A child's guide to reading

THE READING OF POETRY

When Julia Bryant, the daughter of William Cullen Bryant, was a child, a neighbor of the poet made her first call, and was shown into the parlor. She found the small Julia seated on the floor with an illustrated volume of Milton in her lap. She knew, of course, that the pictures and not the text engaged the child’s attention, but by way of beginning an acquaintance, she asked:

“Reading poetry already, little girl”?

Julia looked up and regarded her gravely. Then with an air of politely correcting ignorance, she explained:

“People don’t read poetry. Papas write poetry, and mamas sing poetry, and little girls learn to say poetry, but nobody reads poetry. That isn’t what it’s for.”

If the several members of all families were as happily accounted for as those in Bryant’s household, the Muses would not live so remote from this world. That mothers sing poetry and little girls say it is enough to keep it everlastingly alive. The trouble is that few households are blessed with papas who write poetry; and there are none too many papas who read it.

If we have not learned to read poetry, let us begin now. Suppose we read and commit to memory the following stanza, and then talk a little about it.

This is from Keats’s “Ode to a Nightingale.” It is one of the most musical, most magical stanzas in all English poetry; that much anyone can tell you who has read the poets. But to tell you in what consists its glory is beyond any critic who is not a poet; nothing of analysis can add to the effect it is making in your ears, in your brain, now that you have committed it to memory. One of the best of English critics—and he was a poet, too—Matthew Arnold, in his essay, “The Study of Poetry,” made but a dull and wordy discourse when he tried to tell what the qualities of poetry are. Only by reading the rest of the poem, and then the rest of Keats, and then other poets, can you increase for yourself the delight of those wonderful lines. If they do not tempt you to the great excursion into the poets, you have not read them over, you have not repeated them aloud often enough. Only for the sake of dwelling upon these lines, and because we have agreed to talk about poetry, and not because our comment can reveal the secret, let us go back and study the stanza.

The nightingale’s song is the voice of immortality. It releases the individual soul from the present hour, from the struggle of life and makes it one with the great experiences of the race. The imagination sweeps over all history on the wings of those first four lines, and then carries us into the world of religious story, in the lines recalling the Book of Ruth. And finally we are borne out of the human world into fairyland. All this in a single stanza!

Every poem of high quality, every one of the treasured passages from long poems, makes such a magic flight into the realm of eternal ideas, so that it is commonly said that poetry is “uplifting.” Life and death and Heaven and the stars are the poet’s subjects. And the poem of common things, in praise of simple virtues and domestic happiness, such as have made Burns and Longfellow and Whittier so dear to the heart, have the same kind of power in less degree; if they do not transport us to Heaven they reveal the seed of immortality in daily circumstance.

Keats bears the imagination over the world and beyond it in a single stanza. All poetry of the highest rank has this power to utter eternity in a few words. And though at first it seems a contradictory thing to say, it is true that the long poem has the same quality of compression; it makes long flights of idea in relatively short compass of words. The time of reading, the time that the physical eye needs to catch the winged sentences, is nothing. What, you say, “The Faerie Queene,” “Paradise Lost,” “Hamlet,” the “Iliad,” the “Idylls of the King” are compressed so that the time it takes to read them is annihilated? Just that. The complete works of a great poet do not fill more space than one or two long novels. Poetry is greater than prose if only because it expresses noble ideas in fewer words; it is language at its highest power. Its rhymes and rhythms are all a means of conveying this power. The person who regards poetry as rhymed sentences that might as well be put into prose, has his eye on the shell of form and has never felt the inner virtues of poetry. Poetry has its forms because only in its forms can it say the most.

But what of the great lines of prose that are as eloquent and compact with thought as any line of poetry? There is only one answer to that. Such lines of prose are poetry too. “In my Father’s house are many mansions” is poetry. That it looks like prose on the printed page is a matter of typesetting, and type is only the outermost husk about the shell. Hear that sentence from the Bible, think it and feel it, and you will know that it has high poetic quality. The intensity of language, the heat of high passion has made the diamond; the diamond is more beautiful after it is cut, but cutting cannot make a diamond. The outward form we shall enjoy, but we must look inward for the essential quality. As our Bible is printed, the following passage from Ecclesiastes has the appearance of prose, yet it has, too, something like the stanzaic divisions of poetry.

Whatever else this may be, it is poetry of high power. Millions of men have found in the Bible something which is not in other books, but that it has in common with other great books the miracle of poetic utterance every right view of the Bible must admit. The passage we have just quoted is in beauty equal and not wholly dissimilar to the stanza from Keats. The Biblical poet has into a few words condensed the tragic symbols of death and sorrow; and from their dust and dissolution his soul has aspired upward to the stars.

If the stanza from Keats and the verse from the Bible are both essentially poetic, what becomes of certain devices of arrangement which are in Keats and not in the Bible poem, such devices as rhymes and regularity of accent? These are but instruments of beauty; the words and their arrangement are the result of the inward passion and beauty of the thought, and we in reading are acted upon by that result, and feel again the passion and idea that produced it.

