LECTURE XPOETIC DICTION

LECTURE XPOETIC DICTION(Friday Evening, February 9, 1855)X

(Friday Evening, February 9, 1855)

No one who has read any early poems, of whatever nation, can have failed to notice a freshness in the language—a sort of game flavor, as it were—that gradually wastes out of it when poetry becomes domesticated, so to speak, and has grown to be a mere means of amusement both to writers and readers, instead of answering a deeper necessity in their natures. Our Northern ancestors symbolized the eternal newness of song by calling it the Present, and its delight by calling it the drink of Odin.

There was then a fierce democracy of words; no grades had then been established, and no favored ones advanced to the Upper House of Poetry. Men had a meaning, and so their words had to have one, too. They were not representatives of value, but value itself. They say that Valhalla was roofed with golden shields; that was what they believed, and in their songs they called them golden shingles. We should think shields the more poetical word of the two; but to them the poetry was in thething,and the thought of it and the phrase took its life and meaning from them.

It is one result of the admixture of foreign words in our language that we use a great many phrases without knowing the force of them. There is a metaphoric vitality hidden in almost all of them, and we talk poetry as Molière’s citizen did prose, without ever suspecting it. Formerly mennamedthings; now we merely label them to know them apart. The Vikings called their ships sea-horses, just as the Arabs called their camels ships of the desert. Capes they called sea-noses, without thinking it an undignified term which the land would resent. And still, where mountains and headlands have the luck to be baptized by uncultivated persons, Fancy stands godmother. Old Greylock, up in Berkshire, got his surname before we had State geologists or distinguished statesmen. So did Great Haystack and Saddle-Mountain. Sailors give good names, if they have no dictionary aboard, and along our coasts, here and there, the word and the thing agree, and therefore are poetical. Meaning and poetry still cling to some of our common phrases, and the crow-foot, mouse-ear, goat’s-beard, day’s-eye, heart’s-ease, snow-drop, and many more of their vulgar little fellow-citizens of the wood and roadsides are as happy as if Linnæus had neverbeen born. Such names have a significance even to one who has never seen the things they stand for, but whose fancy would not be touched about a pelargonium unless he had an acquired sympathy with it. Our “cumulus” language, heaped together from all quarters, is like the clouds at sunset, and every man finds something different in a sentence, according to his associations. Indeed, every language that has become a literary one may be compared to a waning moon, out of which the light of beauty fades more and more. Only to poets and lovers does it repair itself from its luminous fountains.

The poetical quality of diction depends on the force and intensity of meaning with which it is employed. We are all of us full of latent significance, and let a poet have but the power to touch us, we forthwith enrich his word with ourselves, pouring into his verse our own lives, all our own experience, and take back again, without knowing it, the vitality which we had given away out of ourselves. Put passion enough into a word, and no matter what it is it becomes poetical; it is no longer what it was, but is a messenger from original man to original man, an ambassador from royal Thee to royal Me, and speaks to us from a level of equality. Pope, who did not scruple to employ the thoughts of Billingsgate, is very fastidious aboutthe dress they come in, and claps a tawdry livery-coat on them, that they may be fit for the service of so fine a gentleman. He did not mind being coarse in idea, but it would have been torture to him to be thought commonplace. The sin of composition which he dreaded was,

Lest ten low words should creep in one dull line.

But there is no more startling proof of the genius of Shakspeare than that he always lifts the language up to himself, and never thinks to raise himself atop of it. If he has need of the service of what is called a low word, he takes it, and it is remarkable how many of his images are borrowed out of the street and the workshop. His pen ennobled them all, and we feel as if they had been knighted for good service in the field. Shakspeare, as we all know (for does not Mr. Voltaire say so?), was a vulgar kind of fellow, but somehow or other his genius will carry the humblest things up into the air of heaven as easily as Jove’s eagle bore Ganymede.

Whatever is used with a great meaning, and conveys that meaning to others in its full intensity, is no longer common and ordinary. It is this which gives their poetic force to symbols, no matter how low their origin. The blacksmith’s apron, once made the royal standard of Persia, can fill armieswith enthusiasm and is as good as the oriflamme of France. A broom is no very noble thing in itself, but at the mast-head of a brave old De Ruyter, or in the hands of that awful shape which Dion the Syracusan saw, it becomes poetical. And so the emblems of the tradesmen of Antwerp, which they bore upon their standards, pass entirely out of the prosaic and mechanical by being associated with feelings and deeds that were great and momentous.

Mr. Lowell here read a poem by Dr. Donne entitled “The Separation.”

As respects Diction,thatbecomes formal and technical when poetry has come to be considered an artifice rather than an art, and when its sole object is to revive certain pleasurable feelings already conventional, instead of originating new sources of delight. Then it is truly earth to earth; dead language used to bury dead emotion in. This kind of thing was carried so far by the later Scandinavian poets that they compiled a dictionary of the metaphors used by the elder Skalds (whose songs were the utterance of that within them whichwouldbe spoken), and satisfied themselves with a new arrangement of them. Inspiration was taught, as we see French advertised to be, in six lessons.

