User: Can you write me a poem about christopher north, shakespeare and poetry?
Assistant: Sure, here's a poem about christopher north, shakespeare and poetry:
  self-revealment than were poets of twenty years ago.
Apparent futility of verse dealing with the poet.--Its
justification.--The poet's personality the hidden theme of all
verse,--The poet's egotism.--Belief that his inspirations are
View that genius results from a happy combination of physical
conditions.--The poet's reluctance to embrace such a theory.--His
body.--Poetic beauty.--Features expressing alert and delicate
senses.--Contrary conception of poet rapt away from sense.--
Blindness.--Physique.--Health.--Hypersensibility of invalids.--
habitat.--Vogue of romantic solitude.--Savage environment.--Its
Contemplation after active life.
The classic conception.--Love as a disturbing factor in
composition.--The romantic conception.--Love the source of
inspiration.--Fusion of intense passion with repose essential to
content.--Aspiration the poetic attitude.--Abstract love-poetry,
Reticence of great geniuses regarding inspiration.--Mystery of
reason.--Belief in infallibility of inspirations.--Limitations of
certain soldier poets in Plato's charge.--Poetry as an amusement
liberty.--Denial of the war-poet's charge.--Poets the authors of
Most of us, mere men that we are, find ourselves caught in some
Christopher North has been much upbraided by a hero-worshiping
With this key
Shakespeare unlocked his heart. Once more
_Did_ Shakespeare? If so, the less Shakespeare he.
self-obliterating splendor of his genius:
In poetry there is but one supreme,
Though there are many angels round his throne,
Mighty and beauteous, while his face is hid.
Now while we are sadly meditating our inability to batter our way
In our life alone does nature live,
Ours is her wedding garment, ours her shrowd.
There was a child went forth every day,
And the first object he looked upon, that object he became.
Like him who met his own eyes in the river,
The poet trembles at his own long gaze
That meets him through the changing nights and days
From out great Nature; all her waters quiver
With his fair image facing him forever:
The music that he listens to betrays
His own heart to his ears: by trackless ways
His wild thoughts tend to him in long endeavor.
His dreams are far among the silent hills;
His vague voice calls him from the darkened plain;
With winds at night vague recognition thrills
His lonely heart with piercing love and pain;
He knows again his mirth in mountain rills,
His weary tears that touch him in the rain.
Great poet, 'twas thy art,
To know thyself, and in thyself to be
Whate'er love, hate, ambition, destiny,
Or the firm, fatal purpose of the heart
Can make of man.
representation of life. Since we have quoted Browning's apparent
"Art," says Aristotle, "is an imitation of life." "_L'art, mes
enfants_," says the modern poet, speaking through the lips of
Verlaine, "_c'est d'être absolument soi-même_." Of course if one
notnature, but stained-glass windows?
language, with men of all callings whatever. He feels himself,
This is the end of the book
I am the earth he took,
I am the rod,
The iron and wood which he struck
With his sounding rod.
A man that's proud--vile groveller in the dust,
Dependent on the mercy of his God
For every breath.
Again they declare that the poet should be
Self-reading, not self-loving, they are twain,
telling him,
Think not of thine own self,
adding,
Always, O bard, humility is power.
Shall not the violet bloom?
and pleading with their critics,
Lightly, kindly deal,
My buds were culled amid bright dews
In morn of earliest youth.
A feeble hand essays
To swell the tide of song,
Go, little book, and with thy little thoughts,
Win in each heart and memory a home.
himself:
I am nae poet, in a sense,
But just a rhymer like, by chance,
And hae to learning nae pretense,
Yet what the matter?
Whene'er my muse does on me glance,
I jingle at her.
Let but the verse befit a hero's fame;
Immortal be the verse, forgot the author's name.
Ye are not great because creation drew
Large revelations round your earliest sense,
Nor bright because God's glory shines for you.
composition, else he will not go to the trouble of recording and
preserving it.
Well I remember how you smiled
To see me write your name upon
The soft sea-sand, "O! what a child,
You think you're writing upon stone!"
I have since written what no tide
Shall ever wash away, what men
Unborn shall read, o'er ocean wide,
And find Ianthe's name again,
Fling a bold stave to the old bald Time,
Telling him that he is too insolent
Who thinks to rase thee from my heart or rhyme,
Whereof to one because thou life hast given,
The other yet shall give a life to thee,
Such as to gain, the prowest swords have striven,
And compassed weaker immortality,
or Yeats' lines _Of Those Who Have Spoken Evil of His Beloved_,
wherein he takes pride in the reflection:
Weigh this song with the great and their pride;
I made it out of a mouthful of air;
Their children's children shall say they have lied.
Yet to me I feel
That an internal brightness is vouchsafed
That must not die,
or in Walt Whitman's injunction:
Recorders ages hence,
Come, I will take you down underneath this impassive
Exterior. I will tell you what to say of me.
Robert Silliman Hillyer, _Poor Faltering Rhymes_.] Self-assertion
How many will come after me,
Singing as well as I sing, none better.
Not a piper can succeed
When I lean against a tree,
Blowing gently on a reed,
and in _The Rivals,_ where he boasts over a bird,
I was singing all the time,
Just as prettily as he,
About the dew upon the lawn,
And the wind upon the lea;
So I didn't listen to him
As he sang upon a tree.
If one were concerned only with this "not marble nor the gilded
monuments" theme, the sixteenth century would quite eclipse the
I, now thirty-seven years old, in perfect health, begin,
Hoping to cease not till death.
Pressing the pulse of the life that has seldom exhibited
itself (the great pride of man in himself)
Chanter of personality.
The sense that he was greater than his kind
Had struck, methinks, his eagle spirit blind
By gazing on its own exceeding light,
Blessed gods in servile masks.
Henceforth I shall be God, for consciousness
Is God. I suffer. I am God.
Another poet-hero is characterized:
He would reach the source of light,
And share, enthroned, the Almighty's might.
Chatterton._] Of another poet-hero one of his friends declares,
You would be arrogant, boy, you know, in hell,
And keep the lowest circle to yourself.
Artists truly great
Are on a par with kings, nor would exchange
Their fate for that of any potentate.
Stephen Phillips is unique in his disposition to ridicule such an
Think not, although my aim is art,
I cannot toy with empire easily.
Shakespeare Ode_; Eugene Field, _Poet and King_.] betraying a
No!--still too proud to be vindictive, I
Have pardoned princes' insults, and would die.
He, from above descending, stooped to touch
The loftiest thought; and proudly stooped, as though
It scarce deserved his verse.
I have felt the ineffable sting
Of life, though I be art's valet.
I have painted the cloud and the clod,
Who should have possessed the earth.
It depressed Alan Seeger:
I, who, conceived beneath another star,
Had been a prince and played with life,
Have been its slave, an outcast exiled far
From the fair things my faith has merited.
It characteristically stings Ezra Pound to expletive:
Great God! if we be damned to be not men but only dreams,
Then let us be such dreams the world shall tremble at,
And know we be its rulers, though but dreams.
I backward mused on wasted time,
How I had spent my youthful prime,
And done naething
But stringin' blithers up in rhyme
For fools to sing.
Of course it is not till we come to Byron that we meet the most
I have not loved the world, nor the world me;
I have not flattered its rank breath, nor bowed
To its idolatries a patient knee.
With terror now he froze the cowering blood,
And now dissolved the heart in tenderness,
Yet would not tremble, would not weep, himself,
But back into his soul retired alone,
Dark, sullen, proud, gazing contemptuously
On hearts and passions prostrate at his feet.
I know not whether I am proud,
But this I know, I hate the crowd,
Therefore pray let me disengage
My verses from the motley page,
Where others, far more sure to please
Pour forth their choral song with ease.
Some secrets may the poet tell
For the world loves new ways;
To tell too deep ones is not well,--
It knows not what he says.
alternately represented his public cackling and barking at him.
Yet to know
That we create an Eden for base worms!
inquires,
Will people accept them?
As a timorous wench from a centaur
(or a centurion)
Already they flee, howling in terror
Will they be touched with the verisimilitude?
Their virgin stupidity is untemptable.
He adds,
I beg you, my friendly critics,
Do not set about to procure me an audience.
Again he instructs his poems, when they meet the public,
Salute them with your thumbs to your noses.
It is very curious, after such passages, to find him pleading, in
May my poems be printed this week?
I pipe but as the linnets do,
And sing because I must.
Fame is the thirst of youth,--but I am not
So young as to regard men's frown or smile
As loss or guerdon of a glorious lot,
I love the song-born poet, for that he
Loves only song--seeks for love's sake alone
Shy Poesie, whose dearest bowers, unknown
To feudaries of fame, are known to thee.
I ne'er sing
But as one entering bright halls, where all
Will rise and shout for him.
In _Sordello,_ again, Browning analyzes the desire for fame:
Souls like Sordello, on the contrary,
Coerced and put to shame, retaining will,
Care little, take mysterious comfort still,
But look forth tremblingly to ascertain
If others judge their claims not urged in vain,
And say for them their stifled thoughts aloud.
So they must ever live before a crowd:
--"Vanity," Naddo tells you.
Emerson's Saadi is one who does not despise fame,
Nor can dispense
With Persia for an audience.
But most, because the grapes are sour,
Farewell, renown?
'Tis ever thus
With times we live in,--evermore too great
To be apprehended near....
I do distrust the poet who discerns
No character or glory in his times,
And trundles back his soul five hundred years.
No living poet ever arrived at the fullness of his fame; the
jury which sits in judgment upon a poet, belonging as he does to
all time, must be composed of his peers.
Of medicated music, answering for
Mankind's forlornest uses.
And like an unruly child the public struggled against the dose.
Whereupon the poet was likely to lose his temper, and declare, as
My Thirty-four Port, no need to waste
On a tongue that's fur, and a palate--paste!
A magnum for friends who are sound: the sick--
I'll posset and cosset them, nothing loath,
Henceforward with nettle-broth.
Carnation,_ which poked fun at the mannerisms of the 1890 poets.
I say an artist
Who does not wholly give himself to art,
Who has about him nothing marked or strange,
But tries to suit himself to all the world
Will ne'er attain to greatness.
How shall we know him?
Ye shall know him not,
Till, ended hate and scorn,
To the grave he's borne.
Of these states the poet is the equable man,
Not in him but off him things are grotesque, eccentric,
fail of their full returns.
Holland, _Jacob Hurd's Child._]
described:
Where the heart of each should beat,
There seemed a wound instead of it,
From whence the blood dropped to their feet.
And toads seen crawling on his hand,
And clinging bats, but dimly scanned,
Full in his face their wings expand.
A paleness took the poet's cheek;
"Must I drink here?" He seemed to seek
The lady's will with utterance meek:
"Ay, ay," she said, "it so must be:"
(And this time she spoke cheerfully)
Behooves thee know world's cruelty.
represents even him as suffering triple punishment,--flogging,
imprisonment and exile,--for his offense against Sir Thomas Lucy,
Alas! what snows are shed
Upon thy laurelled head,
Hurtled by many cares and many wrongs!
Malignity lets none
Approach the Delphic throne;
A hundred lane-fed curs bark down Fame's
hundred tongues.
The Pythian of the age one arrow drew
And smiled. The spoilers tempt no second blow,
They fawn on the proud feet that laid them low.
