory system of

tapping syncopated time, or any painstaking marking of macrons (-) breves

(u) and caesuras (||) will give him full initiation into the mysteries of

prose cadences which have been built, not merely out of stressed and

unstressed syllables, but out of the passionate intellectual life of many

generations of men. He may learn to feel that life as it pulsates in

words, but no one has thus far devised an adequate scheme for its

notation.

_5. Quantity, Stress and Syllable_

The notation of verse, however, while certainly not a wholly simple

matter, is far easier. It is practicable to indicate by conventional

printer's devices the general rhythmical and metrical scheme of a poem,

and to indicate the more obvious, at least, of its incidental variations

from the expected pattern. It remains as true of verse as it is of prose

that the "literary" values of words--their connotations or emotional

overtones--are too subtle to be indicated by any marks invented by a

printer; but the alternation or succession of long or short syllables, of

stressed or unstressed syllables, the nature of particular feet

and lines and stanzas, the order and interlacing of rhymes, and even the

devices of tone-color, are sufficiently external elements of verse to

allow easy methods of indication.

When you and I first began to study Virgil and Horace, for instance, we

were taught that the Roman poets, imitating the Greeks, built heir verses

upon the principle of _Quantity_. The metrical unit was the foot, made up

of long and short syllables in various combinations, two short syllables

being equivalent to one long one. The feet most commonly used were the

Iambus [short-long], the Anapest [short-short-long], the Trochee

[long-short], the Dactyl [long-short-short], and the Spondee [long-long].

Then we were instructed that a "verse" or line consisting of one foot was

called a monometer, of two feet, a dimeter, of three, a trimeter, of four,

a tetrameter, of five, a pentameter, of six, a hexameter. This looked like

a fairly easy game, and before long we were marking the quantities in the

first line of the Aeneid, as other school-children had done ever since the

time of St. Augustine:

_Arma vi¦rumque ca¦no Tro¦jae qui ¦ primus ab¦oris_.

Or perhaps it was Horace's

_Maece¦nas, atavis ¦¦ edite reg¦ibus_.

We were told, of course, that it was not all quite as simple as this: that

there were frequent metrical variations, such as trochees changing places

with dactyls, and anapests with iambi; that feet could be inverted, so

that a trochaic line might begin with an iambus, an anapestic line with a

dactyl, or _vice versa_; that syllables might be omitted at the beginning

or the end or even in the middle of a line, and that this "cutting-off"

was called _catalexis_; that syllables might even be added at the

beginning or end of certain lines and that these syllables were called

_hypermetric_; and that we must be very watchful about pauses,

particularly about a somewhat mysterious chief pause, liable to occur

about the middle of a line, called a _caesura_. But the magic password to

admit us to this unknown world of Greek and Roman prosody was after all

the word _Quantity_.

If a few of us were bold enough to ask the main difference between this

Roman system of versification and the system which governed modern English

poetry--even such rude playground verse as

"Eeny, meeny, miny, mo,

Catch a nigger by the toe"--

we were promptly told by the teacher that the difference was a very plain

one, namely, that English, like all the Germanic languages, obeyed in its

verse the principles of _Stress_. Instead of looking for "long" and

"short" syllables, we had merely to look for "stressed" and "unstressed"

syllables. It was a matter, not of quantity, but of accent; and if we

remembered this fact, there was no harm but rather a great convenience, in

retaining the technical names of classical versification. Only we must be

careful that by "iambus," in English poetry, we _meant_ an unstressed

syllable, rather than a short syllable followed by a long one. And so with

"trochee," "dactyl," "anapest" and the rest; if we knew that accent and

not quantity was what we really had in mind, it was proper enough to speak

of _Paradise Lost_ as written in "iambic pentameter," and _Evangeline_ in

"dactylic hexameter," etc. The trick was to count stresses and not

syllables, for was not Coleridge's _Christabel_ written in a metre which

varied its syllables anywhere from four to twelve for the line, yet

maintained its music by regularity of stress?

Nothing could be plainer than all this. Yet some of us discovered when we

went to college and listened to instructors who grew strangely excited

over prosody, that it was not all as easy as this distinction between

_Quantity_ and _Stress_ would seem to indicate. For we were now told that

the Greek and Roman habits of daily speech in prose had something to do

with their instinctive choice of verse-rhythms: that at the very time when

the Greek heroic hexameters were being composed, there was a natural

dactylic roll in spoken prose; that Roman daily speech had a stronger

stress than Greek, so that Horace, in imitating Greek lyric measures, had

stubborn natural word-accents to reconcile with his quantitative measures;

that the Roman poets, who had originally allowed normal word-accent and

verse-pulse to coincide for the most part, came gradually to enjoy a

certain clash between them, keeping all the while the quantitative

principle dominant; so that when Virgil and Horace read their verses

aloud, and word-accent and verse-pulse fell upon different syllables, the

verse-pulse yielded slightly to the word-accent, thus adding something of

the charm of conversational prose to the normal time-values of the rhythm.

In a word, we were now taught--if I may quote from a personal letter of a

distinguished American Latinist--that "the almost universal belief that

Latin verse is a matter of quantity only is a mistake. Word-accent was not

lost in Latin verse."

And then, as if this undermining of our schoolboy faith in pure Quantity

were not enough, came the surprising information that the Romans had kept,

perhaps from the beginning of their poetizing, a popular type of accented

verse, as seen in the rude chant of the Roman legionaries,

_Mílle Fráncos mílle sémel Sármatás occídimús_.

[Footnote: See C. M. Lewis, _Foreign Sources of Modern English

Versification_. Halle, 1898.]

Certainly those sun-burnt "doughboys" were not bothering themselves

about trochees and iambi and such toys of cultivated "literary" persons;

they were amusing themselves on the march by inventing words to fit the

"goose-step." Their

_Unus homo mille mille mille decollavimus_

which Professor Courthope scans as trochaic verse,

[Footnote: _History of English Poetry_, vol. 1, p. 73.]

seems to me nothing but "stress" verse, like

_"Hay-foot, straw-foot, belly full of bean-soup--Hep--Hep!"_

Popular accentual verse persisted, then, while the more cultivated Roman

public acquired and then gradually lost, in the course of centuries, its

ear for the quantitative rhythms which originally had been copied from the

Greeks.

Furthermore, according to our ingenious college teachers, there was still

a third principle of versification to be reckoned with, not depending on

Quantity or Stress, but merely _Syllabic_, or syllable-counting. This was

immemorially old, it seemed, and it had reappeared mysteriously in Europe

in the Dark Ages.

Dr. Lewis cites from a Latin manuscript poem of the ninth century:

[Footnote: _Foreign Sources_, etc., p. 3.]

_"Beatissimus namque Dionysius ¦ Athenis quondam episcopus,

Quem Sanctus Clemens direxit in Galliam ¦ propter praedicandi

gratiam_," etc.

"Each verse contains 21 syllables, with a caesura after the 12th. No

further regularity, either metrical or rhythmical, can be perceived.

Such a verse could probably not have been written except for music."

Church-music, apparently, was also a factor in the development of

versification,--particularly that "Gregorian" style which demanded neither

quantitative nor accentual rhythm, but simply a fair count of syllables in

the libretto, note matching syllable exactly. But when the great medieval

Latin hymns, like _Dies ire_, were written, the Syllabic principle of

versification, like the Quantitative principle, dropped out of sight,

and we witness once more the emergence of the Stress or accentual system,

heavily ornamented with rhymes.

[Footnote: See the quotation from Taylor's _Classical Heritage of the

Middle Ages_ printed in the "Notes and Illustrations" for this chapter.]

Yet the Syllabic method reappears once more, we were told, in French

prosody, and thus affects the verse of Chaucer and of subsequent English

poetry, and it still may be studied, isolated as far as may be from

considerations of quantity and stress, in certain English songs written

for music, where syllable carefully matches note. The "long metre"

(8 syllables), "short metre" (6 syllables) and "common metre"

(7 syllables, 6 syllables) of the hymn books is a convenient

illustration of thinking of metre in terms of syllables alone.

_6. The Appeal to the Ear_

At this point, perhaps, having set forth the three theories of _Quantity,

Stress_ and _Syllable_, our instructors were sensible enough to make an

appeal to the ear. Reminding us that stress was the controlling principle

in Germanic poetry,--although not denying that considerations of quantity

and number of syllables might have something to do with the effect,--they

read aloud to us some Old English verse. Perhaps it was that _Song of the

Battle of Brunanburh_ which Tennyson has so skilfully rendered into modern

English words while preserving the Old English metre. And here, though the

Anglo-Saxon words were certainly uncouth, we caught the chief stresses

without difficulty, usually four beats to the line. If the instructor,

while these rude strokes of rhythm were still pounding in our ears,

followed the Old English with a dozen lines of Chaucer, we could all

perceive the presence of a newer, smoother, more highly elaborated

verse-music, where the number of syllables had been cunningly

reckoned, and the verse-accent seemed always to fall upon a syllable long

and strong enough to bear the weight easily, and the rhymes rippled like a

brook. Whether we called the metre of the _Prologue_ rhymed couplets of

iambic pentameter, or rhymed couplets of ten-syllabled, five-stressed

verse, the music, at least, was clear enough. And so was the music of the

"blank" or unrhymed five-stress lines of Marlowe and Shakspere and Milton,

and as we listened it was easy to believe that "stress" and "quantity" and

"syllable," all playing together like a chime of bells, are concordant and

not quarrelsome elements in the harmony of modern English verse. Only, to

be richly concordant, each must be prepared to yield a little if need be,

to the other!

I have taken too many pages, perhaps, in thus sketching the rudimentary

education of a college student in the elements of rhythm and metre, and in

showing how the theoretical difficulties of the subject--which are

admittedly great--often disappear as soon as one resolves to let the ear

decide. A satisfied ear may soothe a dissatisfied mind. I have quoted from

a letter of an American scholar about quantity being the "controlling"

element of cultivated Roman verse, and I now quote from a personal letter

of an American poet, emphasizing the necessity of "reading poetry as it

was meant to be read": "My point is _not_ that English verse has no

quantity, but that the controlling element is not quantity but accent. The

lack of fixed _syllabic _quantity is just what I emphasize. This lack

makes definite _beat _impossible: or at least it makes it absurd to

attempt to scan English verse by feet. The proportion of 'irregularities'

and 'exceptions' becomes painful to the student and embarrassing to the

professor. He is put to fearful straits to explain his prosody and make it

fit the verse. And when he has done all this, the student, if he has a

good ear, forthwith forgets it all, and reads the verse as it was meant to

be read, as a succession of musical bars (without pitch, of course), in

which the accent marks the rhythm, and pauses and _rests _often take the

place of missing syllables. To this ingenuous student I hold out my hand

and cast in my lot with him. He is the man for whom English poetry is

written."

It may be objected, of course, that the phrase "reading poetry as it was

meant to be read" really begs the question. For English poets have often

amused themselves by composing purely quantitative verse, which they wish

us to read as quantitative. The result may be as artificial as the

painfully composed Latin quantitative verse of English schoolboys, but the

thing can be done. Tennyson's experiments in quantity are well known, and

should be carefully studied. He was proud of his hexameter:

"High winds roaring above me, dark leaves falling about me,"

and of his pentameter:

"All men alike hate slops, particularly gruel."

Here the English long and short syllables--as far as "long" and "short"

can be definitely distinguished in English--correspond precisely to the

rules of Roman prosody. The present Laureate, Robert Bridges, whose

investigations in English and Roman prosody have been incessant, has

recently published a book of experiments in writing English quantitative

hexameters.

[Footnote: _Ibant Obscuri_. New York, Oxford University Press, 1917.]

Here are half a dozen lines:

"Midway of all this tract, with secular arms an immense elm

Reareth a crowd of branches, aneath whose lofty protection

Vain dreams thickly nestle, clinging unto the foliage on high:

And many strange creatures of monstrous form and features

Stable about th' entrance, Centaur and Scylla's abortion,

And hundred-handed Briareus, and Lerna's wild beast...."

These are lines interesting to the scholar, but they are somehow

"non-English" in their rhythm--not in accordance with "the genius of the

language," as we vaguely but very sensibly say. Neither did the stressed

"dactylic" hexameters of Longfellow, written though they were by a skilful

versifier, quite conform to "the nature of the language."

_7. The Analogy with Music_

One other attempt to explain the difficulties of English rhythm and metre

must at least be mentioned here, namely the "musical" theory of the

American poet and musician, Sidney Lanier. In his _Science of English

Verse_, an acute and very suggestive book, he threw over the whole theory

of stress--or at least, retained it as a mere element of assistance, as in

music, to the marking of time, maintaining that the only necessary element

in rhythm is equal time-intervals, corresponding to bars of music.

According to Lanier, the structure of English blank verse, for instance,

is not an alternation of unstressed with stressed syllables, but a series

of bars of 3/8 time, thus:

[Illustration: Five bars of 3/8 time, each with a short and a long note.]

Thomson, Dabney and other prosodists have followed Lanier's general

theory, without always agreeing with him as to whether blank verse is

written in 3/8 or 2/4 time. Alden, in a competent summary of these various

musical theories as to the basis of English verse,

[Footnote: _Introduction to Poetry_, pp. 190-93. See also Alden's _English

Verse_, Part 3. "The Time-Element in English Verse."]

quotes with approval Mr. T. S. Omond's words: "Musical notes are almost

pure symbols. In theory at least, and no doubt substantially in practice,

they can be divided with mathematical accuracy--into fractions of 1/2,

1/4, 1/8, 1/16, etc.--and the ideal of music is absolute accordance with

time. Verse has other methods and another ideal. Its words are concrete

things, not readily carved to such exact pattern.... The perfection of

music lies in absolute accordance with time, that of verse is continual

slight departures from time. This is why no musical representations of

verse ever seem satisfactory. They assume regularity where none exists."

_8. Prosody and Enjoyment_

It must be expected then, that there will be different preferences in

choosing a nomenclature for modern English metres, based upon the

differences in the individual physical organism of various metrists, and

upon the strictness of their adherence to the significance of stress,

quantity and number of syllables in the actual forms of verse. Adherents

of musical theories in the interpretation of verse may prefer to speak of

"duple time" instead of iambic-trochaic metres, and of "triple" time for

anapests and dactyls. Natural "stressers" may prefer to call iambic and

anapestic units "rising" feet, to indicate the ascent of stress as one

passes from the weaker to the stronger syllables; and similarly, to call

trochaic and dactylic units "falling" feet, to indicate the descent or

decline of stress as the weaker syllable or syllables succeed the

stronger. Or, combining these two modes of nomenclature, one may

legitimately speak of iambic feet as "duple rising,"

"And never lifted up a single stone";

trochaic as "duple falling,"

"Here they are, my fifty perfect poems";

anapestic as "triple rising,"

"But he lived with a lot of wild mates, and they never would let him be

good";

and dactylic as "triple falling";

"Cannon to right of them, cannon to left of them."

If a line is felt as "metrical," i.e. divided into approximately equal

time-intervals, the particular label employed to indicate the nature of

the metre is unimportant. It may be left to the choice of each student of

metre, provided he uses his terms consistently. The use of the traditional

terminology "iambic," "trochaic," etc., is convenient, and is open to no

objection if one is careful to make clear the sense in which he employs

such ambiguous terms.

It should also be added, as a means of reconciling the apparently warring

claims of stress and quantity in English poetry, that recent

investigations in recording through delicate instruments the actual

time-intervals used by different persons in reading aloud the same lines

of poetry, prove what has long been suspected, namely, the close

affiliation of quantity with stress.

[Footnote: "Syllabic Quantity in English Verse," by Ada F. Snell, _Pub. Of

Mod, Lang. Ass_., September, 1918.]

Miss Snell's experiments show that the foot in English verse is made up of

syllables 90 per cent of which are, in the stressed position, longer than

those in the unstressed. The average relation of short to long syllables,

is, in spite of a good deal of variation among the individual readers,

almost precisely as 2 to 4--which has always been the accepted ratio for

the relation of short to long syllables in Greek and Roman verse. If one

examines English words in a dictionary, the quantities of the syllables

are certainly not "fixed" as they are in Greek and Latin, but the moment

one begins to read a passage of English poetry aloud, and becomes

conscious of its underlying type of rhythm, he fits elastic units of

"feet" into the steadily flowing or pulsing intervals of time.

The "foot" becomes, as it were, a rubber link in a moving bicycle chain.

The revolutions of the chain mark the rhythm; and the stressed or

unstressed or lightly stressed syllables in each "link" or foot,

accommodate themselves, by almost unperceived expansion and contraction,

to the rhythmic beat of the passage as a whole.

Nor should it be forgotten that the "sense" of words, their

meaning-weight, their rhetorical value in certain phrases, constantly

affects the theoretical number of stresses belonging to a given line. In

blank verse, for instance, the theoretical five chief stresses are often

but three or four in actual practice, lighter stresses taking their place

in order to avoid a pounding monotony, and conversely, as in Milton's

famous line,

"Rocks, caves, lakes, dens, bogs, fens, and shades of death,"

the rhetorical significance of the monosyllables compels an overloading of

stresses which heightens the desired poetic effect. Corson's _Primer of

English Verse_ and Mayor's _English Metres_ give numerous examples from

the blank verse of Milton and Tennyson to illustrate the constant

substitution and shifting of stresses in order to secure variety of music

and suggestive adaptations of sound to sense. It is well known that

Shakspere's blank verse, as he developed in command of his artistic

resources, shows fewer "end-stopped" lines and more "run-on" lines, with

an increasing proportion of light and weak endings. But the same principle

applies to every type of English rhythm. As soon as the dominant

beat--which is commonly, but not always, apparent in the opening measures

of the poem--once asserts itself, the poet's mastery of technique is

revealed through his skill in satisfying the ear with a verbal music which

is never absolutely identical in its time-intervals, its stresses or its

pitch, with the fixed, wooden pattern of the rhythm he is using.

For the human voice utters syllables which vary their duration, stress and

pitch with each reader. Photographs of voice-waves, as printed by Verrier,

Scripture, and many other laboratory workers, show how great is the

difference between individuals in the intervals covered by the upward and

downward slides or "inflections" which indicate doubt or affirmation. And

these "rising" and "falling" and "circumflex" and "suspended" inflections,

which make up what is called "pitch-accent," are constantly varied, like

the duration and stress of syllables, by the emotions evoked in reading.

Words, phrases, lines and stanzas become colored with emotional overtones

due to the feeling of the instant. Poetry read aloud as something sensuous

and passionate cannot possibly conform exactly to a set mechanical pattern

of rhythm and metre. Yet the hand-woven Oriental rug, though lacking the

geometrical accuracy of a rug made by machinery, reveals a more vital and

intimate beauty of design and execution. Many well-known poets--Tennyson

being perhaps the most familiar example--have read aloud their own verses

with a peculiar chanting sing-song which seemed to over-emphasize the

fundamental rhythm. But who shall correct them? And who is entitled to say

that a line like Swinburne's

"Full-sailed, wide-winged, poised softly forever asway"

is irregular according to the foot-rule of traditional prosody, when it is

probable, as Mr. C. E. Russell maintains, that Swinburne was here

composing in purely musical and not prosodical rhythm?

[Footnote: "Swinburne and Music," by Charles E. Russell, _North American

Review_, November, 1907. See the quotation in the "Notes and

Illustrations" for this chapter.]

Is it not true, furthermore, as some metrical sceptics like to remind us,

that if we once admit the principle of substitution and equivalence, of

hypermetrical and truncated syllables, of pauses taking the place of

syllables, we can very often make one metre seem very much like another?

The question of calling a given group of lines "iambic" or "trochaic," for

instance, can be made quite arbitrary, depending upon where you begin to

count syllables. "Iambic" with initial truncation or "trochaic" with final

truncation? Tweedle-dum or tweedle-dee? Do you count waves from crest to

crest or from hollow to hollow? When you count the links in a bicycle

chain, do you begin with the slender middle of each link or with one of

the swelling ends? So is it with this "iambic" and "trochaic" matter.

Professor Alden, in a suggestive pamphlet,

[Footnote: "The Mental Side of Metrical Form," already cited.]

confesses that these contrasting concepts of rising and falling metre are

nothing more than concepts, alterable at will.

But while the experts in prosody continue to differ and to dogmatize, the

lover of poetry should remember that versification is far older than the

science of prosody, and that the enjoyment of verse is, for millions of

human beings, as unaffected by theories of metrics as the stars are

unaffected by the theories of astronomers. It is a satisfaction to the

mind to know that the stars in their courses are amenable to law, even

though one be so poor a mathematician as to be incapable of grasping and

stating the law. The mathematics of music and of poetry, while heightening

the intellectual pleasure of those capable of comprehending it, is

admittedly too difficult for the mass of men. But no lover of poetry

should refuse to go as far in theorizing as his ear will carry him. He

will find that his susceptibility to the pulsations of various types of

rhythm, and his delight in the intricacies of metrical device, will be

heightened by the mental effort of attention and analysis. The danger is

that the lover of poetry, wearied by the quarrels of prosodists, and

forgetting the necessity of patience, compromise and freedom from

dogmatism, will lose his curiosity about the infinite variety of metrical

effects. But it is this very curiosity which makes his ear finer, even if

his theories may be wrong. Hundreds of metricists admire and envy

Professor Saintsbury's ear for prose and verse rhythms while

disagreeing wholly with his dogmatic theories of the "foot," and his

system of notation. There are sure to be some days and hours when the

reader of poetry will find himself bored and tired with the effort of

attention to the technique of verse. Then he can stop analysing, close his

eyes, and drift out to sea upon the uncomprehended music.

"The stars of midnight shall be dear

To her; and she shall lean her ear

In many a secret place

Where rivulets dance their wayward round,

And beauty born of murmuring sound

Shall pass into her face."

CHAPTER VI

RHYME, STANZA AND FREE VERSE

"Subtle rhymes, with ruin rife,

Murmur in the house of life."

EMERSON

"When this verse was first dictated to me I consider'd a Monotonous

Cadence like that used by Milton & Shakspeare, & all writers of

English Blank Verse, derived from the modern bondage of Rhyming, to

be a necessary and indispensible part of the verse. But I soon found

that in the mouth of a true Orator, such monotony was not only

awkward, but as much a bondage as rhyme itself. I therefore have

produced a variety in every line, both of cadences & number of

syllables. Every word and every letter is studied and put into its

fit place: the terrific numbers are reserved for the terrific parts,

the mild & gentle for the mild & gentle parts, and the prosaic for

inferior parts: all are necessary to each other. Poetry Fetter'd

Fetters the Human Race!"

WILLIAM BLAKE

_1. Battles Long Ago_

As we pass from the general consideration of Rhythm and Metre to some of

the special questions involved in Rhyme, Stanza and Free Verse, it may be

well to revert to the old distinction between what we called for

convenience the "outside" and the "inside" of a work of art. In the field

of music we saw that this distinction is almost, if not quite,

meaningless, and in poetry it ought not to be pushed too far. Yet it is

useful in explaining the differences among men as they regard, now the

external form of verse, and now its inner spirit, and as they ask

themselves how these two elements are related. Professor Butcher, in his

_Aristotle's Theory of Poetry and Fine Art_,

[Footnote: Page 147.]

describes the natural tendencies of two sorts of men, who are quite as

persistent to-day as ever they were in Greece in looking at one side only

of the question:

"We need not agree with a certain modern school who would empty all

poetry of poetical thought and etherealize it till it melts into a

strain of music; who sing to us we hardly know of what, but in such a

way that the echoes of the real world, its men and women, its actual

stir and conflict, are faint and hardly to be discerned. The poetry,

we are told, resides not in the ideas conveyed, not in the blending

of soul and sense, but in the sound itself, in the cadence of the

verse. Yet, false as this view may be, it is not perhaps more false

than that other which wholly ignores the effect of musical sound and

looks only to the thought that is conveyed. Aristotle comes

perilously near this doctrine."

