POETRY

POETRY.
God to his untaught children sent
Law, order, knowledge, art, from high.
And ev'ry heav'nly favour lent,
The world's hard lot to qualify.
They knew not how they should behave,
For all from ileav'n stark-naked came;
But Poetry their garments gave,
And then not one had cause for shame.—Goirras.
The sense of beauty enters into the highest philosophy, as in Plato. The highest poet must be a philosopher, accomplished like Dante, or intuitive like Shakespeare.—GLADSTONE.
T
HE world lives backward in memory as well as forward in ,hope. In the past are the heart's dead
kindred. There are the great who rule our spirits from their urns; there our joys reappear as purer and more brilliant than they were experienced. There sorrow loses its bitterness, and is changed into a sort of pleasing recol¬lection. I love everything that's old,' says Goldsmith; and Sir William Temple, alluding to the charm of anti-quity, quotes the king of Aragon as saying: Among so many things as are by men possessed or pursued in the whole course of their lives, all the rest are baubles beside old wood to burn, old wine to drink, old friends to con-verse with, and old books to read.'
That distance thus quickens the play of the imagina-tion is the chief reason why you may observe in the poets, as already exemplified, a certain infusion of the antique element, which in ordinary modern prose is either un¬known or quite exceptional — thou," thy,'a-weary,'
308
 
DEPARTMENTS OF EXPRESSION — POETRY. 309
'a-gone,' ken," dire," ire," list," ere," surcease,' whilom," wight," sooth," sith," erst,' etc.
You have also observed the marked distinction between the prose writer and the poet in the latter's use of enal¬lage — the constant use, for instance, of the adjective for the adverb, as in —
A braying ass
Did sing most loud and clear.—Cowper.
The sower stalks
With ineasur'd step, and liberal throws the grain.—
Thomson.
The poet's partiality for terse and euphonious com-pounds can hardly have escaped your attention. How forceful and beautiful are Longfellow's care-encumbered men,' Milton's 'young-eyed cherubim,' Shakespeare's ' black-browed night,' Homer's cloud-compelling Jove,' 'far-darting Apollo," silver-footed Thetis," many-sound-ing sea.' These, indeed, are only a more resonant variety of those descriptive and qualifying expressions known, in general, as epithets, which, while exhibited in their full splendor and harmony in our most vigorous prose, as Carlyle's, are most frequent in poetical composition, and happily so. You are familiar with Gray's oft-quoted lines:
The curfew tolls the knell of parting day,
The lowing herd winds slowly o'er the lea,
The ploughman homeward plods his weary way,
And leaves the world to darkness and to me.
Now fades the glimmering landscape on the sight,
And all the air a solemn stillness holds,
Save where the beetle wheels his droning flight,
And drowsy tinklings lull the distant folds.
Now consider how much is lost by a critic's proposed omission of the epithets:
 
310	COMPLETE, RHETORIC.
The curfew tolls the knell of day,
The herd winds slowly o'er the lea, The ploughman homeward plods his way, And leaves the world to me.
Now fades the landscape on the sight,
And all the air a stillness holds,
Save where the beetle wheels his flight,
And tinklings lull the folds.
In this respect Shelley surpasses all poets since the age of Elizabeth:
Beneath is a wide plain of billowy mist,
Encinctured by the dark and blooming forests,
Dim twilight lawns and stream-illumined caves,
And wind-enchanted shapes of wandering mist;
And far on high the keen sky-cleaving mountains Prom icy spires of sun-light radiance fling
The dawn.
All epithets may be said to illustrate a more or less spontaneous device of the mind to call up some image that shall carry the dry fact into the heart with compact, rose-tinted vividness. The prose statement is condemned as 'over-florid' and 'affected' long before it displays that profusion of imagery whigh is allowed in the poetic. The more spiritual and sympathetic the insight, the richer will be the colors, the more uplifting the life, the finer the zesthetic glow. Let the following suffice for further illus-tration:
And winter, slumbering in the open air,
Wears on his smiling face a dream of spring.--Coleridge. How sweet the moonlight sleep S upon this bank!
Here will we sit, and let the sounds of music
Creep into our ears; soft stillness and the night
Become the touches of sweet harmony.
Sit, Jessica: look how the floor of heaven
Is thick inlaid with patines of bright gold;
There's not the smallest orb which thou beholdest, But in his motion like an angel sings,
Still quiring to the young-eyed cherubim.— gkakeepeare.
 