I, the Boy-poet, whom with curse
They hounded on to death's untimely doom.
Never joy illumed my brow
Unlinked with hope that thou wouldst free
This world from its dark slavery.
Who in another's fate now wept his own.
There cannot be confusion of sound forgot,
A single soul that lacks a sweet crystalline cry.
I was taught to feel, perhaps too much,
The self-sufficing power of solitude.
Elsewhere he disposes of the forms of social intercourse:
These all wear out of me, like Forms, with chalk
Painted on rich men's floors, for one feast night.
So he describes the poet's character:
He is retired as noontide dew
Or fountain in a noonday grove.
Think me not unkind and rude
That I walk alone in grove and glen;
I go to the god of the wood,
To fetch his word to men.
He points out the idiosyncrasy of the poet:
Men consort in camp and town,
But the poet dwells alone.
I have no brothers and no peers
And the dearest interferes;
When I would spend a lonely day,
Sun and moon are in my way.
declares:
For me, I'd rather live
With this weak human heart and yearning blood,
Lonely as God, than mate with barren souls.
More brave, more beautiful than myself must be
The man whom I can truly call my friend.
If men must rise and stamp with fury blind
On his pure name who loves them--thou and I,
Sweet friend! can look from our tranquillity
Like lamps into the world's tempestuous night,--
Two tranquil stars, while clouds are passing by,
That burn from year to year with inextinguished light.
comradeship of Elizabethan poets.[Footnote: Keats' _Lines on the
unreserved enjoyment even of his fellows' society. Tennyson's and
Friends! hear the words my wandering thoughts would say,
And cast them into shape some other day;
Southey, my friend of forty years, is gone,
And shattered with the fall, I stand alone.
Such friendships, like happy love-affairs, are too infrequent and
Skylark_, he pictures the poet "hidden in the light of thought."
He lived, he died, he sung, in solitude.
he says of himself,
He came the last, neglected and apart,
and describes himself as
companionless
As the last cloud of an expiring storm,
Whose thunder is its knell.
He alone of men, though he travel to the pit, picks   up no
company by the way; but has a contrivance to avoid scripture,
and find a narrow road to damnation. Indeed, if the majority
of men go to the nether abodes, 'tis the most hopeful argument
I know of his salvation, for 'tis inconceivable that he should
ever do as other men.
characterizes himself,
I who can scarcely speak my fellows' speech,
Love their love or mine own love to them teach,
In antre of this lowly body set,
Girt with a thirsty solitude of soul.
Spares but the cloudy border of his base
To the foiled searching of mortality.
Such is the self-perpetuating principle which appears to insure
If I might dwell where Israfel
Hath dwelt, and he where I,
He might not sing so wildly well
A mortal melody,
Apparently the problem of heredity is too involved to stir him to
qualities derived from more remote ancestors.
otherworldliness and unusual spiritual sensitiveness.
A tall, gaunt woman, with great burning eyes,
And white hair blown back softly from a face
Etherially fierce, as might have looked
Cassandra in old age.
If angels have hereditary wings,
If not by Salic law is handed down
The poet's laurel crown,
To thee, born in the purple of the throne,
The laurel must belong.
What have poets to say on the larger question of their social
inheritance? This is a subject on which, at the beginning of the
Gie me ae spark of nature's fire!
That's a' the learning I desire.
Then, though I drudge through dub and mire
At plough or cart,
My muse, though homely in attire,
May touch the heart.
What if men have found
Poor footmen or rich merchants on the roll
Of his forbears? Did they beget his soul?
us so repeatedly that their souls are aliens upon earth,
Clothed in flesh to suffer: maimed of wings to soar.
So every spirit, as it is most pure,
And hath in it the more of heavenly light,
So it the fairer body doth procure
To habit in, and it more fairly dight
With cheerful grace, and amiable sight;
For of the soul the body form doth take,
For soul is form, and doth the body make.
Desires what it hath not, the beautiful?[Footnote: _The Sensitive
Yet oft it falls that many a gentle mind
Dwells in deformed tabernacle drownd,
Either by chance, against the course of kind,
Or through unaptness of the substance found,
Which it assumed of some stubborn ground
That will not yield unto her form's direction,
But is preformed with some foul imperfection.
Violet-weaving, pure, sweet-smiling Sappho.
A pale, plain-favored face, the smile where-of
Is beautiful; the eyes gray, changeful, bright,
Low-lidded now, and luminous as love,
Anon soul-searching, ominous as night,
Seer-like, inscrutable, revealing deeps
Where-in a mighty spirit wakes or sleeps.
The gloriole of his flame-coloured hair,
The lean, athletic body, deftly planned
To carry that swift soul of fire and air;
The long, thin flanks, the broad breast, and the grand
Heroic shoulders!
He's hideous, I own it; but fame, Love,
Is all that these eyes can adore.
He's lame,--but Lord Byron was lame, Love,
And dumpy, but so is Tom Moore.
Hooted at, jeered at by the Yahoos of the street
For my heavy body, cock eye, and rolling walk,
Here the idea, all in this mystic handful wrapped,
The real Adonis, with the hymeneal
Fresh vernal buds half sunk between
His youthful curls.
It is obnoxious in Alexander Smith's portrait of his hero,
A lovely youth,
With dainty cheeks, and ringlets like a girl's.
Yes, in this silent interspace
God sets his poems in thy face,
and again, in _Her Portrait_, he muses,
How should I gage what beauty is her dole,
Who cannot see her countenance for her soul,
As birds see not the casement for the sky.
Dream dazzled gaze
Aflame and burning like a god in song.
heaven-eyed" [Footnote: Wordsworth, _On the Death of James Hogg_]
With haunted eyes, like starlit forest pools
His steadfast eye burnt inwardly
As burning out his soul,
Humble-lidded eyes, as one inclined
Before the sovran-thought of his own mind.
But the poet sometimes goes farther, making it his ideal to
See, no longer blinded with his eyes,
The living throne, the sapphire blaze
Where angels tremble while they gaze
He saw, but blasted with excess of light,
Closed his eyes in endless night,
By the darkness of thine eyes discern
How piercing was the light within thy soul.
Then, pre-eminently, verse on Homer is characterized by such an
assertion as that of Keats,
There is a triple sight in blindness keen.
Thou that, when first my quickened ear
Thy deeper harmonies might hear,
I imaged to myself as old and blind,
For so were Milton and Maeonides,
Lifted the azure light of earnest eyes,
but his brother,
The one with brighter hues and darker curls
Clustering and purple as the fruit of the vine,
Seemed like that Summer-Idol of rich life
Whom sensuous Greece, inebriate with delight
From orient myth and symbol-worship wrought.
A youth whose sultry eyes
Bold brow and wanton mouth were not all lust.
Yourselves shall trace
(The delicate nostril swerving wide and fine,
A sharp and restless lip, so well combine
With that calm brow) a soul fit to receive
Delight at every sense; you can believe
Sordello foremost in the regal class
Nature has broadly severed from her mass
Of men, and framed for pleasure...
You recognize at once the finer dress
Of flesh that amply lets in loveliness
At eye and ear.
deliberately blinding himself to the facts. What of the father of
He in the waast is shape as wel as I;
This were a popet in an arm tenbrace
For any woman, smal and fair of face?
Coude songes make, and wel endyte.
Chaucer's woe lest his avoirdupois may affect Madame Eglantine
philosophically. James Thomson allowed the stanza about himself,
interpolated by his friends into the _Castle of Indolence_, to
remain, though it begins with the line,
A bard here dwelt, more fat than bard beseems.
proclamation of himself, "Turbulent, fleshy, sensual, eating and
disorders upon his gift, [Footnote: See _As I Sit Writing Here_.]
Projected from the bilious Childe.
A man who measured six feet four:
Broad were his shoulders, ample was his chest,
Compact his frame, his muscles of the best.
verse-writers,
A heavy handed blow, I think,
Would make your veins drip scented ink.
against the Crepuscular Spirit in Modern Poetry_.] finds himself
unable to keep up the pose, and so resorts to the complaint,
We are compared to that sort of person,
Who wanders about announcing his sex
As if he had just discovered it.
Reflect; if art be in truth the higher life,
You need the lower life to stand upon
In order to reach up unto that higher;
And none can stand a tip-toe in that place
He cannot stand in with two stable feet.
In fact, as a noted painter once said to me: These
semi-invalids neither need nor deserve our commiseration,
for in reality the beggars have the advantage
of us. _Their_ nerves are always sensitive and keyed
to pitch, while we husky chaps have to flog ours up to
the point. We must dig painfully through the outer
layers of flesh before we can get at the spirit, while the
invalids are all spirit.
That such a belief had no lack of support from facts in the last
Too long had sickness left her pining trace
With slow still touch on each decaying grace;
Untimely sorrow marked his thoughtful mien;
Despair upon his languid smile was seen.
We can never know. But with Shelley, it becomes evident that
Death and love are yet contending for their prey,
and in _Adonais_ he appears as
A power
Girt round with weakness.
A light spear ...
Vibrated, as the everbearing heart
Shook the weak hand that grasped it.
You might see his colour come and go,
And the softest strain of music made
Sweet smiles, yet sad, arise and fade
Amid the dew of his tender eyes;
And the breath with intermitting flow
Made his pale lips quiver and part.
anti-tuberculosis campaign drove it out of existence.
More tremulous
Than the soft star that in the azure East
Trembles with pity o'er bright bleeding day
Was his frail soul.
Arnold, likewise, in _Thyrsis_, follows the poetic tradition in
thus vaguely accounting for Clough's death:
Some life of men unblest
He knew, which made him droop, and filled his head.
He went, his piping took a troubled sound
Of storms that rage outside our happy ground.
He could not wait their passing; he is dead.
The calm, white brow, as calm as earliest morn,
The eyes that flashed with passionate love and scorn,
The lips that sang of Heaven and of Hell,
The almond face that Giotto drew so well,
The weary face of Dante.[Footnote: _Ravenna._]
Rossetti repeats the tradition that the composition of the
Behold him, how Hell's reek
Has crisped his beard and singed his cheek.
And lo! that hair is blanched with travel-heats of hell.
genius into ill health. Prince Athanase is
A youth who as with toil and travel
Had grown quite weak and gray before his time.
In _Alastor_, too, we see the hero wasting away until
His limbs were lean; his scattered hair,
Sered by the autumn of strange suffering,
Sung dirges in the wind: his listless hand
Hung like dead bone within his withered skin;
Life, and the lustre that consumed it, shone
As in a furnace burning secretly
From his dark eyes alone.
Appeal to Christina Rossetti_, _New Year's Eve_, _Dedication to
feminists have been only embittered by their brothers' praise.
nineteenth century is the considerate one that while women lack a
In each lay poesy--for woman's heart
Nurses the stream, unsought and oft unseen;
And if it flow not through the tide of art,
Nor win the glittering daylight--you may ween
It slumbers, but not ceases, and if checked
The egress of rich words, it flows in thought,
And in its silent mirror doth reflect
Whate'er affection to its banks hath brought.
Lyric love, half angel and half bird,
Women as you are,
Mere women, personal and passionate,
You give us doting mothers, and perfect wives,
Sublime Madonnas and enduring saints!
We get no Christ from you,--and verily
We shall not get a poet, in my mind.
