Chapter VI The Poet and the Reader
I myself but write one or two indicative words for the future, I but advance a moment, only to wheel and hurry back in the darkness.
I am a man who, sauntering along, without fully stopping, turns a casual look upon you, and then averts his face,
Leaving it to you to prove and define it,
Expecting the main things from you. WALT WHITMAN
What is poetry to you or me, as we rush to make the trolley car or suburban train? To get to the office on time seems the main chance, and yet returning home in the evening are we so tired that the funny page of the evening paper fulfils our entire intellectual and spiritual need? In asking this let me ask another question. Day in and day out, in work and play, in sorrow and anxiety, in pleasure and enthusiasm, what is life worth to you and me? We Americans are not much given to philosophizing about life, we prefer to live it. Whereas the intelligent Russian argues about the reason for and the meaning of action, Americans are prone without thought to throw themselves into the mill of violent living, to go at top speed until the gears break down, and then sometimes to say with Kipling’s Galley Slave,
—whate’er comes after, I have lived and toiled with Men!
Our answer to the question “What is the meaning of life?” is simply “The living of it.” “Work while you work, and play while you play” may be considered our national motto. In short, for every minute of our existence we want to have “sixty seconds’ worth of distance run.” To live acutely is our pleasure, to work our hearts out and revel in the doing of it is our end. It is thus, to use an expressive phrase of the vernacular, that “we prove something.” And it is this fact which strengthens the paradox that the American, the man of action and bustle, must draw his greatest source of living in the realization of the spirit of singers.
The poet is he who has drunk more deeply at the well of experience than has his fellow men. Many a profound poet never writes a verse, for when a man of temperament is deeply moved he writes a poem within his own heart. It is for some to transcribe their emotions into words whereby their feelings may be communicated from one man to another; but it is for others to be without the gift of verbal expression and the poems must remain within. How many times in life is your soul afire with enthusiasm, drunk with beauty, stricken with sadness, or overflowing with the meaning or portent of experience? At those times you are a poet, whether or not you transcribe the reflection of your heart upon the written page. The man who sings within is a singer whether or not he gives his song verbal utterance. These hours of poetic ecstasy make life a thing to be cherished. The sources of such ecstasy are manifold—the love of man and woman, or parent and children, religious communion with the Spirit, comradeship, work, pursuance of duty, speed, health, beauty, the joy of the builder or artist, attainment to a higher understanding, sadness, hope,—from such springs come the bubbles of the wine of life, heartening the cherished hours. Our greatest poems are those that have never been written—true experience is poetry, and experience is an open door to life.
Yet all experience is an arch wherethrough
Gleams that untraveled world, whose margin fades
For ever and for ever when I move.
The poetry found in books is experience, directly or indirectly, through the agency of verbal expression, transferred to the printed page. The great writers of poems are those who have undergone spiritual experiences of greater intensity than those which come within the range of us lesser mortals. In their poems we partake of their life, of their ecstasy in the presence of beauty, of the richness of their imaginings, of the depth of their spiritual natures.
You and I, when we hear the wood thrush sing, are moved with the music of the notes, and are possibly carried away into the bosky woods where the richly patterned bird in his evening song pours his heart to Heaven; but when Keats hears the melody of the nightingale, his nature so acutely attuned to the harmony, the message of peace and solitude, is swept away in such an ecstasy of heartfelt longing for that same peace, that same solitude, that his own heart pours forth his song, in words no less musical, in cadences no less rich than the notes of the feathered songster. His experience is preserved for us in “The Ode to a Nightingale” and we may read and derive the same fascination that he felt.
