The Poet's Poet Part 21

[Footnote: _Aurora Leigh_. See also the lines in the same poem, For me, I wrote False poems, like the rest, and thought them true Because myself was true in writing them.]

Has the poet, then, no guarantee for the genuineness of his inspiration?

Must he wait as ignorantly as his contemporaries for the judgment of posterity? One cannot conceive of the grandly egoistic poet saying this.

Yet the enthusiast must not believe every spirit, but try them whether they be of G.o.d. What is his proof?

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.

[Footnote: _The Test_.]

The last lines indicate, do they not, that the depth of the poet's pa.s.sion during inspiration corresponds with the judgment p.r.o.nounced by time upon his verses? William Blake quaintly tells us that he was once troubled over this question of the artist's infallibility, and that on a certain occasion when he was dining with the prophet Elijah, he inquired, "Does a firm belief that a thing is so make it so?" To which Elijah gave the comforting reply, "Every poet is convinced that it does." [Footnote: _The Marriage of Heaven and h.e.l.l_, "A Memorable Fancy."] To the cold critic, such an answer as Emerson's and Blake's is doubtless unsatisfactory, but to the poet, as to the religious enthusiast, his own ecstasy is an all-sufficient evidence.

The thoroughgoing romanticist will accept no other test. The critic of the Johnsonian tradition may urge him to gauge the worth of his impulse by its seemliness and restraint, but the romantic poet's utter surrender to a power from on high makes unrestraint seem a virtue to him. So with the critic's suggestion that the words coming to the poet in his season of madness be made to square with his returning reason. Emerson quotes, and partially accepts the dictum, "Poetry must first be good sense, though it is something more." [Footnote: See the essay on _Imagination_.] But the poet is more apt to account for his belief in his visions by Tertullian's motto, _Credo quod absurdum_.

If overwhelming pa.s.sion is an absolute test of true inspiration, whence arises the uncertainty and confusion in the poet's own mind, concerning matters poetical? Why is a writer so stupid as to include one hundred pages of trash in the same volume with his one inspired poem? The answer seems to be that no writer is guided solely by inspiration. Not that he ever consciously falsifies or modifies the revelation given him in his moment of inspiration, but the revelation is ever hauntingly incomplete.

The slightest adverse influence may jar upon the harmony between the poet's soul and the spirit of poetry. The stories of Dante's "certain men of business," who interrupted his drawing of Beatrice, and of Coleridge's visitors who broke in upon the writing of _Kubla Khan_, are notorious. Tennyson, in _The Poet's Mind_, warns all intruders away from the singer's inspired hour. He tells them,

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.

But it is not fair always to lay the shattering of the poet's dream to an intruder. The poet himself cannot account for its departure, so delicate and evanescent is it. Emerson says,

There are open hours When the G.o.d's will sallies free, And the dull idiot might see 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.

[Footnote: _Merlin_.]

What is the poet, thus shut out of Paradise, to do? He can only make a frenzied effort to record his vision before its very memory has faded from him. Benvenuto Cellini has told us of his tantrums while he was finis.h.i.+ng his bronze statue of Perseus. He worked with such fury, he declares, that his workmen believed him to be no man, but a devil. But the poet, no less than the molder of bronze, is under the necessity of casting his work into shape before the metal cools. And his success is never complete. Sh.e.l.ley writes, "When composition begins, inspiration is already on the decline, and the most glorious poetry that has ever been communicated to the world is probably a feeble shadow of the original conceptions of the poet." [Footnote: _The Defense of Poetry_.]

Hence may arise the pet theory of certain modern poets, that a long poem is an impossibility. Short swallow flights of song only can be wholly sincere, they say, for their ideal is a poem as literally spontaneous as Sordello's song of Elys. In proportion as work is labored, it is felt to be dead.

There is no lack of verse suggesting that extemporaneous composition is most poetical, [Footnote: See Scott's accounts of his minstrels'

composition. See also, Bayard Taylor, _Ad Amicos_, and _Proem Dedicatory_; Edward Dowden, _The Singer's Plea_; Richard Gilder, _How to the Singer Comes the Song_; Joaquin Miller, _Because the Skies are Blue_; Emerson, _The Poet_; Longfellow, _Envoi_; Robert Bridges, _A Song of My Heart_.] but is there nothing to be said on the other side? Let us reread Browning's judgment on the matter:

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!

