The Poet's Poet Part 7

It is through the eyes, of course, that the soul seems to shine most radiantly. Through them, Rupert Brooke's friends recognized his poetical nature,--through his

Dream dazzled gaze Aflame and burning like a G.o.d in song.

[Footnote: W. W. Gibson, _To E. M., In Memory of Rupert Brooke_.]

Generally the poet is most struck by the abstracted expression that he surprises in his eyes. Into it, in the case of later poets, there probably enters unconscious imitation of Keats's gaze, that "inward look, perfectly divine, like a Delphian priestess who saw visions."

[Footnote: The words are Benjamin Haydn's. See Sidney Colvin, _John Keats_, p. 79.] In many descriptions, as of "the rapt one--the heaven-eyed" [Footnote: Wordsworth, _On the Death of James Hogg_]

Coleridge, or of Edmund Spenser,

With haunted eyes, like starlit forest pools [Footnote: Alfred Noyes, _Tales of the Mermaid Inn_.]

one feels the aesthetic possibilities of an abstracted expression. But Mrs. Browning fails to achieve a happy effect. When she informs us of a fict.i.tious poet that

His steadfast eye burnt inwardly As burning out his soul, [Footnote: '_The Poet's Vow_.]

we feel uneasily that someone should rouse him from his revery before serious damage is done.

The idealistic poet weans his eyes from their pragmatic character in varying degree. Wordsworth, in poetic mood, seems to have kept them half closed.[Footnote: See _A Poet's Epitaph_, and _Sonnet: Most Sweet it is with Unuplifted Eyes_.] Mrs. Browning notes his

Humble-lidded eyes, as one inclined Before the sovran-thought of his own mind.

[Footnote: _On a Portrait of Wordsworth_.]

Clough, also, impressed his poetic brothers by "his bewildered look, and his half-closed eyes." [Footnote: The quotation is by Longfellow. See J.

I. Osborne, _Arthur Hugh Clough_.]

But the poet sometimes goes farther, making it his ideal to

See, no longer blinded with his eyes, [Footnote: See Rupert Brooke, _Not With Vain Tears_.]

and may thus conceive of the master-poet as necessarily blind. Milton's n.o.ble lines on blindness in _Samson Agonistes_ have had much to do, undoubtedly, with the conceptions of later poets. Though blindness is seldom extended to other than actual poets, within the confines of verse having such a poet as subject it is referred to, often, as a partial explanation of genius. Thus Gray says of Milton,

The living throne, the sapphire blaze Where angels tremble while they gaze He saw, but blasted with excess of light, Closed his eyes in endless night, [Footnote: _Progress of Poesy_.]

and most other poems on Milton follow this fancy.[Footnote: See John Hughes, _To the Memory of Milton_; William Lisle Bowles, _Milton in Age_; Bulwer Lytton, _Milton_; W. H. Burleigh, _The Lesson_; R. C.

Robbins, _Milton_.] There is a good deal of verse on P. B. Marston, also, concurring with Rossetti's a.s.sertion that we may

By the darkness of thine eyes discern How piercing was the light within thy soul.

[Footnote: See Rossetti, _P. B. Marston_; Swinburne, _Transfiguration, Marston, Light_; Watts-Dunton, _A Grave by the Sea_.]

Then, pre-eminently, verse on Homer is characterized by such an a.s.sertion as that of Keats,

There is a triple sight in blindness keen.

[Footnote: See Keats, _Sonnet on Homer_, Landor, _Homer, Laertes, Agatha_; Joyce Kilmer, _The Proud Poet, Vision_.]

Though the conception is not found extensively in other types of verse, one finds an admirer apostrophizing Wordsworth,

Thou that, when first my quickened ear Thy deeper harmonies might hear, I imaged to myself as old and blind, For so were Milton and Maeonides, [Footnote: Wm. W. Lord, _Wordsworth_ (1845).]

and at least one American writer, Richard Gilder, ascribes blindness to his imaginary artists.[Footnote: See _The Blind Poet_, and _Lost_. See also Francis Carlin _Blind O'Cahan_ (1918.)]

But the old, inescapable contradiction in aesthetic philosophy crops up here. The poet is concerned only with ideal beauty, yet the way to it, for him, must be through sensuous beauty. So, as opposed to the picture of the singer blind to his surroundings, we have the opposite picture--that of a singer with every sense visibly alert. At the very beginning of a narrative and descriptive poem, the reader can generally distinguish between the idealistic and the sensuous singer. The more spiritually minded poet is usually characterized as blond. The natural tendency to couple a pure complexion and immaculate thoughts is surely aided, here, by portraits of Sh.e.l.ley, and of Milton in his youth. The brunette poet, on the other hand, is perforce a member of the fleshly school. The two types are clearly differentiated in Bulwer Lytton's _Dispute of the Poets_. The spiritual one

Lifted the azure light of earnest eyes,

but his brother,

The one with brighter hues and darker curls Cl.u.s.tering and purple as the fruit of the vine, Seemed like that Summer-Idol of rich life Whom sensuous Greece, inebriate with delight From orient myth and symbol-worship wrought.