Matthew Arnold somewhere tells us that all great poetry has one or both of two attributes: “Natural Magic” and “Moral Profundity.” Whatever these two phrases may mean upon first sight, after examining their true import it will be appreciated that the greatest English critic did not consider poetry a thing for the closet, or sentimental matter only to be read by the melancholy lovelorn to his sentimental maid. The effect of the natural magic of a summer’s night, of the sea breaking upon the wind-swept coast, of the sea gull’s flight, is apparent and valued by everyone. What are most holidays other than periods during which we absorb appearances and sensations, that enter our personalities and remain part of ourselves during the succeeding year of work? “Natural Magic” is that which acts upon us as a holiday influence, compounded perhaps of beauty, mystery, fear or sentiment, which for the moment or for eternity gives our minds entrance into a realm of new and pleasurable things. Read Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan” and you will find the essence of natural magic. You enter a realm, indeed, of magic and witchery, for
In Xanadu did Kubla Khan
A stately pleasure-dome decree:
Where Alph, the sacred river, ran
Through caverns measureless to man
Down to a sunless sea.
Do those lines charm you? They charm most of us and the cadence of the words, the confused picture of Xanadu, have become our own,—riches with which we would not care to part.
Every time I read them the blunt edge of life is worn off, living regains its sharpness, I have to an extent experienced an ecstasy, taken a holiday.
It is hard to define the exhilaration of a canter across the meadows upon a crisp October day, or the impulse that surges through you as you look to the ocean breathing the sea breeze, or the sense of religious comradeship that grips you when in the midst of a crowd, great with a single purpose,—but this is all of the true stuff of Natural Magic. Your sensations are not of the minute, but of all time, as they have vivified your soul and become part and parcel of your personality.
It is so with the poets who sing you a song or breathe a sentiment that is not oral, not didactic, not purposeful, but of the stuff that thrills the spirit of man,—their charm is impossible to define, it must be felt, and for having felt it, your spirit is of a color different from what it was before. As Corot’s landscapes painted in the forest of Fontainebleau are said to express the emotion of the painter when in the presence of nature, so does the lyric poet of magical gift express his feelings, lay bare his soul with its emotions and vacillations. The sadness and sensuous mystery of Edgar Allan Poe, the marvellous ability of Tennyson to fit the most exquisite words to the most subtle incantations of beauty, the thrill of romance in Shakespearean England as depicted by our contemporary, Alfred Noyes, the appetite for sensuous delights of Keats, the tuneful, heartfelt songs of the Cavalier poets—these are of natural magic, of delight to the human soul, of the spirit of art.
When Shakespeare wrote,
Where the bee sucks, there suck I:
In a cowslip’s bell I lie,
he had no moral to expound, he merely sung from his heart with the beauties of nature and the ways of fairy-land as an open book before him. If we wish (and there is no rightful reason why we should not) to drain the very dregs of living for the richest drops of wine, let us enrich, make more virile our enjoyment by seeking nourishing draughts of experience from the poets who have expressed those sweetest joys on earth in poems that have cleansed the souls of men for generation upon generation.
There is the other phrase of Matthew Arnold, “Moral Profundity.” It is when we seek wisdom from the poets that we find this attribute. When the greatest of them give us their innermost thought, not the record of experiences, but the essential deductions from all their experiences, we have their true wisdom. When Wordsworth in “The Lines Composed a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey.” wrote the words,
Therefore am I still
.....well pleased to recognize,
In Nature and the language of the sense,
The anchor of my purest thoughts, the nurse,
The guide, the guardian, of my heart, and soul
Of all my moral being;
or when, in his “Ode on the Intimations of Immortality,” he wrote,
Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting:
The Soul that rises with us, our life’s Star,
Hath had elsewhere its setting,
And cometh from afar:
Not in entire forgetfulness,
And not in utter nakedness,
But trailing clouds of glory do we come
From God, who is our home:
and when Shelley wrote,
We look before and after,
And pine for what is not:
Our sincerest laughter
With some pain is fraught;
Our sweetest songs are those that tell of saddest thought.
or when Tennyson, in “Locksley Hall,” wrote,
This is truth the poet sings,
That a sorrow’s crown of sorrow is remembering happier things.
those men formulated in exquisite language truths that have never been more intensively expressed.