DEPARTMENTS OF EXPRESSION — POETRY. 311
The emotions awakened by such lines — charm, fascina¬tion, delight, or by whatever name expressed—are the characteristic of Fine Art. They belong eminently to such poems as Tennyson's Logos-eaters, Keats' Endy¬mion, and Shelley's Cloud.
Rhythm.—You have seen how historians and essayists have sought to enlarge and renforce their meaning by the subtle yet poetic aid of harmony—that principle of pro¬portion or symmetry of parts which appeals to the musical sensibility. The following passage will sufficiently refresh your recollection of this kind of movement:
God called up from dreams a man into the vestibule of heaven, saying, Come thou hither and see the glory of my house. And to the servants that stood around his throne he said, Take him and undress him from his robes of flesh ; cleanse his vision, and put a new breath into his nostrils; only touch not with any change his human heart — the heart that weeps and trembles. . . . Then the man sighed and stopped, shuddered and wept. His overladen heart uttered itself in tears; and he said, Angel, I will go no farther, for the spirit of man aches with this infinity. Insufferable is the glory of God. Let me lie down in the grave from the persecutions of the Infinite, for end, I see, there is none. And from all the listening stars that shone around issued a choral voice, The man speaks truly; end there is none that ever yet we heard of. End is there none? the angel solemnly demanded. Is there indeed no end, and is this the sorrow that kills you? But no voice answered that he might answer himself. Then the angel threw up his glorious hands to the heaven of heavens, saying—End is there none to the universe of God! So, also, there is no beginning! —Richter.
By carefully regarding the accent —the stress thrown upon the pronunciation of syllables —you will perceive in this an alternate swelling and lessening of sound at more or less regular intervals. It is this measured motion that we are to understand by the term rhythm, which, in the sense of recurrence or correspondence, is applied to the roll of the serf, the reverberations of thunder, the coming
 
312	COMPLETE RHETORIC.
and going of the seasons, the ebb and flow of ocean-tides, the revolution of the planets.
Metre.—When the pulses constitute a definite succes-sion — that is, when the rhythm is reduced to law—the result is metre. If either in Dryden's
The double, double, double beat, or in Waller's
How sweet and fair she seems to be,
we attend to the order of accents, the syllables are seen to be so arranged that the first is to the second as the third is to the fourth and the fifth to the sixth, etc. In prose this superior regularity is inadmissible. The arrange¬ment may be rhythmical, but never metrical — at least only fragmentarily, not characteristically or noticeably
SO.
Accent, as stated above, is a particular stress or effort of voice upon certain syllables of words, which distin-guishes them from the others by a greater distinctness and loudness of pronunciation. Obviously, accent tends to lengthen the quantity of a syllable — that is, the time we dwell on it. English metre, being the regular recur-rence of similarly accented syllables at short intervals, thus appears related to time, or quantity, the syllable receiving the rhythm-accent requiring relatively long time (-) for its enunciation, and the unaccented relatively short time (–). Thus in Wesley's
Hangs mt helpless sett' on thee, Leave, rth! leave me not alone,
it is not meant that 'my' and 'me' are short absolutely, or that 'hangs' and 'not' are long in themselves, but simply with reference to the stress on syllables that pre¬cede and follow.
Theoretically, the rhythm-accent should agree with the
 