We women are too apt to look to one,
Which proves a certain impotence in art.
In answer, one is haunted by the line,
I too was born in Arcadia.
Daemon_.]--it is obvious that these gentlemen were in no literal
sense expressing their views on the poet's habitat. It was hardly
Wyoming_, made his bard an Indian, and commented on his songs,
So finished he the rhyme, howe'er uncouth,
That true to Nature's fervid feelings ran
(And song is but the eloquence of truth).
Its seat is deeper in the savage breast
Than in the man of cities.
To most of us, this conception of the poet is familiar because of
If the wind and the brook and the bird would teach
My heart their beautiful parts of speech,
And the natural art they say these with,
My soul would sing of beauty and myth
In a rhyme and a meter none before
Have sung in their love, or dreamed in their lore.
More like a man
Flying from something that he dreads, than one
Who sought the thing he loved.
civilization:
For early didst thou leave the world, with powers
Fresh, undiverted to the world without,
Firm to their mark, not spent on other things;
Free from the sick fatigue, the languid doubt
Which much to have tried, in much been baffled brings.
Only barren hills
Could wring the woman riches out of thee,
The coy muse, with me she would not live
In this dark city,
and the American romanticist, Emerson, said of the poet,
In cities he was low and mean;
The mountain waters washed him clean.
She can find a nobler theme for song
In the most loathsome man that blasts the sight
Than in the broad expanse of sea and shore.
concurred in the view, declaring,
Down the free roads of human happiness
I frolicked, poor of purse but light of heart.
Had I two loaves of bread--ay, ay!
One would I sell and daffodils buy
To feed my soul.
Curse on ungrateful man that can be pleased
And yet can starve the author of the pleasure.
You need not weep for and sigh for and saint me
After you've starved me and driven me dead.
Friends, do you hear? What I want is bread.
A poet! a poet forsooth! Fool! hungry fool!
Would you know what it means to be a poet?
It is to want a friend, to want a home,
A country, money,--aye, to want a meal.
The Devil himself scarce trusts his patented
Gold-making art to any who makes rhymes,
But culls his Faustus from philosophers
And not from poets.
Nor fear, if grim before thine eyes
Pale worldly want, a spectre lowers;
What is a world of vanities
To a world as fair as ours?
To lie in kilns and barns at e'en
When bones are crazed, and blind is thin
Is doubtless great distress,
Yet then content would make us blest.
Shelley, too, eschews wealth, declaring, in _Epipsychidion_,
Our simple life wants little, and true taste
Hires not the pale drudge luxury to waste
The scene it would adorn.
Later poetry is likely to take an even exuberant attitude toward
poverty. [Footnote: See especially verse on the Mermaid group, as
Starving, still I smile,
Laugh at want and wrong,
He is fed and clothed
To whom God giveth song.
One cell there is, concealed from vulgar eye,
The cave of Poverty and Poetry.
Keen, hollow winds howl through the bleak recess,
Emblem of music caused by emptiness,
is accepted quite literally by later writers. Emerson's theory of
The Muse gave special charge
His learning should be deep and large,--
His flesh should feel, his eyes should read
Every maxim of dreadful need.
By want and pain God screeneth him
Till his appointed hour.
It may appear doubtful to us whether the poet has painted ideal
conditions for the nurture of genius in his picture of the poet's
appalling. What can account for it?
In a large percentage of cases, the poet's natural frailty of
For I had the share of life that might have filled a century,
Before its fourth in time had passed me by.
... For my thirty years,
Dashed with sun and splashed with tears,
Wan with revel, red with wine,
Other wiser happier men
Take the full three score and ten.
this richness of experience is not inevitably bound up with
They live not long of thy pure fire composed;
Earth asks but mud of those that will endure.
Far from the trembling throng
Whose souls are never to the tempest given.
wild-winged."
More significant is a different note which is sometimes heard. In
He died--'twas shrewd:
And came with all his youth and unblown hopes
On the world's heart, and touched it into tears.
I have seen more glory in sunrise
Than in the deepening of azure noon,
or in Francis Thompson's _The Cloud's Swan Song_:
I thought of Keats, that died in perfect time,
In predecease of his just-sickening song,
Of him that set, wrapped in his radiant rhyme,
Sunlike in sea. Life longer had been life too long.
Youth rambles on life's arid mount,
And strikes the rock and finds the vein,
And brings the water from the fount.
The fount which shall not flow again.
The man mature with labor chops
For the bright stream a channel grand,
And sees not that the sacred drops
Ran off and vanished out of hand.
And then the old man totters nigh
And feebly rakes among the stones;
The mount is mute, the channel dry,
And down he lays his weary bones.
Greater significance attaches to the fact that some of the
Dull is my verse: not even thou
Who movest many cares away
From this lone breast and weary brow
Canst make, as once, its fountains play;
No, nor those gentle words that now
Support my heart to hear thee say,
The bird upon the lonely bough
Sings sweetest at the close of day.
The last of life for which the first was made,
their longevity.
'Tis the sunset of life gives me mystical lore.
I count it strange and hard to understand
That nearly all young poets should write old.
... It may be perhaps
Such have not settled long and deep enough
In trance to attain to clairvoyance, and still
The memory mixes with the vision, spoils
And works it turbid. Or perhaps again
In order to discover the Muse Sphinx
The melancholy desert must sweep around
Behind you as before.
Alas, near all the birds
Will sing at dawn,--and yet we do not take
The chaffering swallow for the holy lark.
Coinciding with this feeling is Rossetti's sentiment:
... Many men are poets in their youth,
But for one sweet-strung soul the wires prolong
Even through all age the indomitable song.
In me thou seest the glowing of such fire
As on the ashes of his youth doth lie,
and conversely it seems fitting that a _De Senectute_ should come
White-bearded and with eyes that look afar
From their still region of perpetual snow,
Beyond the little smokes and stirs of men.
My thoughts do twine and bud
About thee, as wild vines about a tree
Put out broad leaves, and soon there's nought to see
Except the straggling green that hides the wood.
My solitude is sublime,--for, instead of what I have
described (_i.e._, domestic bliss) there is sublimity
to welcome me home; the roaring of the wind is my wife; and
the stars through the windowpanes are my children; the
mighty abstract idea of beauty in all things, I have,
stifles the more divided and minute domestic happiness.
Borne aloft by his admiration for this passage, the non-lover may
All breathing human passion far above.
theorist sees fit to give us. In _Youth and Art_, the non-lover
I am made up of an intensest life;
Of a most clear idea of consciousness
And I can love nothing,--and this dull truth
Has come at last: but sense supplies a love
Encircling me and mingling with my life.
I have found the lover's crown of myrtle better than the poet's
crown of bays,
To drift with every passion till my soul
Is a stringed lute on which all winds can play,
Is it for this that I have given away
Mine ancient wisdom and austere control?
Methinks my life is a twice-written scroll
Scrawled over on some boyish holiday
With idle songs for pipe and virelai,
Which do but mar the secret of the whole.
Surely there was a time I might have trod
The sunlit heights, and from life's dissonance
Struck one clear chord to reach the ears of God.
Is that time dead? Lo, with a little rod
I did but touch the honey of romance,
And must I lose a soul's inheritance?
How can my muse want subject to invent
While thou dost breathe, that pourest into my verse
Thine own sweet argument?
All sing it now, all praise its artless art,
But ne'er the one for whom the song was made,
Rookh_, Mrs. Browning's _Lady Geraldine's Courtship_, and
Coventry Patmore's _The Angel in the House_, all depend for plot
self-evident to most critics of our time.
But the real question of inspiration by love goes deeper and is
No smooth array of phrase,
Artfully sought and ordered though it be,
Which the cold rhymer lays
Upon his page languid industry
Can wake the listless pulse to livelier speed.
The secret wouldst thou know
To touch the heart or fire the blood at will?
Let thine own eyes o'erflow;
Let thy lips quiver with the passionate thrill.
Seize the great thought, ere yet its power be past,
And bind, in words, the fleet emotion fast.
Accordingly, our poets have not been slow to remind us of their
Few guessed beneath his aspect grave
What passions strove in chains.
But you are blind, and to the blind
The touch of ice and fire is one.
Grown aged in this world of woe,
In deeds, not years, piercing the depths of life,
So that no wonder waits him, nor below
Can love, or sorrow, fame, ambition, strife,
Cut to his heart again with the keen knife
Of silent, sharp endurance.
The very imitative hero of Praed's _The Troubadour_, after
The joys that wound, the pains that bless,
Were all, were all departed,
And he was wise and passionless
And happy and cold-hearted.
O that my heart was quiet as a grave
Asleep in moonlight!
For, as a torrid sunset boils with gold
Up to the zenith, fierce within my soul
A passion burns from basement to the cope.
Poesy, poesy!
The bard who yields to flesh his emotion
Knows naught of the frenzy divine.
A spirit of joy he is, to beauty vowed,
Made to be loved, and every sluggish sense
In him is amorous and passionate.
Whence danger is; therefore I seek him out
So with pure thought and care of things divine
To touch his soul that it partake the gods.
sensuousbeauty.
These I have loved,
Brooke begins,
White plates and cups, clean gleaming,
Ringed with blue lines; and feathery, faery dust;
Wet roofs, beneath the lamplight; the strong crust
Of friendly bread; and many tasting food;
Rainbows, and the blue bitter smoke of wood.
Can proportion of the outward part
Move such affection in the inward mind
That it can rob both sense and reason blind?
Why do not then the blossoms of the field,
Which are arrayed with much more orient hue
And to the sense most daintie odors yield,
Work like impression in the looker's view?
Thou art a glorious madman,
Lodge exclaims,
Born to consume thyself anon in ashes,
And rise again to immortality.
Marlowe replies,
Oh, if she cease to smile, as thy looks say,
What if? I shall have drained my splendor down
To the last flaming drop! Then take me, darkness,
And mirk and mire and black oblivion,
Despairs that raven where no camp-fire is,
Like the wild beasts. I shall be even blest
To be so damned.
For all my days as all thy days from birth
My heart as thy heart was in me as thee
Fire, and not all the fountains of the sea
Have waves enough to quench it; nor on earth
Is fuel enough to feed,
While day sows night, and night sows day for seed.
Dear, we know only that we sigh, kiss, smile;
Each kiss lasts but the kissing; and grief goes over;
Love has no habitation but the heart:
Poor straws! on the dark flood we catch awhile,
Cling, and are borne into the night apart,
The laugh dies with the lips, "Love" with the lover.
What had all we done
That we should live and loathe the sterile sun,
And with the moon wax paler as she wanes,
And pulse by pulse feel time grow through our veins?
Her ways are birth, fecundity and death,
But mine are beauty and immortal love.
Therefore I will be tyrant of myself--
Mine own law will I be! And I will make
Creatures of mind and melody, whose forms
Are wrought of loveliness without decay,
And wild desire without satiety,
And joy and aspiration without death.
And on the wings of these shall I, I, Sappho!
Even when ten thousand blooms of men and maidens
Are fallen and withered.
temperament,
A mighty hunger yearned within her heart,
And all her veins ran fever,
conceives of her much as does Swinburne, who calls her,
Love's priestess, mad with pain and joy of song,
Song's priestess, mad with pain and joy of love.
