A Study of Poetry Part 22

Recordare, Jesu pie, Quod sum causa tuae viae; Ne me perdas ilia die.

Lacrymosa dies illa Qua resurget ex fa villa, Judicandus h.o.m.o reus; Huic ergo parce, Deus!

Pie Jesu, Domine, Dona eis requiem.

"Let any one feel the emotion of these verses and then turn to some piece of cla.s.sic poetry, a pa.s.sage from Homer or Virgil, an elegiac couplet or a strophe from Sappho or Pindar or Catullus, and he will realize the difference, and the impossibility of setting the emotion of a mediaeval hymn in a cla.s.sic metre."

7. "_Friends_: I know how vain it is to gild a grief with words, and yet I wish to take from every grave its fear. Here in this world, where life and death are equal things, all should be brave enough to meet what all the dead have met. The future has been filled with fear, stained and polluted by the heartless past. From the wondrous tree of life the buds and blossoms fall with ripened fruit, and in the common bed of earth, the patriarchs and babes sleep side by side.

"Why should we fear that which will come to all that is?

"We cannot tell, we do not know, which is the greater blessing--life or death. We do not know whether the grave is the end of this life, or the door of another, or whether the night here is not somewhere else at dawn.

Neither can we tell which is the more fortunate--the child dying in its mother's arms, before its lips have learned to form a word, or he who journeys all the length of life's uneven road, painfully taking the last slow steps with staff and crutch.

"Every cradle asks us, 'Whence?' and every coffin, 'Whither?' The poor barbarian, weeping above his dead, can answer these questions as intelligently as the robed priest of the most authentic creed. The tearful ignorance of the one is just as consoling as the learned and unmeaning words of the other. No man, standing where the horizon of a life has touched a grave, has any right to prophesy a future filled with pain and tears. It may be that death gives all there is of worth to life. If those we press and strain against our hearts could never die, perhaps that love would wither from the earth. Maybe this common fate treads from out the paths between our hearts the weeds of selfishness and hate, and I had rather live and love where death is king, than have eternal life where love is not. Another life is naught, unless we know and love again the ones who love us here.

"They who stand with aching hearts around this little grave need have no fear. The larger and the n.o.bler faith in all that is and is to be tells us that death, even at its worst, is only perfect rest. We know that through the common wants of life--the needs and duties of each hour--their griefs will lessen day by day, until at last this grave will be to them a place of rest and peace--almost of joy. There is for them this consolation. The dead do not suffer. And if they live again, their lives will surely be as good as ours. We have no fear. We are all children of the same mother, and the same fate awaits us all.

"We, too, have our religion, and it is this: Help for the living, hope for the dead."

ROBERT G. INGERSOLL, "Address over a Little Boy's Grave."

CHAPTER VI

I have not attempted in this chapter to give elaborate ill.u.s.trations of the varieties of rhyme and stanza in English poetry. Full ill.u.s.trations will be found in Alden's _English Verse_. A clear statement of the fundamental principles involved is given in W. H. Carruth's _Verse Writing_.

Free verse is suggestively discussed by Lowes, _Convention and Revolt_, chapters 6 and 7, and by Andrews, _Writing and Reading of Verse_, chapters 5 and 19. Miss Amy Lowell has written fully about it in the Prefaces to _Sword Blades and Poppy Seed_ and _Can Grande's Castle_, in the final chapter of _Tendencies in Modern American Poetry_, in the Prefaces to _Some Imagist Poets_, and in the _North American Review_ for January, 1917. Mr. Braithwaite's annual _Anthologies of American Verse_ give a full bibliography of special articles upon this topic.

An interesting cla.s.sroom test of the difference between prose rhythm and verse rhythm with strongly marked metre and rhyme may be found in comparing Emerson's original prose draft of his "Two Rivers," as found in volume 9 of his Journal, with three of the stanzas of the finished poem:

"Thy voice is sweet, Musketaquid, and repeats the music of the ram, but sweeter is the silent stream which flows even through thee, as thou through the land.

"Thou art shut in thy banks, but the stream I love flows in thy water, and flows through rocks and through the air and through rays of light as well, and through darkness, and through men and women.

"I hear and see the inundation and the eternal spending of the stream in winter and in summer, in men and animals, in pa.s.sion and thought. Happy are they who can hear it."

"Thy summer voice, Musketaquit, Repeats the music of the rain; But sweeter rivers pulsing flit Through thee, as thou through Concord plain.

"Thou in thy narrow banks are pent; The stream I love unbounded goes Through flood and sea and firmament; Through light, through life, it forward flows.