DEPARTMENTS OF EXPRESSION — POETRY.	313
word-accent — should fall upon the syllable accented in prose, and must do so if it fall on a syllable in a word:
Complaining went that little stream.—Bryant.
Accent in metre may fall on syllables that have not a dis¬tinct word-accent, or on unemphatic monosyllables. In the following, nearly all the vowels (in themselves consid¬ered) have their short sounds:
The bUsy. rivalet in hAmble
Slippeth away in happiness; it ever HUrrieth en, a selitade lireand bAt Heaven above it.
If the syllables be marked relatively to the amount of time consumed by each in prose pronunciation, we shall have:
The bray rivulet in humble valley Slippeth away In happiness; It evèr HUrrieth on, solitude itiOUnd Wit
Heaven libOve it.
As ease and pleasure of utterance require us to avoid a succession of strong impulses, so they require us to avoid a succession of light ones. Hence we can never have three consecutive clearly pronounced syllables without a metrical accent. Therefore the poet, insisting upon the foregoing arrangement, compels us to read:
The busy rivulet in hUmble valley Slippeth away in happiness; it ever Harrieth en, a selitilde areund but
Heaven al:01/e it.
It will be seen that there is a slight discrepancy between the rhythm and the word-accents. Reduced to quantity notation, in which the accent, pronunciative or metrical, makes a syllable long, this becomes:
‘../	-	-	.	•••,
•••	- s-d -	-
V V
 
314	COMPLETE RHETORIC.
In general, the metrical, the prose, and the logical accent should coincide. By the last is meant stress that calls attention to the meaning. Accent thoroughly concurs with sense here:
Richard is Richard, that is, I am I.—Shakespeare.
No longer I follow a sound,
No longer a dream I pursue,
0 happiness not to be found,
Unattainable treasure, Adieu !—Cowper.
The following might be admissible as variations of an air, but certainly would not answer for the 'air' itself:
S6on as thy letters trembling I unclOse.—Pope. I view my crime, but kindle tit the view.—Thid.
With joy and 16ve trifimphing and fair trath.—Milton.
Then Ore with blOody talon the rent plain.—Byron.
In any metrical arrangement of words, the recurring combination or group of accented and non-accented sylla¬bles is called a foot. The feet commonly used in English poetry are: the iambus, which consists of an unaccented syllable followed by an accented (Latin -), as 'prepare,' convey," my hörse," the days'; trochee, which consists of an accented syllable followed by an unaccented (Latin - as ran to," glery," reek of," discord '; anapcest, which consists of two unaccented syllables followed by an accented (Latin — -), as 'to the gray,' 'and the &Ike,' 'comprehend'; dactyl, which consists of one accented syllable followed by two unaccented ones (Latin - as merrily,' gaily the," sweetest and.'
A combination of feet is called a line, or verse (from the Latin vertere, to turn—the reader turning back from the end of one line to the beginning of another). Verses may be named according to the number of accents they contain—one-accent, two-accent, three-accent, etc. The following table explains the classical nomenclature:
 
DEPARTMENTS OF EXPRESSION— POETRY.	315
Verse of one foot .	Monometer.
"	two feet	Dimeter.
ig	three feet	Trimeter.
44	four feet	Tetrameter.
it	five feet .	• Pentameter.
six feet	Hexameter.
••	seven feet	. Heptameter.
if	eight feet	Octometer.
Thus:
Fair Daff odils, I we weep I to see I
You haste I away I so soon:
As yet I the ear I ly ris I ing sun I
Has not I attained I his noon. I
Stay, stay, I
Until I the hast I ing day
Has run I
But to I the e ven song; I
And hay I ing play'd I togeth I er, we
Will go I with you I along. I —Herrick.
A need I less Al I exand I rine ends j the song, I
And, like I a wound I ed snake, I drags its I slow length I along. I
-Pope.
Comrades, I leave me I here a I little, I while as I yet 'tis I early morn: I
Leave me I here, and I when you I want me, I sound up I on the I bugle I horn. I —Tennyson.
All the above measures are iambic, except the last, which is trochaic. As here, verses of different length are often combined to avoid monotony or otherwise enhance the effect. Greater variety is given to the flow of the verse, also, by the interchange of feet— the iambus with the anapEest, the trochee with the dactyl, and conversely. An iambic line admits the trochee, most frequently in the initial foot. The characteristic metre is to be determined, in such cases, by the prevalent foot. The following are examples:
Till the I livelong I daylight I fail;
Thin to the I spicy I mit-brown I ale.—.Milton.
 
