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

and pigments of some picture attributed to this or that master: you will see that Keats, like all the supreme masters of poetic diction, enciphered his lyric message in a language peculiarly his own. It is for us to decipher it as we may. He used, of course, particularly in his earlier work, some of the stock-epithets, the stock poetic “properties” of the Romantic school, just as the young Tennyson, in his volume of 1827, played with the “owl” and the “midnight” and the “solitary mere,” stock properties of eighteenth-century romance. Yet Tennyson, like Keats, and for that matter like Shakspere, passed through this imitative phase into an artistic maturity where without violence or extravagance or eccentricity he compelled words to do his bidding. Each word bears the finger-print of a personality.

Now it is precisely this revelation of personality which gave zest, throughout the Romantic period, to the curiosity about the poetry of alien races. It will be remembered that Romanticism followed immediately upon a period of cosmopolitanism, and that it preceded that era of intense nationalism which came after the Napoleonic wars. Even in that intellectual “United States of Europe,” about 1750—when nationalistic differences were minimized, “enlightenment” was supreme and “propria communia dicere” was the literary motto—there was nevertheless a rapidly growing curiosity about races and literatures outside the charmed circle of Western Europe. It was the era of the Oriental tale, of Northern mythology. Then the poets of England, France and Germany began their fruitful interchange of inspiration. Walter Scott turned poet when he translated Burger’s “Lenore.” Goethe read Marlowe’s Dr. Faustus. Wordsworth and Coleridge visited Germany not in search of general eighteenth-century “enlightenment,” but rather in quest of some peculiar revelation of truth and beauty. In the full tide of Romanticism, Protestant Germany sought inspiration in Italy and Spain, as Catholic France sought it in Germany and England. A new sense of race-values was evident in poetry. It may be seen in Southey, Moore, and Byron, in Hugo’s Les Orientales and in Leconte de Lisle’s Po�mes Barbares. Modern music has shown the same tendency: Strauss of Vienna writes waltzes in Arab rhythms, Grieg composes a Scotch symphony, Dvor�k writes an American national anthem utilizing negro melodies. As communication between races has grown easier, and the interest in race-characteristics more intense, it would be strange indeed if lovers of lyric poetry did not range far afield in their search for new complexities of lyric feeling.

 

8. The Explorer’s Pleasure

This explorer’s pleasure in discovering the lyrics of other races was never more keen than it is to-day. Every additional language that one learns, every new sojourn in a foreign country, enriches one’s own capacity for sharing the lyric mood. It is impossible, of course, that any race or period should enter fully into the lyric impulses of another. Educated Englishmen have known their Horace for centuries, but it can be only a half-knowledge, delightful as it is. France and England, so near in miles, are still so far away in instinctive comprehension of each other’s mode of poetical utterance! No two nations have minds of quite the same “fringe.” No man, however complete a linguist, has more than one real mother tongue, and it is only in one’s mother tongue that a lyric sings with all its overtones. And nevertheless, life offers few purer pleasures than may be found in listening to the half-comprehended songs uttered by alien lips indeed, but from hearts that we know are like our own.

 

“This moment yearning and thoughtful sitting alone,

It seems to me there are other men in other lands

yearning and thoughtful,

It seems to me I can look over and behold them in

Germany, Italy, France, Spain,

Or far, far away, in China, or in Russia or Japan,

talking other dialects,

And it seems to me if I could know those men I

should become attached to them as I do to

men in my own lands,

O I know we should be brethren and lovers,

I know I should be happy with them.”

 

9. A Test

If the reader is willing to test his own responsiveness, not to the alien voices, but to singers of his own blood in other epochs, let him now read aloud—or better, recite from memory—three of the best-known English poems: Milton’s “Lycidas,” Gray’s “Elegy” and Wordsworth’s “Ode to Immortality.” The first was published in 1638, the second in 1751, and the third in 1817. Each is a “central” utterance of a race, a period and an individual. Each is an open-air poem, written by a young Englishman; each is lyrical, elegiac—a song of mourning and of consolation. “Lycidas” is the last flawless music of the English Renaissance, an epitome of classical and pastoral convention, yet at once Christian, political and personal. Beneath the quiet perfection of Gray’s “Elegy” there is the undertone of passionate sympathy for obscure lives: passionate, but restrained. Wordsworth knows no restraint of form or feeling in his great “Ode”; its germinal idea is absurd to logic, but not to the imagination. This elegy, like the others, is a “lyric cry” of a man, an age, and a race; “enciphered” like them, with all the cunning of which the artist was capable; and decipherable only to those who know the language of the English lyric.

There may be readers who find these immortal elegies wearisome, staled by repetition, spoiled by the critical glosses of generations of commentators. In that case, one may test his sense of race, period and personality by a single quatrain of Landor, who is surely not over-commented upon to-day:

 

“From you, Ianthe, little troubles pass

Like little ripples down a sunny river;

Your pleasures spring like daisies in the grass,

Cut down, and up again as blithe as ever.”

Find the classicist, the aristocrat, the Englishman, and the lover in that quatrain!

Or, if Landor seems too remote, turn to Amherst, Massachusetts, and read this amazing elegy in a country churchyard written by a New England recluse, Emily Dickinson:

 

“This quiet Dust was Gentlemen and Ladies,

And Lads and Girls;

Was laughter and ability and sighing,

And frocks and curls.

This passive place a Summer’s nimble mansion,

Where Bloom and Bees

Fulfilled their Oriental Circuit,

Then ceased like these.”