But having made me, me he shall not slay:
Nor slay nor satiate, like those herds of his,
Who laugh and love a little, and their kiss
Contents them.
Teasdale's _Sappho_ she describes herself,
Who would run at dusk
Along the surges creeping up the shore
When tides come in to ease the hungry beach,
And running, running till the night was black,
Would fall forspent upon the chilly sand,
And quiver with the winds from off the sea.
Ah! quietly the shingle waits the tides
Whose waves are stinging kisses, but to me
Love brought no peace, nor darkness any rest.
If I sing no more
To thee, God's daughter, powerful as God,
It is that thou hast made my life too sweet
To hold the added sweetness of a song.
I taught the world thy music; now alone
I sing for her who falls asleep to hear.]
I would my love could kill thee: I am satiated
With seeing thee alive, and fain would have thee dead.
I would find grievous ways to have thee slain,
Intense device and superflux of pain.
To wring thy very spirit through the flesh.
Called to her, saying "Turn to me, O my Sappho,"
Yet she turned her face from the Loves, she saw not
Tears or laughter darken immortal eyelids....
Only saw the beautiful lips and fingers,
Full of songs and kisses and little whispers,
Full of music; only beheld among them
Soar as a bird soars
Newly fledged, her visible song, a marvel
Made of perfect sound and exceeding passion,
Sweetly shapen, terrible, full of thunders,
Clothed with the wind's wings.
While we thus lightly dismiss sensual love as unpoetical, we must
Although by fits so dense a cloud of smoke
Puffs from his sappy and ill-seasoned oak,
Yet, as the spirit of the dream draws near,
Remembered loves make Byron's self sincere.
The puny heart within him swells to view,
The man grows loftier and the poet too.
Thy bosom is endeared with all hearts
Which I by lacking have supposed dead,
is likewise the motive of Rossetti's _Heart's Compass_,
Sometimes thou seemest not as thyself alone,
But as the meaning of all things that are;
A breathless wonder, shadowing forth afar
Some heavenly solstice, hushed and halcyon,
Whose unstirred lips are music's visible tone;
Whose eyes the sungates of the soul unbar,
Being of its furthest fires oracular,
The evident heart of all life sown and mown.
Thus also Mrs. Browning says of her earlier ideal loves,
Their shining fronts,
Their songs, their splendors (better, yet the same,
As river water hallowed into founts)
Met in thee.
Reflection of this sort almost inevitably leads the poet to the
Lady, I fain would tell how evermore
Thy soul I know not from thy body nor
Thee from myself, neither our love from God.
identifies her lover with her Christian faith:
Yea, as I apprehend it, love is such
I cannot love you if I love not Him,
I cannot love Him if I love not you.
I never was attached to that great sect
Whose doctrine is that each one should select
Out of the crowd a mistress or a friend,
And all the rest, though fair and wise, commend
To cold oblivion....
True love in this differs from gold and clay,
That to divide is not to take away.
Love is like understanding, that grows bright
Gazing on many truths....
Narrow the heart that loves, the brain that contemplates,
The life that wears, the spirit that creates
One object and one form, and builds thereby
A sepulchre for its eternity.
These last lines suggest, what many poets have asserted, that the
begins,
There was a damned successful poet,
There was a woman like the Sun.
And they were dead. They did not know it.
They did not know his hymns
Were silence; and her limbs
That had served love so well,
Dust, and a filthy smell.
The feeling that Aphrodite is leading them a merry chase through
As a bathtub lined with white porcelain
When the hot water gives out or goes tepid,--
So is the slow cooling of our chivalrous passion,
My much praised, but not altogether satisfactory lady.
compares her sensations
Last year when I loved Atthis, and this year
When I love thee.
In Mackaye's _Sappho and Phaon_, when Alcaeus pleads for the love
I doubt if ever she saw form of man
Or maiden either whom, being beautiful,
She hath not loved.
When Alcaeus protests, "But not with passion!" she rejoins,
That breathes to her is passion, love itself
All passionate.
How should they know that Sappho lived and died
Faithful to love, not faithful to the lover,
Never transfused and lost in what she loved,
Never so wholly loving nor at peace.
I asked for something greater than I found,
And every time that love has made me weep
I have rejoiced that love could be so strong;
For I have stood apart and watched my soul
Caught in a gust of passion as a bird
With baffled wings against the dusty whirlwind
Struggles and frees itself to find the sky.
She continues, apostrophizing beauty,
In many guises didst thou come to me;
I saw thee by the maidens when they danced,
Phaon allured me with a look of thine,
In Anactoria I knew thy grace.
I looked at Cercolas and saw thine eyes,
But never wholly, soul and body mine
Didst thou bid any love me as I loved.
passion:
I love thee to the depth and breadth and height
My soul can reach, when feeling out of sight
For the ends of Being and ideal grace.
O wondrous deep,
I love you, I give you my light to keep.
Oh, more profound than the moving sea,
That never has shown myself to me.
But out of the woods as night grew cool
A brown pig came to the little pool;
It grunted and splashed and waded in
And the deepest place but reached its chin.
innocence makes him easy prey of a notorious woman:
In her treacherous eyes,
As in dark pools the mirrored stars will gleam,
Here did he see his own eternal skies.
Clasped in the bitter grave of that sweet clay,
Wedded and one with it, he moaned.
Yet, ere he went, he strove once more to trace
Deep in her eyes, the loveliness he knew,
Then--spat his hatred in her smiling face.
idealizing the outcast, which dates back at least to Rossetti's
Last night, ah, yesternight, betwixt her lips and mine
There fell thy shadow, Cynara! thy breath was shed
Upon my soul between the kisses and the wine;
And I was desolate and sick of an old passion;
Yea, I was desolate and bowed my head:
I have been faithful to thee, Cynara! in my fashion.
Marlowe, in Josephine Preston Peabody's drama, distributes his
admiration more equally between his two loves. One stimulates the
I serve a lady so imperial fair,
June paled when she was born. Indeed no star,
No dream, no distance, but a very woman,
Wise with the argent wisdom of the snake;
Fair nurtured with that old forbidden fruit
That thou hast heard of ...
... I would eat, and have all human joy,
And know,--and know.
He continues,
But, for the Evening Star, I have it there.
I would not have it nearer. Is that love
As thou dost understand? Yet is it mine
As I would have it: to look down on me,
Not loving and not cruel; to be bright,
Out of my reach; to lighten me the dark
When I lift eyes to it, and in the day
To be forgotten. But of all things, far,
Far off beyond me, otherwise no star.
How, Dearest, wilt thou have me for most use?
A hope, to sing by gladly? or a fine
Sad memory with thy songs to interfuse?
A shade, in which to sing, of palm or pine?
A grave, on which to rest from singing? Choose.
To follow the process of elimination, we may first dispose of the
How should you, poet, hope to sing?
The lute of love hath a single string.
Its note is sweet as the coo of the dove,
But 'tis only one note, and the note is love.
But when once you have paired and built your nest,
And can brood thereon with a settled breast,
You will sing once more, and your voice will stir
All hearts with the sweetness gained from her.
Let this to lowlier bards atone,
Whose unknown Laura is their own,
Possessing and possessed:
Of whom if sooth they do not sing,
'Tis that near her they fold their wing
To drop into her nest.
Let us not forget Shelley's expression of his need for his wife:
Ah, Mary dear, come to me soon;
I am not well when thou art far;
As twilight to the sphered moon,
As sunset to the evening star,
Thou, beloved, art to me.
Patmore's _The Angel in the House_; likewise of the poet in J. G.
She, being all my world, had left no room
For other occupation than my love.
... I had grown enervate
In the warm atmosphere which I had breathed.
Far off, beyond me, otherwise no star.
I deem well why life unshared
Was ordained me of yore.
In pairing time, we know, the bird
Kindles to its deepmost splendour,
And the tender
Voice is tenderest in its throat.
Were its love, forever by it,
Never nigh it,
It might keep a vernal note,
The crocean and amethystine
In their pristine
Lustre linger on its coat.
The silence of a heart that sang its songs
When youth and beauty made a summer morn,
Silence of love that cannot sing again.]
Successful love may sate itself away.
The wretched are the faithful; 'tis their fate
To have all feeling save the one decay,
And every passion into one dilate,
As rapid rivers into ocean pour.
But ours is bottomless and hath no shore.
Browning, Sonnet VII.
And this! this lute and song, loved yesterday,
Are only dear, the singing angels know
Because thy name moves right in what they say.]
He makes no quest into my thoughts,
But a poet wants to know
What one has felt from earliest days,
Why one thought not in other ways,
And one's loves of long ago.
O beauty, as thy heart o'erflows
In tender yielding unto me,
A vast desire awakes and grows
Unto forgetfulness of thee.
Richard Realf in _Advice Gratis_ satirically depicts the lady's
altruism in rejecting her lover:
It would strike fresh heat in your poet's verse
If you dropped some aloes into his wine,
They write supremely under a curse.]
Have I a lover who is noble and free?
I would he were nobler than to love me.
To poets who do not subscribe to Emerson's belief in one-sided
attachments, Alexander Smith's _A Life Drama_ is a treasury of
suggestions as to devices by which the poet's lady may be kept at
This soul which on thy soul is laid,
As maid's breast upon breast of maid.
There is no other barrier that so elevates love as does death.
Two passions dwelt at once within his soul,
Like eve and sunset dwelling in one sky.
And as the sunset dies along the west,
Eve higher lifts her front of trembling stars
Till she is seated in the middle sky,
So gradual one passion slowly died
And from its death the other drew fresh life,
Until 'twas seated in the soul alone,
The dead was love, the living, poetry.
The mystic merging of Beatrice into ideal beauty is, of course,
The ascent in love for beauty, as Plato describes it, [Footnote:
_Symposium._] might be expected to mark at every step an increase
Dante and Petrarch all unenvied go
From star to star, upward, all heavens above,
The grave forgot, forgot the human woe.
Though glorified, their love was human love,
One unto one; a greater love I know.
But very few of our poets have felt their genius burning at its
idealistic verse.
The Athenian guessed that when our souls descend
From some lost realm (sad aliens here to be),
Dim broken memories of the state before,
Form what we call our reason...
Of all those memories which to parent skies
Mount struggling back--(as to their source, above,
In upward showers, imprisoned founts arise:)
Oh, is not Love the strongest and the clearest?
Whose eyes were more divinely touched
In that long-memoried world whence souls set forth.
Still must I mourn
That every lovely thing escapes the heart
Even in the moment of its cherishing.
Eros I am, the wooer of men's hearts.
Unclasp thy lips; yield me thy close embrace;
So shall thy thoughts once more to heaven climb,
Their music linger here, the joy of men.
Agathon resolves to cleave to him, but at this point Anteros,
The waste desire be his, and sightless fate,
Him light shall not revisit; late he knows
The love that mates the heaven weds the grave.
In its fiery womb I saw
The twisted serpent ringing woe obscene,
And far it lit the pitchy ways of hell.
Let not dejection on thy heart take hold
That nature hath in thee her sure effects,
And beauty wakes desire. Should Daphne's eyes,
Leucothea's arms, and clinging white caress,
The arch of Thetis' brows, be made in vain?
But, he continues,
In fair things
There is another vigor, flowing forth
From heavenly fountains, the glad energy
That broke on chaos, and the outward rush
Of the eternal mind;...