But it is not Aristotle only who permits himself at times to undervalue

the formal element in verse. It is also Sir Philip Sidney, with his famous

"verse being but an ornament and no cause to poetry" and "it is not riming

and versing that maketh a poet." It is Shelley with his "The distinction

between poets and prose writers in a vulgar error.... Plato was

essentially a poet--the truth and splendor of his imagery, and the melody

of his language, are the most intense that it is possible to conceive....

Lord Bacon was a poet." It is Coleridge with his "The writings of Plato,

and Bishop Taylor, and the _Theoria Sacra_ of Burnet, furnish undeniable

proofs that poetry of the highest kind may be written without metre."

In such passages as these, how generous are Sidney, Shelley, and Coleridge

to the prose-men! And yet these same poet-critics, in dozens of other

passages, have explained the fundamental justification of metre, rhyme and

stanza as elements in the harmony of verse. Harmony may be attained, it is

true, by rhythms too complicated to be easily scanned in metrical feet,

and by measures which disregard rhyme and stanza; and poets, as well as

critics, by giving exclusive attention to a single element in harmony, are

able to persuade themselves for the moment that all other elements are

relatively negligible. Milton, in his zeal for blank verse, attacked

rhyme, in which he had already proved himself a master, quite as fiercely

as any of our contemporary champions of free verse. Campion, a trained

musician, argued for a quantitative system of English prosody during the

very period when he was composing, in the accentual system, some of the

most exquisite songs in the language. Daniel, whose _Defense of Rhyme_

(1603) was a triumphant reply to Campion's theory, gave courteous

praise to his opponent's practice. Dryden, most flexible-minded of

critics, argues now for, and now against the use of rhymed heroic couplets

in the drama, fitting his theories to the changing currents of

contemporary taste as well as to the varying, self-determined technique of

his own plays. "Never wholly out of the way, nor in it," was Dryden's

happy phrase to describe the artist's freedom, a freedom always conscious

of underlying law.

_2. Rhyme as a Form of Rhythm_

However theory and practice may happen to coincide or to drift apart, the

fundamental law which justifies rhyme and stanza seems to be this: if

rhythm is a primary fact in poetry, and metre is, as Aristotle called it,

sections of rhythm, any device of repeating identical or nearly identical

sounds at measured intervals is an aid to rhythmical effect. Rhyme is thus

a form, an "externalizing" of rhythm. It is structural as well as

decorative, or rather, it is _one way_ of securing structure, of building

verse. There are other devices, of course, for attaining symmetrical

patterns, for conveying an impression of unity in variety. The "parallel"

structure of Hebrew poetry, where one idea and phrase is balanced against

another,

"I have slain a man to my wounding--

And a young man to my hurt--"

or the "envelope" structure of many of the Psalms, where the initial

phrase or idea is repeated at the close, after the insertion of

illustrative matter, thus securing a pattern by the "return" of the main

idea--the closing of the "curve"--may serve to illustrate the universality

of the principle of balance and contrast and repetition in the

architecture of verse. For Hebrew poetry, like the poetry of many

primitive peoples, utilized the natural pleasure which the ear takes in

listening for and perceiving again an already uttered sound. Rhyme

is a gratification of expectation, like the repetition of a chord in music

[Footnote: "Most musical compositions are written in quite obvious rhymes;

and the array of familiar and classical works that have not only rhymes

but distinct stanzaic arrangements exactly like those of poetry is worth

remembering. Mendelssohn's 'Spring Song' and Rubinstein's 'Romance in E

Flat' will occur at once as examples in which the stanzas are

unmistakable." C. E. Russell, "Swinburne and Music," _North American

Review_, November, 1907.]

or of colors in a rug. It assists the mind in grasping the sense-rhythm,--

the design of the piece as a whole. It assists the emotions through the

stimulus to the attention, through the reinforcement which it gives to the

pulsations of the psycho-physical organism.

"And _sweep_ through the _deep_

While the stormy tempests blow,

While the battle rages long and loud

And the stormy tempests blow."

The pulses cannot help quickening as the rhymes quicken.

But in order to perform this structural, rhythmical purpose it is not

necessary that rhyme be of any single recognized type. As long as the

ear receives the pleasure afforded by accordant sound, any of the various

historical forms of rhyme may serve. It may be Alliteration, the

letter-rhyme or "beginning-rhyme" of Old English poetry:

"_H_im be _h_ealfe stod _h_yse unweaxen,

_C_niht on ge_c_ampe, se full _c_aflice."

Tennyson imitates it in his "Battle of Brunanburh":

"Mighty the Mercian,

Hard was his hand-play,

Sparing not any of

Those that with Anlaf,

Warriors over the

Weltering waters

Borne in the bark's-bosom,

Drew to this island--

Doomed to the death."

This repetition of initial letters survives in phrases of prose like

"dead and done with," "to have and to hold," and it is utilized in modern

verse to give further emphasis to accentual syllables. But masters of

alliterative effects, like Keats, Tennyson and Verlaine, constantly employ

alliteration in unaccented syllables so as to color the tone-quality of a

line without a too obvious assault upon the ear. The unrhymed songs of

_The Princess_ are full of these delicate modulations of sound.

In Common rhyme, or "end-rhyme" (found--abound), the accented vowel and

all succeeding sounds are repeated, while the consonants preceding the

accented vowel vary. Assonance, in its stricter sense, means the

repetition of an accented vowel (blackness--dances), while the succeeding

sounds vary, but the terms "assonance" and "consonance" are often employed

loosely to signify harmonious effects of tone-color within a line or group

of lines. Complete or "identical" rhymes (fair--affair), which were

legitimate in Chaucer's time, are not now considered admissible in

English. "Masculine" rhymes are end-rhymes of one syllable; "feminine"

rhymes are end-rhymes of two syllables (uncertain--curtain); internal or

"middle-rhymes" are produced by the repetition at the end of a line of a

rhyme-sound already employed within the line.

"We were the _first_ that ever _burst_

Into that silent sea."

In general, the more frequent the repetitions of rhyme, the quicker is the

rhythmic movement of the poem, and conversely. Thus, the _In Memoriam_

stanza attains its peculiar effect of retardation by rhyming the first

line with the fourth, so that the ear is compelled to wait for the

expected recurrence of the first rhyme sound.

"Beside the river's wooded reach,

The fortress and the mountain ridge,

The cataract flashing from the bridge,

The breaker breaking on the beach."

This gives a movement markedly different from that secured by rearranging

the same lines in alternate rhymes:

"Beside the river's wooded reach,

The fortress and the mountain ridge,

The breaker breaking on the beach,

The cataract flashing from the bridge."

If all the various forms of rhyme are only different ways of emphasizing

rhythm through the repetition of accordant sounds, it follows that the

varying rhythmical impulses of poets and of readers will demand now a

greater and now a less dependence upon this particular mode of rhythmical

satisfaction. Chaucer complained of the scarcity of rhymes in English as

compared with their affluence in Old French, and it is true that rhyming

is harder in our tongue than in the Romance languages. We have had

magicians of rhyme, like Swinburne, whose very profusion of rhyme-sounds

ends by cloying the taste of many a reader, and sending him back to blank

verse or on to free verse. The Spenserian stanza, which calls for one

fourfold set of rhymes, one threefold, and one double, all cunningly

interlaced, is as complicated a piece of rhyme-harmony as the ear of

the average lover of poetry can carry. It is needless to say that there

are born rhymers, who think in rhyme and whose fecundity of imagery is

multiplied by the excitement of matching sound with sound. They are often

careless in their prodigality, inexact in their swift catching at any

rhyme-word that will serve. At the other extreme are the self-conscious

artists in verse who abhor imperfect concordances, and polish their rhymes

until the life and freshness disappear. For sheer improvising cleverness

of rhyme Byron is still unmatched, but he often contents himself with

approximate rhymes that are nearly as bad as some of Mrs. Browning's and

Whittier's. Very different is the deliberate artifice of the following

lines, where the monotony of the rhyme-sound fits the "solemn ennui"

of the trailing peacocks;

I

"From out the temple's pillared portico,

Thence to the gardens where blue poppies blow

The gold and emerald peacocks saunter slow,

Trailing their solemn ennui as they go,

Trailing their melancholy and their woe.

II

"Trailing their melancholy and their woe,

Trailing their solemn ennui as they go

The gold and emerald peacocks saunter slow

From out the gardens where blue poppies blow

Thence to the temple's pillared portico."

[Footnote: Frederic Adrian Lopere, "World Wisdom," The International,

September, 1915.]

Rhyme, then, is not merely a "jingle," it is rather, as Samuel Johnson

said of all versification, a "joining music with reason." Its blending of

decorative with structural purpose is in truth "a dictate of nature," or,

to quote E. C. Stedman, "In real, that is, spontaneous minstrelsy, the

fittest assonance, consonance, time, even rime,... _come of themselves

with imaginative thought_."

_3. Stanza_

There are some lovers of poetry, however, who will grant this theoretical

justification of rhyme as an element in the harmony of verse, without

admitting that the actual rhyming stanzas of English verse show

"spontaneous minstrelsy." The word "stanza" or "strophe" means literally

"a resting-place," a halt or turn, that is to say, after a uniform group

of rhymed lines. Alden defines it in his _English Verse_ as "the largest

unit of verse-measure ordinarily recognized. It is based not so much on

rhythmical divisions as on periods either rhetorical or melodic; that is,

a short stanza will roughly correspond to the period of a sentence, and a

long one to that of a paragraph, while in lyrical verse the original idea

was to conform the stanza to the melody for which it was written."

"Normally, then," Alden adds in his _Introduction to Poetry_, "all the

stanzas of a poem are identical in the number, the length, the metre, and

the rime-scheme of the corresponding verses." The question arises,

therefore, whether those units which we call "stanzas" are arbitrary or

vital. Have the lines been fused into their rhymed grouping by passionate

feeling, or is their unity a mere mechanical conformation to a pattern? In

Theodore Watts-Dunton's well-known article on "Poetry" in the

_Encyclopaedia Brittanica_

[Footnote: Now reprinted, with many expansions, in his _Poetry and the

Renascence of Wonder_. E. P. Dutton, New York.]

the phrases "stanzaic law" and "emotional law" are used to represent the

two principles at issue:

"In modern prosody the arrangement of the rhymes and the length of

the lines in any rhymed metrical passage may be determined either by

a fixed stanzaic law, or by a law infinitely deeper--by the law which

impels the soul, in a state of poetic exultation, to seize hold of

every kind of metrical aid, such as rhyme, caesura, etc., for the

purpose of accentuating and marking off each shade of emotion as it

arises, regardless of any demands of stanza.... If a metrical passage

does not gain immensely by being written independently of stanzaic

law, it loses immensely; and for this reason, perhaps, that the great

charm of the music of all verse, as distinguished from the music of

prose, is inevitableness of cadence. In regular metres we enjoy the

pleasure of feeling that the rhymes will inevitably fall under a

recognized law of couplet or stanza. But if the passage flows

independently of these, it must still flow inevitably--it must, in

short, show that it is governed by another and a yet deeper force,

the inevitableness of emotional expression."

This distinction between "stanzaic law" and "emotional law" is highly

suggestive and not merely in its application to the metres of the famous

regular and irregular odes of English verse. It applies also to the

infinite variety of stanza-patterns which English poetry has taken over

from Latin and French sources and developed through centuries

ofexperimentation, and it affords a key, as we shall see in a moment, to

some of the vexed questions involved in free verse.

Take first the more familiar of the stanza forms of English verse. They

are conveniently indicated by using letters of the alphabet to correspond

with each rhyme-sound, whenever repeated.

Thus the rhymed couplet

"Around their prows the ocean roars,

And chafes beneath their thousand oars"

may be marked as "four-stress iambic," rhyming _aa_; the heroic couplet

"The zeal of fools offends at any time,

But most of all the zeal of fools in rhyme"

as five-stress iambic, rhyming _aa_. The familiar measure of English

ballad poetry,

"The King has written a braid letter,

And signed it wi' his hand,

And sent it to Sir Patrick Spence,

Was walking on the sand"

is alternating four-stress and three-stress iambic, rhyming _ab cb_. The

_In Memoriam_ stanza,

"Now rings the woodland loud and long,

The distance takes a lovelier hue,

And drown'd in yonder living blue

The lark becomes a sightless song"

is four-stress iambic, rhyming _ab ba_.

The Chaucerian stanza rhymes _a b a b b c c_:

"'Loke up, I seye, and telle me what she is

Anon, that I may gone aboute thi nede:

Know iche hire ought? for my love telle me this;

Thanne wolde I hopen the rather for to spede.'

Tho gan the veyne of Troilus to blede,

For he was hit, and wex alle rede for schame;

'Aha!' quod Pandare, 'here bygynneth game.'"

Byron's "ottava rima" rhymes _a b a b a b c c_:

"A mighty mass of brick, and smoke, and shipping,

Dirty and dusky, but as wide as eye

Could reach, with here and there a sail just skipping

In sight, then lost amidst the forestry

Of masts; a wilderness of steeples peeping

On tiptoe through their sea-coal canopy;

A huge, dun cupola, like a foolscap crown

On a fool's head--and there is London Town!"

The Spenserian stanza rhymes _a b a b b c b c c_, with an extra foot in

the final line:

"Hee had a faire companion of his way,

A goodly lady clad in scarlot red,

Purfled with gold and pearle of rich assay;

And like a Persian mitre on her hed

Shee wore, with crowns and owches garnished,

The which her lavish lovers to her gave:

Her wanton palfrey all was overspred

With tinsell trappings, woven like a wave,

Whose bridle rung with golden bels and bosses brave."

In considering these various groups of lines which we call stanzas it is

clear that we have to do with thought-units as well as feeling-units, and

that both thought-units and feeling-units should be harmonized, if

possible, with the demands of beauty and variety of sound as represented

by the rhymes. It is not absurd to speak of the natural "size" of poetic

thoughts. Pope, for instance, often works with ideas of couplet size, just

as Martial sometimes amused himself with ideas of a still smaller epigram

size, or Omar Khayyam with thoughts and fancies that came in quatrain

sizes. Many sonnets fail of effectiveness because the contained thought is

too scanty or too full to receive adequate expression in the fourteen

lines demanded by the traditional sonnet form. They are sometimes only

quatrain ideas, blown up big with words to fill out the fourteen

lines, or, on the contrary, as often with the Elizabethans, they are whole

odes or elegies, remorselessly packed into the fashionable fourteen-line

limit. No one who has given attention to the normal length of phrases and

sentences doubts that there are natural "breathfuls" of words

corresponding to the units of ideas; and when ideas are organized by

emotion, there are waves, gusts, or ripples of words, matching the waves

of feeling. In the ideal poetic "pattern," these waves of idea, feeling

and rhythmic speech would coincide more or less completely; we should have

a union of "emotional law" with "stanzaic law," the soul of poetry would

find its perfect embodiment.

But if we turn the pages of any collection of English poetry, say the

_Golden Treasury_ or the _Oxford Book of English Verse_, we find something

very different from this ideal embodiment of each poetic emotion in a form

delicately moulded to the particular species of emotion revealed. We

discover that precisely similar stanzaic patterns--like similar metrical

patterns--are often used to express diametrically opposite feelings,--let

us say, joy and sorrow, doubt and exultation, victory and defeat. The

"common metre" of English hymnology is thus seen to be a rough mould into

which almost any kind of religious emotion may be poured. If "trochaic"

measures do not always trip it on a light fantastic toe, neither do

"iambic" measures always pace sedately. Doubtless there is a certain

general fitness, in various stanza forms, for this or that poetic purpose:

the stanzas employed by English or Scotch balladry are admittedly

excellent for story-telling; Spenser's favorite stanza is unrivalled

for painting dream-pictures and rendering dream-music, but less available

for pure narration; Chaucer's seven-line stanza, so delicately balanced

upon that fourth, pivotal line, can paint a picture and tell a story too;

Byron's _ottava rima_ has a devil-may-care jauntiness, borrowed, it is

true, from his Italian models, but perfectly fitted to Byron's own mood;

the rhymed couplets of Pope sting and glitter like his antitheses, and the

couplets of Dryden have their "resonance like a great bronze coin thrown

down on marble"; each great artist in English verse, in short, chooses by

instinct the general stanza form best suited to his particular purpose,

and then moulds its details with whatever cunning he may possess. But the

significant point is this: "stanzaic law" makes for uniformity, for the

endless repetition of the chosen pattern, which must still be recognized

as a pattern, however subtly the artist modulates his details; and in

adjusting the infinitely varied material of thought and feeling, phrase

and image, picture and story to the fixed stanzaic design, there are bound

to be gaps and patches, stretchings and foldings of the thought-stuff,--

for even as in humble tailor-craft, this many-colored coat of poetry must

be cut according to the cloth as well as according to the pattern. How

many pages of even the _Oxford Book of English Verse_ are free from some

touch of feebleness, of redundancy, of constraint due to the remorseless

requirements of the stanza? The line must be filled out, whether or not

the thought is quite full enough for it; rhyme must match rhyme, even if

the thought becomes as far-fetched as the rhyming word; the stanza, in

short, demands one kind of perfection as a constantly repeated musical

design, as beauty of form; and another kind of perfection as the

expression of human emotion. Sometimes these two perfections of "form" and

"significance" are miraculously wedded, stanza after stanza, and we have

our "Ode to a Nightingale," or "Ode to Autumn" as the result. (And perhaps

the best, even in this kind, are but shadows, when compared with the

absolute union of truth and beauty as the poetic idea first took rhythmic

form in the brain of the poet.)

Yet more often lovers of poetry must content themselves, not with such

"dictates of nature" as these poems, but with approximations. Each

stanzaic form has its conveniences, its "fatal facility," its natural

fitness for singing a song or telling a story or turning a thought over

and over into music. Intellectual readers will always like the

epigrammatic "snap" of the couplet, and Spenser will remain, largely

because of his choice of stanza, the "poet's poet." Perhaps

the very necessity of fitting rhymes together stimulates as much poetic

activity as it discourages; for many poets have testified that the delight

of rhyming adds energy to the imagination. If, as Shelley said, "the mind

in creation is as a fading coal, which some invisible influence, like an

inconstant wind, awakens to transitory brightness," why may it not be the

breath of rhyme, as well as any other form of rhythmic energy, which

quickens its drooping flame? And few poets, furthermore, will admit that

they are really in bondage to their stanzas. They love to dance in these

fetters, and even when wearing the same fetters as another poet, they

nevertheless invent movements of their own, so that Mr. Masefield's

"Chaucerian" stanzas are really not so much Chaucer's as Masefield's.

Each Ulysses makes and bends his own bow, after all; it is only the

unsuccessful suitors for the honors of poetic craftsmanship who complain

of its difficulties. Something of our contemporary impatience with fixed

stanzaic forms is due perhaps to the failure to recognize that the greater

poets succeed in making over every kind of poetic pattern in the act of

employing it, just as a Chopin minuet differs from a Liszt minuet,

although both composers are using the same fundamental form of dance

music. We must allow for the infinite variety of creative intention,

technique and result. The true defence of rhyme and stanza against the

arguments of extreme advocates of free verse is to point out that

rhyme and stanza are natural structural devices for securing certain

effects. There are various types of bridges for crossing different kinds

of streams; no one type of bridge is always and everywhere the best. To do

away with rhyme and stanza is to renounce some modes of poetic beauty; it

is to resolve that there shall be one less way of crossing the stream. An

advocate of freedom in the arts may well admit that the artist may bridge

his particular stream in any way he can,--or he may ford it or swim it or

go over in an airplane if he chooses. But some method must be found of

getting his ideas and emotions "across" into the mind and feelings of the

readers of his poetry. If this can adequately be accomplished without

recourse to rhyme and stanza, very well; there is _Paradise Lost_, for

instance, and _Hamlet_. But here we are driven back again upon the

countless varieties of artistic intention and craftsmanship and effect.

Each method--and there are as many methods as there are poets and far

more, for craftsmen like Milton and Tennyson try hundreds of methods in

their time--is only a medium through which the artist is endeavoring to

attain a special result. It is one way--only one, and perhaps not the best

way--of trying to cross the stream.

_4. Free Verse_

Recalling now the discussion of the rhythms of prose in the previous

chapter, and remembering that rhyme and stanza are special forms of

reinforcing the impulse of rhythm, what shall be said of free verse? It

belongs, unquestionably, in that "neutral zone" which some readers, in Dr.

Patterson's phrase, instinctively appropriate as "prose experience," and

others as "verse experience." It renounces metre--or rather endeavors to

renounce it, for it does not always succeed. It professes to do away with

rhyme and stanza, although it may play cunningly upon the sounds of like

and unlike words, and it may arrange phrases into poetic paragraphs,

which, aided by the art of typography, secure a kind of stanzaic effect.

It cannot, however, do away with the element of rhythm, with ordered time.

The moment free verse ceases to be felt as rhythmical, it ceases to be

felt as poetry. This is admitted by its advocates and its opponents

alike. The real question at issue then, is the manner in which free verse

may secure the effects of rhythmic unity and variety, without, on the one

hand, resorting to the obvious rhythms of prose, or on the other hand,

without repeating the recognized patterns of verse. There are many

competent critics who maintain with Edith Wyatt that "on an earth where

there is nothing to wear but clothes, nothing to eat but food, there is

also nothing to read but prose and poetry." "According to the results of

our experiments," testifies Dr. Patterson, "there is no psychological

meaning to claims for a third _genre_ between regular verse and prose,

except in the sense of a jumping back and forth from one side of the fence

to the other."

[Footnote: _The Rhythm of Prose_, p. 77.]

And in the preface to his second edition, after having listened to Miss

Amy Lowell's readings of free verse, Dr. Patterson remarks: "What is

achieved, as a rule, in Miss Lowell's case, is emotional prose,

emphatically phrased, excellent and moving. _Spaced prose_, we may call

it."

Now "spaced prose" is a useful expression, inasmuch as it calls attention

to the careful emphasis and balance of phrases which up so much of the

rhetorical structure of free verse, and it also serves to remind us of the

part which typography plays in "spacing" these phrases, and stressing for

the eye their curves and "returns." But we are all agreed that

typographical appeals to the eye are infinitely deceptive in blurring the

distinction between verse and prose, and that the trained ear must be the

only arbiter as to poetical and pseudo-poetical effects. Ask a lover of

Walt Whitman whether "spaced prose" is the right label for "Out of the

Cradle Endlessly Rocking," and he will scoff at you. He will maintain that

following the example of the rich broken rhythms of the English Bible, the

example of Ossian, Blake, and many another European experimenter during

the Romantic epoch, Whitman really succeeded in elaborating a mode of

poetical expression, nearer for the most part to recitative than to

aria, yet neither pure declamation nor pure song: a unique embodiment of

passionate feeling, a veritable "neutral zone," which refuses to let

itself be annexed to either "prose" or "verse" as those terms are

ordinarily understood, but for which "free verse" is precisely the right

expression. _Leaves of Grass_ (1855) remains the most interesting of all

experiments with free verse, written as it was by an artist whose natural

rhythmical endowment was extraordinary, and whose technical curiosity and

patience in modulating his tonal effects was unwearied by failures and

undiscouraged by popular neglect. But the case for free verse does not,

after all, stand or fall with Walt Whitman. His was merely the most

powerful poetic personality among the countless artificers who have

endeavored to produce rhythmic and tonal beauty through new structural

devices.

