THE READING OF POETRY
When Julia Bryant, the daughter of William Cullen Bryant, was a
child, a neighbor of the poet made her first call, and was shown into
the parlor. She found the small Julia seated on the floor with an
illustrated volume of Milton in her lap. She knew, of course, that the
pictures and not the text engaged the child’s attention, but by way of
beginning an acquaintance, she asked:
“Reading poetry already, little girl”?
Julia looked up and regarded her gravely. Then with an air of politely
correcting ignorance, she explained:
“People don’t _read_ poetry. Papas write poetry, and mamas sing poetry,
and little girls learn to say poetry, but nobody reads poetry. That
isn’t what it’s for.”
If the several members of all families were as happily accounted for as
those in Bryant’s household, the Muses would not live so remote from
this world. That mothers sing poetry and little girls say it is enough
to keep it everlastingly alive. The trouble is that few households are
blessed with papas who write poetry; and there are none too many papas
who read it.
If we have not learned to read poetry, let us begin now. Suppose we
read and commit to memory the following stanza, and then talk a little
about it.
Thou wast not born for death, immortal Bird!
No hungry generations tread thee down;
The voice I heard this passing night was heard
In ancient days by emperor and clown:
Perhaps the self-same song that found a path
Through the sad heart of Ruth, when, sick for home,
She stood in tears amid the alien corn;
The same that oft-times hath
Charmed magic casements, opening on the foam
Of perilous seas, in faery lands forlorn.
This is from Keats’s “Ode to a Nightingale.” It is one of the most
musical, most magical stanzas in all English poetry; that much anyone
can tell you who has read the poets. But to tell you in what consists
its glory is beyond any critic who is not a poet; nothing of analysis
can add to the effect it is making in your ears, in your brain, now
that you have committed it to memory. One of the best of English
critics--and he was a poet, too--Matthew Arnold, in his essay, “The
Study of Poetry,” made but a dull and wordy discourse when he tried
to tell what the qualities of poetry are. Only by reading the rest of
the poem, and then the rest of Keats, and then other poets, can you
increase for yourself the delight of those wonderful lines. If they do
not tempt you to the great excursion into the poets, you have not read
them over, you have not repeated them aloud often enough. Only for the
sake of dwelling upon these lines, and because we have agreed to talk
about poetry, and not because our comment can reveal the secret, let us
go back and study the stanza.
The nightingale’s song is the voice of immortality. It releases the
individual soul from the present hour, from the struggle of life and
makes it one with the great experiences of the race. The imagination
sweeps over all history on the wings of those first four lines, and
then carries us into the world of religious story, in the lines
recalling the Book of Ruth. And finally we are borne out of the human
world into fairyland. All this in a single stanza!
Every poem of high quality, every one of the treasured passages from
long poems, makes such a magic flight into the realm of eternal ideas,
so that it is commonly said that poetry is “uplifting.” Life and death
and Heaven and the stars are the poet’s subjects. And the poem of
common things, in praise of simple virtues and domestic happiness, such
as have made Burns and Longfellow and Whittier so dear to the heart,
have the same kind of power in less degree; if they do not transport us
to Heaven they reveal the seed of immortality in daily circumstance.
Keats bears the imagination over the world and beyond it in a single
stanza. All poetry of the highest rank has this power to utter eternity
in a few words. And though at first it seems a contradictory thing to
say, it is true that the long poem has the same quality of compression;
it makes long flights of idea in relatively short compass of words.
The time of reading, the time that the physical eye needs to catch
the winged sentences, is nothing. What, you say, “The Faerie Queene,”
“Paradise Lost,” “Hamlet,” the “Iliad,” the “Idylls of the King” are
compressed so that the time it takes to read them is annihilated? Just
that. The complete works of a great poet do not fill more space than
one or two long novels. Poetry is greater than prose if only because
it expresses noble ideas in fewer words; it is language at its highest
power. Its rhymes and rhythms are all a means of conveying this power.
The person who regards poetry as rhymed sentences that might as well be
put into prose, has his eye on the shell of form and has never felt the
inner virtues of poetry. Poetry has its forms because only in its forms
can it say the most.
But what of the great lines of prose that are as eloquent and compact
with thought as any line of poetry? There is only one answer to that.
Such lines of prose are poetry too. “In my Father’s house are many
mansions” is poetry. That it looks like prose on the printed page is
a matter of typesetting, and type is only the outermost husk about
the shell. Hear that sentence from the Bible, think it and feel it,
and you will know that it has high poetic quality. The intensity of
language, the heat of high passion has made the diamond; the diamond
is more beautiful after it is cut, but cutting cannot make a diamond.
The outward form we shall enjoy, but we must look inward for the
essential quality. As our Bible is printed, the following passage from
Ecclesiastes has the appearance of prose, yet it has, too, something
like the stanzaic divisions of poetry.