... Hence the poet's eye
That mortal sees, creates immortally
The hero more than men, not more than man,
The type prophetic.
For truth divine is life, not love,
Creative truth, and evermore
Fashions the object of desire
Through love that breathes the spirit's fire.
We may fittingly conclude a discussion of the poet as lover with
The _Epipsychidion_ I cannot bear to look at. I think
one is always in love with something or other; the
error, and I confess it is not easy for spirits cased in
flesh and blood to avoid it, consists in seeking in a
mortal image the likeness of what is perhaps eternal.
She met me, robed in such exceeding glory
That I beheld her not.
She met me, Stranger, upon life's rough way
And lured me towards sweet death.
This early vision passed away, however,
Into the dreary cone of our life's shade.
Whose voice was venomed melody.
The breath of her false mouth was like sweet flowers,
Her touch was as electric poison.
What storms then shook the ocean of my sleep,
Blotting that moon, whose pale and waning lips
Then shrank as in the sickness of eclipse.
Woe is me!
The winged words on which my soul would pierce
Into the height of Love's rare universe
Are chains of lead around its flight of fire;
I pant, I sink, I tremble, I expire.
His flashing eyes, his floating hair!
Weave a circle round him thrice,
And close your eyes in holy dread--
Still, is it not well to follow a forlorn hope? Among the less
Ion may arouse hope in the breasts of us, the humblest readers of
When they went
Unto the fullness of their great content
Like moths into the grass with folded wings.
Like desert pools that show the stars
Once in long leagues.
I, who cower mean and small
In the frequent interval
When wisdom not with me resides.
Discrowned and timid, thoughtless, worn,
The child of genius sits forlorn,
A cripple of God, half-true, half-formed.
curiosity as to his nature in moments of soaring. By continual
straggling branches.] This, however, is Emerson in a singularly
Vainly, O burning poets!
Ye wait for his inspiration.
Hasten back, he will say, hasten back
To your provinces far away!  There, at my own good time
Will I send my answer to you.
Who looked for thee, thou little song of mine?
This winter of a silent poet's heart
Is suddenly sweet with thee, but what thou art,
Mid-winter flower, I would I could divine.
The muses' hill by fear is guarded;
A bolder foot is still rewarded.
The genius on thy daily walks
Shall meet, and take thee by the hand;
But serve him not as who obeys;
He is thy slave if thou command.
The average artist is probably inclined to quarrel with this last
Purged with high thoughts and infinite desire
I entered fearless the most holy place;
Received between my lips the sacred fire,
The breath of inspiration on my face.
Another writer stresses the efficacy of longing no less strongly;
The unsatiated, insatiable desire
Which at once mocks and makes all poesy.
Nothing keeps a poet
In his high singing mood,
Like unappeasable hunger
For unattainable food.
Two states of the recipient artist-soul;
One forward, personal, wanting reverence,
Because aspiring only. We'll be calm,
And know that when indeed our Joves come down,
We all turn stiller than we have ever been.
Correggio, etc_.]
As the romantic movement progresses, one meets with more lyrical
There's naething like the honest nappy.
I've seen me daist upon a time
I scarce could wink or see a styme;
Just ae half mutchkin does me prime;
Aught less is little,
Then back I rattle with the rhyme
As gleg's a whittle.
Again he assures us,
But browster wives and whiskey stills,
They are my muses.
Then, in more exalted mood:
O thou, my Muse, guid auld Scotch drink!
Whether through wimplin' worms thou jink,
Or, richly brown, ream o'er the brink
In glorious faem,
Inspire me, till I lisp and wink
To sing thy name.
Landor, also, tells us meaningly,
Songmen, grasshoppers and nightingales
Sing cheerily but when the throat is moist.
The vine is nature's poet: from his bloom
The air goes reeling, typsy with perfume,
And when the sun is warm within his blood
It mounts and sparkles in a crimson flood,
Interpretation in the poet's mind.
If wine be evil, song is evil too.
Peabody [Footnote: See _Marlowe_.] writers on the Elizabethan
And Ben was there,
Humming a song upon the old black settle,
"Or leave a kiss within the cup
And I'll not ask for wine,"
But meanwhile, he drank malmsey.
Whatso he drinks that has an antic in it,
He's wondering what's to pay on his insides.
Aye, when the soul is fled
Too high above our head,
Affrighted do we gaze
After its airy maze
As doth a mother wild
When her young infant child
Is in an eagle's claws.
Across the midnight sea of mind
A thought comes streaming like a blazing ship
Upon a mighty wind,
A terror and a glory! Shocked with light,
His boundless being glares aghast.
Soft as the moonbeams when they sought
Endymion's fragrant bower,
She parts the whispering leaves of thought
To show her full-leaved flower.
Edwin Markham says,
She comes like the hush and beauty of the night.
And Richard Watson Gilder's mood is the same:
How to the singer comes his song?
How to the summer fields
Come flowers? How yields
Darkness to happy dawn? How doth the night
Bring stars?
Various as are these accounts which poets give of their inspired
plainly:
Think you I choose or that or this to sing?
I lie as patient as yon wealthy stream
Dreaming among green fields its summer dream,
Which takes whate'er the gracious hours will bring
Into its quiet bosom.
To the same effect is a somewhat prosaic poem, _Accident in Art_,
What poet has not found his spirit kneeling
A sudden at the sound of such or such
Strange verses staring from his manuscript,
Written, he knows not how, but which will sound
Like trumpets down the years.
Doubtless it is a very natural result of his resignation to this
The first note that I heard,
A magical undertone,
Was sweeter than any bird
--Or so it seemed to me--
And my tears ran wild.
This tale, this tale is true.
The light was growing gray,
And the rhymes ran so sweet
(For I was only a child)
That I knelt down to pray.
She almost shrank
To feel the secret and expanding might
Of her own mind,
thought:
The everlasting universe of things
Flows through the mind, and rolls its rapid waves,
Now dark--now glittering--now reflecting gloom--
Now lending splendor, where from secret springs
The source of human thought its tribute brings
Of waters.
Again, in _The Defense of Poetry_ he says,
The mind in creation is a fading coal, which some invisible
influence, like an inconstant wind, awakens to transitory
brightness; this power arises from within, like the color of a
flower which fades and changes as it is developed, and the
conscious portions of our nature are unprophetic either of its
approach or departure.
A plastic power
Abode with me, a forming hand, at times
Rebellious, acting in a devious mood,
A local spirit of its own, at war
With general tendency, but for the most
Subservient strictly to external things
With which it communed. An auxiliary light
Came from my mind which on the setting sun
Bestowed new splendor--
As the earth
Plunges in fury, when the internal fires
Have reached and pricked her heart, and throwing flat
The marts and temples, the triumphal gates
And towers of observation, clears herself
To elemental freedom.
Upthrust, out-staggering on the world,
Subsiding into shape, a darkness rears
Its outline, kindles at the core--.
"Ever when slept the poet his dreams were music," [Footnote: _The
And through his sleep, and o'er each waking hour
Thoughts after thoughts, unresting multitudes,
Were driven within him by some secret power
Which bade them blaze, and live, and roll afar,
Like lights and sounds, from haunted tower to tower.
Alchemist Memory turned his past to gold,
Live in the past; await no more
The rush of heaven-sent wings;
Earth still has music left in store
While memory sighs and sings.
Athanase_. For Matthew Arnold's views, see _Self Deception_.]
Are these wild thoughts, thus fettered in my rhymes,
Indeed the product of my heart and brain?
Her touch is a vibration and a light
From worlds before and after.
... Mixed with memories not my own
The sweet streams throng into my breast.
Before this life began to be
The happy songs that wake in me
Woke long ago, and far apart.
Heavily on this little heart
Presses this immortality.
I come from nothing, but from where
Come the undying thoughts I bear?
Down through long links of death and birth,
From the past poets of the earth,
My immortality is there.
I have thought, sometimes, when I have tried
To work his will, the hand that moved my pen
Was mine and yet--not mine. The bodily mask
Is mine, and sometimes dull as clay it sleeps
With old Musaeus. Then strange flashes come,
Oracular glories, visionary gleams,
And the mask moves, not of itself, and sings.
I do but rave, for it is better thus;
Were once thy starry nature given to mine,
In the one life which would encircle us
My voice would melt, my voice be lost in thine;
Better to bear the far sublimer pain
Of thought that has not ripened into speech.
To hear in silence Truth and Beauty sing
Divinely to the brain;
For thus the poet at the last shall reach
His own soul's voice, nor crave a brother's string.
_My Songs._] If the poet feels that his genius comes from a power
My own best poets, am I one with you?
. . . When my joy and pain,
My thought and aspiration, like the stops
Unless melodious, do you play on me,
My pipers, and if, sooth, you did not play,
Would no sound come? Or is the music mine;
As a man's voice or breath is called his own,
Inbreathed by the life-breather?
apologetically. The usual tone is that of Andrew Lang, when he
confesses, apropos of the departure of his poetic gift:
'Twas not much at any time
She could hitch into a rhyme,
Never was the muse sublime
Who has fled.
idealists.
The next he writes his soul's memorial.
So Shelley describes the experience:
Meaning on his vacant mind
Flashed like strong inspiration.
Rolled round in earth's diurnal course
With rocks and stones and trees.
There is no invention in him (the poet) 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 unable to utter his oracles. [Footnote:
And again,
There is a ... kind of madness which is a possession of the
Muses; this enters into a delicate and virgin soul, and
there inspiring frenzy, awakens lyric and all other
numbers.... But he who, not being inspired, and having no
touch of madness in his soul, comes to the door and thinks
he will get into the temple by the help of art, he, I say,
and his poetry are not admitted; the sane man is nowhere at
all when he enters into rivalry with the madman. [Footnote:
Poetry implies either a happy gift of nature, or a strain of
madness. In the one case, a man can take the mold of any
character; in the other he is lifted out of his proper self.
Like Lear's--for he had felt the sting
Of all too greatly giving
The kingdom of his mind to those
Who for it deemed him mad.
Leonora_.] Helen Hunt Jackson, [Footnote: See _The Singer's
Woodberry, [Footnote: See _He Ate the Laurel and is Mad_.] concur
Yes--as Love is truer far
Than all other things; so are
Mere false shows in some great Mime
By dreadful mystery sublime.
But at the end Tasso's faith is troubled, and he ponders,
For were life no flitting dream,
Were things truly what they seem,
Were not all this world-scene vast
But a shade in Time's stream glassed;
Were the moods we now display
Less phantasmal than the clay
In which our poor spirits clad
Act this vision, wild and sad,
I must be mad, mad,--how mad!
As for the old seers
Whose eyes God touched with vision of the life
Of the unfolding ages, I must doubt
Whether they comprehended what they saw.]
Such a view has been a boon to literary critics. Shakespeare
And ah, we poets, I misdoubt
Are little more than thou.
We speak a lesson taught, we know not how,
And what it is that from us flows
The hearer better than the utterer knows.
It goes without saying that this is a romantic conception, wholly
All pictures that's painted with sense and with thought
Are painted by madmen as sure as a groat.
What chance did he have of recognition?
Some demon stole my pen (forgive the offense)
And once betrayed me into common sense.
A set o' dull, conceited hashes
Confuse their brains in college classes!