Readers who are familiar with the experiments of contemporary poets will

easily recognize four prevalent types of "free verse":

(a) Sometimes what is printed as "free verse" is nothing but prose

disguised by the art of typography, i.e. judged by the ear, it is made up

wholly of the rhythms of prose.

(b) Sometimes the prose rhythms predominate, without excluding a mixture

of the recognized rhythms of verse.

(c) Sometimes verse rhythms predominate, and even fixed metrical feet are

allowed to appear here and there.

(d) Sometimes verse rhythms and metres are used exclusively, although in

new combinations which disguise or break up the metrical pattern.

A parody by F. P. A. in _The Conning Tower_ affords a convenient

illustration of the "a" type:

ADD SPOON RIVER ANTHOLOGY

Peoria, Ill., Jan. 24.--The Spoon River levee, which protected thousands

of acres of farm land below Havana, Ill., fifty-five miles south of here,

broke this morning.

A score or more of families fled to higher ground. The towns of Havana,

Lewiston and Duncan Mills are isolated. Two dozen head of cattle are

reported drowned on the farm of John Himpshell, near Havana.--Associated

Press dispatch.

Edgar Lee Masters wrote a lot of things

About me and the people who

Inhabited my banks.

All of them, all are sleeping on the hill.

Herbert Marshall, Amelia Garrick, Enoch Dunlap,

Ida Frickey, Alfred Moir, Archibald Highbie and the rest.

Me he gave no thought to--

Unless, perhaps, to think that I, too, was asleep.

Those people on the hill, I thought,

Have grown famous;

But nobody writes about me.

I was only a river, you know,

But I had my pride,

So one January day I overflowed my banks;

It wasn't much of a flood, Mr. Masters,

But it put me on the front page

And in the late dispatches

Of the Associated Press.

It is clear that the quoted words of the Associated Press dispatch from

Peoria are pure prose, devoid of rhythmical pattern, devoted to a plain

statement of fact. So it is with the imaginary speech of the River. Not

until the borrowed fourth line:

"All of them, all are sleeping on the hill,"

do we catch the rhythm (and even the metre) of verse, and F. P. A. is

here imitating Mr. Masters's way of introducing a strongly rhythmical and

even metrical line into a passage otherwise flatly "prosaic" in its

time-intervals. But "free verse" adopts many other cadences of English

prose besides this "formless" structure which goes with matter-of-fact

statement. It also reproduces the neat, polished, perhaps epigrammatic

sentence which crystallizes a fact or a generalization; the more emotional

and "moving" period resulting from heightened feeling, and finally the

frankly imitative and ornamented cadences of descriptive and highly

impassioned prose. Let us take some illustrations from Sidney Lanier's

_Poem Outlines_, a posthumously published collection of some of his

sketches for poems, "jotted in pencil on the backs of envelopes, on the

margins of musical programmes, or little torn scraps of paper."

"The United States in two hundred years

has made Emerson out of a witch-burner."

This is polished, graphic prose. Here is an equally graphic, but more

impassioned sentence, with the staccato rhythm and the alliterative

emphasis of good angry speech:

_To the Politicians_

"You are servants. Your thoughts are the thoughts of cooks curious to

skim perquisites from every pan, your quarrels are the quarrels of

scullions who fight for the privilege of cleaning the pot with most

leavings in it, your committees sit upon the landings of back-stairs,

and your quarrels are the quarrels of kitchens."

But in the following passage, apparently a first draft for some lines in

_Hymns of the Marshes_, Lanier takes a strongly rhythmical, heavily

punctuated type of prose, as if he were writing a Collect:

"The courses of the wind, and the shifts thereof, as also what way the

clouds go; and that which is happening a long way off; and the full face

of the sun; and the bow of the Milky Way from end to end; as also the

small, the life of the fiddler-crab, and the household of the marsh-hen;

and more, the translation of black ooze into green blade of marsh-grass,

which is as if filth bred heaven: This a man seeth upon the marsh."

In that rhapsody of the marsh there is no recognizable metrical scheme, in

spite of the plainly marked rhythm, but in the following symbolic sketch

the imitation of the horse's ambling introduces an element of regular

metre:

"Ambling, ambling round the ring,

Round the ring of daily duty,

Leap, Circus-rider, man, through the paper hoop of death,

--Ah, lightest thou, beyond death, on this same slow-ambling,

padded horse of life."

And finally, in such fragments as the following, Lanier uses a regular

metre of "English verse"--it is true with a highly irregular third line--

"And then

A gentle violin mated with the flute,

And both flew off into a wood of harmony,

Two doves of tone."

It is clear that an artist in words, in jotting down thoughts and images

as they first emerge, may instinctively use language which is subtly

blended of verse and prose, like many rhapsodical passages in the private

journals of Thoreau and Emerson. When duly elaborated, these passages

usually become, in the hands of the greater artists, either one thing or

the other, i.e. unmistakable prose or unmistakable verse. But it remains

true, I think, that there is another artistic instinct which impels

certain poets to blend the types in the endeavor to reach a new and hybrid

beauty.

[Footnote: Some examples of recent verse are printed in the "Notes and

Illustrations" for this chapter.]

Take these illustrations of the "b" type--i.e. prose rhythms predominant,

with some admixture of the rhythms of verse:

"I hear footsteps over my head all night.

They come and go. Again they come and again they go all night.

They come one eternity in four paces and they go one eternity in four

paces, and between the coming and the going there is Silence and Night

and the Infinite.

For infinite are the nine feet of a prison cell, and endless is the

march of him who walks between the yellow brick wall and the red iron

gate, thinking things that cannot be chained and cannot be locked, but

that wander far away in the sunlit world, in their wild pilgrimage

after destined goals.

Throughout the restless night I hear the footsteps over my head.

Who walks? I do not know. It is the phantom of the jail, the sleepless

brain, a man, the man, the Walker.

One--two--three--four; four paces and the wall."

[Footnote: From Giovanitti's "The Walker."]

Or take this:

"Jerusalem a handful of ashes blown by the wind, extinct,

The Crusaders' streams of shadowy midnight troops sped with the sunrise,

Amadis, Tancred, utterly gone, Charlemagne, Roland, Oliver gone,

Palmerin, ogre, departed, vanish'd the turrets that Usk from its waters

reflected,

Arthur vanish'd with all his knights, Merlin and Lancelot and Galahad,

all gone, dissolv'd utterly like an exhalation;

Pass'd! Pass'd! for us, forever pass'd, that once so mighty world, now

void, inanimate, phantom world,

Embroider'd, dazzling, foreign world, with all its gorgeous legends,

myths,

Its kings and castles proud, its priests and warlike lords and courtly

dames,

Pass'd to its charnel vault, coffin'd with crown and armor on,

Blazon'd with Shakspere's purple page,

And dirged by Tennyson's sweet sad rhyme."

[Footnote: Whitman, "Song of the Exposition."]

Here are examples of the "c" type--i.e. predominant verse rhythms, with

occasional emphasis upon metrical feet:

"Would you hear of an old-time sea-fight?

Would you learn who won by the light of the moon and stars?

List to the yarn, as my grandmother's father the sailor told it to me.

"Our foe was no skulk in his ship I tell you, (said he,)

His was the surly English pluck, and there is no tougher or truer, and

never was, and never will be;

Along the lower'd eve he came horribly raking us.

* * * * *

"Our frigate takes fire,

The other asks if we demand quarter?

If our colors are struck and the fighting done?

"Now I laugh content, for I hear the voice of my little captain,

_We have not struck_, he composedly cries, _we have just begun our part

of the fighting_.

* * * * *

"One of the pumps has been shot away, it is generally thought we are

sinking.

"Serene stands the little captain,

He is not hurried, his voice is neither high nor low,

His eyes give more light to us than our battle-lanterns.

Toward twelve there in the beams of the moon they surrender to us."

[Footnote: Whitman. "Song of Myself."]

Read William Blake's description of the Bastille, in his recently printed

poem on "The French Revolution":

"'Seest thou yonder dark castle, that moated around, keeps this city of

Paris in awe?

Go, command yonder tower, saying: "Bastille, depart! and take thy

shadowy course;

Overstep the dark river, thou terrible tower, and get thee up into the

country ten miles.

And thou black southern prison, move along the dusky road to Versailles;

there

Frown on the gardens--and, if it obey and depart, then the King will

disband

This war-breathing army; but, if it refuse, let the Nation's Assembly

thence learn

That this army of terrors, that prison of horrors, are the bands of the

murmuring kingdom."'

"Like the morning star arising above the black waves, when a shipwrecked

soul sighs for morning,

Thro' the ranks, silent, walk'd the Ambassador back to the Nation's

Assembly, and told

The unwelcome message. Silent they heard; then a thunder roll'd round

loud and louder;

Like pillars of ancient halls and ruins of times remote, they sat.

Like a voice from the dim pillars Mirabeau rose; the thunders subsided

away;

A rushing of wings around him was heard as he brighten'd, and cried out

aloud:

'Where is the General of the Nation?' The walls re-echo'd: 'Where is the

General of the Nation?'"

And here are passages made up exclusively of the rhythms and metres of

verse, in broken or disguised patterns ("d" type):

"Under a stagnant sky,

Gloom out of gloom uncoiling into gloom,

The River, jaded and forlorn,

Welters and wanders wearily--wretchedly--on;

Yet in and out among the ribs

Of the old skeleton bridge, as in the piles

Of some dead lake-built city, full of skulls,

Worm-worn, rat-riddled, mouldy with memories,

Lingers to babble, to a broken tune

(Once, O the unvoiced music of my heart!)

So melancholy a soliloquy

It sounds as it might tell

The secret of the unending grief-in-grain,

The terror of Time and Change and Death,

That wastes this floating, transitory world."

[Footnote: W. E. Henley, "To James McNeill Whistler." ]

Or take this:

"They see the ferry

On the broad, clay-laden

Lone Chorasmian stream;--thereon,

With snort and strain,

Two horses, strongly swimming, tow

The ferry-boat, with woven ropes

To either bow

Firm-harness'd by the mane; a chief,

With shout and shaken spear,

Stands at the prow, and guides them; but astern

The cowering merchants in long robes

Sit pale beside their wealth

Of silk-bales and of balsam-drops,

Of gold and ivory,

Of turquoise-earth and amethyst,

Jasper and chalcedony,

And milk-barr'd onyx-stones.

The loaded boat swings groaning

In the yellow eddies;

The Gods behold them."

[Footnote: Arnold, "The Strayed Reveller."]

_5. Discovery and Rediscovery_

It is not pretended that the four types of free verse which have been

illustrated are marked by clear-cut generic differences. They shade into

one another. But they are all based upon a common sensitiveness to the

effects of rhythmic prose, a common restlessness under what is felt to be

the restraint of metre and rhyme, and a common endeavor to break down the

conventional barrier which separates the characteristic beauty of prose

speech from the characteristic beauty of verse. In this endeavor to

obliterate boundary lines, to secure in one art the effects hitherto

supposed to be the peculiar property of another, free verse is only one

more evidence of the widespread "confusion of the genres" which marks

contemporary artistic effort. It is possible, with the classicists, to

condemn outright this blurring of values.

[Footnote: See, for instance, Irving Babbitt, _The New Laokoon_. Houghton

Mifflin Company, 1910.]

One may legitimately maintain, with Edith Wyatt, that the traditional

methods of English verse are to the true artist not oppressions but

liberations. She calls it "a fallacious idea that all individual and all

realistic expression in poetry is annulled by the presence of distinctive

musical discernment, by the movement of rhyme with its keen heightening of

the impulse of rhythm, by the word-shadows of assonance, by harmonies,

overtones and the still beat of ordered time, subconsciously perceived but

precise as the sense of the symphony leader's flying baton. To readers, to

writers for whom the tonal quality of every language is an intrinsic value

these faculties of poetry serve not at all as cramping oppressions, but as

great liberations for the communication of truth."

[Footnote: _New Republic_, August 24, 1918.]

But many practitioners of free verse would reply that this is not a matter

for theorizing, but of individual preference, and that in their endeavor

to communicate new modes of feeling, new aspects of beauty, they have a

right to the use of new forms, even if those new forms be compounded out

of the wreck of old ones. This argument for freedom of experiment is

unanswerable; the true test of its validity lies in the results secured.

That free verse has now and then succeeded in creating lovely flowering

hybrids seems to me as indubitable as the magical tricks which Mr. Burbank

has played with flowers and fruits. But the smiling Dame Nature sets her

inexorable limits to "Burbanking"; she allows it to go about so far, and

no farther. Freakish free verse, like freakish plants and animals, gets

punished by sterility. Some of the "imagist" verse patterns are uniquely

and intricately beautiful. Wrought in a medium which is neither wholly

verse nor wholly prose, but which borrows some of the beauty peculiar to

each art, they are their own excuse for being. And nevertheless they may

not prove fertile. It may be that they have been produced by "pushing a

medium farther than it will go."

It must be admitted, furthermore, that a great deal of contemporary free

verse has been written by persons with an obviously incomplete command

over the resources of expression. Max Eastman has called it "Lazy Verse,"

the product of "aboriginal indolence"; and he adds this significant

distinction, "In all arts it is the tendency of those who are ungrown to

confuse the expression of intense feeling with the intense expression of

feeling--which last is all the world will long listen to." Shakspere,

Milton, Keats are masters of concentrated, intensest expression: their

verse, at its best, is structural as an oak. Those of us who have read

with keen momentary enjoyment thousands of pages of the "New Verse,"

are frequently surprised to find how little of it stamps itself upon the

memory. Intense feeling has gone into these formless forms, very

certainly, but the medium soaks up the feeling like blotting-paper. In

order to live, poetry must be plastic, a stark embodiment of emotion, and

not a solution of emotion.

That fragile, transient fashions of expression have their own evanescent

type of beauty no one who knows the history of Euphuism will deny. And

much of the New Verse is Euphuistic, not merely in its self-conscious

cleverness, its delightful toying with words and phrases for their own

sake, its search of novel cadences and curves, but also in its naive

pleasure in rediscovering and parodying what the ancients had discovered

long before. "Polyphonic prose," for instance, as announced and

illustrated by Mr. Paul Fort and Miss Amy Lowell, is prose that

makes use of all the "voices" of poetry,--viz. metre, _vers libre_,

assonances, alliteration, rhyme and return. "Metrical verse," says Miss

Lowell in the Preface to _Can Grande's Castle_, "has one set of laws,

cadenced verse another; 'polyphonic prose' can go from one to the other in

the same poem with no sense of incongruity.... I finally decided to base

my form upon the long, flowing cadence of oratorical prose. The variations

permitted to this cadence enable the poet to change the more readily into

those of _vers libre_, or even to take the regular beat of metre, should

such a marked time seem advisable.... Rhyme is employed to give a richness

of effect, to heighten the musical feeling of a passage, but ... the

rhymes should seldom come at the ends of the cadences.... Return in

'polyphonic prose' is usually achieved by the recurrence of a dominant

thought or image, coming in irregularly and in varying words, but still

giving the spherical effect which I have frequently spoken of as

imperative in all poetry."

Now every one of these devices is at least as old as Isocrates. It was in

this very fashion that Euphues and his Friends delighted to serve and

return their choicest tennis balls of Elizabethan phrase. But little De

Quincey could pull out the various stops of polyphonic prose even more

cleverly than John Lyly; and if one will read the admirable description of

St. Mark's in _Can Grandel’s Castle_, and then re-read Ruskin's

description of St. Mark's, he will find that the Victorian's orchestration

of many-voiced prose does not suffer by comparison.

Yet though it is true enough of the arts, as Chaucer wrote suavely long

ago, that "There nys no newe thing that is not olde," we must remember

that the arts are always profiting by their naive rediscoveries. It is

more important that the thing should seem new than that it should really

be new, and the fresh sense of untried possibilities, the feeling that

much land remains to be possessed, has given our contemporaries the

spirits and the satisfactions of the pioneer. What matters it that a few

antiquaries can trace on old maps the very rivers and harbors which the

New Verse believed itself to be exploring for the first time? Poetry does

not live by antiquarianism, but by the passionate conviction that all

things are made new through the creative imagination.

"Have the elder races halted?

Do they droop and end their lesson, wearied over there beyond the seas?

We take up the task eternal, and the burden and the lesson,

Pioneers! O pioneers!"

PART II

THE LYRIC IN PARTICULAR

"O hearken, love, the battle-horn!

The triumph clear, the silver scorn!

O hearken where the echoes bring.

Down the grey disastrous morn,

Laughter and rallying!"

WILLIAM VAUGHN MOODY

CHAPTER VII

THE FIELD OF LYRIC POETRY

"'Lyrical,' it may be said, implies a form of musical utterance

in words governed by overmastering emotion and set free by a

powerfully concordant rhythm."

ERNEST RHYS, _Lyric Poetry_

That "confusion of the genres" which characterizes so much of contemporary

art has not obliterated the ancient division of poetry into three chief

types, namely, lyric, epic and dramatic. We still mean by these words very

much what the Greeks meant: a "lyric" is something sung, an "epic" tells

a story, a "drama" sets characters in action. Corresponding to these

general purposes of the three kinds of poetry, is the difference which

Watts-Dunton has discussed so suggestively: namely, that in the lyric the

author reveals himself fully, while in the "epic" or narrative poem the

author himself is but partly revealed, and in the drama the author is

hidden behind his characters. Or, putting this difference in another way,

the same critic points out that the true dramatists possess "absolute"

vision, i.e. unconditioned by the personal impulses of the poet himself,

whereas the vision of the lyrist is "relative," conditioned by his own

situation and mood. The pure lyrist, says Watts-Dunton, has one voice and

sings one tune; the epic poets and quasi-dramatists have one voice but can

sing several tunes, while the true dramatists, with their objective,

"absolute" vision of the world, have many tongues and can sing in all

tunes.

_1. A Rough Classification_

Passing over the question of the historical origins of those various

species of poetry, such as the relation of early hymnic songs and

hero-songs to the epic, and the relation of narrative material and method

to the drama, let us try to arrange in some sort of order the kinds of

poetry with which we are familiar. Suppose we follow Watts-Dunton's hint,

and start, as if it were from a central point, with the Pure Lyric, the

expression of the Ego in song. Shelley's "Stanzas Written in Dejection

near Naples," Coleridge's "Ode to Dejection," Wordsworth's "She dwelt

among the untrodden ways," Tennyson's "Break--Break" will serve for

illustrations. These are subjective, personal poems. Their vision

is "relative" to the poet's actual circumstances. Yet in a "dramatic

lyric" like Byron's "Isles of Greece" or Tennyson's "Sir Galahad" it is

clear that the poet's vision is not occupied primarily with himself, but

with another person. In a dramatic monologue like Tennyson's "Simeon

Stylites" or Browning's "The Bishop orders his Tomb in St. Praxed's

Church" it is not Tennyson and Browning themselves who are talking, but

imaginary persons viewed objectively, as far as Tennyson and Browning were

capable of such objectivity. The next step would be the Drama, preoccupied

with characters in action--the "world of men," in short, and not the

personal subjective world of the highly sensitized lyric poet.

Let us now move away from that pure lyric centre in another direction. In

a traditional ballad like "Sir Patrick Spens," a modern ballad like

Tennyson's "The Revenge," or Coleridge's "Ancient Mariner," is not the

poet's vision becoming objectified, directed upon events or things outside

of the circle of his own subjective emotion? In modern epic verse, like

Tennyson's "Morte d'Arthur," Arnold's "Sohrab and Rustum," Morris's

"Sigurd the Volsung," and certainly in the "Aeneid" and the "Song of

Roland," the poet sinks his own personality, as far as possible, in the

objective narration of events. And in like manner, the poet may turn from

the world of action to the world of repose, and portray Nature as

enfolding and subduing the human element in his picture. In Keats's "Ode

to Autumn," Shelley's "Autumn," in Wordsworth's "Solitary Reaper,"

Browning's "Where the Mayne Glideth," we find poets absorbed in the

external scene or object and striving to paint it. It is true that the

born lyrists betray themselves constantly, that they suffuse both the

world of repose and the world of action with the coloring of their own

unquiet spirits. They cannot keep themselves wholly out of the story they

are telling or the picture they are painting; and it is for this reason

that we speak of "lyrical" passages even in the great objective dramas,

passages colored with the passionate personal feelings of the poet. For he

cannot be wholly "absolute" even if he tries: he will invent favorite

characters and make them the mouthpiece of his own fancies: he will devise

favorite situations, and use them to reveal his moral judgment of men and

women, and his general theory of human life.

_2. Definitions_

While we must recognize, then, that the meaning of the word "lyrical" has

been broadened so as to imply, frequently, a quality of poetry rather than

a mere form of poetry, let us go back for a moment to the original

significance of the word. Derived from "lyre," it meant first a song

written for musical accompaniment, say an ode of Pindar; then a poem whose

form suggests this original musical accompaniment; then, more loosely, a

poem which has the quality of music, and finally, purely personal poetry.

[Footnote: See the definitions in John Erskine's _Elizabethan Lyric_, E.

B. Heed's _English Lyrical Poetry_, Ernest Rhys's _Lyric Poetry_, F. E.

Schelling's _The English Lyric_, John Drinkwater's _The Lyric_, C. E.

Whitmore in _Pub. Mod. Lang. Ass._, December, 1918.]

"All songs, all poems following classical lyric forms; all short poems

expressing the writer's moods and feelings in rhythm that suggests music,

are to be considered lyrics," says Professor Reed. "The lyric is concerned

with the poet, his thoughts, his emotions, his moods, and his passions....

With the lyric subjective poetry begins," says Professor Schelling. "The

characteristic of the lyric is that it is the product of the pure poetic

energy unassociated with other energies," says Mr. Drinkwater. These are

typical recent definitions. Francis T. Palgrave, in the Preface to the

_Golden Treasury of English Songs and Lyrics_, while omitting to stress

the elements of musical quality and of personal emotion, gives a working

rule for anthologists which has proved highly useful. He held the term

"lyrical" "to imply that each poem shall turn on a single thought, feeling

or situation." The critic Scherer also gave an admirable practical

definition when he remarked that the lyric "reflects a situation or a

desire." Keats's sonnet "On first looking into Chapman's Homer," Charles

Kingsley's "Airlie Beacon" and Whitman's "O Captain! My Captain!" (_Oxford

Book of Verse_, Nos. 634, 739 and 743) are suggestive illustrations of

Scherer's dictum.

_3. General Characteristics_

But the lyric, however it may be defined, has certain general

characteristics which are indubitable. The lyric "vision," that is to say,

the experience, thought, emotion which gives its peculiar quality to lyric

verse, making it "simple, sensuous, passionate" beyond other species of

poetry, is always marked by freshness, by egoism, and by genuineness.