"I see the inundation sweet, I hear the spending of the stream Through years, through men, through nature fleet, Through love and thought, through power and dream."

I also suggest for cla.s.sroom discussion the following brief pa.s.sages from recent verse, printed without the authors' names:

1. "The milkman never argues; he works alone and no one speaks to him; the city is asleep when he is on his job; he puts a bottle on six hundred porches and calls it a day's work; he climbs two hundred wooden stairways; two horses are company for him; he never argues."

2. "Sometimes I have nervous moments-- there is a girl who looks at me strangely as much as to say, You are a young man, and I am a young woman, and what are you going to do about it?

And I look at her as much as to say, I am going to keep the teacher's desk between us, my dear, as long as I can."

3. "I hold her hands and press her to my breast.

"I try to fill my arms with her loveliness, to plunder her sweet smile with kisses, to drink her dark glances with my eyes.

"Ah, but where is it? Who can strain the blue from the sky?

"I try to grasp the beauty; it eludes me, leaving only the body in my hands.

"Baffled and weary, I came back. How can the body touch the flower which only the spirit may touch?"

4. "Child, I smelt the flowers, The golden flowers ... hiding in crowds like fairies at my feet, And as I smelt them the endless smile of the infinite broke over me, and I knew that they and you and I were one.

They and you and I, the cowherds and the cows, the jewels and the potter's wheel, the mothers and the light in baby's eyes.

For the sempstress when she takes one st.i.tch may make nine unnecessary; And the smooth and shining stone that rolls and rolls like the great river may gain no moss, And it is extraordinary what a lot you can do with a plat.i.tude when you dress it up in Blank Prose.

Child, I smelt the flowers."

CHAPTER VII

Recent criticism has been rich in its discussions of the lyric. John Drinkwater's little volume on _The Lyric_ is suggestive. See also C. E.

Whitmore's article in the _Pub. Mod. Lang. a.s.s._, December, 1918. Rhys's _Lyric Poetry_, Sch.e.l.ling's _English Lyric_, Reed's _English Lyrical Poetry_ cover the whole field of the historical English lyric. A few books on special periods are indicated in the "Notes" to chapter ix.

An appreciation of the lyric mood can be helped greatly by adequate oral reading in the cla.s.sroom. For teachers who need suggestions as to oral interpretation, Professor Walter Barnes's edition of Palgrave's _Golden Treasury_ (Row, Petersen & Co., Chicago) is to be commended.

The student's ability to a.n.a.lyse a lyric poem should be tested by frequent written exercises. The method of criticism may be worked out by the individual teacher, but I have found it useful to ask students to test a poem by some or all of the following questions:

(a) What kind of experience, thought or emotion furnishes the basis for this lyric? What kind or degree of sensitiveness to the facts of nature?

What sort of inner mood or pa.s.sion? Is the "motive" of this lyric purely personal? If not, what other relationships or a.s.sociations are involved?

(b) What sort of imaginative transformation of the material furnished by the senses? What kind of imagery? Is it true poetry or only verse?

(c) What degree of technical mastery of lyric structure? Subordination of material to unity of "tone"? What devices of rhythm or sound to heighten the intended effect? Noticeable words or phrases? Does the author's power of artistic expression keep pace with his feeling and imagination?

CHAPTER VIII

For a discussion of narrative verse in general, see Gummere's _Poetics_ and _Oldest English Epic_, Hart's _Epic and Ballad_, Council's _Study of Poetry_, and Matthew Arnold's essay "On Translating Homer."

For the further study of ballads, note G. L. Kittredge's one volume edition of Child's _English and Scottish Popular Ballads_, Gummere's _Popular Ballad_, G. H. Stempel's _Book of Ballads_, J. A. Lomax's _Cowboy Songs and other Frontier Ballads_, and Hart's summary of Child's views in _Pub. Mod. Lang. a.s.s._, vol. 21, 1906. The _Oxford Book of English Verse_, Nos. 367-389, gives excellent specimens.

All handbooks on _Poetics_ discuss the Ode. Gosse's _English Odes_ and William Sharp's _Great Odes_ are good collections.

For the sonnet, note Corson's chapter in his _Primer of English Verse_, and the Introduction to Miss Lockwood's collection. There are other well-known collections by Leigh Hunt, Hall Caine and William Sharp.

Special articles on the sonnet are noted in Poole's _Index_.

The dramatic monologue is well discussed by Claude Howard, _The Dramatic Monologue_, and by S. S. Curry, _The Dramatic Monologue in Tennyson and Browning_.

CHAPTER IX