I know a man who says
That he gets godliness out of a book.
He told me this as we sought arbutus
On the April hills--
Little color-poems of God
Lilted to us from the ground,
Lyric blues and whites and pinks.
We climbed great rocks,
Eternally chanting their gray elegies,
And all about, the cadenced hills
Were proud
With the stately green epic of the Almighty.
And then we walked home under the stars,
While he kept telling me about his book
And the godliness in it.
There are many great lyrics in our literature which have no palpable
or deducible philosophy; but they are the utterance of deep, serious,
imaginative natures, and they reach our minds and hearts. Wordsworth's
"Daffodils," his "Cuckoo," his "Skylark," and scores of others, live
because they have the freshness and spontaneity of birds and flowers
themselves.
Such a poem as Gray's "Elegy" holds its own, and will continue to hold
it, because it puts in pleasing verse form the universal human emotion
which all persons feel more or less when gazing upon graves.
The intellectual content of Scott's poems is not great but the human and
emotional content in them is great. A great minstrel of the border
speaks in them. The best that Emerson could say of Scott was that "he is
the delight of generous boys," but the spirit of romance offers as
legitimate a field for the poet as does the spirit of transcendentalism,
though yielding, of course, different human values.
Every poet of a high order has a deep moral nature, and yet the poet
is far from being a mere moralist--
"A reasoning, self-sufficing thing,
An intellectual all-in-all."
Every true poem is an offering upon the altar of art; it exists to no
other end; it teaches as nature teaches; it is good as nature is
good; its art is the art of nature; it brings our spirits in closer
and more loving contact with the universe; it is for the edification
of the soul.