In narrative and descriptive poetry we feel that proper keeping demands a certain choice and luxury of words. The question of propriety becomes one of prime importance here. Certain terms have an acquired imaginative value from the associations they awake in us. Certain words are more musical than others. Some rhymes are displeasing; some measures wearisome. Moreover, there are words which have become indissolubly entangled with ludicrous or mean ideas. Hence it follows that there is such a thing as Poetic Diction, and it was this that Milton was thinking of when he spoke of making our English “search her coffers round.”

I will illustrate this. Longfellow’s “Evangeline” opens with a noble solemnity:

This is the forest primeval; the murmuring pines and the hemlocks,Bearded with moss and in garments green, indistinct in the twilight,Stand like the Druids of eld, with voices sad and prophetic,Stand like harpers hoar, with beards that rest on their bosoms.Loud from its rocky caverns the deep-voiced neighboring oceanSpeaks, and in accents disconsolate answers the wail of the forest.

This is the forest primeval; the murmuring pines and the hemlocks,

Bearded with moss and in garments green, indistinct in the twilight,

Stand like the Druids of eld, with voices sad and prophetic,

Stand like harpers hoar, with beards that rest on their bosoms.

Loud from its rocky caverns the deep-voiced neighboring ocean

Speaks, and in accents disconsolate answers the wail of the forest.

There is true feeling here, and the sigh of the pines is heard in the verses. I can find only one epithet to hang a criticism on, and that is the “wailof the forest” in the last line, which is not in keeping with the general murmur. Now I do not suppose that the poet turned over any vocabulary to find the words he wanted, but followed his own poetic instinct altogether in the affair. But suppose for a moment, that instead of being a true poet, he had been only a gentleman versifying; suppose he had written, “This is the primitive forest.” The prose meaning is the same, but the poetical meaning, the music, and the cadence would be gone out of it, and gone forever. Or suppose that, instead of “garments green,” he had said “dresses green”; the idea is identical, but the phrase would have come down from its appropriate remoteness to the milliner’s counter. But not to take such extreme instances, only substitute instead of “harpers hoar,” the words “harpers gray,” and you lose not only the alliteration, but the fine hoarse sigh of the original epithet, which blends with it the general feeling of the passage. So if you put “sandy beaches” in the place of “rocky caverns,” you will not mar the absolute truth to nature, but you will have forfeited the relative truth to keeping.

When Bryant says so exquisitely,

Painted mothsHavewandered the blue skyand died again,

Painted moths

Havewandered the blue skyand died again,

we ruin the poetry, the sunny spaciousness of the image, without altering the prose sense, by substituting

Haveflown through the clear air.

But the words “poetic diction” have acquired a double meaning, or perhaps I should say there are two kinds of poetic diction, the one true and the other false, the one real and vital, the other mechanical and artificial. Wordsworth for a time confounded the two together in one wrathful condemnation, and preached a crusade against them both. He wrote, at one time, on the theory that the language of ordinary life was the true dialect of poetry, and that one word was as good as another. He seemed even to go farther and to adopt the Irishman’s notion of popular equality, that “one man is as good as another, and a dale better, too.” He preferred, now and then, prosaic words and images to poetical ones. But he was not long in finding his mistake and correcting it. One of his mosttender and pathetic poems, “We are Seven,” began thus in the first edition:

A simple child,dear brother Jim.

All England laughed, and in the third edition Wordsworth gave in and left the last half of the line blank, as it has been ever since. If the poem had been a translation from the Turkish and had begun,

A simple child, dear Ibrahim,

there would have been nothing unpoetical in it; but the “dear brother Jim,” which would seem natural enough at the beginning of a familiar letter, is felt to be ludicrously incongruous at the opening of a poem.

To express a profound emotion, the simpler the language and the less removed from the ordinary course of life the better. There is a very striking example of this in Webster’s tragedy of “The Duchess of Malfy.” The brother of the Duchess has procured her murder, and when he comes in and sees the body he merely says:

“Cover her face; mine eyes dazzle; she died young.”

Horror could not be better expressed than in these few words, and Webster has even taken careto break up the verse in such a way that a too entire consciousness of the metre may not thrust itself between us and the bare emotion he intends to convey.

In illustration, Mr. Lowell quoted from Shakspeare (“Henry V”), Marlowe, Chapman, Dunbar, Beaumont and Fletcher, Waller, Young, and Cawthorn.

These men [the poets of the eighteenth century] were perfectly conscious of the fact that poetry is not produced under an ordinary condition of the mind, and accordingly, when they begin to grind their barrel-organs, they go through the ceremony of invoking the Muse, talk in the blandest way of divine rages and sacred flames, and one thing or another, and ask for holy fire to heat their little tea-urns with as coolly as one would borrow a lucifer. They appeal ceremoniously to the “sacred Nine,” when the only thing really necessary to them was the ability to count as high as the sacred ten syllables that constituted their verse. If the Muse had once granted their prayer, if shehadonce unveiled her awful front to the poor fellows, they would have hidden under their beds, every man John of them.