316	COMPLETE RHETORIC.
Merrily I swim we, the I 'neon shines bright;
Dewnward we I drift through the I shadow and I light. finder yon I rack the I eddies I sleep
Calm and I silent, I dark and I deep.—Scott.
Beheld, I how they taw I their terch I es on high.—Dryden.
The cawslip startles in meadows green,
The battercup catches the min in its chalice, And there's never a leaf nor a blade too mean To be some hippy creature's palace.—Lowell.
Not only do measures intermix in the same verse, but verses of different feet as well as of different lengths are substituted for one another:
Now strike the golden lyre again, Break his b6nds of sleep asander,
And rouse him like a rattling peal of thander. Revenge! Revenge! Timatheus cries,
See the Furies arise;
See the snakes that they rear,
How they hiss in the air!—Dryden.
A further variation is in the use of a single syllable for a whole foot. This is virtually the omission of a syllable required by the law of the verse:
Break, break, break,
At the foot of thy crags, 0 seal
But the tender grace of a day that is dead Will never come back to me.—Tennyson.
Sometimes an extra syllable or two are added, as in the selection from Lowell, and in this:
I fly to scenes romantic, Where never men resort, For in an age so frantic Impiety is sport.—Cowper.
Thy w6rds with grace divine
Imbued, bring to their sweetness n6 satiety.—Milton.
A verse consisting of integral feet —neither deficient nor redundant — is said to be acatalectic. It may also be
 
DEPARTMENTS OF EXPRESSION — POETRY.	317
observed, in passing, that an intervening pause renders admissible two consecutive accents, as in the quotation from Milton. The pause, it should be added, cannot be neglected, in reading, without loss of rhythmical effect. It is an important means of varying and beautifying the rhythm:
From branch to branch the smaller birds with song Solaced the woods, and spread their painted wings Till even; nor then the solemn nightingale
Ceased warbling, blit all night tilned her soft lays: Others on silver lakes and rivers, bathed
Their downy breast; II the swan with arched neck Between her white wings mantling proudly, rews Her state with oary feet. —Milton.
When the pause, as in the fourth line, intersects a foot, it is properly called a ecesura (cutting). With less propri¬ety the term has been extended to all medial pauses.
Rhyme.—Metre, in the wide sense, as the regular re 
currence of similarly affected syllables, includes rhyme, which determines a recurrence of sound in the closing syllable or syllables of successive or proximate lines. A perfect rhyme between two syllables requires (1) that they be identical in sound from the vowel to the end — weight, straight ; sky, try ; sea, free : (2) that the articu¬lation before the vowel-sound be different — call, fall; atrain, drain: (3) that both be accented —contdin, com¬pldin; not retdin, f6untain. Rhymes are single, double, or triple:
Sceptre and crown
Must tumble down,
And in the dust be equal made
With the poor crooked scythe and spade.—Shirley.
Patron of all those luckless brains
That, to the wrong side leaning, Indite much metre with much pains,
And little or no meaning.—Cowper.
 
318	COMPLETE RHETORIC.
Take her up tenderly,
Lift her with care,
Fashioned so slenderly,
Young and so fair.—Hood.
Rhyme confined to the close of separate verses is called terminal, which is the English standard. Not infre¬quently, however, it occurs within the line, usually with a quickening effect. Shelley's Cloud illustrates both cases.
I bring fresh showers for the thirsting flowers
From the seas and the streams;
I bear light shade for the leaves when laid
In their noon-day dreams.
Rhymes like the foregoing, in which both vowels and consonants are in concord, are said to be consonant. A correspondence of vowels only, is called assonance. Thus:
Let me choose, and I will dwell
Where the sea, with sounding tread
Climbeth, till his feathery crest
Brush the mountain's feet.
The assonant or vowel-rhyme is an element so subtle as to be, to an unpracticed ear, scarcely perceptible. The Brownings employ it to an extent that more timid natures would hardly venture upon.
No poetical artifice stands higher in popular estimation than rhyme proper, yet the pleasing effect is not reached without great difficulty — without danger, we may say, of degenerating into vapid jingle. To aspiring rhymesters we recommend the remarks of the younger Hood: 'Let the beginner remember one thing— Rhyme is a fetter, undoubtedly. Let him therefore refrain from attempting measures with frequent rhymes, for experience alone can give ease in such essays. Only the skilled can dance gracefully in fetters.'
Unrhymed or blank verse, not held to so strict a law, allows the lines to run into each other with great liberty,
 