Indeed?

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.

[Footnote: _Epilogue to the Dramatic Idyls_. The same thought is in the sonnet, "I ask not for those thoughts that sudden leap," by James Russell Lowell, and _Overnight, a Rose_, by Caroline Giltiman.]

Is it possible that the one epic poem which is a man's life work may be as truly inspired as is the lyric that leaps to his lips with a sudden gush of emotion? Or is it true, as Sh.e.l.ley seems to aver that such a poem is never an ideal unity, but a collection of inspired lines and phrases connected "by the intertexture of conventional phrases?"

[Footnote: _The Defense of Poetry_.]

It may be that the latter view seems truer to us only because we misunderstand the manner in which inspiration is limited. Possibly poets bewail the incompleteness of the flash which is revealed to them, not because they failed to see all the glories of heaven and earth, but because it was a vision merely, and the key to its expression in words was not given them. "Pa.s.sion and expression are beauty itself," says William Blake, and the pa.s.sion, so far from making expression inevitable and spontaneous, may by its intensity be an actual handicap, putting the poet into the state "of some fierce thing replete with too much rage."

Surely we have no right to condemn the poet because a perfect expression of his thought is not immediately forthcoming. Like any other artist, he works with tools, and is handicapped by their inadequacy. According to Plato, language affords the poet a more flexible implement than any other artist possesses, [Footnote: See _The Republic_, IX, 588 D.]

yet, at times, it appears to the maker stubborn enough. To quote Francis Thompson,

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 d.a.m.n, not memorize a spirit!

[Footnote: _Her Portrait_.]

Walt Whitman voices the same complaint:

Speech is the twin of my vision: it is unequal to measure itself; It provokes me forever; it says sarcastically, "Walt, you contain enough, why don't you let it out then?"

[Footnote: _Song of Myself_.]

Accordingly there is nothing more common than verse bewailing the singer's inarticulateness. [Footnote: See Tennyson, _In Memoriam_, "For words, like nature, half reveal"; Oliver Wendell Holmes, _To my Readers_; Mrs. Browning, _The Soul's Expression_; Jean Ingelow, _A Lily and a Lute_; Coventry Patmore, _Dead Language_; Swinburne, _The Lute and the Lyre, Plus Intra_; Francis Thompson, _Daphne_; Joaquin Miller, _Ina_; Richard Gilder, _Art and Life_; Alice Meynell, _Singers to Come_; Edward Dowden, _Unuttered_; Max Ehrmann, _Tell Me_; Alfred Noyes, _The Sculptor_; William Rose Benet, _Thwarted Utterance_; Robert Silliman Hillyer, _Even as Love Grows More_; Daniel Henderson, _Lover and Lyre_; Dorothea Lawrence Mann, _To Imagination_; John Hall Wheelock, _Rossetti_; Sara Teasdale, _The Net_; Lawrence Binyon, _If I Could Sing the Song of Her_.]

Frequently these confessions of the impossibility of expression are coupled with the bitterest tirades against a stupid audience, which refuses to take the poet's genius on trust, and which remains utterly unmoved by his avowals that he has much to say to it that lies too deep for utterance. Such an outlet for the poet's very natural petulance is likely to seem absurd enough to us. It is surely not the fault of his hearers, we are inclined to tell him gently, that he suffers an impediment in his speech. Yet, after all, we may be mistaken. It is significant that the singers who are most aware of their inarticulateness are not the romanticists, who, supposedly, took no thought for a possible audience; but they are the later poets, who are obsessed with the idea that they have a message. Emily d.i.c.kinson, herself as untroubled as any singer about her public, yet puts the problem for us. She avers,

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?