The eighteenth century produced some true poets, but almost all, even of them, were infectedby the prevailing style. I cannot find any name that expresses it better than the “Dick Swiveller style.” As Dick always called wine the “rosy,” sleep the “balmy,” and so forth, so did these perfectlycorrectgentlemen always employ either a fluent epithet or a diffuse paraphrasis to express the commonest emotions or ideas. If they wished to sayteathey would have done it thus:

Of China’s herb the infusion hot and mild.

Coffee would be

The fragrant juice of Mocha’s kernel gray,

or brown or black, as the rhyme demanded. A boot is dignified into

The shining leather that the leg encased.

Wine is

The purple honor of th’ ambrosial vine.

All women are “nymphs,” carriages are “harnessed pomps,” houses are sumptuous or humble “piles,” as the case may be, and everything is purely technical. Of nature there seems to have been hardly a tradition.

But instead of attempting to describe in prose thediluent diction which passed for poetic under the artificial system—which the influence of Wordsworth did more than anything else to abolish and destroy—I will do it by a few verses in the same style. Any subject will do—a Lapland sketch, we will say:

Where far-off suns their fainter splendors throwO’er Lapland’s wastes of uncongenial snow,Where giant icebergs lift their horrent spiresAnd the blank scene a gelid fear expires,Where oft the aurora of the northern nightCheats with pale beams of ineffectual light,Where icy Winter broods o’er hill and plain,And Summer never comes, or comes in vain;Yet here, e’en here, kind Nature grants to manA boon congenial with her general plan.Though no fair blooms to vernal gales expand,And smiling Ceres shuns th’ unyielding land,Behold, even here, cast up a monstrous spoil,The sea’s vast monarch yields nutritious oil,Escaped, perchance, from where the unfeeling crewsDart the swift steel, and hempen coils unloose,He whirls impetuous through the crimson tide,Nor heeds the death that quivers in his side;Northward he rushes with impulsive fin,Where shores of crystal groan with ocean’s din,Shores that will melt with pity’s glow more soonThan the hard heart that launched the fierce harpoon.In vain! he dies! yet not without availThe blubbery bulk between his nose and tail.Soon shall that bulk, in liquid amber stored,Shed smiling plenty round some Lapland board.Dream not, ye nymphs that flutter round the trayWhen suns declining shut the door of day,While China’s herb, infused with art, ye sip,And toast and scandal share the eager lip.Dream not to you alone that Life is kind,Nor Hyson’s charms alone can soothe the mind;If you are blest, ah, how more blest is heBy kinder fate shut far from tears and tea,Who marks, replenished by his duteous hand,Dark faces oleaginously expand;And while you faint to see the scalding doomInvade with stains the pride of Persia’s loom,Happier in skins than you in silks perhaps,Deals the bright train-oil to his little Lap’s.

Where far-off suns their fainter splendors throw

O’er Lapland’s wastes of uncongenial snow,

Where giant icebergs lift their horrent spires

And the blank scene a gelid fear expires,

Where oft the aurora of the northern night

Cheats with pale beams of ineffectual light,

Where icy Winter broods o’er hill and plain,

And Summer never comes, or comes in vain;

Yet here, e’en here, kind Nature grants to man

A boon congenial with her general plan.

Though no fair blooms to vernal gales expand,

And smiling Ceres shuns th’ unyielding land,

Behold, even here, cast up a monstrous spoil,

The sea’s vast monarch yields nutritious oil,

Escaped, perchance, from where the unfeeling crews

Dart the swift steel, and hempen coils unloose,

He whirls impetuous through the crimson tide,

Nor heeds the death that quivers in his side;

Northward he rushes with impulsive fin,

Where shores of crystal groan with ocean’s din,

Shores that will melt with pity’s glow more soon

Than the hard heart that launched the fierce harpoon.

In vain! he dies! yet not without avail

The blubbery bulk between his nose and tail.

Soon shall that bulk, in liquid amber stored,

Shed smiling plenty round some Lapland board.

Dream not, ye nymphs that flutter round the tray

When suns declining shut the door of day,

While China’s herb, infused with art, ye sip,

And toast and scandal share the eager lip.

Dream not to you alone that Life is kind,

Nor Hyson’s charms alone can soothe the mind;

If you are blest, ah, how more blest is he

By kinder fate shut far from tears and tea,

Who marks, replenished by his duteous hand,

Dark faces oleaginously expand;

And while you faint to see the scalding doom

Invade with stains the pride of Persia’s loom,

Happier in skins than you in silks perhaps,

Deals the bright train-oil to his little Lap’s.

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