Remember now thy Creator in the days of thy youth, while the evil days
come not, nor the years draw nigh, when thou shalt say, I have no
pleasure in them;
While the sun, or the light, or the moon, or the stars be not
darkened, nor the clouds return after the rain:
In the day when the keepers of the house shall tremble, and the strong
men shall bow themselves, and the grinders cease because they are few,
and those that look out of the windows be darkened,
And the doors shall be shut in the streets, when the sound of the
grinding is low, and he shall rise up at the voice of the bird, and
all the daughters of music shall be brought low;
Also when they shall be afraid of that which is high, and fears shall
be in the way, and the almond tree shall flourish, and the grasshopper
shall be a burden, and desire shall fail: because man goeth to his
long home, and the mourners go about the streets:
Or ever the silver cord be loosed, or the golden bowl be broken, or
the pitcher be broken at the fountain, or the wheel broken at the
cistern;
Then shall the dust return to the earth as it was: and the spirit
shall return unto God who gave it.
Whatever else this may be, it is poetry of high power. Millions of men
have found in the Bible something which is not in other books, but that
it has in common with other great books the miracle of poetic utterance
every right view of the Bible must admit. The passage we have just
quoted is in beauty equal and not wholly dissimilar to the stanza from
Keats. The Biblical poet has into a few words condensed the tragic
symbols of death and sorrow; and from their dust and dissolution his
soul has aspired upward to the stars.
If the stanza from Keats and the verse from the Bible are both
essentially poetic, what becomes of certain devices of arrangement
which are in Keats and not in the Bible poem, such devices as rhymes
and regularity of accent? These are but instruments of beauty; the
words and their arrangement are the result of the inward passion and
beauty of the thought, and we in reading are acted upon by that result,
and feel again the passion and idea that produced it.
In inferior poetry cause and effect are reversed or fail altogether.
Thousands of poets have tried to make poetry by devices of rhyme and
line division, by deliberately arranging vowels and consonants into
pleasant sounds; almost any conventionally educated person can learn
to do this, just as almost anybody with practice can learn to play a
piece on the piano and carefully obey every sign on the music score.
But no music results, only an empty regularity of sound. Because there
are so many of these mechanical pianists, the sound of the piano seldom
attracts and arrests us. Because so many verses, thousands in the
monthly magazines, have merely the outward form of poetry, thousands
of persons have come to believe that poetry is an artificial trick of
words. The heart of poetry is emotion and a sense of beauty. The great
emotions, patriotism, religion, love, acting upon the poet, turn his
words into magic sequences. When the poetry is finished and arranged
on the printed page, we find, true, that it has a form, that it has
metrical excellences, that its varieties of sound are thus and so; the
poets are masters of at least as many technicalities as the little
versifiers. The test comes when we read the sequence of words cooled,
as it were, into a set form, and touched by their appeal to our inward
sense feel them start into warm life again.
If we go far enough in our reading to study poetry, then we shall
expect to learn about the technical methods and rhetorical elements of
verse; we shall expect to learn about the lives of the poets and about
their growth in their art. Just so the lover of music will wish to
study the laws of sound, even the mechanical and physical properties
of musical instruments, mastering from a scientific point of view the
conditions and materials of the art. Such study helps us to appreciate
great music and great poetry. But it is not necessary. The orchestra
will act upon us without our knowing how it is arranged. The true poem
will act on us if we know nothing more than our own language and our
own feelings. Our pleasant task is to offer ourselves to the great poem
with attention and a desire for pleasure.
Attention and a desire for pleasure are easily distracted in those who
have not the habit of reading poetry. And poetry is often surrounded
by unnecessary distractions. The very zeal of those who would draw our
sympathies to it leads them to stand in the light attempting to explain
what needs no explanation, what, indeed, cannot be explained. The
lecturer upon music too often talks while the orchestra is playing.
After one knows Shakespeare, a discourse on the “lessons of the
tragedies” may enlarge one’s understanding. But such disquisitions are
a forbidding introduction to any poet. We have in America many worthy
persons who lecture on the ethical beliefs of Robert Browning. Of
course any interest, any occasion that will bring in a new “convert,”
and lead him to think of Browning at all, is a gain--the principal
excuse for lectures and criticisms is that they do invite wandering
souls in to meet a poet. But it is usually true that two hours’ reading
in Browning is more delightful and more profitable than a two hours’
lecture about him. And it is often the case that lectures about his
philosophy repel readers who might enjoy his poetry. The lesson of
poetry is beauty; the meaning of poetry is exalted emotions. The
private special beliefs of the poet are of interest, because those
beliefs raised the poet’s intelligence to a white heat, and that heat
left us verse crystals which are beautiful long after the poet’s
beliefs have passed away. Through his beliefs the poet reaches to great
passions that endure, and anyone can understand them without knowing
how the poet arrived at them. If a poet cannot deliver his message,
a critic cannot do it for him. Shelley was a worshiper of democracy;
Shakespeare was a believer in the divinity of kings. Browning was an
optimist. Omar Khayyám, as Edward Fitzgerald rendered him in English
poetry, was a kind of pessimistic fatalist. All this is interesting to
know. But the reader of poetry does not, in the immediate enjoyment of
the poets, vex himself with these diversities of faith. Hear the poets
themselves:
Shakespeare’s unrighteous king, Macbeth, hedged round by his enemies,
dulled in feeling yet still keenly intelligent, hears of the death of
his queen.
