A Study of Poetry, Bliss Perry [books to read to improve english .txt] 📗

productions whose perusal cannot be completed at one sitting. We may

continue the reading of a prose composition, from the very nature of

prose itself, much longer than we can preserve, to any good purpose, in

the perusal of a poem. This latter, if truly fulfilling the demands of

the poetic sentiment, induces an exaltation of the soul which cannot be

long sustained. All high excitements are necessarily transient. Thus a

long poem is a paradox. And, without unity of impression, the deepest

effects cannot be brought about. Epics were the offspring of an

imperfect sense of Art, and their reign is no more. A poem too brief

may produce a vivid, but never an intense or enduring impression.

Without a certain continuity of effort—without a certain duration or

repetition of purpose—the soul is never deeply moved.”

Gray’s analysis of the law of lyric brevity is picturesque, and too little known:

“The true lyric style, with all its flights of fancy, ornaments, and

heightening of expression, and harmony of sound, is in its nature

superior to every other style; which is just the cause why it could not

be borne in a work of great length, no more than the eye could bear to

see all this scene that we constantly gaze upon,—the verdure of the

fields and woods, the azure of the sea-skies, turned into one dazzling

expanse of gems. The epic, therefore, assumed a style of graver colors,

and only stuck on a diamond (borrowed from her sister) here and there,

where it best became her…. To pass on a sudden from the lyric glare to

the epic solemnity (if I may be allowed to talk nonsense)….” [Footnote: Gray’s Letters, vol. 2, p. 304. (Gosse ed.)]

It is evident that the laws of brevity and unity cannot be disassociated. The unity of emotion which characterizes the successful lyric corresponds to the unity of action in the drama, and to the unity of effect in the short story. It is this fact which Palgrave stressed in his emphasis upon “some single thought, feeling, or situation.” The sonnets, for instance, that most nearly approach perfection are those dominated by one thought. This thought may be turned over, indeed, as the octave passes into the sextet, and may be viewed from another angle, or applied in an unexpected way. And yet the content of a sonnet, considered as a whole, must be as integral as the sonnet’s form. So must it be with any song. The various devices of rhyme, stanza and refrain help to bind into oneness of form a single emotional reflection of some situation or desire.

Watts-Dunton points out that there is also a law of simplicity of grammatical structure which the lyric disregards at its peril. Browning and Shelley, to mention no lesser names, often marred the effectiveness of their lyrics by a lack of perspicuity. If the lyric cry is not easily intelligible, the sympathy of the listener is not won. Riddle-poems have been loved by the English ever since Anglo-Saxon times, but the intellectual satisfaction of solving a puzzle may be purchased at the cost of true poetic pleasure. Let us quote Gray once more, for he had an unerring sense of the difficulty of moulding ideas into “pure, perspicuous and musical form.”

“Extreme conciseness of expression, yet pure, perspicuous, and musical,

is one of the grand beauties of lyric poetry. This I have always aimed

at, and never could attain; the necessity of rhyming is one great

obstacle to it: another and perhaps a stronger is, that way you have

chosen of casting down your first ideas carelessly and at large, and

then clipping them here and there, and forming them at leisure; this

method, after all possible pains, will leave behind it in some places a

laxity, a diffuseness; the frame of a thought (otherwise well invented,

well turned, and well placed) is often weakened by it. Do I talk

nonsense, or do you understand me?” [Footnote: Gray’s Letters, vol. 2, p. 352. (Gosse ed.)]

Poe, whose theory of poetry comprehends only the lyric, and indeed chiefly that restricted type of lyric verse in which he himself was a master, insisted that there was a further lyric law,—the law of vagueness or indefiniteness. “I know,” he writes in his “Marginalia,” “that indefiniteness is an element of the true music—I mean of the true musical expression. Give to it any undue decision—imbue it with any very determinate tone—and you deprive it, at once, of its ethereal, its ideal, its intrinsic and essential character. You dispel its luxury of dream. You dissolve the atmosphere of the mystic upon which it floats. You exhaust it of its breath of fa�ry. It now becomes a tangible and easily appreciable idea—a thing of the earth, earthy.”