To the lyric poet all must seem new; each sunrise "_herrlich wie am ersten

Tag._" "Thou know'st 'tis common," says Hamlet's mother, speaking of his

father's death, "Why seems it so particular with thee?" But to men of the

lyrical temperament everything is "particular." Age does not alter their

exquisite sense of the novelty of experience. Tennyson's lines on "Early

Spring," written at seventy-four, Browning's "Never the Time and the

Place" written at seventy-two, Goethe's love-lyrics written when he was

eighty, have all the delicate bloom of adolescence. Sometimes this

freshness seems due in part to the poet's early place in the development

of his national literature: he has had, as it were, the first chance at

his particular subject. There were countless springs, of course, before a

nameless poet, about 1250, wrote one of the first English lyrics for which

we have a contemporary musical score:

"Sumer is icumen in,

Lhude sing cuccu."

But the words thrill the reader, even now, as he hears in fancy that

cuckoo's song,

"Breaking the silence of the seas

Beyond the farthest Hebrides."

Or, the lyric poet may have the luck to write at a period when settled,

stilted forms of poetical expression are suddenly done away with. Perhaps

he may have helped in the emancipation, like Wordsworth and Coleridge in

the English Romantic Revival, or Victor Hugo in the France of 1830. The

new sense of the poetic possibilities of language reacts upon the

imaginative vision itself. Free verse, in our own time, has profited by

this rejuvenation of the poetic vocabulary, by new phrases and cadences to

match new moods. Sometimes an unwonted philosophical insight makes all

things new to the poet who possesses it. Thus Emerson's vision of the

"Eternal Unity," or Browning's conception of Immortality, afford the very

stuff out of which poetry may be wrought. Every new experience, in short,

like falling in love, like having a child, like getting "converted,"

[Footnote: See William James, _The Varieties of Religious Experience_.]

gives the lyric poet this rapturous sense of living in a world hitherto

unrealized. The old truisms of the race become suddenly "particular" to

him. "As for man, his days are as grass. As a flower of the field, so he

flourisheth." That was first a "lyric cry" out of the depths of some fresh

individual experience. It has become stale through repetition, but many a

man, listening to those words read at the burial of a friend, has seemed,

in his passionate sense of loss, to hear them for the first time.

Egoism is another mark of the lyric poet. "Of every poet of this class,"

remarks Watts-Dunton, "it may be said that his mind to him 'a kingdom is,'

and that the smaller the poet the bigger to him is that kingdom." He

celebrates himself. Contemporary lyrists have left no variety of physical

sensation unnoted: they tell us precisely how they feel and look when they

take their morning tub. Far from avoiding that "pathetic fallacy" which

Ruskin analysed in a famous chapter,

[Footnote: _Modern Painters_, vol. 3, chap. 12.]

and which attributes to the external world qualities which belong only to

the mind itself, they revel in it. "Day, like our souls, is _fiercely

dark_," sang Elliott, the Corn-Law Rhymer. Hamlet, it will be remembered,

could be lyrical enough upon occasion, but he retained the power of

distinguishing between things as they actually were and things as they

appeared to him in his weakness and his melancholy. "This goodly frame,

the earth, seems _to me_ a sterile promontory; this most excellent canopy,

the air, look you, this brave o'erhanging firmament, this majestical roof

fretted with golden fire, why, it appears no other thing _to me_ than a

foul and pestilent congregation of vapors. What a piece of work is a man!

How noble in reason! how infinite in faculty!... And yet, _to me_,

what is this quintessence of dust?"

Nevertheless this lyric egoism has certain moods in which the individual

identifies himself with his family or tribe:

"O Keith of Ravelstone,

The sorrows of thy line!"

School and college songs are often, in reality, tribal lyrics. The

choruses of Greek tragedies dealing with the guilt and punishment of a

family, the Hebrew lyrics chanting, like "The Song of Deborah," the

fortunes of a great fight, often broaden their sympathies so as to

include, as in "The Persians" of Aeschylus, the glory or the downfall of a

race. And this sense of identification with a nation or race implies no

loss, but often an amplification of the lyric impulse. Alfred Noyes's

songs about the English, D'Annunzio's and Hugo's splendid chants of the

Latin races, Kipling's glorification of the White Man, lose nothing of

their lyric quality because of their nationalistic or racial inspiration.

Read Wilfrid Blunt's sonnet on "Gibraltar" (_Oxford Book of Verse_,

No. 821):

"Ay, this is the famed rock which Hercules

And Goth and Moor bequeath'd us. At this door

England stands sentry. God! to hear the shrill

Sweet treble of her fifes upon the breeze,

And at the summons of the rock gun's roar

To see her red coats marching from the hill!"

Are patriotic lyrics of this militant type destined to disappear, as

Tolstoy believed they ought to disappear, with the breaking-down of the

barriers of nationality, or rather with the coming of

"One common wave of thought and joy,

Lifting mankind again"

over the barriers of nationality? Certainly there is already a type of

purely humanitarian, altruistic lyric, where the poet instinctively thinks

in terms of "us men" rather than of "I myself." It appeared long ago in

that rebellious "Titanic" verse which took the side of oppressed mortals

as against the unjust gods. Tennyson's "Lotos-Eaters" is a modern echo of

this defiant or despairing cry of the "ill-used race of men." The songs of

Burns reveal ever-widening circles of sympathy,--pure personal egoism,

then songs of the family and of clan and of country-side, then passion for

Scotland, and finally this fierce peasant affection for his own passes

into the glorious

"It's comin' yet for a' that,

That man to man the world o'er

Shall brithers be for a' that."

One other general characteristic of the lyric mood needs to be emphasized,

namely, its _genuineness_. It is impossible to feign

"the lyric gush,

And the wing-power, and the rush

Of the air."

Second-rate, imitative singers may indeed assume the role of genuine lyric

poets, but they cannot play it without detection. It is literally true

that natural lyrists like Sappho, Burns, Goethe, Heine, "sing as the bird

sings." Once endowed with the lyric temperament and the command of

technique, their cry of love or longing, of grief or patriotism, is the

inevitable resultant from a real situation or desire. Sometimes, like

children, they do not tell us very clearly what they are crying about, but

it is easy to discover whether they are, like children, "making believe."

_4. The Objects of the Lyric Vision_

Let us look more closely at some of the objects of the lyric vision; the

sources or material, that is to say, for the lyric emotion. Goethe's

often-quoted classification is as convenient as any: the poet's vision, he

says, may be directed upon Nature, Man or God.

And first, then, upon Nature. One characteristic of lyric poetry is the

clearness with which single details or isolated objects in Nature may be

visualized and reproduced. The modern reflective lyric, it is true, often

depends for its power upon some philosophical generalization from a single

instance, like Emerson's "Rhodora" or Wordsworth's "Small Celandine." It

may even attempt a sort of logical or pseudo-logical deduction from given

premises, like Browning's famous

"Morning's at seven;

The hillside's dew-pearled;

The lark's on the wing:

The snail's on the thorn;

God's in his Heaven--

_All's right with the world!_"

The imagination cannot be denied this right to synthesize and to

interpret, and nevertheless Nature offers even to the most unphilosophical

her endless profusion of objects that awaken delight. She does not insist

that the lyric poet should generalize unless he pleases. Moth and snail

and skylark, daisy and field-mouse and water-fowl, seized by an eye that

is quick to their poetic values, their interest to men, furnish material

enough for lyric feeling. The fondness of Romantic poets for isolating a

single object has been matched in our day by the success of the Imagists

in painting a single aspect of some phenomenon--

"Light as the shadow of the fish

That falls through the pale green water--"

any aspect, in short, provided it affords the "romantic quiver," the

quick, keen sense of the beauty in things. What an art-critic said of the

painter W. M. Chase applies equally well to many contemporary Imagists who

use the forms of lyric verse: "He saw the world as a display of beautiful

surfaces which challenged his skill. It was enough to set him painting to

note the nacreous skin of a fish, or the satiny bloom of fruit, or the

wind-smoothed dunes about Shinnecock, or the fine specific olive of a

woman's face.... He took objects quite at their face value, and rarely

invested them with the tenderness, mystery and understanding that comes

from meditation and remembered feelings.... We get in him a fine, bare

vision, and must not expect therewith much contributary enrichment from

mind and mood."

[Footnote: _The Nation_, November 2, 1916.]

Our point is that this "fine, bare vision" is often enough for a lyric. It

has no time for epic breadth of detail, for the rich accumulation of

harmonious images which marks Arnold's "Sohrab and Rustum" or Keats's "Eve

of St. Agnes."

The English Romantic poets were troubled about the incursion of scientific

fact into the poet's view of nature. The awful rainbow in heaven might be

turned, they thought, through the curse of scientific knowledge, into the

"dull catalogue of common things." But Wordsworth was wiser than this. He

saw that if the scientific fact were emotionalized, it could still serve

as the stuff of poetry. Facts could be transformed into truths. No aspect

of Tennyson's lyricism is more interesting than his constant employment of

the newest scientific knowledge of his day, for instance, in geology,

chemistry and astronomy. He set his facts to music. Eugene Lee-Hamilton's

poignant sonnet about immortality is an illustration of the ease with

which a lyric poet may find material in scientific fact, if appropriated

and made rich by feeling.

[Footnote: Quoted in chap. VIII, section 7.]

If lyric poetry shows everywhere this tendency to humanize its "bare

vision" of Nature, it is also clear that the lyric, as the most highly

personalized species of poetry, exhibits an infinite variety of visions of

human life. Any anthology will illustrate the range of observation, the

complexity of situations and desires, the constant changes in key, as the

lyric attempts to interpret this or that aspect of human emotion. Take for

example, the Elizabethan love-lyric. Here is a single human passion,

expressing itself in the moods and lyric forms of one brief generation of

our literature. Yet what variety of personal accent, what kaleidoscopic

shiftings of mind and imagination, what range of lyric beauty! Or take the

passion for the wider interests of Humanity, expressed in the lyrics of

Schiller and Burns, running deep and turbid through Revolutionary

and Romantic verse, and still coloring--perhaps now more strongly than

ever--the stream of twentieth-century poetry. Here is a type of lyric

emotion where self-consciousness is lost, absorbed in the wider

consciousness of kinship, in the dawning recognition of the oneness of the

blood and fate of all nations of the earth.

The purest type of lyric vision is indicated in the third word of Goethe's

triad. It is the vision of God. Here no physical fact intrudes or mars.

Here thought, if it be complete thought, is wholly emotionalized. Such

transcendent vision, as in the Hebrew lyrists and in Dante, is itself

worship, and the lyric cry of the most consummate artist among English

poets of the last generation is simply an echo of the ancient voices:

"Hallowed be Thy Name--Hallelujah!"

If Tennyson could not phrase anew the ineffable, it is no wonder that most

hymn-writers fail. They are trying to express in conventionalized

religious terminology and in "long and short metre" what can with

difficulty be expressed at all, and if at all, by the unconscious art of

the Psalms or by a sustained metaphor, like "Crossing the Bar" or the

"Recessional." The medieval Latin hymns clothed their transcendent themes,

their passionate emotions, in the language of imperial Rome. The modern

sectaries succeed best in their hymnology when they choose simple ideas,

not too definite in content, and clothe them, as Whittier did, in words of

tender human association, in parables of longing and of consolation.

_5. The Lyric Imagination_

The material thus furnished by the lyric poet's experience, thought and

emotion is reshaped by an imagination working simply and spontaneously.

The lyrist is born and not made, and he cannot help transforming the

actual world into his own world, like Don Quixote with the windmills and

the serving-women. Sometimes his imagination fastens upon a single trait

or aspect of reality, and the resultant metaphor seems truer than any

logic.

"Death lays his _icy hand_ on Kings."

"I wandered _lonely as a cloud_."

Sometimes his imagination fuses various aspects of an object into a

composite effect:

"A lily of a day

Is fairer far in May,

Although it fall and die that night;

It was the _plant and flower of light_."

The lyric emotion, it is true, does not always catch at imagery. It may

deal directly with the fact, as in Burns's immortal

"If we ne'er had met sae kindly,

If we ne'er had loved sae blindly,

Never loved, and never parted,

We had ne'er been broken-hearted."

The lyric atmosphere, heavy and clouded with passionate feeling, idealizes

objects as if they were seen through the light of dawn or sunset. It is

never the dry clear light of noon.

"She was _a phantom_ of delight."

"Thy soul was _like a star_, and dwelt apart,

Thou hadst a voice whose sound was _like the sea_,

Pure as _the naked heavens_...."

This idealization is often not so much a magnification of the object as a

simplification of it. Confusing details are stripped away. Contradictory

facts are eliminated, until heart answers to heart across the welter of

immaterialities.

Although the psychologists, as has been already noted, are now little

inclined to distinguish between the imagination and the fancy, it remains

true that the old distinction between superficial or "fanciful"

resemblances, and deeper or "imaginative" likenesses, is a convenient one

in lyric poetry. E. C. Stedman, in his old age, was wont to say that our

younger lyrists, while tuneful and fanciful enough, had no imagination or

passion, and that what was needed in America was some adult male verse.

The verbal felicity and richness of fancy that characterized the

Elizabethan lyric were matched by its sudden gleams of penetrative

imagination, which may be, after all, only the "fancy" taking a deeper

plunge. In the familiar song from _The Tempest_, for example, we have in

the second and third lines examples of those fanciful conceits in which

the age delighted, but that does not impair the purely imaginative beauty

of the last three lines of the stanza,--the lines that are graven upon

Shelley's tombstone in Rome:

"Full fathom five thy father lies;

Of his bones are coral made;

Those are pearls that were his eyes:

Nothing of him that doth fade

But doth suffer a sea-change

Into something rich and strange."

So it was that Hawthorne's "fancy" first won a public for his stories,

while it is by his imagination that he holds his place as an artist. For

the deeply imaginative line of lyric verse, like the imaginative

conception of novelist or dramatist, often puzzles or repels a poet's

contemporaries. Jeffrey could find no sense in Wordsworth's superb couplet

in the "Ode to Duty":

"Thou dost preserve the stars from wrong;

And the most ancient heavens, through Thee, are

fresh and strong."

And oddly enough, Emerson, the one man upon this side of the Atlantic from

whom an instinctive understanding of those lines was to be expected, was

as much perplexed by them as Jeffrey.

_6. Lyric Expression_

Is it possible to formulate the laws of lyric expression? "I do not mean

by expression," said Gray, "the mere choice of words, but the whole dress,

fashion, and arrangement of a thought."

[Footnote: Gray's _Letters_, vol. 2, p. 333. (Gosse ed.)]

Taking expression, in this larger sense, as the final element in that

threefold process by which poetry comes into being, and which has been

discussed in an earlier chapter, we may assert that there are certain

general laws of lyric form. One of them is the law of brevity. It is

impossible to keep the lyric pitch for very long. The rapture turns to

pain. "I need scarcely observe," writes Poe in his essay on "The Poetic

Principle," "that a poem deserves its title only inasmuch as it excites,

by elevating the soul. The value of the poem is in the ratio of this

elevating excitement. But all excitements are, through a psychical

necessity, transient. That degree of excitement which would entitle

a poem to be so called at all, cannot be sustained throughout a

composition of any great length. After the lapse of half an hour, at the

very utmost, it flags--fails--a revulsion ensues--and then the poem is, in

effect, and in fact, no longer such."

In another passage, from the essay on "Hawthorne's 'Twice-Told Tales,'"

Poe emphasizes this law of brevity in connection with the law of unity of

impression. It is one of the classic passages of American literary

criticism:

"Were we bidden to say how the highest genius could be most

advantageously employed for the best display of its own powers, we

should answer, without hesitation--in the composition of a rhymed poem,

not to exceed in length what might be perused in an hour. Within this

limit alone can the highest order of true poetry exist. We need only

here say, upon this topic, that, in almost all classes of composition,

the unity of effect or impression is a point of the greatest importance.

It is clear, moreover, that this unity cannot be thoroughly preserved in

productions whose perusal cannot be completed at one sitting. We may

continue the reading of a prose composition, from the very nature of

prose itself, much longer than we can preserve, to any good purpose, in

the perusal of a poem. This latter, if truly fulfilling the demands of

the poetic sentiment, induces an exaltation of the soul which cannot be

long sustained. All high excitements are necessarily transient. Thus a

long poem is a paradox. And, without unity of impression, the deepest

effects cannot be brought about. Epics were the offspring of an

imperfect sense of Art, and their reign is no more. A poem _too_ brief

may produce a vivid, but never an intense or enduring impression.

Without a certain continuity of effort--without a certain duration or

repetition of purpose--the soul is never deeply moved."

Gray's analysis of the law of lyric brevity is picturesque, and too little

known:

"The true lyric style, with all its flights of fancy, ornaments, and

heightening of expression, and harmony of sound, is in its nature

superior to every other style; which is just the cause why it could not

be borne in a work of great length, no more than the eye could bear to

see all this scene that we constantly gaze upon,--the verdure of the

fields and woods, the azure of the sea-skies, turned into one dazzling

expanse of gems. The epic, therefore, assumed a style of graver colors,

and only stuck on a diamond (borrowed from her sister) here and there,

where it best became her.... To pass on a sudden from the lyric glare to

the epic solemnity (if I may be allowed to talk nonsense)...."

[Footnote: Gray's _Letters_, vol. 2, p. 304. (Gosse ed.)]

It is evident that the laws of brevity and unity cannot be disassociated.

The unity of emotion which characterizes the successful lyric corresponds

to the unity of action in the drama, and to the unity of effect in the

short story. It is this fact which Palgrave stressed in his emphasis upon

"some single thought, feeling, or situation." The sonnets, for instance,

that most nearly approach perfection are those dominated by one thought.

This thought may be turned over, indeed, as the octave passes into the

sextet, and may be viewed from another angle, or applied in an unexpected

way. And yet the content of a sonnet, considered as a whole, must be as

integral as the sonnet's form. So must it be with any song. The various

devices of rhyme, stanza and refrain help to bind into oneness of form a

single emotional reflection of some situation or desire.

Watts-Dunton points out that there is also a law of simplicity of

grammatical structure which the lyric disregards at its peril. Browning

and Shelley, to mention no lesser names, often marred the effectiveness of

their lyrics by a lack of perspicuity. If the lyric cry is not easily

intelligible, the sympathy of the listener is not won. Riddle-poems have

been loved by the English ever since Anglo-Saxon times, but the

intellectual satisfaction of solving a puzzle may be purchased at the cost

of true poetic pleasure. Let us quote Gray once more, for he had an

unerring sense of the difficulty of moulding ideas into "pure, perspicuous

and musical form."

"Extreme conciseness of expression, yet pure, perspicuous, and musical,

is one of the grand beauties of lyric poetry. This I have always aimed

at, and never could attain; the necessity of rhyming is one great

obstacle to it: another and perhaps a stronger is, that way you have

chosen of casting down your first ideas carelessly and at large, and

then clipping them here and there, and forming them at leisure; this

method, after all possible pains, will leave behind it in some places a

laxity, a diffuseness; the frame of a thought (otherwise well invented,

well turned, and well placed) is often weakened by it. Do I talk

nonsense, or do you understand me?"

[Footnote: Gray's _Letters_, vol. 2, p. 352. (Gosse ed.)]

Poe, whose theory of poetry comprehends only the lyric, and indeed chiefly

that restricted type of lyric verse in which he himself was a master,

insisted that there was a further lyric law,--the law of vagueness or

indefiniteness. "I know," he writes in his "Marginalia," "that

indefiniteness is an element of the true music--I mean of the true musical

expression. Give to it any undue decision--imbue it with any very

determinate tone--and you deprive it, at once, of its ethereal, its ideal,

its intrinsic and essential character. You dispel its luxury of dream. You

dissolve the atmosphere of the mystic upon which it floats. You exhaust it

of its breath of faëry. It now becomes a tangible and easily appreciable

idea--a thing of the earth, earthy."

This reads like a defence of Poe's own private practice, and yet many

poets and critics are inclined to side with him. Edmond Holmes, for

instance, goes quite as far as Poe. "The truth is that poetry, which is

the expression of large, obscure and indefinable feelings, finds its

appropriate material in _vague_ words--words of large import and with many

meanings and shades of meaning. Here we have an almost unfailing test for

determining the poetic fitness of words, a test which every true poet

unconsciously, but withal unerringly, applies. Precision, whether in the

direction of what is commonplace or of what is technical, is always

unpoetical."

[Footnote: _What is Poetry_, p. 77. London and New York, 1900.]

This doctrine, it will be observed, is in direct opposition to the Imagist

theory of "hardness and economy of speech; the exact word," and it also

would rule out the highly technical vocabulary of camp and trail,

steamship and jungle, with which Mr. Kipling has greatly delighted our

generation. No one who admires the splendid vitality of "McAndrew's Hymn"

is really troubled by the slang and lingo of the engine-room.

One of the most charming passages in Stedman's _Nature and Elements of

Poetry_ (pp. 181-85) deals with the law of Evanescence. The "flowers that

fade," the "airs that die," "the snows of yester-year," have in their very

frailty and mortality a haunting lyric value. Don Marquis has written a

poem about this exquisite appeal of the transient, calling it "The

Paradox":

"'T is evanescence that endures;

The loveliness that dies the soonest has the longest life."

But we touch here a source of lyric beauty too delicate to be analysed in

prose. It is better to read "Rose Aylmer," or to remember what Duke Orsino

says in Twelfth Night:

"Enough; no more:

'T is not so sweet now as it was before."

7._ Expression and Impulse_

A word must be added, nevertheless, about lyric expression as related to

the lyric impulse. No one pretends that there is such a thing as a set

lyric pattern.

"There are nine-and-sixty ways of constructing tribal lays,

And every single one of them is right."

No two professional golfers, for instance, take precisely the same stance.

Each man's stance is the expression, the result, of his peculiar physical

organization and his muscular habits. There are as many "styles" as there

are players, and yet each player strives for "style," i.e. economy and

precision and grace of muscular effort, and each will assert that the

chief thing is to "keep your eye on the ball" and "follow through." "And

every single one of them is right."

Apply this analogy to the organization of a lyric poem. Its material, as

we have seen, is infinitely varied. It expresses all conceivable "states

of soul." Is it possible, therefore, to lay down any general formula for

it, something corresponding to the golfer's "keep your eye on the ball"

and "follow through"? John Erskine, in his book on _The Elizabethan

Lyric_, ventures upon this precept: "Lyric emotion, in order to express

itself intelligibly, must first reproduce the cause of its existence. If

the poet will go into ecstasies over a Grecian urn, to justify himself he

must first show us the urn." Admitted. Can one go farther? Mr. Erskine

attempts it, in a highly suggestive analysis:

"Speaking broadly, all successful lyrics have three parts. In the first

the emotional stimulus is given--the object, the situation, or the thought

from which the song arises. In the second part the emotion is developed to

its utmost capacity, until as it begins to flag the intellectual element

reasserts itself. In the third part the emotion is finally resolved into a

thought, a mental resolution, or an attribute."

[Footnote: _The Elizabethan Lyric_, p. 17.]

Let the reader choose at random a dozen lyrics from the _Golden Treasury_,

and see how far this orderly arrangement of the thought-stuff of the lyric

is approximated in practice. My own impression is that the critic

postulates more of an "intellectual element" than the average English song

will supply. But at least here is a clear-cut statement of what one may

look for in a lyric. It shows how the lyric impulse tends to mould lyric

expression into certain lines of order.