They gang in sticks and come out asses,
Plain truth to speak,
And syne they think to climb Parnassus
By dint of Greek.[Footnote: _Epistle to Lapraik_.]
He was too wise
Either to fear, or follow, or despise
Whom men call science--for he knew full well
All she had told, or still might live to tell
Was known to him before her very birth.
Yours is the living pall,
The aloof and frozen place of listeners
And lookers-on at life. But mine--ah! Mine
The fount of life itself, the burning fount
Pierian. I pity you.
How proud the poet's billow swells!
The God! the God! his boast:
A boast how vain! what wrecks abound!
Dead bards stench every coast.
There could be no more telling blow against the poet's view of
The name
Is royal, and to sign it like a queen
Is what I dare not--though some royal blood
Would seem to tingle in me now and then
With sense of power and ache,--with imposthumes
And manias usual to the race. Howbeit
I dare not: 'tis too easy to go mad
And ape a Bourbon in a crown of straws;
The thing's too common.
For me, I wrote
False poems, like the rest, and thought them true
Because myself was true in writing them.]
Emerson suggests a test, in a poem by that name. He avers,
I hung my verses in the wind.
Time and tide their faults may find.
All were winnowed through and through:
Five lines lasted sound and true;
Five were smelted in a pot
Than the south more fierce and hot.
enthusiast, his own ecstasy is an all-sufficient evidence.
In your eye there is death;
There is frost in your breath
Which would blight the plants.
In the heart of the garden the merry bird chants;
It would fall to the ground if you came in.
There are open hours
When the God's will sallies free,
The flowing fortunes of a thousand years;--
Sudden, at unawares,
Self-moved, fly to the doors,
Nor sword of angels could reveal
What they conceal.
composition. See also, Bayard Taylor, _Ad Amicos_, and _Proem
Dedicatory_; Edward Dowden, _The Singer's Plea_; Richard Gilder,
Touch him ne'er so lightly, into song he broke.
Soil so quick receptive,--not one feather-seed,
Not one flower-dust fell but straight its fall awoke
Vitalizing virtue: song would song succeed
Sudden as spontaneous--prove a poet soul!
Rock's the song soil rather, surface hard and bare:
Sun and dew their mildness, storm and frost their rage
Vainly both expend,--few flowers awaken there:
Quiet in its cleft broods--what the after-age
Knows and names a pine, a nation's heritage.
It may be that the latter view seems truer to us only because we
Our untempered speech descends--poor heirs!
Grimy and rough-cast still from Babel's brick-layers;
Curse on the brutish jargon we inherit,
Strong but to damn, not memorize a spirit!
Walt Whitman voices the same complaint:
Speech is the twin of my vision: it is unequal to measure itself;
"Walt, you contain enough, why don't you let it out then?"
Accordingly there is nothing more common than verse bewailing the
I found the phrase to every thought
I ever had, but one;
And that defies me,--as a hand
Did try to chalk the sun.
To races nurtured in the dark;--
How would your own begin?
Can blaze be done in cochineal,
Or noon in mazarin?
My counsel to the budding bard
Is, "Don't be long," and "Don't be hard."
Your "gentle public," my good friend,
Won't read what they can't comprehend.
O for ten years, that I may overwhelm
Myself in poesy; so I may do the deed
My soul has to herself decreed.
Bryant warns the poet,
Deem not the framing of a deathless lay
The pastime of a drowsy summer day;
But gather all thy powers
And wreak them on the verse that thou dost weave.
Touch the crude line with fear
But in the moments of impassioned thought.
Keep up the fire
And leave the generous flames to shape themselves.
When the embrace has failed, the rapture fled,
Not he, not he, the wild sweet witch is dead,
And though he cherisheth
The babe most strangely born from out her death,
Some tender trick of her it hath, maybe,
It is not she.
Hear me tell
How much my will transcends my feeble powers,
As one with blind eyes feeling out in flowers
Their tender hues.
unquenchable is his desire for a new and fuller revelation.
It cannot, however, be maintained that England is unique in her
_Republic_, "Poetry feeds and waters the passions instead of
Much of the inconsistency in the poet's exhibitions of his moral
abhorrence,
Now the poet cannot die
Nor leave his music as of old,
But round him ere he scarce be cold
Begins the scandal and the cry:
Proclaim the faults he would not show,
Break lock and seal; betray the trust;
Keep nothing sacred; 'tis but just
The many-headed beast should know.
Yea, he hath sinned. Who hath revealed
That he was more than man or less?
Sin met thy brother everywhere,
And is thy brother blamed?
From passion, danger, doubt and care
He no exemption claimed.
He is not
That despicable thing, a hypocrite.
denouncing his failings.
God finds his mighty way
Into his verse. The dimmest window panes
Let in the morning light, and in that light
Our faces shine with kindled sense of God
And his unwearied goodness, but the glass
Gets little good of it; nay, it retains
Its chill and grime beyond the power of light
To warm or whiten ...
... The psalmist's soul
Was not a fitting place for psalms like his
To dwell in overlong, while wanting words.
But from thy feet now death hath washed the mire,
philistines quarrel over technical points in their conceptions of
There is no doubt that poets, as a class, have acknowledged the
untemptable," [Footnote: Ezra Pound, _Tensone._] it is easy to
Whatever its justification, the excuse for the poets flaunting an
Come down and redeem us from virtue,
upon his youthful zest in leaving
The lilies and languors of virtue
For the roses and raptures of vice,
If on his cheek unholy blood
Burned for one youthful hour,
'Twas but the flushing of the bud
That bloomed a milk-white flower.
Leave untried
Virtue, the creaming honey-wine; quick squeeze
Vice, like a biting serpent, from the lees
Of life! Together let wrath, hatred, lust,
All tyrannies in every shape be thrust
Upon this now.
autobiographical poetry,--the lyrics, _Childe Harold_ and _Don
Wine and women and song,
Three things garnish our way:
Yet is day overlong.
Three things render us strong,
Vine-leaves, kisses and bay.
Yet is day overlong.
There's ae wee faut they whiles lay to me,
I like the lassies--Gude forgie me.
I saw thy pulses' maddening play,
Wild, send thee Pleasure's devious way,
And yet the light that led astray
Was light from Heaven.
What expiating agony
May for him damned to poesy
Shut in that little sentence be,--
What deep austerities of strife,--
He lived his life. He lived his life.
temptation.
expression of his theories.
In the van of the recoil against Byronic morals one finds Crabbe,
There will be fools that in the name of art
Will wallow in the mire, crying, "I fall,
I fall from heaven!" fools that have only heard
From earth, the murmur of those golden hooves
Far, far above them.
Whittier's, Bryant's strength of character has frequently been
Loveliness of perfect deeds,
More strong than all poetic thought,
Learn to sing,
But first in all thy learning, learn to be.
He held his manly name
Far dearer than the muse,
They are like angels, but some angels fell.
Dimmed and dwarfed, in times like these
The poet seems beside the man;
His life is now his noblest strain.
Your humming birds may sip the sweet they need
From every flower, and why not humming poets?
Raymond makes Dante reply,
The poets are not lesser men, but greater,
And so should find unworthy of themselves
A word, a deed, that makes them seem less worthy.
I take the hap
Of all my deeds. The wind that fills my sails
Propels, but I am helmsman.
Virtues by departed heroes taught
Raise in your soul a pure immortal flame,
Adorn your life, and consecrate your fame.
With pureness in youth and religion in age.
since he conceives as the function of poetry
To raise and purify the grovelling soul,
And the whole man with lofty thoughts to fill.
subscription to the old Platonic doctrine of the trinity,--the
fundamental identity of the good, the true and the beautiful.
Tis not in
The harmony of things--this hard decree,
This ineradicable taint of sin,
This boundless upas, this all-blasting tree
Whose root is earth.
feeling."] Wordsworth, Shelley and Keats was unflinching in this
particular. The Brownings subscribed to the doctrine. Tennyson's
O singing heart, think not of aught save song,
Beauty can do no wrong.
Again one hears of the singer,
Pure must he be;
Oh, blessed are the pure; for they shall hear
Where others hear not; see where others see
With a dazed vision,
and again,
To write a poem, a man should be as pure
As frost-flowers.
Only recently a writer has pictured the poet as one who
Lived beyond men, and so stood
Admitted to the brotherhood
Of beauty.
philistine.
Fearless he was, and scorning all disguise.
What he dared do or think, though men might start
He spoke with mild, yet unaverted eyes.
typically bourgeois respectability. In Mrs. Browning's _Aurora
The milk-soup men call domestic bliss.
Likewise, in _The Angel in the House_, the poet follows a most
And ere I slept, on bended knee
I owned myself, with many a tear
Unseasonable, disorderly.
conventional standards poets merit every consideration, being
Tall galleons,
Out of their very beauty driven to dare
The uncompassed sea, founder in starless night.
He is convinced that the public, far from sympathizing with such
My sins they learn by rote,
And never miss one; no, no miser of them,
Avid of foulness, so they hound me out
Away from blessing that they prate about,
But never saw, and never dreamed upon,
And know not how to long for with desire.
Bigot, one folly of the man you flout
Is more to God than thy lean life is whole.
The curse of Cain
Light on his head who pierced thy innocent breast
And scared the angel soul that was its earthly guest.
Naught of ill his heart could understand,
But pity and wild sorrow for the same.
A voice of right amidst a world's foul wrong,
With heavenly inspiration, too divine
For souls besotted with earth's sensual wine.
Shoe_. In this poem we find Nash describing to the Mermaid group
thetragic end of Marlowe, who lies
Dead like a dog in a drunken brawl,
Dead for a phial of paint, a taffeta gown.
Blaspheming Tamborlin must die,
And Faustus meet his end;
Repent, repent, or presently
To hell you must descend,
A child's heart, packed with splendid hopes and dreams.
His manner,
Untamed, adventurous, but still innocent,
Used all her London tricks
To coney-catch the country greenhorn.
Simple as all great, elemental things,
when she expressed an infatuation for him, then
In her treacherous eyes,
As in dark pools the mirrored stars will gleam,
Here did he see his own eternal skies.
And all that God had meant to wake one day
Under the Sun of Love, suddenly woke
By candle-light, and cried, "The Sun, the Sun."
At last, holding him wrapped in her hair, the woman attempted to
I saw his face,
Pale, innocent, just the clear face of that boy
Who walked to Cambridge, with a bundle and stick,
The little cobbler's son. Yet--there I caught
My only glimpse of how the sun-god looked--
Mourning for his death, the great dramatists agree that
His were, perchance, the noblest steeds of all,
And from their nostrils blew a fierier dawn
Above the world.... Before his hand
Had learned to quell them, he was dashed to earth.
His cherub soul has passed to its eclipse,
Peace awaits thee with caressings,
Sitting at the feet of Jesus.
These larger hearts must feel the rolls
Of stormier-waved temptation;
These star-wide souls beneath their poles
Bear zones of tropic passion.
I do these wild things in sheer despite
And play the fooleries you catch me at
In sheer rage.
But invariably, whatever a poet hero's failings maybe, the author
That so my purged, once human heart,
From all the human rent,
May gather strength to pledge and drink
Your wine of wonderment,
While you pardon me all blessingly
The woe mine Adam sent.