The decadents favor swarthy poets, and, in describing their features, seize upon the most expressive symbols of sensuality. Thus the hero of John Davidson's _Ballad in Blank Verse on the Making of a Poet_ is

A youth whose sultry eyes Bold brow and wanton mouth were not all l.u.s.t.

But even the idealistic poet, if he be not one-sided, must have sensuous features, as Browning conceives him. We are told of Sordello,

Yourselves shall trace (The delicate nostril swerving wide and fine, A sharp and restless lip, so well combine With that calm brow) a soul fit to receive Delight at every sense; you can believe Sordello foremost in the regal cla.s.s Nature has broadly severed from her ma.s.s Of men, and framed for pleasure...

You recognize at once the finer dress Of flesh that amply lets in loveliness At eye and ear.

Perhaps it is with the idea that the flesh may be shuffled off the more easily that poets are given "barely enough body to imprison the soul,"

as Mrs. Browning's biographer says of her. [Footnote: Mrs. Anna B.

Jameson. George Stillman Milliard says of Mrs. Browning, "I have never seen a human frame which seemed so nearly a transparent veil for a celestial and immortal spirit." Sh.e.l.ley, Keats, Clough and Swinburne undoubtedly helped to strengthen the tradition.] The imaginary bard is so inevitably slender that allusion to "the poet's frame" needs no further description. Yet, once more, the poet may seem to be deliberately blinding himself to the facts. What of the father of English song, who, in the _Canterbury Tales_, is described by the burly host,

He in the waast is shape as wel as I; This were a popet in an arm tenbrace For any woman, smal and fair of face?

[Footnote: _Prologue to Sir Thopas_.]

Even here, however, one can trace the modern aesthetic aversion to fat.

Chaucer undoubtedly took sly pleasure in stressing his difference from the current conception of the poet, which was typified so well by the handsome young squire, who

Coude songes make, and wel endyte.

[Footnote: _Prologue_.]

Such, at least, is the interpretation of Percy Mackaye, who in his play, _The Canterbury Pilgrims_, derives the heartiest enjoyment from Chaucer's woe lest his avoirdupois may affect Madame Eglantine unfavorably. The modern English poet who is oppressed by too, too solid flesh is inclined to follow Chaucer's precedent and take it philosophically. James Thomson allowed the stanza about himself, interpolated by his friends into the _Castle of Indolence_, to remain, though it begins with the line,

A bard here dwelt, more fat than bard beseems.

And in these days, the sentimental reader is shocked by Joyce Kilmer's callous a.s.sertion, "I am fat and gross.... In my youth I was slightly decorative. But now I drink beer instead of writing about absinthe."

[Footnote: Letter to Father Daly, November, 1914.]

Possibly it would not be unreasonable to take difference in weight as another distinction between idealistic and sensuous poets. Of one recent realistic poet it is recorded, "How a poet could _not_ be a glorious eater, he said he could not see, for the poet was happier than other men, by reason of his acuter senses." [Footnote: Richard Le Gallienne, _Joyce Kilmer_.] As a rule, however, decadent and spiritual poets alike shrink from the thought of grossness, in spite of the fact that Joyce Kilmer was able to win his wager, "I will write a poem about a delicatessen shop. It will be a high-brow poem. It will be liked."

[Footnote: Robert Cortez Holliday, _Memoir of Joyce Kilmer_, p. 62.] Of course Keats accustomed the public to the idea that there are aesthetic distinctions in the sense of taste, but throughout the last century the idea of a poet enjoying solid food was an anomaly. Whitman's proclamation of himself, "Turbulent, fleshy, sensual, eating and drinking and breeding" [Footnote: _Song of Myself_.] automatically shut him off, in the minds of his contemporaries, from consideration as a poet.

It is a nice question just how far a poet may go in ignoring the demands of the flesh. Sh.e.l.ley's friends record that his indifference reached the stage of forgetting, for days at a time, that he was in a body at all.

Even more extreme was the att.i.tude of Poe, as it is presented at length in Olive Dargan's drama, _The Poet_. So cordial is his detestation of food and bed that he not only eschews them himself, but withholds them from his wife, driving the poor woman to a lingering death from tuberculosis, while he himself succ.u.mbs to delirium tremens. In fact, excessive abstemiousness, fostering digestive disorders, has been alleged to be the secret of the copious melancholy verse in the last century. It is not the ill-nourished poet, however, but enemies of the melancholy type of verse, who offer this explanation. Thus Walt Whitman does not hesitate to write poetry on the effect of his digestive disorders upon his gift, [Footnote: See _As I Sit Writing Here_.]

and George Meredith lays the weakness of _Manfred_ to the fact that it was

Projected from the bilious Childe.

[Footnote: George Meredith, _Manfred_.]

But to all conscious of possessing poetical temperament in company with emaciation, the explanation has seemed intolerably sordid.