Most of the narrower precepts governing lyric form follow from the general

principles already discussed. The lyric vocabulary, every one admits,

should not seem studied or consciously ornate, for that breaks the law of

spontaneity. It may indeed be highly finished, the more highly in

proportion to its brevity, but the clever word-juggling of such

prestidigitators as Poe and Verlaine is perilous. Figurative language must

spring only from living, figurative thought, otherwise the lyric falls

into verbal conceits, frigidity, conventionality. Stanzaic law must follow

emotional law, just as Kreisler's accompanist must keep time with

Kreisler. All the rich devices of rhyme and tone-color must heighten

and not cloy the singing quality. But why lengthen this list of truisms?

The combination of genuine lyric emotion with expertness of technical

expression is in reality very rare. Goethe's "Ueber alien Gipfeln ist Ruh"

and Coleridge's "Kubla Khan" are miracles of art, yet one was scribbled in

a moment, and the other dreamed in an opium slumber. The lyric is the

commonest, and yet, in its perfection, the rarest type of poetry; the

earliest, and yet the most modern; the simplest, and yet in its laws of

emotional association, perhaps the most complex; and it is all these

because it expresses, more intimately than other types of verse, the

personality of the poet.

CHAPTER VIII

RELATIONSHIPS AND TYPES OF THE LYRIC

"_Milk-Woman_. What song was it, I pray? Was it 'Come, shepherds, deck

your heads'? or, 'As at noon Dulcina rested'? or, 'Phillida flouts me'?

or, 'Chevy Chase'? or, 'Johnny Armstrong'? or, 'Troy Town'?"

ISAAC WALTON, _The Complete Angler_

We have already considered, at the beginning of the previous chapter, the

general relationship of the three chief types of poetry. Lyric, epic and

drama, i.e. song, story and play, have obviously different functions to

perform. They may indeed deal with a common fund of material. A given

event, say the settlement of Virginia, or the episode of Pocahontas,

provides situations and emotions which may take either lyric or narrative

or dramatic shape. The mental habits and technical experience of the poet,

or the prevalent literary fashions of his day, may determine which general

type of poetry he will employ. There were born lyrists, like Greene in the

Elizabethan period, who wrote plays because the public demanded drama, and

there have been natural dramatists who were compelled, in a period when

the theatre fell into disrepute, to give their material a narrative form.

But we must also take into account the dominant mood or quality of certain

poetic minds. Many passages in narrative and dramatic verse, for instance,

while fulfilling their primary function of telling a story or throwing

characters into action, are colored by what we have called the lyric

quality, by that passionate, personal feeling whose natural mode of

expression is in song. In Marlowe's _Tamburlaine_, for instance, or Victor

Hugo's _Hernani_, there are superb pieces of lyric declamation, in which

we feel that Marlowe and Hugo themselves--not the imaginary Tamburlaine

and Hernani--are chanting the desires of their own hearts. Arnold's

"Sohrab and Rustum," after finishing its tragic story of the son slain by

the unwitting father, closes with a lyric description of the majestic Oxus

stream flowing on to the Aral sea. Objective as it all seems, this close

is intensely personal, permeated with the same tender stoicism which

colors Arnold's "Dover Beach" and "A Summer Night." The device of using a

Nature picture at the end of a narrative, to heighten, by harmony or

contrast, the mood induced by the story itself, was freely utilized

by Tennyson in his _English Idylls_, such as "Audley Court," "Edwin

Morris," "Love and Duty," and "The Golden Year." It adds the last touch of

poignancy to Robert Frost's "Death of the Hired Man." These descriptive

passages, though lacking the song form, are as purely lyrical in their

function as the songs in _The Princess _or the songs in _The Winter's

Tale_.

_1. The Blending of Types_

While the scope of the present volume, as explained in the Preface,

precludes any specific study of drama and epic, the reader must bear in

mind that the three main types of poetry are not separated, in actual

practice, by immovably hard and fast lines. Pigeonhole classifications of

drama, epic and lyric types are highly convenient to the student for

purposes of analysis. But the moment one reads a ballad like "Edward,

Edward" (_Oxford_, No. 373) or "Helen of Kirconnell" (_Oxford_, No. 387)

the pigeon-hole distinctions must be subordinated to the actual fact that

these ballads are a blend of drama, story and song. The "form" is lyrical,

the stuff is narrative, the mode of presentation is often that of purely

dramatic dialogue.

Take a contemporary illustration of this blending of types. Mr. Vachel

Lindsay has told us the origins of his striking poem "The Congo." He was

already in a "national-theme mood," he says, when he listened to a sermon

about missionaries on the Congo River. The word "Congo" began to haunt

him. "It echoed with the war-drums and cannibal yells of Africa." Then,

for a list of colors for his palette, he had boyish memories of Stanley's

_Darkest Africa_, and of the dances of the Dahomey Amazons at the World's

Fair in Chicago. He had seen the anti-negro riots in Springfield,

Illinois. He had gone through a score of negro-saloons--"barrel-houses"--

on Eleventh Avenue, New York, and had "accumulated a jungle impression

that remains with me yet." Above all, there was Conrad's _Heart of

Darkness_. "I wanted to reiterate the word Congo--and the several refrains

in a way that would echo stories like that. I wanted to suggest

the terror, the reeking swamp-fever, the forest splendor, the

black-lacquered loveliness, and above all the eternal fatality of Africa,

that Conrad has written down with so sure a hand. I do not mean to say,

now that I have done, that I recorded all these things in rhyme. But every

time I rewrote 'The Congo' I reached toward them. I suppose I rewrote it

fifty times in these two months, sometimes three times in one day."

It is not often that we get so veracious an account of the making

of a poem, so clear a conception of the blending of sound-motives,

color-motives, story-stuff, drama-stuff, personal emotion, into a single

whole.

Nor is there any clear separation of types when we strive to look back to

the primitive origins of these various forms of poetry. In the opinion of

many scholars, the origins are to be traced to a common source in the

dance. "Dances, as overwhelming evidence, ethnological and sociological,

can prove, were the original stuff upon which dramatic, lyric and epic

impulses wove a pattern that is traced in later narrative ballads mainly

as incremental repetition. Separation of its elements, and evolution to

higher forms, made the dance an independent art, with song, and then

music, ancillary to the figures and the steps; song itself passed to lyric

triumphs quite apart from choral voice and choral act; epic went its

artistic way with nothing but rhythm as memorial of the dance, and the

story instead of dramatic situation; drama retained the situation, the

action, even the chorus and the dance, but submitted them to the shaping

and informing power of individual genius."

[Footnote: Gummere, _The Popular Ballad_, p. 106.]

In another striking passage, Professor Gummere asks us to visualize "a

throng of people without skill to read or write, without ability to

project themselves into the future, or to compare themselves with the

past, or even to range their experience with the experience of other

communities, gathered in festal mood, and by loud song, perfect rhythm and

energetic dance, expressing their feelings over an event of quite local

origin, present appeal and common interest. Here, in point of evolution,

is the human basis of poetry, the foundation courses of the pyramid."

_2. Lyrical Element in Drama_

We cannot here attempt to trace, even in outline, the course of this

historic evolution of genres. But in contemporary types of both dramatic

and narrative poetry, there may still be discovered the influence of lyric

form and mood. We have already noted how the dramatist, for all of his

supposed objectivity, cannot refrain from coloring certain persons and

situations with the hues of his own fancy. Ibsen, for instance, injects

his irony, his love for symbolism, his theories for the reconstruction of

society, into the very blood and bone of his characters and into the

structure of his plots. So it is with Shaw, with Synge, with Hauptmann,

with Brieux. Even if their plays are written in prose, these men

are still "makers," and the prose play may be as highly subjective in

mood, as definitely individual in phrasing, as full of atmosphere, as if

it were composed in verse.

But the lyric possibilities of the drama are more easily realized if we

turn from the prose play to the play in verse, and particularly to those

Elizabethan dramas which are not only poetical in essence, but which

utilize actual songs for their dramatic value. No less than thirty-six of

Shakspere's plays contain stage-directions for music, and his marvelous

command of song-words is universally recognized. The English stage had

made use of songs, in fact, ever since the liturgical drama of the Middle

Ages. But Shakspere's unrivalled knowledge of _stage-craft_, as well as

his own instinct for harmonizing lyrical with theatrical effects, enabled

him to surpass all of his contemporaries in the art of using songs to

bring actors on and off the stage, to anticipate following action, to

characterize personages, to heighten climaxes, and to express motions

beyond the reach of spoken words.

[Footnote: These points are fully discussed in J. Robert Moore's Harvard

dissertation (unpublished) on The Songs in the English Drama.]

The popularity of such song-forms as the "madrigal," which was sung

without musical accompaniment, made it easy for the public stage to cater

to the prevalent taste. The "children of the Chapel" or "of Paul's," who

served as actors in the early Elizabethan dramas, were trained choristers,

and songs were a part of their stock in trade. Songs for sheer

entertainment, common enough upon the stage when Shakspere began to write,

turned in his hands into exquisite instruments of character revelation and

of dramatic passion, until they became, on the lips of an Ophelia or a

Desdemona, the most touching and poignant moments of the drama. "Music

within" is a frequent stage direction in the later Elizabethan plays, and

if one remembers the dramatic effectiveness of the Easter music,

off-stage, in Goethe's _Faust_, or the horn in _Hernani_, one can

understand how Wagner came to believe that a blending of music with poetry

and action, as exhibited in his "music-dramas," was demanded by the ideal

requirements of dramatic art. Wagner's theory and practice need not be

rehearsed here. It is sufficient for our purpose to recall the

indisputable fact that in some of the greatest plays ever written, lyric

forms have contributed richly and directly to the total dramatic effect.

_3. The Dramatic Monologue_

There is still another _genre_ of poetry, however, where the

inter-relations of drama, of narrative, and of lyric mood are peculiarly

interesting. It is the dramatic monologue. The range of expressiveness

allowed by this type of poetry was adequately shown by Browning and

Tennyson, and recent poets like Edwin Arlington Robinson, Robert Frost

and Amy Lowell have employed it with consummate skill. The dramatic

monologue is a dynamic revelation of a soul in action, not a mere static

bit of character study. It chooses some representative and specific

occasion,--let us say a man's death-bed view of his career, as in "The

Bishop orders his Tomb" or the first "Northern Farmer." It is something

more than a soliloquy overheard. There is a listener, who, though without

a speaking part, plays a very real role in the dialogue. For the dramatic

monologue is in essence a dialogue of which we hear only the chief

speaker's part, as in "My Last Duchess," or in E. A. Robinson's "Ben

Jonson Entertains a Man from Stratford." It is as if we were watching and

listening to a man telephoning. Though we see and hear but one person, we

are aware that the talk is shaped to a certain extent by the personality

at the other end of the line. In Tennyson's "Rizpah," for example, the

characteristics of the well-meaning, Bible-quoting parish visitor

determine some of the finest lines in the old mother's response. In

Browning's "Andrea del Sarto" the painter's wife, Lucrezia, says never a

word, but she has a more intense physical presence in that poem than many

of the _dramatis personae_ of famous plays. Tennyson's "Ulysses" and "Sir

Galahad" and "The Voyage of Maeldune" are splendid soliloquies and nothing

more. The first "Locksley Hall" is likewise a soliloquy, but in the second

"Locksley Hall" and "To-Morrow," where scraps of talk from the unseen

interlocutor are caught up and repeated by the speaker in passionate

rebuttal, we have true drama of the "confrontation" type. We see a whole

soul in action.

Now this intense, dynamic fashion of revealing character through narrative

talk--and it is commonly a whole life-story which is condensed within the

few lines of a dramatic monologue--touches lyricism at two points. The

first is the fact that many dramatic monologues use distinctively lyric

measures. The six-stress anapestic line which Tennyson preferred for his

later dramatic monologues like "Rizpah" is really a ballad measure, and is

seen as such to its best advantage in "The Revenge." But in his monologues

of the pure soliloquy type, like "St. Agnes" and "Sir Galahad," the metre

is brilliantly lyrical, and the lyric associations of the verse are

carried over into the mood of the poem. And the other fact to be

remembered is that the poignant self-analysis and self-betrayal of the

dramatic monologue, its "egoism" and its ultimate and appalling

sincerities, are a part of the very nature of the lyric impulse. These

revealers of their souls may use the speaking, rather than the singing

voice, but their tones have the deep, rich lyric intimacy.

4. _Lyric and Narrative_

In narrative poetry, no less than in drama, we must note the intrusion of

the lyric mood, as well as the influence of lyric forms. Theoretically,

narrative or "epic" poetry is based upon an objective experience.

Something has happened, and the poet tells us about it. He has heard or

read, or possibly taken part in, an event, and the event, rather than the

poet's thought or feeling about it, is the core of the poem. But as soon

as he begins to tell his tale, we find that he is apt to "set it out" with

vivid description. He is obliged to paint a picture as well as to spin a

yarn, and not even Homer and Virgil--"objective" as they are supposed to

be---can draw a picture without betraying something of their attitude and

feeling towards their material. Like the messenger in Greek drama,

their voices are shaken by what they have seen or heard. In the popular

epic like the Nibelungen story, there is more objectivity than in the epic

of art like _Jerusalem Delivered_ or _Paradise Lost_. We do not know who

put together in their present form such traditional tales as the _Lay of

the Nibelungs_ and _Beowulf_, and the personal element in the narrative is

only obscurely felt, whereas _Jerusalem Delivered_ is a constant

revelation of Tasso, and the personality of Milton colors every line in

_Paradise Lost_. When Matthew Arnold tells us that Homer is rapid, plain,

simple and noble, he is depicting the characteristics of a poet as well as

the impression made by the _Iliad_ and the _Odyssey_. Those general traits

of epic poetry which have been discussed ever since the Renaissance, like

"breadth," and "unity" and the sustained "grand" style, turn ultimately

upon the natural qualities of great story-tellers. They are not mere

rhetorical abstractions.

The narrative poet sees man as accomplishing a deed, as a factor in an

event. His primary business is to report action, not to philosophize or to

dissect character or to paint landscape. Yet so sensitive is he to the

environing circumstances of action, and so bent upon displaying the

varieties of human motive and conduct, that he cannot help reflecting in

his verse his own mental attitude toward the situations which he depicts.

He may surround these situations, as we have seen, with all the beauties

and pomps and terrors of the visible world. In relating "God's ways to

man" he instinctively justifies or condemns. He cannot even tell a story

exactly as it was told to him: he must alter it, be it ever so slightly,

to make it fit his general conceptions of human nature and human fate. He

gives credence to one witness and not to another. His imagination plays

around the noble and base elements in his story until their original

proportions are altered to suit his mind and purpose. Study the Tristram

story, as told by Gottfried of Strassburg, by Malory, Tennyson,

Arnold, Swinburne and Wagner, and you will see how each teller betrays his

own personality through these instinctive processes of transformation of

his material. It is like the Roman murder story told so many times over in

Browning's _Ring and the Book_: the main facts are conceded by each

witness, and yet the inferences from the facts range from Heaven to Hell.

Browning is of course an extreme instance of this irruption of the poet's

personality upon the stuff of his story. He cannot help lyricising and

dramatizing his narrative material, any more than he can help making all

his characters talk "Browningese." But Byron's tales in verse show the

same subjective tendency. He was so little of a dramatist that all of his

heroes, like Poe's, are images of himself. No matter what the raw material

of his narrative poems may be, they become uniformly "Byronic" as he

writes them down. And all this is "lyricism," however disguised. William

Morris, almost alone among modern English poets, seemed to stand gravely

aloof from the tales he told, as his master Chaucer stood smilingly aloof.

Yet the "tone" of Chaucer is perceived somehow upon every page, in spite

of his objectivity.

The whole history of medieval verse Romances, indeed, illustrates this

lyrical tendency to rehandle inherited material. Tales of love, of

enchantment, of adventure, could not be held down to prosaic fact. Whether

they dealt with "matter of France," or "matter of Brittany," whether a

brief "lai" or a complicated cycle of stories like those about Charlemagne

or King Arthur, whether a merry "fabliau" or a beast-tale like "Reynard

the Fox," all the Romances allow to the author a margin of mystery, an

opportunity to weave his own web of brightly colored fancies. A specific

event or legend was there, of course, as a nucleus for the story, but the

sense of wonder, of strangeness in things, of individual delight in

brocading new patterns upon old material, dominated over the sense of

fact. "Time," said Shelley, "which destroys the beauty and the use of the

story of particular facts, stripped of the poetry which should invest

them, augments that of poetry, and forever develops new and wonderful

applications of the eternal truth which it contains.... A story of

particular facts is as a mirror which obscures and distorts that which

should be beautiful: poetry is a mirror which makes beautiful that which

is distorted."

And in modern narrative verse, surely, the line between "epic" quality and

"lyric" quality is difficult to draw. Choose almost at random a half-dozen

story-telling poems from the _Oxford Book of English Verse_, say "The

Ancient Mariner," "The Burial of Sir John Moore," "La Belle Dame sans

Merci," "Porphyria's Lover," "The Forsaken Merman," "He Fell among

Thieves." Each of these poems narrates an event, but what purely lyric

quality is there which cannot be found in "La Belle Dame sans Merci" and

"The Ancient Mariner"? And does not each of the other poems release and

excite the lyric mood?

We must admit, furthermore, that narrative measures and lyric measures are

frequently identical, and help to carry over into a story a singing

quality. Ballad measures are an obvious example. Walter Scott's facile

couplets were equally effective for story and for song. Many minor species

of narrative poetry, like verse satire and allegory, are often composed in

traditional lyric patterns. Even blank verse, admirably suited as it is

for story-telling purposes, yields in its varieties of cadence many a bar

of music long associated with lyric emotion. Certainly the blank verse of

Wordsworth's "Michael" is far different in its musical values from the

blank verse, say, of Tennyson's _Princess_--perhaps truly as different as

the metre of _Sigurd the Volsung_ is from that of _The Rape of the Lock_.

The perfect matching of metrical form to the nature of the narrative

material, whether that material be traditional or firsthand, simple or

complex, rude or delicate, demands the finest artistic instinct. Yet it

appears certain that many narrative measures affect us fully as

much through their intimate association with the moods of song as through

their specific adaptiveness to the purposes of narrative.

_5. The Ballad_

The supreme illustration of this blending of story and song is the ballad.

The word "ballad," like "ode" and "sonnet," is very ancient and has been

used in various senses. We think of it to-day as a song that tells a

story, usually of popular origin. Derived etymologically from _ballare_,

to dance, it means first of all, a "dance-song," and is the same word as

"ballet." Solomon's "Song of Songs" is called in the Bishops' Bible of

1568 "The Ballet of Ballets of King Solomon." But in Chaucer's time a

"ballad" meant primarily a French form of lyric verse,--not a narrative

lyric specifically. In the Elizabethan period the word was used loosely

for "song." Only after the revival of interest in English and Scottish

popular ballads in the eighteenth century has the word come gradually to

imply a special type of story-telling song, with no traces of individual

authorship, and handed down by oral tradition. Scholars differ as to

the precise part taken by the singing, dancing crowd in the composition

and perpetuation of these traditional ballads. Professor Child,

the greatest authority upon English and Scottish balladry, and

Professors Gummere, Kittredge and W. M. Hart have emphasized the

element of "communal" composition, and illustrated it by many types of

song-improvisation among savage races, by sailors' "chanties," and negro

"work-songs." It is easy to understand how a singing, dancing crowd

carries a refrain, and improvises, through some quick-tongued individual,

a new phrase, line or stanza of immediate popular effect; and it is also

easy to perceive, by a study of extant versions of various ballads, such

as Child printed in glorious abundance, to see how phrases, lines and

stanzas get altered as they are passed from lip to lip of unlettered

people during the course of centuries. But the actual historical

relationship of communal dance-songs to such narrative lyrics as were

collected by Bishop Percy, Ritson and Child is still under debate.

[Footnote: See Louise Pound, "The Ballad and the Dance," _Pub. Mod. Lang.

Ass._, vol. 34, No. 3 (September, 1919), and Andrew Lang's article on

"Ballads" in Chambers' _Cyclopedia of Eng. Lit._, ed. of 1902.]

"All poetry," said Professor Gummere in reply to a critic of his theory of

communal composition of ballads, "springs from the same poetic impulse,

and is due to individuals; but the conditions under which it is made,

whether originally composed in a singing, dancing throng and submitted to

oral tradition, or set down on paper by the solitary and deliberate poet,

have given birth to that distinction of 'popular' and 'artistic,' or

whatever the terms may be, which has obtained in some form with nearly all

writers on poetry since Aristotle." Avoiding questions that are still in

controversy, let us look at some of the indubitable characteristics of the

"popular" ballads as they are shown in Child's collection.

[Footnote: Now reprinted in a single volume of the "Cambridge Poets"

(Houghton Mifflin Company), edited with an introduction by G. L.

Kittredge.]

They are impersonal. There is no trace whatever of individual authorship.

"This song was made by Billy Gashade," asserts the author of the immensely

popular American ballad of "Jesse James." But we do not know what "Billy

Gashade" it was who first made rhymes about Robin Hood or Johnny

Armstrong, or just how much help he had from the crowd in composing them.

In any case, the method of such ballads is purely objective. They do not

moralize or sentimentalize. There is little description, aside from the

use of set, conventional phrases. They do not "motivate" the story

carefully, or move logically from event to event. Rather do they "flash

the story at you" by fragments, and then leave you in the dark. They

leap over apparently essential points of exposition and plot structure;

they omit to assign dialogue to a specific person, leaving you to guess

who is talking. Over certain bits of action or situation they linger as if

they hated to leave that part of the story. They make shameless use of

"commonplaces," that is, stock phrases, lines or stanzas which are

conveniently held by the memory and which may appear in dozens of

different ballads. They are not afraid of repetition,--indeed the theory

of choral collaboration implies a constant use of repetition and refrain,

as in a sailor's "chanty." One of their chief ways of building a situation

or advancing a narrative is through "incremental repetition," as Gummere

termed it, i.e. the successive additions of some new bits of fact as the

bits already familiar are repeated.

"'Christine, Christine, tread a measure for me!

A silken sark I will give to thee.'

"'A silken sark I can get me here,

But I'll not dance with the Prince this year.'

"'Christine, Christine, tread a measure for me,

Silver-clasped shoes I will give to thee!'

"'Silver-clasped shoes,'" etc.

American cowboy ballads show the same device:

"I started up the trail October twenty-third,

I started up the trail _with the 2-U herd_."

Strikingly as the ballads differ from consciously "artistic" narrative in

their broken movement and allusive method, the contrast is even more

different if we consider the naive quality of their refrains. Sometimes

the refrain is only a sort of musical accompaniment:

"There was an old farmer in Sussex did dwell,

(_Chorus of Whistlers_)

There was an old farmer in Sussex did dwell

And he had a bad wife, as many knew well.

(_Chorus of Whistlers_)"

Or,

"The auld Deil cam to the man at the pleugh,

_Rumchy ae de aidie_."

Sometimes the words of the choral refrain have a vaguely suggestive

meaning:

"There were three ladies lived in a bower,

_Eh vow bonnie_

And they went out to pull a flower,

_On the bonnie banks of Fordie_."

Sometimes the place-name, illustrated in the last line quoted, is

definite:

"There was twa sisters in a bower,

_Edinburgh, Edinburgh_,

There was twa sisters in a bower,

_Stirling for aye_

There was twa sisters in a bower,

There came a knight to be their wooer,

_Bonny Saint Johnston stands upon Tay_."