DEPARTMENTS OF EXPRESSION — POETRY.	319
and hence is especially suited to themes of dignity and force, demanding more free and manly numbers than rhyme, which finds its most appropriate place in the mid 
dle regions of thought and sentiment. Its main form is the iambic pentameter, called heroic from its constant employment in the high epic. In this are written Mil¬ton's Paradise Lost, for instance, and the plays of Shakespeare. It was first established and popularized, however, by Marlowe in his play of Tamburlaine, the hero of which, a shepherd, aspirant to the throne of Persia, says:
For in a field, whose superficies
Is cover'd with a liquid purple veil,
And sprinkled with the brains of slaughtered men My royal chair of state shall be advanc'd;
And he that means to place himself therein, Must armed wade up to the chin in blood, . Or make a bridge of murdered carcasses,
Whose arches should be fram'd with bones of Turks, Ere I would lose the title of a king.
'Other forms of blank verse, appearing here and there, but not likely to command the interest of many readers, and hardly to be imitated, are the choral measures, as in Samson Agortistes; the trochaic tetrameter, in Hia-watha; the iambic hexameter in Evangeline:
The sun to me is dark, And silent is the moon When she deserts the night
Hid in her vacant interlunar cave.—Milton.
Whence these legends and traditions, With the odors of the forest,
With the dew and damp of meadows, With the curling smoke of wigwams, With the rushing of great rivers, With their frequent repetitions,
And their wild reverberations,
As of thunder in the mountains.—Longfellow.
 
320	COMPLETE RHETORIC.
Even as rivulets twain, from distant and separate sources, Seeing each other afar, as they leap from the rocks and pursuing Each one its devious path, but drawing nearer and nearer,
Rush together at last, at their trysting place in the forest: So these lives that run thus far in separate channels,
Coming in sight of each other, then swerving and flowing asunder, Parted by barriers strong, but drawing nearer and nearer, Rushed together at last and one was lost in the other. —Ibid.
Alliteration.—Metre, in the comprehensive sense of consonance, includes also alliteration, or the recurrence, at short intervals, of the same initial letter. This, indeed, as a kind of correspondence in sound, is a species of rhyme. It was a prominent, formal feature of Anglo- Saxon verse. As a rule, two accented or emphatic words in one line, and one in the next, were alliterated. Thus:
Any science under sonne,
The sevene artz and alle,
But thei ben /erned of our Lordes love, Lost is all the tyme. —Langlande.
The Elizairethan authors combined the alliterative system with the rhyming. Spenser uses alliteration profusely. Along with antithesis, it was a main feature of Eliza¬bethan Euphuism, a sort of superfine style that derives its name from the Euphues of Lily. Says the hero of this story:
There is no privilege that needeth a pardon, neither is there any remission to be asked, where a commission is granted. I spe,ake this, Gentlemen, not to excuse the offence which was taken, but to offer a defence where I was mistaken. A cleare conscience is a sure card; truth hath the prerogative to speake with plainnesse, and the mod¬esty to heare with patience.
Shakespeare ridicules the excess, or abuse, of it: Whereat with blade, with bloody blameful blade, He bravely broached his boiling bloody breast.
In modern English it occurs as an occasional variety, often with striking and beautiful effect, but is never a
 
