NOTE UPON THE SHORTEST FORMS OF ENGLISH POETRY
Perhaps there is an idea among Japanese students that one general
difference between Japanese and Western poetry is that the former
cultivates short forms and the latter longer ones, gut this is only in
part true. It is true that short forms of poetry have been cultivated in
the Far East more than in modern Europe; but in all European literature
short forms of poetry are to be found--indeed quite as short as anything
in Japanese. Like the Japanese, the old Greeks, who carried poetry to the
highest perfection that it has ever attained, delighted in short forms;
and the Greek Anthology is full of compositions containing only two or
three lines. You will find beautiful translations of these in Symonds's
"Studies of Greek Poets," in the second volume. Following Greek taste, the
Roman poets afterwards cultivated short forms of verse, but they chiefly
used such verse for satirical purposes, unfortunately; I say,
unfortunately, because the first great English poets who imitated the
ancients were chiefly influenced by the Latin writers, and they also used
the short forms for epigrammatic satire rarely for a purely esthetic
object. Ben Jonson both wrote and translated a great number of very short
stanzas--two lines and four lines; but Jonson was a satirist in these
forms. Herrick, as you know, delighted in very short poems; but he was
greatly influenced by Jonson, and many of his couplets and of his
quatrains are worthless satires or worthless jests. However, you will find
some short verses in Herrick that almost make you think of a certain class
of Japanese poems. After the Elizabethan Age, also, the miniature poems
were still used in the fashion set by the Roman writers,--then the
eighteenth century deluged us with ill-natured witty epigrams of the like
brief form. It was not until comparatively modern times that our Western
world fully recognized the value of the distich, triplet or quatrain for
the expression of beautiful thoughts, rather than for the expression of
ill-natured ones. But now that the recognition has come, it has been
discovered that nothing is harder than to write a beautiful poem of two or
four lines. Only great masters have been truly successful at it. Goethe,
you know, made a quatrain that has become a part of world-literature:
Who ne'er his bread in sorrow ate,--
Who ne'er the lonely midnight hours,
Weeping upon his bed has sate,
He knows ye not, ye Heavenly Powers!
--meaning, of course, that inspiration and wisdom come to us only through
sorrow, and that those who have never suffered never can be wise. But in
the universities of England a great deal of short work of a most excellent
kind has been done in Greek and Latin; and there is the celebrated case of
an English student who won a prize by a poem of a single line. The subject
given had been the miracle of Christ's turning water into wine at the
marriage feast; and while other scholars attempted elaborate composition
on the theme, this student wrote but one verse, of which the English
translation is
The modest water saw its Lord, and blushed.
Of course the force of the idea depends upon the popular conception of
wine being red. The Latin and Greek model, however, did not seem to
encourage much esthetic effort in short poems of English verse until the
time of the romantic movement. Then, both in France and England, many
brief forms of poetry made their appearance. In France, Victor Hugo
attempted composition in astonishingly varied forms of verse--some forms
actually consisting of only two syllables to a line. With this
surprisingly short measure begins one of Hugo's most remarkably early
poems, "Les Djins," representing the coming of evil spirits with a storm,
their passing over the house where a man is at prayer, and departing into
the distance again. Beginning with only two syllables to the line, the
measure of the poem gradually widens as the spirits approach, becomes very
wide, very long and sonorous as they reach the house, and again shrinks
back to lines of two syllables as the sound of them dies away. In England
a like variety of experiments has been made; but neither in France nor in
England has the short form yet been as successfully cultivated as it was
among the Greeks. We have some fine examples; but, as an eminent English
editor observed a few years ago, not enough examples to make a book. And
of course this means that there are very few; for you can make a book of
poetry very well with as little as fifty pages of largely and widely
printed text. However, we may cite a few modern instances.
I think that about the most perfect quatrains we have are those of the
extraordinary man, Walter Savage Landor, who, you know, was a rare Greek
scholar, all his splendid English work being very closely based upon the
Greek models. He made a little epitaph upon himself, which is matchless of
its kind:
I strove with none, for none was worth my strife;
Nature I loved, and next to Nature, Art;
I warmed both hands before the fire of life:
It sinks; and I am ready to depart.
You know that Greeks used the short form a great deal for their exquisite
epitaphs, and that a considerable part of the anthology consists of
epitaphic literature. But the quatrain has a much wider range than this
funereal limitation, and one such example of epitaph will suffice.