But often it is sheer faëry-land magic:

"He's ta'en three locks o' her yellow hair,

_Binnorie, O Binnorie_!

And wi' them strung his harp sae rare

_By the bonnie milldams o' Binnorie_."

(_Oxford_, No.376.)

It is through the choral refrains, in fact, that the student of lyric

poetry is chiefly fascinated as he reads the ballads. Students of epic

and drama find them peculiarly suggestive in their handling of narrative

and dramatic material, while to students of folklore and of primitive

society they are inexhaustible treasures. The mingling of dance-motives

and song-motives with the pure story-element may long remain obscure, but

the popular ballad reinforces, perhaps more persuasively than any type of

poetry, the conviction that the lyrical impulse is universal and

inevitable. As Andrew Lang, scholar and lover of balladry, wrote

long ago: "Ballads sprang from the very heart of the people and flit from

age to age, from lip to lip of shepherds, peasants, nurses, of all the

class that continues nearest to the state of natural man. The whole soul

of the peasant class breathes in their burdens, as the great sea resounds

in the shells cast up on the shores. Ballads are a voice from secret

places, from silent peoples and old times long dead; and as such they stir

us in a strangely intimate fashion to which artistic verse can never

attain."

[Footnote: _Encyclopaedia Brittanica_, article "Ballads."]

_6. The Ode_

If the ballad is thus an example of "popular" lyricism, with a narrative

intention, an example of "artistic" lyricism is found in the Ode. Here

there is no question of communal origins or of communal influence upon

structure. The ode is a product of a single artist, working not naively,

but consciously, and employing a highly developed technique. Derived from

the Greek verb meaning "to sing," the word "ode" has not changed its

meaning since the days of Pindar, except that, as in the case of the word

"lyric" itself, we have gradually come to grow unmindful of the original

musical accompaniment of the song. Edmund Gosse, in his collection of

_English Odes_, defines the ode as "any strain of enthusiastic and exalted

lyrical verse directed to a fixed purpose and dealing progressively with

one dignified theme." Spenser's "Epithalamium" or marriage ode,

Wordsworth's "Ode on the Intimations of Immortality," Tennyson's elegiac

and encomiastic "Ode on the Death of the Duke of Wellington," Lowell's

"Harvard Commemoration Ode," are among the most familiar examples of the

general type.

English poetry has constantly employed, however, both of the two metrical

species of odes recognized by the ancients. The first, made up of uniform

stanzas, was called "Aeolian" or "Horatian,"--since Horace imitated the

simple, regular strophes of his Greek models. The other species of ode,

the "Dorian," is more complex, and is associated with the triumphal odes

of Pindar. It utilizes groups of voices, and its divisions into so-called

"strophe," "antistrophe" and "epode" (sometimes called fancifully "wave,"

"answering wave" and "echo") were determined by the movements of the

groups of singers upon the Greek stage, the "singers moving to one side

during the strophe, retracing their steps during the antistrophe (which

was for that reason metrically identical with the strophe), and standing

still during the epode."

[Footnote: See Bronson's edition of the poems of Collins. Athenaeum

Press.]

It must be observed, however, that the English odes written in strictly

uniform stanzas differ greatly in the simplicity of the stanzaic pattern.

Andrew Marvell's "Horatian Ode upon Cromwell's Return from Ireland,"

Collins's "Ode to Evening," Shelley's "To a Skylark," and Wordsworth's

"Ode to Duty" are all in very simple stanza forms. But Collins's "Ode on

the Superstitions of the Highlands," Shelley's "Ode to Liberty" and

Coleridge's "Ode to France" follow very complicated patterns, though all

the stanzas are alike. The English "Horatian" ode, then, while exhibiting

the greatest differences in complexity of stanzaic forms, is

"homostrophic."

To understand the "Pindaric" English ode, we must remember that a few

scholars, like Ben Jonson, Congreve and Gray, took peculiar pleasure in

reproducing the general effect of the Greek strophic arrangement of

"turn," "counterturn" and "pause." Ben Jonson's "Ode to Sir Lucius Cary

and Sir H. Morison" (_Oxford_, No. 194) has been thought to be the first

strictly Pindaric ode in English, and Gray's "Bard" and "Progress of

Poesy" (_Oxford_, Nos. 454, 455) are still more familiar examples of this

type. But the great popularity of the so-called "Pindaric" ode in English

in the seventeenth century was due to Cowley, and to one of those periodic

loyalties to lawlessness which are characteristic of the English. For

Cowley, failing to perceive that Pindar's apparent lawlessness was

due to the corruption of the Greek text and to the modern ignorance of the

rules of Greek choral music, made his English "Pindaric" odes an outlet

for rebellion against all stanzaic law. The finer the poetic frenzy, the

freer the lyric pattern! But, alas, rhetoric soon triumphed over

imagination, and in the absence of metrical restraint the ode grew

declamatory, bombastic, and lowest stage of all, "official," the last

refuge of laureates who felt obliged to produce something sonorous in

honor of a royal birthday or wedding. This official ode persisted long

after the pseudo-Pindaric flag was lowered and Cowley had become

neglected.

With the revival of Romantic imagination, however, came a new interest in

the "irregular" ode, whose strophic arrangement ebbs and flows without

apparent restraint, subject only to what Watts-Dunton termed "emotional

law." Wordsworth's "Ode on the Intimations of Immortality" moves in

obedience to its own rhythmic impulses only, like Coleridge's "Kubla Khan"

and Emerson's "Bacchus." Metrical variety can nowhere be shown more freely

and gloriously than in the irregular ode: there may be any number of lines

in each strophe, and often the strophe itself becomes dissolved into

something corresponding to the "movement" of a symphony. Masterpieces like

William Vaughn Moody's "Ode in Time of Hesitation" and Francis Thompson's

"Hound of Heaven" reveal of course a firm intellectual grasp upon the

underlying theme of the ode and upon the logical processes of its

development. But although we may follow with keen intellectual

delight these large, free handlings of a lyrical theme, there are few

readers of poetry whose susceptibility to complicated combinations of

rhyme-sound allows them to perceive the full verbal beauty of the great

irregular odes. Even in such regular strophes as those of Keats's "Grecian

Urn," who remembers that the rhyme scheme of the first stanza is unlike

that of the following stanzas? Or that the second stanza of the "Ode to a

Nightingale" runs on four sounds instead of five? Let the reader test his

ear by reading aloud the intricate sound-patterns employed in such elegies

as Arnold's "Scholar Gypsy" (_Oxford_, No. 751) or Swinburne's "Ave atque

Vale" (_Oxford_, No. 810), and then let him go back to "Lycidas"

(_Oxford_, No. 317), the final test of one's responsiveness to the

blending of the intellectual and the sensuous elements in poetic beauty.

If he is honest with himself, he will probably confess that neither his

ear nor his mind can keep full pace with the swift and subtle demands made

upon both by the masters of sustained lyric energy. But he will also

become freshly aware that the ode is a supreme example of that union of

excitement with a sense of order, of liberty with law, which gives Verse

its immortality.

_7. The Sonnet_

The sonnet, likewise, is a lyric form which illustrates the delicate

balance between freedom and restraint. Let us look first at its structure,

and then at its capacity for expressing thought and feeling.

Both name and structure are Italian in origin, "sonetto" being the

diminutive of "suono," sound. Dante and Petrarch knew it as a special

lyric form intended for musical accompaniment. It must have fourteen

lines, neither more nor less, with five beats or "stresses" to the line.

Each line must end with a rhyme. In the arrangement of the rhymes the

sonnet is made up of two parts, or rhyme-systems: the first eight lines

forming the "octave," and the last six the "sestet." The octave is made up

of two quatrains and the sestet of two tercets. There is a main pause in

passing from the octave to the sestet, and frequently there are minor

pauses in passing from the first quatrain to the second, and from the

first tercet to the last.

Almost all of Petrarch's sonnets follow this rhyme-scheme: for the octave,

_a b b a a b b a_; for the sestet, either _c d e c d e_ or _c d c d c d_.

This strict "Petrarchan" form has endured for six centuries. It has been

adopted by poets of every race and language, and it is used to-day as

widely or more widely than ever. While individual poets have constantly

experimented with different rhyme-schemes, particularly in the sestet, the

only really notable invention of a new sonnet form was made by the

Elizabethans. Puttenham's _Arte of English Poesie_ (1589) declares that

"Sir Thomas Wyatt the elder and Henry Earl of Surrey, having travelled

into Italy and there tasted the sweet and stately measures and style of

the Italian poesie,... greatly polished our rude and homely manner of

vulgar poesie.... Their conceits were lofty, their style stately, their

conveyance cleanly, their terms proper, their metre sweet and

well-proportioned, in all imitating very naturally and studiously their

Master Francis Petrarch."

This is charming, but as a matter of fact both Wyatt and Surrey, with

natural English independence, broke away from the strict Petrarchan rhyme

form. Wyatt liked a final couplet, and Surrey used a rhyme-scheme which

was later adopted by Shakspere and is known to-day as the "Shaksperean"

form of sonnet: namely, three quatrains made up of alternate rhymes--a

separate rhyme-scheme for each quatrain--and a closing couplet. The rhymes

consequently run thus: _a b a b c d c d e f e f g g_. To the Petrarchan

purist this is clearly no sonnet at all, in spite of its fourteen

five-beat, rhyming lines. For the distinction between octave and sestet

has disappeared, there is a threefold division of the first twelve lines,

and the final couplet gives an epigrammatic summary or "point" which

Petrarch took pains to avoid.

The difference will be still more clearly manifest if we turn from a

comparison of rhyme-structure to the ordering of the thought in the

Petrarchan sonnet. Mark Pattison, a stout "Petrarchan," lays down these

rules in the Preface to his edition of Milton's Sonnets:

[Footnote: D. Appleton & Co., New York, 1883.]

"a. A sonnet, like every other work of art, must have its unity. It must

be the expression of one, and only one, thought or feeling.

"b. This thought or mood should be led up to, and opened in the early

lines of the sonnet; strictly, in the first quatrain; in the second

quatrain the hearer should be placed in full possession of it.

"c. After the second quatrain there should be a pause, not full, nor

producing the effect of a break, as of one who had finished what he had

got to say, and not preparing a transition to a new subject, but as of

one who is turning over what has been said in the mind to enforce it

further.

"d. The opening of the second system, strictly the first tercet, should

turn back upon the thought or sentiment, take it up and carry it forward

to the conclusion.

"e. The conclusion should be a resultant, summing the total of the

suggestion in the preceding lines, as a lakelet in the hills gathers

into a still pool the running waters contributed by its narrow area of

gradients.

"f. While the conclusion should leave a sense of finish and

completeness, it is necessary to avoid anything like epigrammatic point.

By this the sonnet is distinguished from the epigram. In the epigram the

conclusion is everything; all that goes before it is only there for the

sake of the surprise of the end, or _dénouement_, as in a logical

syllogism the premisses are nothing but as they necessitate the

conclusion. In the sonnet the emphasis is nearly, but not quite, equally

distributed, there being a slight swell, or rise, about its middle. The

sonnet must not advance by progressive climax, or end abruptly; it

should subside, and leave off quietly."

Miss Lockwood, in the Introduction to her admirable collection of English

sonnets,

[Footnote: _Sonnets, English and American_, selected by Laura E. Lockwood.

Houghton Mifflin Company, 1916.]

makes a still briefer summary of the thought-scheme of the regular Italian

sonnet: it "should have a clear and unified theme, stated in the first

quatrain, developed or proved in the second, confirmed or regarded from a

new point of view in the first tercet, and concluded in the second tercet.

It had thus four parts, divided unevenly into two separate systems, eight

lines being devoted to placing the thought before the mind, and six to

deducing the conclusion from that thought."

A surprisingly large number of sonnets are built upon simple formulas like

"As"--for the octave--and "So"--for the sestet--(see Andrew Lang's "The

Odyssey," _Oxford_, No. 841); or "When" and "Then" (see Keats's "When I

have fears that I may cease to be," _Oxford_, No. 635). A situation plus a

thought gives a mood; or a mood plus an event gives a mental resolve, etc.

The possible combinations are infinite, but the law of logical relation

between octave and sestet, premise and conclusion, is immutable.

Let the reader now test these laws of sonnet form and thought by reading

aloud one of the most familiarly known of all English sonnets--Keats's "On

First Looking into Chapman's Homer":

"Much have I travell'd in the realms of gold,

And many goodly states and kingdoms seen;

Round many western islands have I been

Which bards in fealty to Apollo hold.

Oft of one wide expanse had I been told

That deep-brow'd Homer ruled as his demesne;

Yet did I never breathe its pure serene

Till I heard Chapman speak out loud and bold:

Then felt I like some watcher of the skies

When a new planet swims into his ken;

Or like stout Cortez when with eagle eyes

He stared at the Pacific--and all his men

Look'd at each other with a wild surmise--

Silent, upon a peak in Darien."

Read next another strictly Petrarchan sonnet, where the thought divisions

of quatrains and tercets are marked with exceptional clearness, Eugene

Lee-Hamilton's disillusioned "Sea-Shell Murmurs":

"The hollow sea-shell that for years hath stood

On dusty shelves, when held against the ear

Proclaims its stormy parent; and we hear

The faint far murmur of the breaking flood.

"We hear the sea. The sea? It is the blood

In our own veins, impetuous and near,

And pulses keeping pace with hope and fear

And with our feelings' every shifting mood.

"Lo, in my heart I hear, as in a shell,

The murmur of a world beyond the grave,

Distinct, distinct, though faint and far it be.

"Thou fool; this echo is a cheat as well,--

The hum of earthly instincts; and we crave

A world unreal as the shell-heard sea."

And now read aloud one of the best-known of Shakspere's sonnets, where he

follows his favorite device of a threefold statement of his central

thought, using a different image in each quatrain, and closing with a

personal application of the idea:

"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,

Consumed with that which it was nourish'd by.

This thou perceivest, which makes thy love more strong,

To love that well which thou must leave ere long."

Where there is beauty such as this, it is an impertinence to insist that

Shakspere has not conformed to the special type of beauty represented in

the Petrarchan sonnet. He chose not to conform. He won with other tactics.

If the reader will analyse the form and thought of the eighty sonnets in

the _Oxford Book_, or the two hundred collected by Miss Lockwood, he will

feel the charm of occasional irregularity in the handling of both the

Petrarchan and the Shaksperean sonnet. But he is more likely, I think, to

become increasingly aware that whatever restraints are involved in

adherence to typical forms are fully compensated by the rich verbal beauty

demanded by the traditional arrangement of rhymes.

For the sonnet, an intricately wrought model of the reflective lyric,

requires a peculiarly intimate union of thinking and singing. It may be,

as it often was in the Elizabethan period, too full of thought to allow

free-winged song, and it may also be too full of uncontrolled, unbalanced

emotion to preserve fit unity of thought. Conversely, there may not be

enough thought and emotion to fill the fourteen lines: the idea not being

of "sonnet size." The difficult question as to whether there is such a

thing as an "average-sized" thought and lyrical reflection upon it has

been touched upon in an earlier chapter. The limit of a sentence, says

Mark Pattison, "is given by the average capacity of human apprehension....

The limit of a sonnet is imposed by the average duration of an

emotional mood.... May we go so far as to say that fourteen lines is the

average number which a thought requires for its adequate embodiment before

attention must collapse?"

The proper distribution of thought and emotion, that is, the balance of

the different parts of a sonnet, is also a very delicate affair. It is

like trimming a sailboat. Wordsworth defended Milton's frequent practice

of letting the thought of the octave overflow somewhat into the sestet,

believing it "to aid in giving that pervading sense of intense unity in

which the excellence of the sonnet has always seemed to me mainly to

consist." Most lovers of the sonnet would differ here with these masters

of the art. Whether the weight of thought and feeling can properly be

shifted to a final couplet is another debatable question, and critics will

always differ as to the artistic value of the "big" line or "big" word

which marks the culmination of emotion in many a sonnet. The strange or

violent or sonorous word, however splendid in itself, may not fit the

curve of the sonnet in which it appears: it may be like a big red apple

crowded into the toe of a Christmas stocking.

Nor must the sonnet lean towards either obscurity--the vice of Elizabethan

sonnets, or obviousness--the vice of Wordsworth's sonnets after 1820. The

obscure sonnet, while it may tempt the reader's intellectual ingenuity,

affords no basis for his emotion, and the obvious sonnet provides no

stimulus for his thought. Conventionality of subject and treatment,

like the endless imitation of Italian and French sonnet-motives and

sonnet-sequences, sins against the law of lyric sincerity. In no lyric

form does mechanism so easily obtrude itself. A sonnet is either, like

Marlowe's raptures, "all air and fire," or else it is a wooden toy.

CHAPTER IX

RACE, EPOCH AND INDIVIDUAL

"Unless there is a concurrence between the contemporary idioms and

rhythms of a period, with the individual idiom of the lyrist, half

the expressional force of his ideas will be lost."

ERNEST RHYS, Foreword to _Lyric Poetry_

We have been considering the typical qualities and forms of lyric poetry.

Let us now attempt a rapid survey of some of the conditions which have

given the lyric, in certain races and periods and in the hands of certain

individuals, its peculiar power.

_1. Questions that are involved_

A whole generation of so-called "scientific" criticism has come and gone

since Taine's brilliant experiments with his formula of "race, period and

environment" as applied to literature. Taine's _English Literature_

remains a monument to the suggestiveness and to the dangers of his method.

Some of his countrymen, notably Brunetière in the _Evolution de la Poésie

Lyrique en France au XIX Siècle_, and Legouis in the _Défense de la Poésie

Française_, have discussed more cautiously and delicately than Taine

himself the racial and historic conditions affecting lyric poetry in

various periods.

The tendency at present, among critics of poetry, is to distrust formulas

and to keep closely to ascertainable facts, and this tendency is surely

more scientific than the most captivating theorizing. For one thing, while

recognizing, as the World War has freshly compelled us to recognize, the

actuality of racial differences, we have grown sceptical of the old

endeavors to classify races in simple terms, as Madame de Staël attempted

to do, for instance, in her famous book on Germany. We endeavor to

distinguish, more accurately than of old, between ethnic, linguistic and

political divisions of men. We try to look behind the name at the thing

itself: we remember that "Spanish" architecture is Arabian, and a good

deal of "Gothic" is Northern French. We confess that we are only at the

beginning of a true science of ethnology. "It is only in their degree of

physical and mental evolution that the races of men are different,"

says Professor W. Z. Ripley, author of _Races in Europe_. The late

Professor Josiah Royce admitted: "I am baffled to discover just what the

results of science are regarding the true psychological and moral meaning

of race differences.... All men in prehistoric times are surprisingly

alike in their minds, their morals and their arts.... We do not

scientifically know what the true racial varieties of mental type really

are."

[Footnote: See Royce's _Race-Questions_. New York, 1908.]

I have often thought of these utterances of my colleagues, as I have

attempted to teach something about lyric poetry in Harvard classrooms

where Chinese, Japanese, Jewish, Irish, French, German, Negro, Russian,

Italian and Armenian students appear in bewildering and stimulating

confusion. Precisely what is their racial reaction to a lyric of Sappho?

To an Anglo-Saxon war-song of the tenth century? To a Scotch ballad? To

one of Shakspere's songs? Some specific racial reaction there must be,

one imagines, but such capacity for self-expression as the student

commands is rarely capable of giving more than a hint of it.

And what real response is there, among the majority of contemporary

lovers of poetry, to the delicate shades of feeling which color the

verse of specific periods in the various national literatures? We all use

catch-words, and I shall use them myself later in this chapter, in the

attempt to indicate the changes in lyric atmosphere as we pass, for

instance, from the Elizabethan to the Jacobean age, or from the "Augustan"

to the Romantic epoch in English literature. Is this sensitiveness to the

temper of various historic periods merely the possession of a few hundred

professional scholars, who have trained themselves, like Walter Pater, to

live in some well-chosen moment of the past and to find in their

hyper-sensitized responsiveness to its voices a sort of consolation prize

for their isolation from the present? Race-mindedness is common, no doubt,

but difficult to express in words: historic-mindedness, though more

capable of expression, is necessarily confined to a few. Is the response

to the poetry of past epochs, then, chiefly a response of the individual

reader to an individual poet, and do we cross the frontiers of race and

language and historic periods with the main purpose of finding a man after

our own heart? Or is the secret of our pleasure in the poetry of alien

races and far-off times simply this: that nothing human is really alien,

and that poetry through its generalizing, universalizing power, reveals to

us the essential oneness of mankind?

_2. Graphic Arts and the Lyric_

A specific illustration may suggest an answer. An American collector of

Japanese prints recognizes in these specimens of Oriental craftsmanship

that mastery of line and composition which are a part of the universal

language of the graphic arts. Any human being, in fact, who has developed

a sensitiveness to artistic beauty will receive a measure of delight from

the work of Japanese masters. A few strokes of the brush upon silk, a bit

of lacquer work, the decoration of a sword-hilt, are enough to set his eye

dancing. But the expert collector soon passes beyond this general

enthusiasm into a quite particular interest in the handicraft of special

artists,--a Motonobu, let us say, or a Sesshiu. The collector finds his

pleasure in their individual handling of artistic problems, their unique

faculties of eye and hand. He responds, in a word, both to the

cosmopolitan language employed by every practitioner of the fine arts, and

to the local idiom, the personal accent, of, let us say, a certain

Japanese draughtsman of the eighteenth century.

And now take, by way of confirmation and also of contrast, the attitude of

an American lover of poetry toward those specimens of Japanese and Chinese

lyrics which have recently been presented to us in English translations.

The American's ignorance of the riental languages cuts him off from any

appreciation of the individual handling of diction and metre. A Lafcadio

Hearn may write delightfully about that special seventeen syllable form of

Japanese verse known as the _hokku_. Here is a _hokku_ by Basho, one of

the most skilled composers in that form. Hearn prints it with the

translation,

[Footnote: _Kwaidan_, p. 188. Houghton Mifflin Company, 1904.]

and explains that the verses are intended to suggest the joyous feeling of

spring-time:

"Oki, oki yo!

Waga tomo ni sen

Néru--kocho!"

(Wake up! Wake up!--I will make thee my comrade, thou sleeping butterfly.)

An Occidental reader may recognize, through the translation, the charm of

the poetic image, and he may be interested in a technical lyric form

hitherto new to him, but beyond this, in his ignorance of Japanese, he

cannot go. Here is a lyric by Wang Ch'ang-Ling, a Chinese poet of the

eighth century:

_Tears in the Spring_

[Footnote: These Chinese lyrics are quoted from _The Lute of Jade_,

London, 1909. The translations are by L. Cranmer-Byng.]

"Clad in blue silk and bright embroidery

At the first call of Spring the fair young bride,

On whom as yet Sorrow has laid no scar,

Climbs the Kingfisher's Tower. Suddenly

She sees the bloom of willows far and wide,

And grieves for him she lent to fame and war."

And here is another spring lyric by Po Chü-I (A.D. 772-846), as clear and

simple as anything in the Greek Anthology:

_The Grass_

[Footnote: These Chinese lyrics are quoted from _The Lute of Jade_,

London, 1909. The translations are by L. Cranmer-Byng.]

"How beautiful and fresh the grass returns!

When golden days decline, the meadow burns;

Yet autumn suns no hidden root have slain,

The spring winds blow, and there is grass again.