She should have died hereafter;
There would have been a time for such a word.
To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day
To the last syllable of recorded time;
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!
Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
And then is heard no more. It is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.
Shelley, the lover of human liberty and the wide freedom of nature,
chants to the West Wind:
Make me thy lyre, even as the forest is;
What if my leaves are falling like its own!
The tumult of thy mighty harmonies
Will take from both a deep, autumnal tone,
Sweet though in sadness. Be thou, spirit fierce,
My spirit! Be thou me, impetuous one!
Drive my dead thoughts over the universe
Like withered leaves to quicken a new birth!
And, by the incantation of this verse,
Scatter, as from an unextinguished hearth
Ashes and sparks, my words among mankind!
Be through my lips to unawakened earth
The trumpet of a prophecy! O, wind,
If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind?
[Illustration: SHELLEY]
Hear Browning, the athletic optimist:
The year’s at the spring
And day’s at the morn;
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!
And of himself, at the close of his life, Browning sings:
One who never turned his back but marched breast forward,
Never doubted clouds would break,
Never dreamed, though right were worsted, wrong would triumph,
Held we fall to rise, ere baffled to fight better,
Sleep to wake.
Finally listen to the beauty-loving pessimist that Fitzgerald brought
out of Persia and set among the jewels in the crown of English poetry:
So when the Angel of the darker Drink
At last shall find you by the River-brink,
And, offering his Cup, invite your Soul
Forth to your Lips to quaff--you shall not shrink.
I sent my Soul through the Invisible,
Some letter of that After-life to spell:
And after many Days my Soul returned
And said, “Behold, Myself am Heaven and Hell.”
Here are four poets of different generations and different beliefs;
large volumes have been written to expound each and tell us the
meaning, the philosophy, the development, the tendencies, the influence
of this poet and that. But see them together: no explanation of their
_meanings_ can divide them, for they are all poets, and no group of
men on earth are liker one to another _in purpose_ than great poets
are like to each other. They are all singing the eternal in words of
unmatchable power. They are wondrously alike in their celebration of
beauty and high feelings.
The great poet differs not from other great poets, but from inferior
ones; he differs from his equals mainly in manner of expression. The
new poet is he who brings the old messages in ways that no other poet
has conceived, and the old poet is always new, because he has attained
to beautiful utterance of ideas that we cannot outgrow, which indeed
most of mankind have not yet reached. Prose becomes old-fashioned
(except the Bible, which has a special place in our life and is,
moreover, largely poetic in substance); the prose of Shakespeare’s
time and Milton’s is difficult to read, it seems written in an antique
language. But Shakespeare and Milton are the poetry of to-day and of
uncounted to-morrows.
Not to read poetry is to miss the greatest ideas in the world, to
disregard the noblest and most exalted work that the human mind has
achieved. To poetry all other arts and sciences are in some way
inferior. Not music, nor painting, nor the laws of government, nor the
discoveries of mechanics, nor anything else that man has done has the
right of poetry to be called divine, except only that of which poetry
is the vehicle, which is in a sense one with it, religious prophecy
and worship. Whether religion and poetry are one, as some philosophers
hold, it is a fact of history that the great religious prophets have
had the gifts of poets, and the poets are all singers of hymns and
incantations which stir in our hearts the religious sense. We need
not go further into this question than to this simple truth, that the
man who has no poetry in him is likely to be an irreligious man, not
necessarily lacking in goodness and righteousness, but lacking the
upward aspiration of the truly religious mind.
Come, poet, come!
A thousand laborers ply their task,
And what it tends to scarcely ask,
And trembling thinkers on the brink
Shiver and know not how to think.
To tell the purport of their pain,
And what our silly joys contain;
In lasting lineaments portray
The substance of the shadowy day;
Our real and inner deeds rehearse,
And make our meaning clear in verse:
Come, Poet, come! or but in vain
We do the work or feel the pain,
And gather up the seeming gain,
Unless before the end thou come
To take, ere they are lost, their sum.
Come, Poet, come!
To give an utterance to the dumb,
And make vain babblers silent, come;
A thousand dupes point here and there,
Bewildered by the show and glare;
And wise men half have learned to doubt
Whether we are not best without.
Come, Poet; both but wait to see
Their error proved to them in thee.
Come, Poet, come!
In vain I seem to call. And yet
Think not the living times forget.
Ages of heroes fought and fell
That Homer in the end might tell;
O’er groveling generations past
Upstood the Doric fane at last;
And countless hearts on countless years
Had wasted thoughts, and hopes, and fears,
Rude laughter and unmeaning tears,
Ere England Shakespeare saw, or Rome
The pure perfection of her dome.
Others, I doubt not, if not we,
The issue of our toils shall see;
Young children gather as their own
The harvest that the dead had sown,
The dead forgotten and unknown.
ARTHUR HUGH CLOUGH.