CHAPTER VII.POETRY.
Poetry is the flower of literature, the most perfect utterance of the human mind in no other of his works does man so nearly approach the Divine, so that in every age the poet has been regarded as the inspired mouthpiece of God. The prophet was the forth teller not merely the foreteller and his message commanded attention and respect as coming from a power above the speaker. Whatever may be said to the contrary there still remains the fact that the greatest and noblest thoughts which have ever occupied the mind of man have found their highest and most permanent expression in poetry, the outward form of which differing from the language of daily life is at once the accompaniment and indication of the dignity of a great idea.
Wordsworth calls poetry the breath and finer spirit of all knowledge. To the question, “What is a poet?” he replies,“He is a man speaking to men; a man, it is true, endowed with more lively sensibility, more enthusiasm and tenderness, who has a greater knowledge of human nature, and a more comprehensive Soul than are supposed to be common amongmankind.To these qualities he has added a disposition to be affected more than other men by absent things as if they were present.”
Poetry is life crystalized into literature, its value is in its eternal truth, in its universal adaptation to the higher needs of our nature. It is because we find in poetry what we have observed but could not formulate for ourselves that it impresses us so deeply. George Eliot said of Wordsworth’s poems, “I never before met with so many of my own feelings expressed just as I should like them.” “There is some awe mixed with the joy of our surprise,” wrote Emerson, “when this poet, who lived in some past world, two or three hundred years ago, says that which lies close to my own Soul, that which I also had well-nigh thought and said.”
Lowell thought that the highest office of a great poet is to show us how much variety, freshness, and opportunity abidesinthe obvious and the familiar. Great poets have concentrated in their works the thought of an age. Gladstone says that the poems of Homer constitute a world of their own. “The study of him is not a mere matter of literary criticism, but is a full study of life in every one of its departments.” Poetry has somewhat the same relation to prose that a landscape painted by Corot bears to a photograph of the same scene. It is truth idealized. The poets teach us to admire beauties in nature that we have often looked at but never perceived. If it were not for Scott few people would know of Loch Katrine.
There is just as beautiful scenery elsewhere, but we are waiting for the poets to show it to us.
Sometimes the poets compress their observations of life and of the working of the spirit of man into words which embody a great truth in a little space. “Jewels five words long that on the stretch’d forefinger of all Time sparkle forever.” Often the poets produce animpression or make a picture by the use or a single appropriate word, as when Tennyson says the cloudsmoulderson the cliff. He is master of the art of calling up mental images by allusions to color, sound and smell, and he carefully chooses from his enormous vocabulary the exact word to produce the desired effect.
Lowell thought that the real literary genius stored up the apt or pleasing word, and Ruskin said, “he is the best poet who can by the fewest words touch the greatest number of secret chords of thought in his reader’s own mind, and set them to work in their own way.”
The inspiration and delight derived from familiarity with the best poetry is one of the most precious results of culture. More than any other work of man poetry helps us to cherish the ideal and we look to our ideals to counteract the hardness of our daily life, to strengthen and uplift us. To read a great poet for a few minutes every day raises one out of the commonplace. Matthew Arnold, who was one of the hardest worked men of his time, used to read a hundred linesor more of theOdysseybefore he went to bed. He said that “Good poetry does undoubtedly tend to form the Soul and character; it tends to beget a love of beauty and of truth in alliance together; it suggests however indirectly high and noble principles of action, and it inspires the emotions helpful in making principlesoperative,”and he added, “We have to turn to poetry to interpret life for us, to console us, to sustain us.”
It is one of the fortunate miracles of literature that so much of the very best poetry is also within the comprehension of the humblest understanding. Many of the poems which have been the delight and consolation of men of the greatest mental capacities have also the power to encourage and uplift those of far lower abilities. ThePsalms of David, for example, have heights and depths which have made them the inspiration of men of all classes in all ages. Progress in the understanding of the poets is the result of reading which, beginning with those that are easiest to comprehend, goes on with increasing power to those, who, like Wordsworth, are philosophical and deep and those, who, likeBrowning,present particular difficulties the overcoming of which is rewarded by a vast wealth of inspiring thought.
Matthew Arnold, who speaks with authority on these subjects says, “Constantly in reading poetry a sense of the best, the really excellent, and of the strength and joy to be drawn from it, should be present in our minds, and should govern our estimate of what we read.” and he remarks of the poet that, “if he is a real classic, if his work belongs to the class of the very best (for this is the true and right meaning of the word,classic,classical), then the great thing for us is to feel and enjoy his work as deeply as ever we can, and to appreciate the wide difference between it and all work which has not the same highcharacter.This is what is salutary, this is what is formative, this is the great benefit to be got from the study of poetry.”
It is not to be expected that at the first reading you can see all the beauties that a word-painter like Tennyson spent years in elaborating. A masterpiece cannot be read too carefully nor too often. To appreciate a great picture like theSistine Madonna, you must return to it again and again and let its gracious sweetness sink into your soul. It is so that you must study a great poem.
Hence it follows naturally that there is great culture value in storing the memory with noble poems. While we should not go so far as to say with Ruskin that no poetry is worth reading which is not worth learning by heart, there is an inspiration in adorning our minds with as much as we can learn accurately from the great poets; and this inspiration is derived especially from the poetry we have known and loved in youth, which has, from its very associations, a strength and sweetness that no other can have.
“Many a noble poem,” says Henry Pancoast, “early acquired by a pure effort of the memory and at first but dimly understood, has gradually worked its way into the hidden depths of a child’s conscious life, revealing its full power and beauty only by slow degrees, and elevating, quickening, and enlarging his spirit in secrecy and in silence.”
Poetry as the truest expression of the life and morals of an age is at once a prophecyand a history. A prophecy as indicating that to which the nation would aspire—a history as a record of the fact of pastaspiration.Concrete individual fact has little significance to poetry except as the manifestation of an idea or of a universal truth.—The poet is the embodiment of his age and his era and a full understanding of his poetry gives us an insight into the very heart of them.