"Green rioting on olden ways it falls:

The blue sky storms the ruined city walls;

Yet since Wang Sun departed long ago,

When the grass blooms both joy and fear I know."

The Western reader, although wholly at the mercy of the translator,

recognizes the pathos and beauty of the scene and thought expressed by the

Chinese poet. But all that is specifically Chinese in lyric form is lost

to him.

I have purposely chosen these Oriental types of lyric because they

represent so clearly the difference between the universal language of the

graphic arts and the more specialized language of poetry. The latter is

still able to convey, even through translation, a suggestion of the

emotions common to all men; and this is true of the verse which lies

wholly outside the line of that Hebrew-Greek-Roman tradition which has

affected so profoundly the development of modern European literature. Yet

to express "_ce que tout le monde pense_"--which was Boileau's version of

Horace's "_propria communia dicere_"--is only part of the function of

lyric poetry. To give the body of the time the form and pressure of

individual feeling, of individual artistic mastery of the language of

one's race and epoch;--this, no less than the other, is the task and the

opportunity of the lyric poet.

_3. Decay and Survival_

To appreciate the triumph of whatever lyrics have survived, even when

sheltered by the protection of common racial or cultural traditions, one

must remember that the overwhelming majority of lyrics, like the majority

of artistic products of all ages and races and stages of civilization, are

irretrievably lost. Weak-winged is song! A book like Gummere's _Beginnings

of Poetry_, glancing as it does at the origins of so many national

literatures and at the rudimentary poetic efforts of various races that

have never emerged from barbarism, gives one a poignant sense of the

prodigality of the song-impulse compared with the slenderness of the

actual survivals. Autumn leaves are not more fugitive. Even when preserved

by sacred ritual, like the Vedas and the Hebrew Psalter, what we possess

is only an infinitesimal fraction of what has perished. The Sibyl tears

leaf after leaf from her precious volume and scatters them to the winds.

How many glorious Hebrew war-songs of the type presented in the "Song of

Deborah" were chanted only to be forgotten! We have but a handful of the

lyrics of Sappho and of the odes of Pindar, while the fragments of lyric

verse gathered up in the _Greek Anthology_ tantalize us with their

reminder of what has been lost beyond recall.

Yet if we keep to the line of Hebrew-Greek-Roman tradition, we are equally

impressed with the enduring influence of the few lyrics that have

survived. The Hebrew lyric, in its diction, its rhythmical patterns, and

above all in its flaming intensity of spirit, bears the marks of racial

purity, of mental vigor and moral elevation. It became something even more

significant, however, than the spiritual expression of a chosen race. The

East met the West when these ancient songs of the Hebrew Psalter were

adopted and sung by the Christian Church. They were translated, in the

fourth century, into the Latin of the Vulgate. Many an Anglo-Saxon gleeman

knew that Latin version. It moulded century after century the liturgy of

the European world. It influenced Tyndale's English version of the Psalms,

and this has in turn affected the whole vocabulary and style of the modern

English lyric. There is scarcely a page of the _Oxford Book of English

Verse_ which does not betray in word or phrase the influence of the

Hebrew Psalter.

Or take that other marvelous example of the expression of emotion in terms

of bodily sensation, the lyric of the Greeks. Its clarity and unity, its

dislike of vagueness and excess, its finely artistic restraint, are

characteristic of the race. The simpler Greek lyrical measures were taken

over by Catullus, Horace and Ovid, and though there were subtle qualities

of the Greek models which escaped the Roman imitators, the Greco-Roman or

"classic" restraint of over-turbulent emotions became a European heritage.

It is doubtless true, as Dr. Henry Osborn Taylor has pointed out,

[Footnote: See his _Classical Heritage of the Middle Ages_, chap. 9, and

particularly the passage quoted in the "Notes and Illustrations" to chap.

v of this volume.]

that the Greek and Roman classical metres became in time inadequate to

express the new Christian spirit "which knew neither clarity nor measure."

"The antique sense of form and proportion, the antique observance of the

mean and avoidance of extravagance and excess, the antique dislike for the

unlimited or the monstrous, the antique feeling for literary unity, and

abstention from irrelevancy, the frank love for all that is beautiful or

charming, for the beauty of the body and for everything connected with the

joy of mortal life, the antique reticence as to hopes or fears of what was

beyond the grave,--these qualities cease in medieval Latin poetry."

_4. Lyrics of Western Europe_

The racial characteristics of the peoples of Western Europe began to show

themselves even in their Latin poetry, but it is naturally in the rise of

the vernacular literatures, during the Middle Ages, that we trace the

signs of thnic differentiation. Teuton and Frank and Norseman, Spaniard or

Italian, betray their blood as soon as they begin to sing in their own

tongue. The scanty remains of Anglo-Saxon lyrical verse are colored with

the love of battle and of the sea, with the desolateness of lonely wolds,

with the passion of loyalty to a leader. Read "Deor's Lament," "Widsith,"

"The Wanderer," "The Sea-farer," or the battle-songs of Brunanburh and

Maldon in the Anglo-Saxon _Chronicle_.

[Footnote: See Cook and Tinker, _Select Translations from Old English

Poetry_ (Boston, 1902), and Pancoast and Spaeth, _Early English Poems_

(New York, 1911).]

The last strophe of "Deor's Lament," our oldest English lyric, ends with

the line:

_"Thaes ofereode, thisses swa maeg"_

_"That he surmounted, so this may I!"_

The wandering Ulysses says something like this, it is true, in a line of

the _Odyssey_, but to feel its English racial quality one has only to read

after it Masefield's "To-morrow":

"Oh yesterday our little troop was ridden through and through,

Our swaying, tattered pennons fled, a broken beaten few,

And all a summer afternoon they hunted us and slew;

_But to-morrow,

By the living God, we 'II try the game again_!"

When Taillefer, knight and minstrel, rode in front of the Norman line at

the battle of Hastings, "singing of Charlemagne and of Roland and of

Oliver and the vassals who fell at Roncevaux," he typified the coming

triumphs of French song in England.

[Footnote: See E. B. Reed, _English Lyrical Poetry_, chap. 2. 1912.]

French lyrical fashions would have won their way, no doubt, had there been

no battle of Hastings. The banners of William the Conqueror had been

blessed by Rome. They represented Europe, and the inevitable flooding of

the island outpost of "Germania" by the tide of European civilization.

_Chanson_ and _carole_, dance-songs, troubadour lyrics, the _ballade_,

_rondel_ and _Noël_, amorous songs of French courtiers, pious hymns of

French monks, began to sing themselves in England. The new grace and

delicacy is upon every page of Chaucer. What was first Provençal and then

French, became English when Chaucer touched it. From the shadow and

grimness and elegiac pathos of Old English poetry we come suddenly into

the light and color and gayety of Southern France.

[Footnote: See the passage from Legouis quoted in the "Notes and

Illustrations" for this chapter.]

In place of Caedmon's terrible picture of Hell--"ever fire or frost"--or

Dunbar's "Lament for the Makers" (_Oxford_, No. 21) with its refrain:

"_Timor Mortis conturbat me,_"

or the haunting burden of the "Lyke-Wake Dirge" (_Oxford_, No. 381),

"This ae nighte, this ae nighte,

_--Every nighte and alle,_

Fire and sleet and candle-lighte,

_And Christe receive thy saule_,"

we now find English poets echoing _Aucassin and Nicolette_:

"In Paradise what have I to win? Therein I seek not to enter, but only

to have Nicolette, my sweet lady that I love so well. For into Paradise

go none but such folk as I shall tell thee now: Thither go these same

old priests, and halt old men and maimed, who all day and night cower

continually before the altars and in the crypts; and such folk as wear

old amices and old clouted frocks, and naked folk and shoeless, and

covered with sores, perishing of hunger and thirst and of cold, and of

little ease. These be they that go into Paradise; with them I have

naught to make. But into Hell would I fain go; for into Hell fare the

goodly clerks, and goodly knights that fall in tourneys and great wars,

and stout men at arms, and all men noble. With these would I liefly go.

And thither pass the sweet ladies and courteous that have two lovers or

three, and their lords also thereto. Thither goes the gold and the

silver, the cloth of vair and cloth of gris, and harpers and makers, and

the prince of this world. With these I would gladly go, let me but have

with me Nicolette, my sweetest lady."

_5. The Elizabethan Lyric_

The European influence came afresh to England, as we have seen, with those

"courtly makers" who travelled into France and Italy and brought back the

new-found treasures of the Renaissance. Greece and Rome renewed, as they

are forever from time to time renewing, their hold upon the imagination

and the art of English verse. Sometimes this influence of the classics has

worked toward contraction, restraint, acceptance of human limitations and

of the "rules" of art. But in Elizabethan poetry the classical influence

was on the side of expansion. In that release of vital energy which

characterized the English Renaissance, the rediscovery of Greece and Rome

and the artistic contacts with France and Italy heightened the confidence

of Englishmen, revealed the continuity of history and gave new faith in

human nature. It spelled, for the moment at least, liberty rather than

authority. It stimulated intellectual curiosity and enthusiasm. Literary

criticism awoke to life in the trenchant discussions of the art of poetry

by Gascoigne and Sidney, by Puttenham, Campion and Daniel. The very titles

of the collections of lyrics which followed the famous _Tottel's

Miscellany_ of 1557 flash with the spirit of the epoch: _A Paradise of

Dainty Devices, A Gorgeous Gallery of Gallant Inventions, A Handfull

of Pleasant Delights, The Phoenix Nest, England's Helicon_, Davison's

_Poetical Rhapsody._

Bullen, Schelling, Rhys, Braithwaite, and other modern collectors of the

Elizabethan lyric have ravaged these volumes and many more, and have shown

how the imported Italian pastoral tallied with the English idyllic mood,

how the study of prosody yielded rich and various stanzaic effects, how

the diffusion of the passion for song through all classes of the community

gave a marvelous singing quality to otherwise thin and mere "dildido"

lines. Mr. Arnold Dolmetsch and his friends have revived the music of the

Elizabethan song-books, and John Erskine and other scholars have

investigated the relation of the song-books--especially the songs composed

by musicians such as Byrd, Dowland and Campion--to the form and quality of

the surviving lyric verse. But one does not need a knowledge of the

Elizabethan lute and viol, and of the precise difference between a

"madrigal" and a "catch" or "air" in order to perceive the tunefulness

of a typical Elizabethan song:

"I care not for these ladies,

That must be woode and praide:

Give me kind Amarillis,

The wanton countrey maide.

Nature art disdaineth,

Here beautie is her owne.

Her when we court and kisse,

She cries, Forsooth, let go:

But when we come where comfort is,

She never will say No."

It is not that the spirit of Elizabethan lyric verse is always care-free,

even when written by prodigals such as Peele and Greene and Marlowe. Its

childlike grasping after sensuous pleasure is often shadowed by the sword,

and by quick-coming thoughts of the brevity of mortal things. Yet it is

always spontaneous, swift, alive. Its individual voices caught the tempo

and cadence of the race and epoch, so that men as unlike personally as

Spenser, Marlowe and Donne are each truly "Elizabethan." Spenser's

"vine-like" luxuriance, Marlowe's soaring energy, Donne's grave realistic

subtleties, illustrate indeed that note of individualism which is never

lacking in the great poetic periods. This individualism betrays itself in

almost every song of Shakspere's plays. For here is English race, surely,

and the very echo and temper of the Renaissance, but with it all there is

the indescribable, inimitable _timbre_ of one man's singing voice.

_6. The Reaction_

If we turn, however, from the lyrics of Shakspere to those of Ben Jonson

and of the "sons of Ben" who sang in the reigns of James I and Charles I,

we become increasingly conscious of a change in atmosphere. The moment of

expansion has passed. The "first fine careless rapture" is over. Classical

"authority" resumes its silent, steady pressure. Scholars like to remember

that the opening lines of Ben Jonson's "Drink to me only with thine eyes"

are a transcript from the Greek. In his "Ode to Himself upon the Censure

of his _New Inn_" in 1620 Jonson, like Landor long afterward, takes

scornful refuge from the present in turning back to Greece and Rome:

"Leave things so prostitute,

And take the Alcaic lute;

Or thine own Horace, or Anacreon's lyre;

Warm thee by Pindar's fire."

The reaction in lyric form showed itself in the decay of sonnet, pastoral

and madrigal, in the neglect of blank verse, in the development of the

couplet. Milton, in such matters as these, was a solitary survival of the

Elizabethans. Metrical experimentation almost ceased, except in the hands

of ingenious recluses like George Herbert. The popular metre of the

Caroline poets was the rhymed eight and six syllable quatrain:

"Yet this inconstancy is such

As thou too shalt adore;

I could not love thee, Dear, so much

Loved I not Honour more."

The mystics like Crashaw, Vaughan and Traherne wished and secured a wider

metrical liberty, and it is, in truth, these complicated patterns of the

devotional lyric of the seventeenth century that are of greatest interest

to the poets of our own day. But contemporary taste, throughout the

greater portion of that swiftly changing epoch, preferred verse that

showed a conservative balance in thought and feeling, in diction and

versification. Waller, with his courtier-like instinct for what was

acceptable, took the middle of the road, letting Cowley and Quarles

experiment as fantastically as they pleased. Andrew Marvell, too, a

Puritan writing in the Restoration epoch, composed as "smoothly"

as Waller. Herrick, likewise, though fond of minor metrical experiments,

celebrated his quiet garden pleasures and his dalliance with amorous

fancies in verse of the true Horatian type. "Intensive rather than

expansive, fanciful rather than imaginative, and increasingly restrictive

in its range and appeal": that is Professor Schelling's expert summary of

the poetic tendencies of the age.

And then the lyric impulse died away in England. Dryden could be

magnificently sonorous in declamation and satire, but he lacked the

singing voice. Pope likewise, though he "lisped in numbers," could never,

for all of his cleverness, learn to sing. The age of the Augustans, in the

first quarter of the eighteenth century, was an age of prose, of reason,

of good sense, of "correctness." The decasyllabic couplet, so resonant in

Dryden, so admirably turned and polished by Pope, was its favorite

measure. The poets played safe. They took no chances with "enthusiasm,"

either in mood or metrical device. What could be said within the

restraining limits of the couplet they said with admirable point, vigor

and grace. But it was speech, not song.

7. _The Romantic Lyric_

The revolt came towards the middle of the century, first in the lyrics of

Collins, then in Gray. The lark began to soar and sing once more in

English skies. New windows were opened in the House of Life. Men looked

out again with curiosity, wonder and a sense of strangeness in the

presence of beauty. They saw Nature with new eyes; found a new richness in

the Past, a new picturesque and savor in the life of other races,

particularly in the wild Northern and Celtic strains of blood. Life grew

again something mysterious, not to be comprehended by the "good sense" of

the Augustans, or expressible in the terms of the rhymed couplet. Instead

of the normal, poets sought the exceptional, then the strange, the

far-away in time or place, or else the familiar set in some unusual

fantastic light. The mood of poetry changed from tranquil sentiment to

excited sentiment or "sensibility," and then to sheer passion. The forms

of poetry shifted from the conventional to the revival of old measures

like blank verse and the Spenserian stanza, then to the invention of new

and freer forms, growing ever more lyrical. Poetic diction rebelled

against the Augustan conventions, the stereotyped epithets, the frigid

personifications. It abandoned the abstract and general for the specific

and the picturesque. It turned to the language of real life, and then,

dissatisfied, to the heightened language of passion. If one reads Cowper,

Blake, Burns and Wordsworth, to say nothing of poets like Byron and

Shelley who wrote in the full Romantic tide of feeling, one finds that

this poetry has discovered new themes. It portrays the child, the peasant,

the villager, the outcast, the slave, the solitary person, even the idiot

and the lunatic. There is a new human feeling for the individual, and for

the endless, the poignant variety of "states of soul." Browning, by and

by, is to declare that "states of soul" are the only things worth a poet's

attention.

Now this new individuality of themes, of language, of moods, assisted in

the free expression of lyricism, the release of the song-impulse of the

"single, separate person." The Romantic movement was revelatory, in a

double sense. "Creation widened in man's view"; and there was equally a

revelation of individual poetic energy which gave the Romantic lyric an

extraordinary variety and beauty of form. There was an exaggerated

individualism, no doubt, which marked the weak side of the whole movement:

a deliberate extravagance, a cultivated egoism. Vagueness has its

legitimate poetic charm, but in England no less than in Germany or France

lyric vagueness often became incoherence. Symbolism degenerated into

meaninglessness. But the fantastic and grotesque side of Romantic

individualism should not blind us to the central fact that a rich

personality may appear in a queer garb. Victor Hugo, like his young

friends of the 1830's, loved to make the gray-coated citizens of Paris

stare at his scarlet, but the personality which could create such lyric

marvels as the _Odes et Ballades_ may be forgiven for its eccentricities.

William Blake was eccentric to the verge of insanity, yet he opened, like

Whitman and Poe, new doors of ivory into the wonder-world.

Yet a lyrist like Keats, it must be remembered, betrayed his personality

not so much through any external peculiarity of the Romantic temperament

as through the actual texture of his word and phrase and rhythm. Examine

his brush-work microscopically, as experts in Italian painting examine the

brushstrokes and pigments of some picture attributed to this or that

master: you will see that Keats, like all the supreme masters of poetic

diction, enciphered his lyric message in a language peculiarly his own. It

is for us to decipher it as we may. He used, of course, particularly in

his earlier work, some of the stock-epithets, the stock poetic

"properties" of the Romantic school, just as the young Tennyson, in his

volume of 1827, played with the "owl" and the "midnight" and the "solitary

mere," stock properties of eighteenth-century romance. Yet Tennyson, like

Keats, and for that matter like Shakspere, passed through this imitative

phase into an artistic maturity where without violence or extravagance or

eccentricity he compelled words to do his bidding. Each word bears the

finger-print of a personality.

Now it is precisely this revelation of personality which gave zest,

throughout the Romantic period, to the curiosity about the poetry of alien

races. It will be remembered that Romanticism followed immediately upon a

period of cosmopolitanism, and that it preceded that era of intense

nationalism which came after the Napoleonic wars. Even in that

intellectual "United States of Europe," about 1750--when nationalistic

differences were minimized, "enlightenment" was supreme and "propria

communia dicere" was the literary motto--there was nevertheless a rapidly

growing curiosity about races and literatures outside the charmed circle

of Western Europe. It was the era of the Oriental tale, of Northern

mythology. Then the poets of England, France and Germany began their

fruitful interchange of inspiration. Walter Scott turned poet when he

translated Burger's "Lenore." Goethe read Marlowe's _Dr. Faustus_.

Wordsworth and Coleridge visited Germany not in search of general

eighteenth-century "enlightenment," but rather in quest of some peculiar

revelation of truth and beauty. In the full tide of Romanticism,

Protestant Germany sought inspiration in Italy and Spain, as Catholic

France sought it in Germany and England. A new sense of race-values

was evident in poetry. It may be seen in Southey, Moore, and Byron, in

Hugo's _Les Orientales_ and in Leconte de Lisle's _Poèmes Barbares_.

Modern music has shown the same tendency: Strauss of Vienna writes waltzes

in Arab rhythms, Grieg composes a Scotch symphony, Dvorák writes an

American national anthem utilizing negro melodies. As communication

between races has grown easier, and the interest in race-characteristics

more intense, it would be strange indeed if lovers of lyric poetry did not

range far afield in their search for new complexities of lyric feeling.

_8. The Explorer's Pleasure_

This explorer's pleasure in discovering the lyrics of other races was

never more keen than it is to-day. Every additional language that one

learns, every new sojourn in a foreign country, enriches one's own

capacity for sharing the lyric mood. It is impossible, of course, that any

race or period should enter fully into the lyric impulses of another.

Educated Englishmen have known their Horace for centuries, but it can be

only a half-knowledge, delightful as it is. France and England, so near in

miles, are still so far away in instinctive comprehension of each other's

mode of poetical utterance! No two nations have minds of quite the same

"fringe." No man, however complete a linguist, has more than one real

mother tongue, and it is only in one's mother tongue that a lyric

sings with all its over-tones. And nevertheless, life offers few purer

pleasures than may be found in listening to the half-comprehended songs

uttered by alien lips indeed, but from hearts that we know are like our

own.

"This moment yearning and thoughtful sitting alone,

It seems to me there are other men in other lands

yearning and thoughtful,

It seems to me I can look over and behold them in

Germany, Italy, France, Spain,

Or far, far away, in China, or in Russia or Japan,

talking other dialects,

And it seems to me if I could know those men I

should become attached to them as I do to

men in my own lands,

O I know we should be brethren and lovers,

I know I should be happy with them."

9. _A Test_

If the reader is willing to test his own responsiveness, not to the alien

voices, but to singers of his own blood in other epochs, let him now read

aloud--or better, recite from memory--three of the best-known English

poems: Milton's "Lycidas," Gray's "Elegy" and Wordsworth's "Ode to

Immortality." The first was published in 1638, the second in 1751, and the

third in 1817. Each is a "central" utterance of a race, a period and an

individual. Each is an open-air poem, written by a young Englishman; each

is lyrical, elegiac--a song of mourning and of consolation. "Lycidas" is

the last flawless music of the English Renaissance, an epitome of

classical and pastoral convention, yet at once Christian, political and

personal. Beneath the quiet perfection of Gray's "Elegy" there is the

undertone of passionate sympathy for obscure lives: passionate, but

restrained. Wordsworth knows no restraint of form or feeling in

his great "Ode"; its germinal idea is absurd to logic, but not to the

imagination. This elegy, like the others, is a "lyric cry" of a man, an

age, and a race; "enciphered" like them, with all the cunning of which the

artist was capable; and decipherable only to those who know the language

of the English lyric.

There may be readers who find these immortal elegies wearisome, staled by

repetition, spoiled by the critical glosses of generations of

commentators. In that case, one may test his sense of race, period

and personality by a single quatrain of Landor, who is surely not

over-commented upon to-day:

"From you, Ianthe, little troubles pass

Like little ripples down a sunny river;

Your pleasures spring like daisies in the grass,

Cut down, and up again as blithe as ever."

Find the classicist, the aristocrat, the Englishman, and the lover in that

quatrain!

Or, if Landor seems too remote, turn to Amherst, Massachusetts, and read

this amazing elegy in a country churchyard written by a New England

recluse, Emily Dickinson:

"This quiet Dust was Gentlemen and Ladies,

And Lads and Girls;

Was laughter and ability and sighing,

And frocks and curls.

This passive place a Summer's nimble mansion,

Where Bloom and Bees

Fulfilled their Oriental Circuit,

Then ceased like these."

CHAPTER X

THE PRESENT STATUS OF THE LYRIC

"And the same may be said of lust and anger and all the other

affections, of desire and pain and pleasure which are held to be

inseparable from every action--in all of them poetry feeds and waters

the passions instead of withering and starving them; she lets them rule

instead of ruling them as they ought to be ruled, with a view to the

happiness and virtue of mankind."

PLATO'S _Republic_, Book 10

"A man has no right to say to his own generation, turning quite away

from it, 'Be damned!' It is the whole Past and the whole Future, this

same cotton-spinning, dollar-hunting, canting and shrieking, very

wretched generation of ours."

CARLYLE _to_ EMERSON, _August 29, 1842_

Let us turn finally to some phases of the contemporary lyric. We shall not

attempt the hazardous, not to say impossible venture of assessing the

artistic value of living poets. "Poets are not to be ranked like

collegians in a class list," wrote the wise John Morley long ago.