DEPARTMENTS OF EXPRESSION — POETRY.	321
prevailing characteristic. Popular proverbs, as Waste not, want not,' Meddle and muddle,' bear testimony to its naturalness.
Verse-combinations.—Two successive rhymes form a couplet; three, a triplet. A number of lines— from two upwards— taken together and so adjusted as to form a whole with respect to similar groups in a poem, is a stanza:
Many an evening by the waters did we watch the stately ships, And our spirits rush'd together at the touching of the lips.
—Tennyson.
I said,	toil beneath the curse,
But, knowing not the universe,
I fear to slide from bad to worse.—Ibid.
A stanza of three lines, without regard to rhyme, may be called a tercet. A stanza of four lines is a quatrain, the most common of all. Some forms of this have received, in certain religious poems for public worship, peculiar names. We illustrate the construction of the three that are most familiar.— Long, Short, and Common Metre:
The fearful soul that tries and faints, And walks the ways of God no more, Is but esteemed almost a saint,
And makes his own destruction sure.
—Isaac Watts.	I --I --I --I -- I	- I	- I	- I	-
I	- I --I --I	-
Nearer my Father's house,
Where many mansions be;
Nearer the throne where Jesus reigns, Nearer the crystal sea.
—Pho3be Carey.
Through every period of my life	I	- I
Thy goodness I'll pursue;
And after death in distant worlds,	_ I
Thy glorious theme renew.
--Addison.
21
 
322	COMPLETE RHETORIC.
The stanza of five lines is of uncommon occurrence. The best example of it is Shelley's Ode to a Skylark:
Higher still, and higher
From the earth thou springest:
Like a cloud of fire,
The blue deep thou wingest,
And singing still dost soar, and soaring ever singest.
The six-line stanza —notably exemplified in Byron's Isles of Greece— is much practiced :
The isles of Greece, the isles of Greece!
Where burning Sappho loved and sung, Where grew the arts of war and peace,—
Where Delos rose, and Phoebus sprung! Eternal summer gilds them yet,
But all, except their sun, is set.
Certain stanzas have acquired historical celebrity. The first of these is the rhyme royal, or seven-line stanza, of Chaucer and the Elizabethans. From the specimen that follows, it will be seen that the first four lines make an ordinary quatrain, of alternate rhymes; and that the fifth line repeats the rhyme of the fourth, while the last two form a couplet:
My throte is cut unto my nekke-bone, Saide this child, and as by way of kinde
I shottlde have deyd, yea, longe time agone; But Jesu Christ, as ye in bookes finde,
Will that His glory last and be in minds, And for the worship of his mother dere, Yet may I sing 0 Alma loud and clere.
Eight heroics (iambic pentameters), the first six rhyming alternately and the last two successively, compose the ottava rima, a favorite with the Italian and Spanish poets. The following specimen is from Byron's Don Juan:
 
DEPARTMENTS OF EXPRESSION — POETRY.	323
Between two worlds life hovers like a star,
'Twixt night and morn, upon the horizon's verge: How little do we know that which we are!
How less what we may be! The eternal surge Of time and tide rolls on, and bears afar
Our bubbles; as the old burst, new emerge, Lash'd from the foam of ages; while the graves Of empires heave but like some passing wave.
The most noted of all stanzas is the Spenserian, so called fioni the author of the Faerie Queene, by whom it was borrowed from the Italians. It consists of eight heroics rhyming at intervals, and followed by a rhyming Alexan¬drine (iambic hexameter). It has been used with success by Thomson in his Castle of Indolence, and by Beattie in The Minstrel; but its most successful cultivator, among moderns, is Byron. Here is a specimen from his
Childe Harold:
And when, at length, the mind shall be all free From what it hates in this degraded form,
Heft of its carnal life, save what shall be
Existent happier in the fly and worm,—
When elements to elements conform,
And dust is as it should be, shall I not
Feel all I see, less dazzling, but more warm? The bodiless thought? the Spirit of each spot?
Of which, even now, I share at times the immortal lot.
It will be convenient to consider, next in order, the sonnet, though not a stanza, inasmuch as it is something complete in itself — a short poem. First cultivated in Italy, it was imported into England by Sir Thomas Wyatt, in the reign of Henry VIII. On the pattern of Petrarch, it is composed of two quatrains and two tercets (fourteen iambic pentameters); the two outside lines of each qua¬train rhyming together, and likewise the two middle lines of each; the first, second, and third lines of the first tercet rhyming severally with the first, second, and third lines of the second. Thus:
 