I had resolved
No age should come on me ere youth was spent,
For I would wear myself out,
Omar Khayyam's
While you live
Drink!--for once dead you never shall return,
Swinburne's cry of despair,
Thou has conquered, O pale Galilean; the world has
grown gray with thy breath;
We have drunken of things Lethean, and fed on the
fullness of death,[Footnote: _Hymn to Proserpine_.]
principle of restlessness
That would be all, have, see, know, taste, feel, all
Turn his heart from lovely maids,
And make the darlings of the earth
Swainish, coarse, and nothing worth,
Eager for good, not hating ill;
On his tense chords all strokes are felt,
The good, the bad, with equal zeal.
Does the road wind uphill all the way?
Yes, to the very end!
Will the day's journey take the whole long day?
From morn till night, my friend.
If in my youth I have been pure in heart,
If, mingling with the world, I am content
With my own modest pleasures, and have lived
With God and Nature communing, removed
From little enmities and low desires,
The gift is yours.
When love is an unerring light,
And joy its own felicity.
The world shall bow to me conceiving all
Man's life, who see its blisses, great and small
Afar--not tasting any; no machine
To exercise my utmost will is mine,
Be mine mere consciousness: Let men perceive
What I could do, a mastery believe
Asserted and established to the throng
By their selected evidence of song,
Which now shall prove, whate'er they are, or seek
To be, I am.
dares to take
Life's rule from passion craved for passion's sake,
None of the singers ever yet
Has wholly lived his minstrelsy,
Or truly sung his true, true thought.
I leave
For Beauty, Beauty's rarest flower,
For Truth, the lips that ne'er deceive;
For Love, I leave Love's haunted bower.
As was the case in their attack upon the poet's morals, so in the
Such a conclusion the poet denies. The philosopher, to whom a
To that gaudy tangle of what gardens, after all, are meant
to produce, in the decay of time, as we may think at first
sight, the systematic, logical gardener put his meddlesome
hand, and straightway all ran to seed; to _genus_ and
_species_ and _differentia_, into formal classes,
under general notions, and with--yes! with written labels
fluttering on the stalks instead of blossoms--a botanic or
physic garden, as they used to say, instead of our
flower-garden and orchard. [Footnote: _Plato and
already drooping.
And now at last authentic word I bring
Witnessed by every dead and living thing;
Good tidings of great joy for you, for all:
There is no God; no fiend with name divine
Made us and tortures us; if we must pine
It is to satiate no Being's gall.
He came to the desert of London town,
Mirk miles broad;
He wandered up and he wandered down,
Ever alone with God.
"aesthetic repose."
Vain is his voice in whom no longer dwells
Hunger that craves immortal bread and wine.
Very dim, indeed, it may be, the sense is, yet in almost every
present, even Carl Sandburg cannot escape the conclusion that his
Summer-saulting for God's sake.
Arnold's mind Wordsworth's concern with the flower which brought
"thoughts which do often lie too deep for tears" was ridiculously
Flower in the crannied wall,
I pluck you out of the crannies;--
I hold you here, root and all, in my hand,
Little flower--but if I could understand
What you are, root and all and all in all,
I should know what God and man is.
Rossetti was, by a duality in his nature, by
The foolishest fond folly of a heart
Divided, neither here nor there at rest,
That hankers after Heaven, but clings to earth.
On the other hand, if he tries to content himself with the merely
The Being that is in the clouds and air,
That is in the green leaves among the groves,
and was led to the conclusion,
It is my faith that every flower
Enjoys the air it breathes.
Up through the mystic deeps of sunny air
I cried to God, "Oh Father, art thou there?"
Sudden the answer like a flute I heard;
It was an angel, though it seemed a bird.
There is no God, O son!
If thou be none,
Though earth and man were gone,
And suns and universes ceased to be,
And Thou wert left alone,
Every existence would exist in Thee.
There is not room for Death,
Nor atom that his might could render void;
And what Thou art may never be destroyed.
In the eighteenth century poets seem not to have been averse to
placating their enemies by publishing their attendance upon the
appointed means of grace. Among the more conservative poets, this
You were ever still
Among Christ's flock a perilous infidel.
Shelley helped to foster the tradition, too, that the poet was
persecuted by the church. In _Rosalind and Helen_, the hero was
hated by the clergy,
For he made verses wild and queer
Of the strange creeds priests hold so dear,
and this predilection for making them wild and queer resulted in
Lionel's death, for
The ministers of misrule sent
Seized on Lionel and bore
His chained limbs to a dreary tower,
For he, they said, from his mind had bent
Against their gods keen blasphemy.
Swinburne, in particular, praises his daring, in that he
Smote the God of base men's choice
At God's own gate.
The poet's youthful zest in scandalizing the orthodox is likely,
How sweet to enter in, to kneel and pray
With all the others whom we love so well!
All disbelief and doubt might pass away,
And peace float to us with its Sabbath bell.
Conscience replies, There is but one good rest,
Whose head is pillowed upon Truth's pure breast.
There lives more faith in honest doubt,
Believe me, than in half the creeds.
Ah, but there should be one!
There should be one. And there's the bitterness
Of this unending torture-place for men,
For the proud soul that craves a perfectness
That might outwear the rotting of all things
Rooted in earth.
satisfaction. Thus the hero of _Pauline_ comes to no triumphant
issue, though he maintains,
I have always had one lode-star; now
As I look back, I see that I have halted
Or hastened as I looked towards that star,
A need, a trust, a yearning after God.
The same bafflement is Sordello's, over whom the author muses,
Of a power above you still,
Which, utterly incomprehensible,
Is out of rivalry, which thus you can
Love, though unloving all conceived by man--
What need! And of--none the minutest duct
To that out-nature, naught that would instruct
And so let rivalry begin to live--
But of a Power its representative
Who, being for authority the same,
Communication different, should claim
A course, the first chosen, but the last revealed,
This human clear, as that Divine concealed--
What utter need!
The too-bold dying song of her whose soul
Knew no fellow for might,
Passion, vehemence, grief,
Daring, since Byron died.
Who dropped his plummet down the broad
Deep universe, and said, "No God,"
Finding no bottom.
Our little systems have their day,
They have their day and cease to be;
They are but broken lights of thee,
And thou, O Lord, art more than they,
yet he may feel, with Rossetti, that it is best to
Let lore of all theology
Be to thy soul what it can be.
Indeed, many of the lesser poets have capitulated to overtures of
irreproachable churchman. At present Vachel Lindsay keeps up the
tradition of the poet-revivalist.
Cortes Holliday.] But Kilmer went much farther and advocated the
Grant thou, that when my art hath made thee known
And others bow, I shall not worship thee,
But as I pray thee now, then let me pray
Some greater god,--like thee to be conceived
Within my soul.
You forget all the fighting poets that have been in every land.
strong,
And Sir Walter Raleigh met the axe as a lover meets his bride,
Because he carried in his heart the courage of his song.
When the true lightning of his soul was bared,
Long smouldering till the Mesolonghi torch.
But no matter how heroic the poet may prove himself to be, in his
I said, to do little is bad; to do nothing is worse,
And wrote verse.
The days of long-haired poets now are o'er,
The short-haired poet seems to have the floor;
For now the world no more attends to rhymes
That do not catch the spirit of the times.
The short-haired poet has no muse or chief,
He sings of corn. He eulogizes beef.
One harvest from thy field
Homeward brought the oxen strong;
A second crop thine acres yield
Which I gather in a song.
useless." [Footnote: Preface to _Dorian Gray_.]
"I know what is and what has been;
Not anything to me comes strange,
Who in so many years have seen
And lived through every kind of change.
I know when men are bad or good,
When well or ill," he slowly said,
"When sad or glad, when sane or mad
And when they sleep alive or dead."
Painting and sculpture are but images;
Are merely shadows cast by outward things
On stone or canvas, having in themselves
No separate existence. Architecture,
As something in itself, and not an image,
A something that is not, surpasses them
As substance shadow.
He who might have wrought in flame
Only traced upon the foam.
A keen-edged sword, a soldier's heart,
Are greater than a poet's art,
And greater than a poet's fame
A little grave that has no name.
But Plato's more significant statement is untouched. Is poetry an
As a lake
Reflects the flower, tree, rock, and bending heaven,
Shall he reflect our great humanity.
And these lines are not false to the general view of the poet's
If there's good in war and crime,
There may be in my bits of rhyme.
thoroughly hopeless exposition of the world's meaninglessness, in
And they shall be accounted poet-kings
Who simply tell the most heart-easing things,
said Keats in his youth. Such a statement of the artist's purpose
Dreamer of dreams, born out of my due time,
Why should I strive to set the crooked straight?
Let it suffice me that my murmuring rhyme
Beats with light wing against the ivory gate,
Telling a tale, not too importunate
To those who in the sleepy region stay,
Lulled by the singer of an empty day.
_Preludes_.] and agree with Keats that, whether art has any other
'Tis the privilege of art
Thus to play its cheerful part
Man on earth to acclimate
And bend the exile to his fate.
representation of things is not obscuring them, but is doing us a
Paint a body well,
You paint a soul by implication.
If you get simple beauty and naught else,
You get about the best thing God invents.
A many-sided mirror,
Which could distort to many a shape of error
This true, fair world of things.
With a sorrowful and conquering beauty,
The soul of all looked grandly from his eyes.
But life upon the larger scale, the higher,
When, graduating up a spiral line
Of still expanding and ascending gyres
It pushes toward the intense significance
Of all things, hungry for the infinite.
He will watch from dawn to gloom
The lake-reflected sun illume
The yellow bees in the ivy bloom,
Nor heed nor see, what things they be;
But from these create he can
Forms more real than living man,
Nurslings of immortality.
discoverer and revealer of the perennial under the deciduous";
trivial, but let us see how the case stands.
From one approach the dispute seems to arise from a comparison of
Not learnt, but native, her own natural notes.
Think you, mid all this mighty sum
Of things forever speaking,
That nothing of itself will come,
We must be ever seeking?
To this the philosopher may rejoin that poetry, far from making
True science investigates and brings to human perception such
truths and such knowledge as the people of a given time and
society consider most important. Art transmits these truths
from the region of perception to the region of emotion. And
thus a false activity of science inevitably causes a
correspondingly false activity of art. [Footnote: _What is
Philosophy will clip an angel's wings,
Conquer all mysteries by rule and line,
We are they who dream no dreams,
Singers of a rising day,
Who undaunted,
Where the sword of reason gleams,
Follow hard, to hew away
The woods enchanted.
Science, true daughter of Old Time thou art!
Who alterest all things with thy peering eyes,
Why preyest thou thus upon the poet's heart,
Vulture, whose wings are dull realities?
How should he love thee? Or how deem thee wise,
Who wouldst not leave him in his wandering
Albeit he soared with an undaunted wing?
Hast thou not dragged Diana from her car,
And driven the Hamadryad from the wood
To seek for shelter in some happier star?
Hast thou not torn the Naiad from her flood,
The Elfin from the green grass, and from me
The summer dream beneath the tamarund tree?
Most true it is that I have looked on truth
Askance and strangely,
At the mere touch of cold philosophy,
In his rebuttal the poet makes a good case for himself. He has
The loftiest star of unascended heaven,
Pinnacled dim in the intense inane,
A marsh, where only flat leaves lie,
And showing but the broken sky
Too surely is the sweetest lay
That wins the ear and wastes the day
Where youthful Fancy pouts alone
And lets not wisdom touch her zone.