Only one English poet of our own day, and that a minor one, has attempted
to make the poem of four lines a specialty--that is William Watson. He has
written a whole volume of such little poems, but very few of them are
successful. As I said before, we have not enough good poems of this sort
for a book; and the reason is not because English poets despise the short
form, but because it is supremely difficult. The Greeks succeeded in it,
but we are still far behind the Greeks in the shaping of any kind of
verse. The best of Watson's pieces take the form of philosophical
suggestions; and this kind of verse is particularly well adapted to
philosophical utterance.
Think not thy wisdom can illume away
The ancient tanglement of night and day.
Enough to acknowledge both, and both revere;
They see not clearliest who see all things clear.
That is to say, do not think that any human knowledge will ever be able to
make you understand the mystery of the universe with its darkness and
light, its joy and pain. It is best to revere the powers that make both
good and evil, and to remember that the keenest, worldly, practical minds
are not the minds that best perceive the great truths and mysteries of
existence. Here is another little bit, reminding us somewhat of Goethe's
quatrain, already quoted.
Lives there whom pain hath evermore passed by
And sorrow shunned with an averted eye?
Him do thou pity,--him above the rest,
Him, of all hapless mortals most unblessed.
That needs no commentary, and it contains a large truth in small space.
Here is a little bit on the subject of the artist's ambition, which is
also good.
The thousand painful steps at last are trod,
At last the temple's difficult door we win,
But perfect on his pedestal, the God
Freezes us hopeless when we enter in.
The higher that the artist climbs by effort, the nearer his approach to
the loftier truth, the more he understands how little his very best can
achieve. It is the greatest artist, he who veritably enters the presence
of God--that most feels his own weakness; the perception of beauty that
other men can not see, terrifies him, freezes him motionless, as the poet
says.
Out of all of Watson's epigrams I believe these are the best. The rest
with the possible exception of those on the subject of love seem to me
altogether failures. Emerson and various American poets also attempted the
quatrain--but Emerson's verse is nearly always bad, even when his thought
is sublime. One example of Emerson will suffice.
Thou canst not wave thy staff in air,
Or dip thy paddle in the lake,
But it carves the bow of beauty there,
And the ripples in rhyme the oar forsake.
The form is atrociously bad; but the reflection is grand--it is another
way of expressing the beautiful old Greek thought that "God _geometrizes_
everywhere"--that is, that all motion is in geometrical lines, and full of
beauty. You can pick hundreds of fine things in very short verse out of
Emerson, but the verse is nearly always shapeless; the composition of the
man invariably makes us think of diamonds in the rough, jewels uncut. So
far as form goes a much better master of quatrain is the American poet
Aldrich, who wrote the following little thing, entitled "Popularity."
Such kings of shreds have wooed and won her,
Such crafty knaves her laurel owned,
It has become almost an honour
Not to be crowned.
This is good verse. The reference to "a king of shreds and patches"--that
is, a beggar king--you will recognize as Shakespearean. But although this
pretty verse has in it more philosophy than satire, it approaches the
satiric class of epigrams. Neither America nor England has been able to do
very much in the sort of verse that we have been talking about. Now this
is a very remarkable thing,--because at the English universities beautiful
work has been done in Greek or Latin--in poems of a single line, of two
lines, of three lines and other very brief measures. Why can it not be
done in English? I suspect that it is because our English language has not
yet become sufficiently perfect, sufficiently flexible, sufficiently
melodious to allow of great effect with a very few words. We can do the
thing in Greek or in Latin because either Greek or Latin is a more perfect
language.
So much for theory. I should like to suggest, however, that it is very
probable many attempts at these difficult forms of poetry will be
attempted by English poets within the next few years. There is now a
tendency in that direction. I do not know whether such attempts will be
successful; but I should like you to understand that for Western poets
they are extremely difficult and that you ought to obtain from the
recognition of this fact a new sense of the real value of your own short
forms of verse in the hands of a master. Effects can be produced in
Japanese which the Greeks could produce with few syllables, but which the
English can not. Now it strikes me that, instead of even thinking of
throwing away old forms of verse in order to invent new ones, the future
Japanese poets ought rather to develop and cultivate and prize the forms
already existing, which belong to the genius of the language, and which
have proved themselves capable of much that no English verse or even
French verse could accomplish. Perhaps only the Italian is really
comparable to Japanese in some respects; you can perform miracles with
Italian verse.