In inferior poetry cause and effect are reversed or fail altogether. Thousands of poets have tried to make poetry by devices of rhyme and line division, by deliberately arranging vowels and consonants into pleasant sounds; almost any conventionally educated person can learn to do this, just as almost anybody with practice can learn to play a piece on the piano and carefully obey every sign on the music score. But no music results, only an empty regularity of sound. Because there are so many of these mechanical pianists, the sound of the piano seldom attracts and arrests us. Because so many verses, thousands in the monthly magazines, have merely the outward form of poetry, thousands of persons have come to believe that poetry is an artificial trick of words. The heart of poetry is emotion and a sense of beauty. The great emotions, patriotism, religion, love, acting upon the poet, turn his words into magic sequences. When the poetry is finished and arranged on the printed page, we find, true, that it has a form, that it has metrical excellences, that its varieties of sound are thus and so; the poets are masters of at least as many technicalities as the little versifiers. The test comes when we read the sequence of words cooled, as it were, into a set form, and touched by their appeal to our inward sense feel them start into warm life again.

If we go far enough in our reading to study poetry, then we shall expect to learn about the technical methods and rhetorical elements of verse; we shall expect to learn about the lives of the poets and about their growth in their art. Just so the lover of music will wish to study the laws of sound, even the mechanical and physical properties of musical instruments, mastering from a scientific point of view the conditions and materials of the art. Such study helps us to appreciate great music and great poetry. But it is not necessary. The orchestra will act upon us without our knowing how it is arranged. The true poem will act on us if we know nothing more than our own language and our own feelings. Our pleasant task is to offer ourselves to the great poem with attention and a desire for pleasure.

Attention and a desire for pleasure are easily distracted in those who have not the habit of reading poetry. And poetry is often surrounded by unnecessary distractions. The very zeal of those who would draw our sympathies to it leads them to stand in the light attempting to explain what needs no explanation, what, indeed, cannot be explained. The lecturer upon music too often talks while the orchestra is playing. After one knows Shakespeare, a discourse on the “lessons of the tragedies” may enlarge one’s understanding. But such disquisitions are a forbidding introduction to any poet. We have in America many worthy persons who lecture on the ethical beliefs of Robert Browning. Of course any interest, any occasion that will bring in a new “convert,” and lead him to think of Browning at all, is a gain—the principal excuse for lectures and criticisms is that they do invite wandering souls in to meet a poet. But it is usually true that two hours’ reading in Browning is more delightful and more profitable than a two hours’ lecture about him. And it is often the case that lectures about his philosophy repel readers who might enjoy his poetry. The lesson of poetry is beauty; the meaning of poetry is exalted emotions. The private special beliefs of the poet are of interest, because those beliefs raised the poet’s intelligence to a white heat, and that heat left us verse crystals which are beautiful long after the poet’s beliefs have passed away. Through his beliefs the poet reaches to great passions that endure, and anyone can understand them without knowing how the poet arrived at them. If a poet cannot deliver his message, a critic cannot do it for him. Shelley was a worshiper of democracy; Shakespeare was a believer in the divinity of kings. Browning was an optimist. Omar Khayyám, as Edward Fitzgerald rendered him in English poetry, was a kind of pessimistic fatalist. All this is interesting to know. But the reader of poetry does not, in the immediate enjoyment of the poets, vex himself with these diversities of faith. Hear the poets themselves:

Shakespeare’s unrighteous king, Macbeth, hedged round by his enemies, dulled in feeling yet still keenly intelligent, hears of the death of his queen.

Shelley, the lover of human liberty and the wide freedom of nature, chants to the West Wind:

Hear Browning, the athletic optimist:

And of himself, at the close of his life, Browning sings:

Finally listen to the beauty-loving pessimist that Fitzgerald brought out of Persia and set among the jewels in the crown of English poetry:

Here are four poets of different generations and different beliefs; large volumes have been written to expound each and tell us the meaning, the philosophy, the development, the tendencies, the influence of this poet and that. But see them together: no explanation of their meanings can divide them, for they are all poets, and no group of men on earth are liker one to another in purpose than great poets are like to each other. They are all singing the eternal in words of unmatchable power. They are wondrously alike in their celebration of beauty and high feelings.

The great poet differs not from other great poets, but from inferior ones; he differs from his equals mainly in manner of expression. The new poet is he who brings the old messages in ways that no other poet has conceived, and the old poet is always new, because he has attained to beautiful utterance of ideas that we cannot outgrow, which indeed most of mankind have not yet reached. Prose becomes old-fashioned (except the Bible, which has a special place in our life and is, moreover, largely poetic in substance); the prose of Shakespeare’s time and Milton’s is difficult to read, it seems written in an antique language. But Shakespeare and Milton are the poetry of to-day and of uncounted to-morrows.

Not to read poetry is to miss the greatest ideas in the world, to disregard the noblest and most exalted work that the human mind has achieved. To poetry all other arts and sciences are in some way inferior. Not music, nor painting, nor the laws of government, nor the discoveries of mechanics, nor anything else that man has done has the right of poetry to be called divine, except only that of which poetry is the vehicle, which is in a sense one with it, religious prophecy and worship. Whether religion and poetry are one, as some philosophers hold, it is a fact of history that the great religious prophets have had the gifts of poets, and the poets are all singers of hymns and incantations which stir in our hearts the religious sense. We need not go further into this question than to this simple truth, that the man who has no poetry in him is likely to be an irreligious man, not necessarily lacking in goodness and righteousness, but lacking the upward aspiration of the truly religious mind.

Arthur Hugh Clough.