Probably most readers of poetry have already considered these two phrases, and those who have, I feel sure, will agree that they are useful in making for a clearer understanding in our estimation of values. To read intelligently, to get the most out of our books, we should certainly attempt to formulate the various aspects of life the different poets represent, their relation to the time in which they live, and their excellencies when they stand before the bar of the reader’s judgment.
Very few great poets produce poetry of but a single aspect. Shakespeare wrote the magical fairy jingles and yet created the stupendously profound character of “woe-entangled Hamlet”; Tennyson composed many a lilting tune in words, yet as a moralist he presented the most sincere thought of his generation. When we feel philosophic and thoughtful, we turn to the poems containing solemn truths; when weary, jaded, and off color, we turn to the honey of romance, the witcheries of sensuous beauty,—and regain our lost edge.
A single phrase may have natural magic, and yet may express a thought for which during years of our life we have been vainly groping. The poetry of thoughtful content is probably that which has meant the most to men, as upon the philosophy of such religious poets as Dante or Whitman many a man has braced his faith; yet we must remember that much of the wisdom of sages is expressed in as magical language as we have in our cherished heritage.
Let us not, however, be academic about our poets, let us not balance one against the other, let us not be carping about metre, subject matter and critical phrases, let us go to them for what they can give towards making this world a more marvellous place in which to dwell.
If Kipling makes you feel the glory of work, of the hard, terrific work in which we rejoice, if he gives you the call of the road, the wanderlust, and you hear,
—the song—how long! how long!
Pull out on the trail again!
if Bobbie Burns with his songs of Scotia gives you a human sympathy with mankind, an appreciation that for all his foibles and impossibilities “a man’s a man for a’ that”; if Byron fills your heart with the divine discontent that in a sweep of glory lands you above and beyond the commonplaces of every-day existence; if Wordsworth makes you see Nature as you have never seen her before, if he makes a meadow of buttercups appear in a new light, with unsuspected meaning, with hitherto unseen color and grace; if Keats attunes your heart to a deeper appreciation of a form, a fragrance, a musical harmony; if Milton’s solemn cadences inspire you with the depth of that great Puritan’s spirit; if Shakespeare unbares your own character in revealing the inner springs of his eternal heroes; if Longfellow in “My Lost Youth” brings back to you the home of your boyhood, and you see again
The sheen of the far-surrounding seas,
And islands that were the Hesperides
Of all my boyish dreams;—
if you can say with Walt Whitman,
Logic and sermons never convince;
The damp of the night drives deeper into my soul;
or if there is a man unknown except for one poem that still stirs you with the sentiments that you love and honor—if these, I say, have thus met your requirements, each and all of them are great poets to you, they have opened a door to a life richer in content, deeper in import, more vastly worth living.
There is no danger that the poets will ever be in need of readers. The musical expression of thought or sentiment is as old and fundamental as is human nature. The sailors singing their chants as they pull in their anchor, the negro laborers whom we have seen singing a song as they unload the railroad ties, or put the heavy rails in place, the Western range rider calming the steers, and quieting his own nerves through the lone night watches, the sagas and harvest songs of simple people in all lands, are facts that establish the part that poetry plays in the workings of the human heart. In reading poetry you will obtain no credit for upholding a tradition, as the tradition will stand of its own vitality; but in not reading it you will miss one of the most bounteous sources of inspiration, you will pass by the richest treasure house, you will neglect the supreme opportunity for a thorough life that the art of man has put within your reach. When you do read, do it for all time, not for a moment. If the muse is to give you of her best, you must feel after sharing her store as did Wordsworth when he heard the Highland Reaper singing,
For old, unhappy, far-off things,
And battles long ago:
as he tells us,
The music in my heart I bore,
Long after it was heard no more.
The poem but begins after you have read it—the experiences that come after are the ones that count. Let us remember the simile and hold the music in our hearts as a reservoir of powerful beauty that will carry us over the stupid, the heavy, the unpoetic bumps of the days’ doings.