"To races nurtured in the dark." There lies a prolific source to the poet's difficulties. His task is not merely to ensure the permanence of his own resplendent vision, but to interpret it to men who take their darkness for light. As Emerson expresses it in his translation of Zoroaster, the poet's task is "inscribing things unapparent in the apparent fabrication of the world." [Footnote: _Essay on Imagination_.]

Here is the point where poets of the last one hundred years have most often joined issues. As writers of the eighteenth century split on the question whether poetry is the product of the human reason, or of a divine visitation, literal "inspiration," so poets of the nineteenth century and of our time have been divided as to the propriety of adapting one's inspiration to the limitations of one's hearers. It too frequently happens that the poet goes to one extreme or the other. He may either despise his audience to such a degree that he does not attempt to make himself intelligible, or he may quench the spark of his thought in the effort to trim his verse into a shape that pleases his public.

Austin Dobson takes malicious pleasure, often, in championing the less aristocratic side of the controversy. His _Advice to a Poet_ follows, throughout, the tenor of the first stanza:

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.

This precipitates us at once into the marts of the money changers, and one shrinks back in distaste. If this is what is meant by keeping one's audience in mind during composition, the true poet will have none of it.

Poe's account of his deliberate composition of the _Raven_ is enough to estrange him from the poetic brotherhood. Yet we are face to face with an issue that we, as the "gentle reader," cannot ignore. Shall the poet, then, inshrine his visions as William Blake did, for his own delight, and leave us unenlightened by his apocalypse?

There is a middle ground, and most poets have taken it. For in the intervals of his inspiration the poet himself becomes, as has been reiterated, a mere man, and except for the memories of happier moments that abide with him, he is as dull as his reader. So when he labors to make his inspiration articulate he is not coldly manipulating his materials, like a pedagogue endeavoring to drive home a lesson, but for his own future delight he is making the spirit of beauty incarnate. And he will spare no pains to this end. Keats cries,

O for ten years, that I may overwhelm Myself in poesy; so I may do the deed My soul has to herself decreed.

[Footnote: _Sleep and Poetry_. See also the letter to his brother George, April, 1817.]

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.

[Footnote: _The Poet_.]

It is true that not all poets agree that these years of labor are of avail. Even Bryant, just quoted, warns the poet,

Touch the crude line with fear But in the moments of impa.s.sioned thought.

[Footnote: _The Poet_.]

Indeed the singer's awe of the mysterious revelation given him may be so deep that he dares not tamper with his first impetuous transcription of it. But as a sculptor toils over a single vein till it is perfect, the poet may linger over a word or phrase, and so long as the pulse seems to beat beneath his fingers, no one has a right to accuse him of artificiality. Sometimes, indeed, he is awkward, and when he tries to wreathe his thoughts together, they wither like field flowers under his hot touch. Or, in his zeal, he may fas.h.i.+on for his forms an embroidered robe of such richness that like heavy brocade it disguises the form which it should express. In fact, poets are apt to have an affection, not merely for their inspiration, but for the words that clothe it.

Keats confessed, "I look upon fine phrases as a lover." Tennyson delighted in "jewels fine words long, that on the stretched forefinger of all time sparkle forever." Rossetti spoke no less sincerely than these others, no doubt, even though he did not ill.u.s.trate the efficacy of his search, when he described his interest in reading old ma.n.u.scripts with the hope of "pitching on some stunning words for poetry." Ever and anon there is a rebellion against conscious elaboration in dressing one's thoughts. We are just emerging from one of the noisiest of these.

The vers-librists insist that all adornment and disguise be stripped off, and the idea be exhibited in its naked simplicity. The quarrel with more conservative writers comes, not from any disagreement as to the beauty of ideas in the nude, but from a doubt on the part of the conservatives as to whether one can capture ideal beauty without an accurately woven net of words. Nor do the vers-librists prove that they are less concerned with form than are other poets. "The poet must learn his trade in the same manner, and with the same painstaking care, as the cabinet maker," says Amy Lowell. [Footnote: Preface to _Sword Blades and Poppy Seed_.] The disagreement among poets on this point is proving itself to be not so great as some had supposed. The ideal of most singers, did they possess the secret, is to do as Mrs. Browning advises them,