This reads like a defence of Poe’s own private practice, and yet many poets and critics are inclined to side with him. Edmond Holmes, for instance, goes quite as far as Poe. “The truth is that poetry, which is the expression of large, obscure and indefinable feelings, finds its appropriate material in vague words—words of large import and with many meanings and shades of meaning. Here we have an almost unfailing test for determining the poetic fitness of words, a test which every true poet unconsciously, but withal unerringly, applies. Precision, whether in the direction of what is commonplace or of what is technical, is always unpoetical.” [Footnote: What is Poetry, p. 77. London and New York, 1900.] This doctrine, it will be observed, is in direct opposition to the Imagist theory of “hardness and economy of speech; the exact word,” and it also would rule out the highly technical vocabulary of camp and trail, steamship and jungle, with which Mr. Kipling has greatly delighted our generation. No one who admires the splendid vitality of “McAndrew’s Hymn” is really troubled by the slang and lingo of the engine-room.

One of the most charming passages in Stedman’s Nature and Elements of Poetry (pp. 181-85) deals with the law of Evanescence. The “flowers that fade,” the “airs that die,” “the snows of yester-year,” have in their very frailty and mortality a haunting lyric value. Don Marquis has written a poem about this exquisite appeal of the transient, calling it “The Paradox”:

“‘T is evanescence that endures;

The loveliness that dies the soonest has the longest life.”

But we touch here a source of lyric beauty too delicate to be analysed in prose. It is better to read “Rose Aylmer,” or to remember what Duke Orsino says in Twelfth Night:

“Enough; no more:

‘T is not so sweet now as it was before.”

7._ Expression and Impulse_

A word must be added, nevertheless, about lyric expression as related to the lyric impulse. No one pretends that there is such a thing as a set lyric pattern.

“There are nine-and-sixty ways of constructing tribal lays,

And every single one of them is right.”

No two professional golfers, for instance, take precisely the same stance. Each man’s stance is the expression, the result, of his peculiar physical organization and his muscular habits. There are as many “styles” as there are players, and yet each player strives for “style,” i.e. economy and precision and grace of muscular effort, and each will assert that the chief thing is to “keep your eye on the ball” and “follow through.” “And every single one of them is right.”

Apply this analogy to the organization of a lyric poem. Its material, as we have seen, is infinitely varied. It expresses all conceivable “states of soul.” Is it possible, therefore, to lay down any general formula for it, something corresponding to the golfer’s “keep your eye on the ball” and “follow through”? John Erskine, in his book on The Elizabethan Lyric, ventures upon this precept: “Lyric emotion, in order to express itself intelligibly, must first reproduce the cause of its existence. If the poet will go into ecstasies over a Grecian urn, to justify himself he must first show us the urn.” Admitted. Can one go farther? Mr. Erskine attempts it, in a highly suggestive analysis: “Speaking broadly, all successful lyrics have three parts. In the first the emotional stimulus is given—the object, the situation, or the thought from which the song arises. In the second part the emotion is developed to its utmost capacity, until as it begins to flag the intellectual element reasserts itself. In the third part the emotion is finally resolved into a thought, a mental resolution, or an attribute.” [Footnote: The Elizabethan Lyric, p. 17.] Let the reader choose at random a dozen lyrics from the Golden Treasury, and see how far this orderly arrangement of the thought-stuff of the lyric is approximated in practice. My own impression is that the critic postulates more of an “intellectual element” than the average English song will supply. But at least here is a clear-cut statement of what one may look for in a lyric. It shows how the lyric impulse tends to mould lyric expression into certain lines of order.

Most of the narrower precepts governing lyric form follow from the general principles already discussed. The lyric vocabulary, every one admits, should not seem studied or consciously ornate, for that breaks the law of spontaneity. It may indeed be highly finished, the more highly in proportion to its brevity, but the clever word-juggling of such prestidigitators as Poe and Verlaine is perilous. Figurative language must spring only from living, figurative thought, otherwise the lyric falls into verbal conceits, frigidity, conventionality. Stanzaic law must follow emotional law, just as Kreisler’s accompanist must keep time with Kreisler. All the rich devices of rhyme and tone-color must heighten and not cloy the singing quality. But why lengthen this list of truisms? The combination of genuine lyric emotion with expertness of technical expression is in reality very rare. Goethe’s “Ueber alien Gipfeln ist Ruh” and Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan” are miracles of art, yet one was scribbled in a moment, and the other dreamed in an opium slumber. The lyric is the commonest, and yet, in its perfection, the rarest type of poetry; the earliest, and yet the most modern; the simplest, and yet in its laws of emotional association, perhaps the most complex; and it is all these because it expresses, more intimately than other types of verse, the personality of the poet.