Certainly they cannot be ranked until their work is finished. Nor is it

possible within the limits of this chapter to attempt, upon a smaller

scale, anything like the task which has been performed so interestingly by

books like Miss Lowell's _Tendencies in Modern American Poetry_, Mr.

Untermeyer's _New Era in American Poetry_, Miss Wilkinson's _New Voices_,

and Mr. Lowes's _Convention and Revolt_. I wish rather to remind the

reader, first, of the long-standing case against the lyric, a case

which has been under trial in the court of critical opinion from Plato's

day to our own; and then to indicate, even more briefly, the lines of

defence. It will be clear, as we proceed, that contemporary verse in

America and England is illustrating certain general tendencies which not

only sharpen the point of the old attack, but also hearten the spirit of

the defenders of lyric poetry.

1. _Plato's Moralistic Objection_

Nothing could be more timely, as a contribution to a critical battle which

is just now being waged,

[Footnote: See the Introduction and the closing chapter of Stuart P.

Sherman's _Contemporary Literature_. Holt, 1917.]

than the passage from Plato's _Republic_ which furnishes the motto for the

present chapter. It expresses one of those eternal verities which each

generation must face as best it may: "Poetry feeds and waters the passions

instead of withering and starving them; she lets them rule instead of

ruling them." "Did we not imply," asks the Athenian Stranger in Plato's

_Laws_, "that the poets are not always quite capable of knowing what is

good or evil?" "There is also," says Socrates in the Phoedrus, "a third

kind of madness, which is the possession of the Muses; this enters into a

delicate and virgin soul, and there inspiring frenzy, awakens lyric and

all other members." This Platonic notion of lyric "inspiration" and

"possession" permeates the immortal passage of the _Ion_:

"For all good poets, epic as well as lyric, compose their beautiful

poems not as works of art, but because they are inspired and possessed.

And as the Corybantian revellers when they dance are not in their right

mind, so the lyric poets are not in their right mind when they are

composing their beautiful strains: but when falling under the power of

music and metre they are inspired and possessed; like Bacchic maidens

who draw milk and honey from the rivers, when they are under the

influence of Dionysus, but not when they are in their right mind. And

the soul of the lyric poet does the same, as they themselves tell us;

for they tell us that they gather their strains from honied fountains

out of the gardens and dells of the Muses; thither, like the bees, they

wing their way. And this is true. For the poet is a light and winged and

holy thing, and there is no invention in him until he has been inspired

and is out of his senses, and the mind is no longer in him: when he has

not attained to this state, he is powerless and is to utter his oracles.

Many are the noble words in which poets speak of actions like your own

Words about Homer; but they do not speak of them by any rules of art:

only when they make that to which the Muse impels them are their

inventions inspired; and then one of them will make dithyrambs, another

hymns of praise, another choral strains, another epic or iambic

verses--and he who is good at one is not good at any other kind of

verse: for not by art does the poet sing, but by power divine. Had he

learned by rules of art, he would have known how to speak not of one

theme only, but of all; and therefore God takes away the minds of poets,

and uses them as his ministers, as he also uses diviners and holy

prophets, in order that we who hear them may know that they speak not of

themselves who utter these priceless words in a state of

unconsciousness, but that God is the speaker, and that through them he

is conversing with us."

[Footnote: Plato's _Ion_, Jowett's translation.]

The other Platonic notion about poetry being "imitation" colors the

well-known section of the third book of the _Republic_, which warns

against the influence of certain effeminate types of lyric harmony:

"I answered: Of the harmonies I know nothing, but I want to have one

warlike, which will sound the word or note which a brave man utters in

the hour of danger and stern resolve, or when his cause is failing and

he is going to wounds or death or is overtaken by some other evil, and

at every such crisis meets fortune with calmness and endurance; and

another which may be used by him in times of peace and freedom of

action, when there is no pressure of necessity--expressive of entreaty

or persuasion, of prayer to God, or instruction of man, or again, of

willingness to listen to persuasion or entreaty and advice; and which

represents him when he has accomplished his aim, not carried away by

success, but acting moderately and wisely, and acquiescing in the event.

These two harmonies I ask you to leave; the strain of necessity and the

strain of freedom, the strain of the unfortunate and the strain of the

fortunate, the strain of courage, and the strain of temperance; these,

I say, leave."

So runs the famous argument for "the natural rhythms of a manly life," and

conversely, the contention that "the absence of grace and rhythm and

harmony is closely allied to an evil character." While it is true that the

basis for this argument has been modified by our abandonment of the Greek

aesthetic theories of "inspiration" and "imitation," Plato's moralistic

objection to lyric effeminacy and lyric naturalism is widely shared by

many of our contemporaries. They do not find the "New Poetry," lovely as

it often is, altogether "manly." They find on the contrary that some of it

is what Plato calls "dissolute," i.e. dissolving or relaxing the fibres of

the will, like certain Russian dance-music. I asked an American composer

the other day: "Is there anything at all in the old distinction between

secular and sacred music?" "Certainly," he replied; "secular music

excites, sacred music exalts." If this distinction is sound, it is plain

that much of the New Poetry aims at excitement of the senses for its

own sake--or in Plato's words, at "letting them rule, instead of ruling

them as they ought to be ruled." Or, to use the severe words of a

contemporary critic: "They bid us be all eye, no mind; all sense, no

thought; all chance, all confusion, no order, no organization, no fabric

of the reason."

However widely we may be inclined to differ with such moralistic judgments

as these, it remains true that plenty of idealists hold them, and it is

the idealists, rather than the followers of the senses, who have kept the

love of poetry alive in our modern world.

_2. A Rationalistic Objection_

But the Philistines, as well as the Platonists, have an indictment to

bring against modern verse, and particularly against the lyric. They find

it useless and out of date. Macaulay's essay on Milton (1825) is one of

the classic expressions of "Caledonian" rationalism:

"We think that as civilization advances, poetry almost necessarily

declines.... Language, the machine of the poet, is best fitted for his

purpose in its rudest state. Nations, like individuals, first perceive

and then abstract. They advance from particular images to general terms.

Hence the vocabulary of an enlightened society is philosophical, that of

a half-civilized people is poetical.... In proportion as men know more

and think more, they look less at individuals, and more at classes. They

therefore make better theories and worse poems.... In an enlightened age

there will be much intelligence, much science, much philosophy,

abundance of just classification and subtle analysis, abundance of wit

and eloquence, abundance of verses and even of good ones, but little

poetry." In the essay on Dryden (1828) Macaulay renews the charge:

"Poetry requires not an examining but a believing freedom of mind.... As

knowledge is extended and as the reason develops itself, the imitative

arts decay."

Even Macaulay, however, is a less pungent and amusing advocate of

rationalism than Thomas Love Peacock in _The Four Ages of Poetry_.

[Footnote: Reprinted in A. S. Cook's edition of Shelley's _Defense of

Poetry_. Boston, 1891.]

A few sentences must suffice:

"A poet in our times is a semi-barbarian in a civilized community. He

lives in the days that are past. His ideas, thoughts, feelings,

associations, are all with barbarous manners, obsolete customs, and

exploded superstitions. The march of his intellect is like that of a

crab, backward.... The highest inspirations of poetry are resolvable

into three ingredients: the rant of unregulated passion, the whining of

exaggerated feeling, and the cant of factitious sentiment; and can

therefore serve only to ripen a splendid lunatic like Alexander, a

puling driveler like Werter, or a morbid dreamer like Wordsworth. It can

never make a philosopher, nor a statesman, nor in any class of life a

useful or rational man. It cannot claim the slightest share in any one

of the comforts and utilities of life, of which we have witnessed so

many and so rapid advances.... We may easily conceive that the day is

not distant when the degraded state of every species of poetry will be

as generally recognized as that of dramatic poetry has long been; and

this not from any decrease either of intellectual power or intellectual

acquisition, but because intellectual power and intellectual acquisition

have turned themselves into other and better channels, and have

abandoned the cultivation and the fate of poetry to the degenerate fry

of modern rimesters, and their Olympic judges, the magazine critics, who

continue to debate and promulgate oracles about poetry as if it were

still what it was in the Homeric age, the all-in-all of intellectual

progression, and as if there were no such things in existence as

mathematicians, historians, politicians, and political economists, who

have built into the upper air of intelligence a pyramid, from the summit

of which they see the modern Parnassus far beneath them, and knowing how

small a place it occupies in the comprehensiveness of their prospect,

smile at the little ambition and the circumscribed perceptions with

which the drivelers and mountebanks upon it are contending for the

poetical palm and the critical chair."

No one really knows whether Peacock was wholly serious in this diatribe,

but inasmuch as it produced Shelley's _Defense of Poetry_ "as an

antidote"--as Shelley said--we should be grateful for it. Both Peacock and

Macaulay wrote nearly a century ago, but their statements as to the

uselessness of poetry, as compared with the value of intellectual exertion

in other fields, is wholly in the spirit of twentieth-century rationalism.

Few readers of this book may hold that doctrine, but they will meet it on

every side; and they will need all they can remember of Sidney and Shelley

and George Woodberry "as an antidote."

3. _An Aesthetic Objection_

In Aristotle's well-known definition of Tragedy in the fifth section of

the _Poetics_, there is one clause, and perhaps only one, which has been

accepted without debate. "A Tragedy, then, is an artistic imitation of an

action that is serious, complete in itself, _and of an adequate

magnitude_." Does a lyric possess "an adequate magnitude?" As the

embodiment of a single aspect of feeling, and therefore necessarily brief,

the lyric certainly lacks "mass." As an object for aesthetic

contemplation, is the average lyric too small to afford the highest and

most permanent pleasure? "A long poem," remarks A. C. Bradley in his

_Oxford Lectures on Poetry_,

[Footnote: London, 1909. The passage cited is from the chapter on "The

Long Poem in the Age of Wordsworth."]

"requires imaginative powers superfluous in a short one, and it would be

easy to show that it admits of strictly poetic effects of the highest

value which the mere brevity of a short one excludes." Surely the lyric,

like the short story, cannot see life steadily and whole. It reflects, as

we have seen, a single situation or desire. "Short swallow-flights of

song"; piping "as the linnet sings"; have not the lyric poets themselves

confessed this inherent shortcoming of their art in a thousand similes?

Does not a book of lyrics often seem like a plantation of carefully tended

little trees, rather than a forest? The most ardent collector of

butterflies is aware that he is hunting only butterflies and not big game.

Mr. John Gould Fletcher's _Japanese Prints_ is a collection of the

daintiest lyric fragments, lovely as a butterfly's wing. But do such

lyrics lack "adequate magnitude"?

It seems to the present writer that this old objection is a real one, and

that it is illustrated afresh by contemporary poetry, but that it is not

so much an argument against the lyric as such, as it is an explanation of

the ineffectiveness of certain lyric poems. This defect is not primarily

that they lack "magnitude," but rather that they lack an adequate basis in

our emotional adjustment to the fact or situation upon which they turn.

The reader is not prepared for the effect which they convey. The art of

the drama was defined by the younger Dumas as the art of preparation. Now

the lyrics which are most effective in primarily dramatic compositions,

let us say the songs in "Pippa Passes" or Ariel's songs in _The Tempest_,

are those where the train of emotional association or contrast has been

carefully laid and is waiting to be touched off. So it is with the

markedly lyrical passages in narrative verse--say the close of "Sohrab and

Rustum." When a French actress sings the "Marseillaise" to a theatre

audience in war-time, or Sir Harry Lauder, dressed in kilts, sings

to a Scottish-born audience about "the bonny purple heather," or a

marching regiment strikes up "Dixie," the actual song is only the release

of a mood already stimulated. But when one comes upon an isolated lyric

printed as a "filler" at the bottom of a magazine page, there is no train

of emotional association whatever. There is no lyric mood waiting to

respond to a "lyric cry." To overcome this obstacle, Walter Page and other

magazine editors, a score of years ago, made the experiment of printing

all the verse together, instead of scattering it according to the

exigencies of the "make-up." Miss Monroe's _Poetry_, _Contemporary Verse_,

and the other periodicals devoted exclusively to poetry, easily avoid this

handicap of intruding prose. One turns their pages as he turns leaves of

music until he finds some composition in accordance with his mood of the

moment. The long poem or the drama creates an undertone of feeling

in which the lyrical mood may easily come to its own, based and reinforced

as it is by the larger poetical structure. The isolated magazine lyric, on

the other hand, is like one swallow trying to make a summer. Even the

lyrics collected in anthologies are often "mutually repellent particles,"

requiring through their very brevity and lack of relation with one

another, a perpetual re-focussing of the attention, a constant re-creation

of lyric atmosphere. These conditions have been emphasized, during the

last decade, by that very variety of technical experimentation, that

increased range and individualism of lyric effort, which have renewed the

interest in American poetry.

4. _Subjectivity as a Curse_

I have often thought of a conversation with Samuel Asbury, a dozen years

ago, about a friend of ours, a young Southern poet of distinct promise,

who had just died. Like many Southern verse-writers of his generation, he

had lived and written under the inspiration of Poe. Asbury surprised me by

the almost bitter remark that Poe's influence had been a blight upon the

younger Southern poets, inasmuch as it had tended to over-subjectivity, to

morbid sensibility, and to a pre-occupation with purely personal emotions.

He argued, as he has since done so courageously in his _Texas Nativist_,

[Footnote: Published by the author at College Station, Texas.]

that more objective forms of poetry, particularly epic and dramatic

handling of local and historic American material, was far healthier stuff

for a poet to work with.

This objection to the lyric as an encourager of subjective excitement, of

egoistic introspection, like the other objections already stated, is one

of old standing. Goethe remarked that the subjectivity of the smaller

poets was of no significance, but that they were interested in nothing

really objective. But though this indictment of over-individualism has

often been drawn, our own times are a fresh proof of its validity. If the

revelation of personality unites men, the stress upon mere individuality

separates them, and there are countless poets of the day who glory in

their eccentric individualism without remembering that it is only through

a richly developed personality that poetry gains any universal values.

"Nothing in literature is so perishable as eccentricity, with regard to

which each generation has its own requirements and its own standard of

taste; and the critic who urges contemporary poets to make their work as

individual as possible is deliberately inviting them to build their

structures on sand instead of rock."

[Footnote: Edmond Holmes, _What is Poetry_, p. 68.]

Every reader of contemporary poetry is aware that along with its

exhilarating freshness and force there has been a display of singularity

and of silly nudity both of body and mind. Too intimate confidences have

been betrayed in the lyric confessional. It is a fine thing to see a

Varsity eight take their dip in the river at the end of an afternoon's

spin. Those boys strip well. But there are middle-aged poets who strip

very badly. Nature never intended them to play the role of Narcissus.

Dickens wrote great novels in a room so hung with mirrors that he could

watch himself in the act of composition. But that is not the best sort of

writing-room for lyric poets, particularly in a decade when acute

self-consciousness, race-consciousness and even coterie-consciousness are

exploited for commercial purposes, and the "lutanists of October" are duly

photographed at their desks.

5. _Mere Technique_

There is one other count in the old indictment of the lyric which is sure

to be emphasized whenever any generation, like our own, shows a new

technical curiosity about lyric forms. It is this: that mere technique

will "carry" a lyric, even though thought, passion and imagination be

lacking. This charge will inevitably be made from time to time, and not

merely by the persons who naturally tend to stress the content-value of

poetry as compared with its form-value. It was Stedman, who was peculiarly

susceptible to the charm of varied lyric form, who remarked of some of

Poe's lyrics, "The libretto (i.e. the sense) is nothing, the score is all

in all." And it must be admitted that the "libretto" of "Ulalume," for

instance, is nearly or quite meaningless to many lovers of poetry who

value the "score" very highly. In a period marked by enthusiasm for new

experiments in versification, new feats of technique, the borderland

between real conquests of novel territory and sheer nonsense verse

becomes very hazy. The _Spectra_ hoax, perpetrated so cleverly in 1916 by

Mr. Ficke and Mr. Witter Bynner, fooled many of the elect.

[Footnote: See Untermeyer's _New Era_, etc., pp. 320-23.]

I have never believed that Emerson meant to decry Poe when he referred to

him as "the jingle-man." Emerson's memory for names was faulty, and he was

trying to indicate the author of the

"tintinnabulation of the bells."

That Poe was a prestidigitator with verse, and may be regarded solely with

a view to his professional expertness, is surely no ground for disparaging

him as a poet. But it is the kind of penalty which extraordinary technical

expertness has to pay in all the arts. Many persons remember Paganini only

as the violinist who could play upon a single string. Every "_amplificolor

imperii_"--every widener of the bounds of the empire of poetry, like

Vachel Lindsay with his experiments in chanted verse, Robert Frost with

his subtle renderings of the cadences of actual speech, Miss Amy Lowell

with her doctrine of "curves" and "returns" and polyphony--runs the risk

of being regarded for a while as a technician and nothing more. Ultimately

a finer balance is struck between the claims of form and content: the

ideas of a poet, his total vision of life, his contribution to the thought

as well as to the craftsmanship of his generation, are thrown into the

scale. Victor Hugo is now seen to be something far other than the mere

amazing lyric virtuoso of the _Odes et Ballades_ of 1826. Walt Whitman

ultimately gets judged as Walt Whitman, and not merely as the inventor

of a new type of free verse in 1855. A rough justice is done at last, no

doubt, but for a long time the cleverest and most original manipulators of

words and tunes are likely to be judged by their virtuosity alone.

_6. The Lines of Defence_

The objections to lyric poetry which have just been rehearsed are of

varying degrees of validity. They have been mentioned here because they

still affect, more or less, the judgment of the general public as it

endeavors to estimate the value of the contemporary lyric. I have little

confidence in the taste of professed admirers of poetry who can find no

pleasure in contemporary verse, and still less confidence in the taste of

our contemporaries whose delight in the "new era" has made them deaf to

the great poetic voices of the past. I am sorry for the traditionalist who

cannot enjoy Robert Frost and Edwin Arlington Robinson and Edgar Lee

Masters and Carl Sandburg. He is, in my opinion, in a parlous state. But

the state of the young rebel who cannot enjoy "Lycidas" and "The Progress

of Poesy" and the "Ode to Dejection" is worse than parlous. It is

hopeless.

It is not for him, therefore, that these final paragraphs are written, but

rather for those lovers of poetry who recognize that it transcends all

purely moralistic and utilitarian, as it does all historical and technical

considerations,--that it lifts the reader into a serene air where beauty

and truth abide, while the perplexed generations of men appear and

disappear. Sidney and Campion and Daniel pleaded its cause for the

Elizabethans, Coleridge and Wordsworth and Shelley defended it against the

Georgian Philistines, Carlyle, Newman and Arnold championed it through

every era of Victorian materialism. In the twentieth century, critics like

Mackail and A. C. Bradley and Rhys, poets like Newbolt and Drinkwater and

Masefield--to say nothing of living poets and critics among our own

countrymen--have spoken out for poetry with a knowledge, a sympathy and an

eloquence unsurpassed in any previous epoch. The direct "Defence of

Poetry" may safely be left to such men as these.

I have chosen, rather, the line of indirect vindication of poetry, and

particularly of the lyric, which has been attempted in this book. We have

seen that the same laws are perpetually at work in poetry as in all the

other arts; that we have to do with the transmission of a certain kind of

feeling through a certain medium; that the imagination remoulds the

material proffered by the senses, and brings into order the confused and

broken thoughts of the mind, until it presents the eternal aspect of

things through words that dance to music. We have seen that the study of

poetry leads us back to the psychic life of primitive races, to the

origins of language and of society, and to the underlying spirit of

institutions and nationalities, so that even a fragment of surviving lyric

verse may be recognized as a part of those unifying and dividing

forces that make up the life of the world. We have found poetry,

furthermore, to be the great personal mode of literary expression, a

revelation of noble personality as well as base, and that this personal

mode of expression has continued to hold its own in the modern world. The

folk-epic is gone, the art-epic has been outstripped by prose fiction, and

the drama needs a theatre. But the lyric needs only a _poet_, who can

compose in any of its myriad forms. No one who knows contemporary

literature will deny that the lyric is now interpreting the finer spirit

of science, the drift of social progress, and above all, the instincts of

personal emotion. Through it to-day, as never before in the history of

civilization, the heart of a man can reach the heart of mankind. It is

inconceivable that the lyric will not grow still more significant

with time, freighted more and more deeply with thought and passion and

touched with a richer and more magical beauty. Some appreciation of it, no

matter how inadequate, should be a part of the spiritual possessions of

every civilized man.'

"Die Geisterwelt ist nicht verschlossen;

Dein Sinn ist zu, dein Herz ist todt!

Auf! bade, Schüler, unverdrossen

Die ird'sche Brust im Morgenrothl"

NOTES AND ILLUSTRATIONS

I add here some suggestions to teachers who may wish to use this book in

the classroom. In connection with each chapter I have indicated the more

important discussions of the special topic. There is also some additional

illustrative material, and I have indicated a few hints for classroom

exercises, following methods which have proved helpful in my own

experience as a teacher.

I have tried to keep in mind the needs of two kinds of college courses in

poetry. One of them is the general introductory course, which usually

begins with the lyric rather than with the epic or the drama, and which

utilizes some such collection as the _Golden Treasury_ or the _Oxford Book

of English Verse_. Any such collection of standard verse, or any of the

anthologies of recent poetry, like those selected by Miss Jessie B.

Rittenhouse or Mr. W. S. Braithwaite, should be constantly in use in the

classroom as furnishing concrete illustration of the principles discussed

in books like mine.

The other kind of course which I have had in mind is the one dealing with

the works of a single poet. Spenser, Milton, Wordsworth, Tennyson,

Browning, are among the poets most frequently chosen for this sort of

study. I have found it an advantage to carry on the discussion of the

general principles of poetic imagination and expression in connection with

the close textual study of the complete work of any one poet. It is hoped

that this book may prove helpful for such a purpose.

CHAPTER I

This chapter aims to present, in as simple a form as possible, some of the

fundamental questions in aesthetic theory as far as they bear upon the

study of poetry. James Sully's article on "Aesthetics" in the

_Encyclopaedia Britannica_, and Sidney Colvin's article on "The Fine

Arts," afford a good preliminary survey of the field. K. Gordon's

_Aesthetics_, E. D. Puffer's _Psychology of Beauty_, Santayana's _Sense of

Beauty_, Raymond's _Genesis of Art Form_, and Arthur Symons's _Seven

Arts_, are stimulating books. Bosanquet's _Three Lectures on Aesthetic_ is

commended to those advanced students who have not time to read his

voluminous _History of Aesthetic_, just as Lane Cooper's translation of

_Aristotle on the Art of Poetry_ may be read profitably before taking up

the more elaborate discussions in Butcher's _Aristotle's Theory of Poetry

and Fine Art_. In the same way, Spingarn's _Creative Criticism_ is a good

preparation for Croce's monumental _Aesthetics_. The student should

certainly make some acquaintance with Lessing's _Laokoon_, and he will

find Babbitt's _New Laokoon_ a brilliant and trenchant survey of the old

questions.

It may be, however, that the teacher will prefer to pass rapidly over the

ground covered in this chapter, rather than to run the risk of confusing

his students with problems admittedly difficult. In that case the

classroom discussions may begin with chapter II. I have found, however,

that the new horizons which are opened to many students in connection with

the topics touched upon in chapter I more than make up for some temporary

bewilderment.