We call those poets who are first to mark
Through earth's dull mist the coming of the dawn,--
Who see in twilight's gloom the first pale spark
While others only note that day is gone;
For them the Lord of light the curtain rent
That veils the firmament.
Strange hints
Of things past, present and to come there lie
Sealed in the magic pages of that music,
Which, laying hold on universal laws,
Ranges beyond these mud-walls of the flesh.
Ah, but to find
A certain mood enervate such a mind,
Counsel it slumber in the solitude
Thus reached, nor, stooping, task for mankind's good
Its nature just, as life and time accord.
--Too narrow an arena to reward
Emprize--the world's occasion worthless since
Not absolutely fitted to evince
Its mastery!
horror of physical vision as a bondage, but he is fired with an
Arnold, _Heine's Grave_; George Eliot, _O May I Join the Choir
Never joy illumed my brow
Unlinked with hope that thou wouldst free
This world from its dark slavery.
But all is changed the moment you descry
Mankind as half yourself.
The poet, to whose mighty heart
Heaven doth a quicker pulse impart,
Subdues that energy to scan
Not his own course, but that of man.
Though he move mountains, though his day
Be passed on the proud heights of sway,
Though he hath loosed a thousand chains,
Though he hath borne immortal pains,
Action and suffering though he know,
He hath not lived, if he lives so.
beautiful.
would go so far as to make a charge like this one, though Thomas
Peacock, who locked horns with Shelley on the question of poetry,
If thou hast ever done amiss
It was, O Southey, but in this,
That, to redeem the lost estate
Of the poor Muse, a man so great
Abased his laurels where some Georges stood
Knee-deep in sludge and ordure, some in blood.
Was ever genius but thyself
Friend or befriended of a Guelf?
monarchical government, poets will again scramble for the post of
conclusion as Shelley:
Her track, where'er the goddess roves,
Glory pursue, and generous shame,
The unconquerable will, and freedom's holy flame.
Where's the poet? Show him, show him,
Muses mine, that I may know him!
'Tis the man who with a man  Is an equal, be he king
Or poorest of the beggar clan.
Here pause: the poet claims at least this praise,
That virtuous Liberty hath been the scope
Of his pure song.
Poets (hear the word)
Half-poets even, are still whole democrats.
Oh, not that they're disloyal to the high,
But loyal to the low, and cognizant
Of the less scrutable majesties.
It is true that to the poet liberty is an inner thing, not always
Browning was not in favor of too radical social changes, and Mrs.
and there the socialist, Romney Leigh, sneers at the poet's
inefficiency, telling Aurora that the world
To rhyme the cry with which she still beats back
Those savage hungry dogs that hunt her down
To the empty grave of Christ ...
... Who has time,
An hour's time--think!--to sit upon a bank
And hear the cymbal tinkle in white hands.
themselves are blind to the light toward which they profess to be
Unless the artist keep up open roads
Betwixt the seen and unseen, bursting through
The best of our conventions with his best,
The speakable, imaginable best
God bids him speak, to prove what lies beyond
Both speech and imagination.
Thus speaks Mrs. Browning.
Oft shall war end and peace return
And cities rise where cities burn
Ere one man my hill shall climb
Who can turn the golden rhyme.
Let them manage how they may,
Heed thou only Saadi's lay.
No sword
Of wrath her right arm whirled,
But one poor poet's scroll, and with his word
She shook the world.
The gods talk in the breath of the woods,
They talk in the shaken pine,
And fill the long reach of the old seashore
With dialogue divine.
And the poet who overhears
Some random word they say
Is the fated man of men
Whom the nations must obey.
The choir invisible
Of those immortal dead who live again
In minds made better by their presence: live
In pulses stirred to generosity,
In thoughts sublime that pierce the night like stars,
And with their mild persistence urge man's search
To vaster issues.
Poets to come! orators, singers, musicians to come!
Not today is to justify me and answer what I am for,
But you, a new brood, native, athletic, continental,
greater than before known,
Arouse! for you must justify me!
I shall not die; I shall not utterly die,
For beauty born of beauty--that remains.
While in France poetry has been accustomed to reflect the
general tongue of the people, the great poets of England have
almost always had to struggle against a complete dissonance
between their own aims and interests and those of the nation.
The result has been that England, the most inartistic of the
modern races, has produced the largest number of exquisite
literary artists. [Footnote: _French Profiles_, p. 344.]
This may not be enough to justify our faith that these defensive
excellence as a piece of impressionism, which one must scan with
clamorous contradiction is precisely what the aggregate of poets'
How many bards gild the lapses of time!
... Often, when I sit me down to rhyme,
These will in throngs before my mind intrude,
But no confusion, no disturbance rude
Do they occasion; 'tis a pleasing chime.
The confusion of sound which our critic complains of is not to be
environment, two voices are equally strong. Genius is fostered by
duty of the poet is
to scan
Not his own course, but that of man.
Within the romantic period the same phenomenon is evident. Does
antithesis of thought is not less evident.
environments. To quote Walt Whitman,
What the full-grown poet came,
Out spake pleased Nature (the round impassive globe
with all its shows of day and night) saying, He
is mine;
But out spake too the Soul of men, proud, jealous
and unreconciled, Nay, he is mine alone;
--Then the full-grown poet stood between the two and
took each by the hand;
And today and ever so stands, as blender, uniter, tightly
holding hands,
Which he will never release till he reconciles the two,
And wholly and joyously blends them.
The dress
Of flesh that amply lets in loveliness
At eye and ear,
importunatedemands upon the spirit.
bondage, and open their eyes to the spiritual world.
Sometimes how strange and clear to the soul
That all these solid things are indeed but apparitions,
concepts, non-realities.
An appetite, a feeling and a love
That had no need of a remoter charm
By thought supplied.
infinite, says Socrates in the _Philebus_. Do the poet's desires
The swan existing
Is like a song with an accompaniment
Across the grassy lake,
Across the lake to the shadow of the willows
It is accompanied by an image,
--as by Debussy's
"Réflets dans l'eau."
The swan that is
Upon the solitary water--breast to breast
With the duplicity:
"The other one!"
And breast to breast it is confused.
O visionary wedding! O stateliness of the procession!
It is accompanied by the image of itself
At night
The lake is a wide silence,
Without imagination.
But why should poets assume, someone may object, that this mystic
With the single exception of Burke, however, the critics of the
Few poets of the highest class have chosen to exhibit the
beauty of their conception in naked truth and splendor, and it
is doubtful whether the alloy of costume, habit, etc., be not
necessary to temper this planetary music to mortal ears.
The harmony in Shelley's nature which made it possible for his
contemporaries to believe him a gross sensualist, and succeeding
His noblest characteristic I call his simultaneous perception
of Power and Love in the absolute, and of beauty and good in
the concrete, while he throws, from his poet-station between
them both, swifter, subtler and more numerous films for the
connection of each with each than have been thrown by any
modern artificer of whom I have knowledge.[Footnote: Preface
to the letters of Shelley (afterward found spurious).]
struggled with, when he exclaimed,
What quality went to form a man of achievement, especially in
literature, and which Shakespeare possessed so enormously--I mean
"A.E." (see George William Russell),
his discontent;
on the poet's death;
inspiration;
loneliness;  morality;
religion;
usefulness;
youth;
his sense of superiority.
later poets on;
on inspiration;
on the poet as truthteller;
on the poet's religion.
appearance;
on the poet's age;
content with his own time;
democracy;
eyes;
habitat;
health,
humanitarianism,
inferiority to his creations,
inspiration,
love,
morals,
pain,
personality,
religion,
resentment at patronage,
self-consciousness,
self-expression,
usefulness,
other poets on,
on fame,
on inspiration,
on the poet's beauty,
loneliness,
love,
morals,
persecutions,
pride,
religion,
self-expression,
superiority,
usefulness,
other poets on
his self-depreciation,
on the poet's caste,
habitat,
inspiration,
love of liberty,
morals, persecutions,
poverty,
superiority,
other poets on
his body,
escape from himself in poetry,
friendship with Shelley,
indifference to fame,
later poets on,
his morals,
his mother,
his religion,
self-portraits in verse,
superiority,
appearance;
friendship with Wordsworth;
on the poet's habitat;
health;
love;
morals;
reflection in nature;
religion;
youth;
usefulness;
later poets on
Cornwall, Barry (see Procter, Bryan Waller),
his contempt for the public;
his democracy;
his humility;
on inspiration;
on love of fame;
on the poet's divinity;
love;
morals;
poverty;
solitude;
usefulness
on the poet's age;
blindness;
inspiration;
morality;
normality;
poverty
"Hope, Lawrence" (see Violet
his body;
on his desire for fame;
his egotism;
on Elizabethan poets;
on expression;
on the harmony of poets
Homer's blindness;
on his indifference to the public;
on inspiration;
later poets on Keats;
on love;
quarrel with philosophy;
on the poet's democracy,
gift of prophecy,
habitat,
morals,
persecutions,
unpoetical character,
unobtrusiveness,
usefulness
confidence in immortality;
on female poets;
on intoxication and inspiration;
on the poet's age,
morals,
pride;
on poetry and reason;
his democracy;
on grief and poetry;
on the poet's morals,
solitude;
on the savage poet;
on inspiration
on the poet's age,
divinity,
habitat,
inspiration,
usefulness
on the female poet;
on the poet's appearance,
fame,
persecution,
usefulness
McDonald, Carl
"Macleod, Fiona" (see William Sharp)
MacNiel, J. C.
poet's expression,
indifference to fame,
love,
morals,
religion,
usefulness
on the poet's age,
expression,
inspiration,
love,
morals,
usefulness
modern poets on her genius,
on her passion
on female poets,
his hostility to the public,
his indifference to his body,
on the poet's early death,
habitat,
inspiration,
love,
madness,
loneliness,
morals,
persecutions,
poverty,
religion,
seership,
usefulness,
on prenatal life,
Smith, J. Thorne, jr.,
chafing against moral restraints;
on his mother;
on the poet's age;
love of liberty;
morals;
parentage;
religion;
usefulness;
burlesque on inspiration in wine;
his contempt for the public;
on the poet's death;
expression;
inspiration;
intuitions;
love of liberty;
lovelessness;
morality;
pantheism;
persecution;
rank;
religion;
superiority to art;
usefulness
confidence in immortality;
humility;
on inspiration;
on love and poetry;
on the poet's body;
expression;
grief;
habitat;
loneliness;
morals;
youth
his atheism;
on inspiration;
on pessimistic poetry;
on Platonic love;
confidence in immortality;
democracy;
on expression;
on the poet's idleness,
inspiration,
morals,
normality,
protean nature,
love,
reconciling of man and nature;
on the poet-warrior;
his zest
on love and art;
his morals;
on the poet's prophecy;
on the uselessness of art
apology;
on friendship;  on the poet's love;
on inspiration;
confidence in immortality;
on female poets;
his friendship with Coleridge;
on inspiration;
Keats' annoyance with Wordsworth;
on love poetry;
on the peasant poet;
on the poet's democracy,
habitat,
morals,
religion,
solitude;
on prenatal life;
quarrel with philosophy;
repudiation of inspiration through wine