824	COMPLETE RHETORIC.
When I consider how my life is spent
Ere half my days, in this dark world and wide, And that one talent, which is death to hide. Lodged with me useless, though my soul more bent
To serve therewith my Maker, and present
My true account, lest he, returning chide;
Doth God exact day-labor, light denied?
I fondly ask. But Patience, to prevent
That murmur, soon replies, 'God doth not need Either man's work, or his own gifts. Who best
Bear his mild yoke, they serve him best. His state
Is kingly; thousands at bidding speed,
And post o'er land and ocean without rest;
They also serve who only stand and wait.—MiIfon.
In the second part, however, great variety prevails. Sometimes there are only two rhymes instead of three, and even when there are three, the order is often varied. Shakespeare always concludes with a couplet, and Words-worth not seldom.
It will be noticed how thoroughly compacted and intervoven are the two quatrains, while to prevent the tercets from swaying apart, care is usually taken that there shall be no grammatical or logical break, and thus the whole structure is a unit.
What is a Sonnet? 'Tis the pearly shell That murmurs of the far-off, murmuring sea; A precious jewel carved most curiously;
It is a little picture painted well.
What is a Sonnet? 'Tis the tear that fell From a great poet's hidden ecstacy;
A two-edged sword, a star, a song—ah me! Sometimes a heavy tolling funeral bell.—Gilder.
What is Poetry?—Thus far we have had to do with the form of poetical composition; diction, rhythm, metre, rhyme —the last being an accidental, not a necessary element. Any production that bears the external mark of metre is customarily termed a poem, just as an essay
 
DEPARTMENTS OF EXPRESSION — POETRY.	325
which chances to be spoken is indifferently styled an oration. But
' Thirty days bath September,
April, June, and November,'
is not poetry, though it be verse.
Beyond the melody of easy-flowing verses there must be manifest the gift to touch the vitals of a subject, a deeply sympathetic insight, a seeing with the inward as well as with the outward eyes, a rich personality, wealth of material, an intellect urged to its finest action by an ardent, a generous and beauty-loving sensibility. High poetry must have depth and energy of thought, and the highest is the most solidly, the most firmly set in truth. It must have breadth of feeling, heat to fuse the parts into unity. Over all, it must have ideality. History relates, science groups, philosophy explains, but poetry must create, must transmute into fresh and throbbing forms the stores gathered by perception and memory, set¬ting its lucent and spiritualizing mirror behind the facts and events it exhibits, swathing its object in October hues of emblematic association and suggestion, throwing over the common things of life a super-earthly light. Going beyond the actual, however, it may not go beyond the possibilities of nature. 'For as truth,' says Hobbes, is the bound of the historian, so the resemblance of truth is the utmost limit of poetical liberty.' Its true function is to interpret, to illumine.
In scenic delineation, besides completing the harmony, the poet goes beyond nature in the richness of the accumulation, and colors the language with glowing illustrations. Such are the chosen scenes of romance and of fairy-land, the happy valleys and islands of the blest, the gardens of the Hesperides, the Elysian fields, and the pictures of Paradise.
The portraying of characters likewise undergoes the idealizing process. Men and women are produced with larger intellects, greater virtues, higher charms, than life can afford; it being agree 
 
326 COMPLETE RHETORIC.
able to contemplate such elevated natures. The bright points of real character are set forth, with omission of the dark features; strong qualities are given without the corresponding weaknesses, and incompatible virtues united in the same person. Lofty aspira-tions and practical sense, rigid justice and tender consideration, the forester and the marl:ter, are made to come together, notwithstand¬ing the rarity of the combinations in the actual.
Seeing that human society labors under a chronic want of disin¬terestedness and mutual consideration on the part of its members, there is a demand for select or heightened pictures of love, devoted¬ness, and sympathy, as an ideal compensation.
The Ideal of story consists in assigning the fortunes and destinies of individuals with greater liberality and stricter equity than under the real or actual. The miseries as well as the flatness of life are passed over, or redeemed; the moments of felicity are represented as if they were the rule; Poetic Justice is supreme, and measures out to each man his deserts; mixed and bad characters are admitted along with the good, but all are dealt with as the poet's .(which is also the reader's) sense of justice demands Poetic represen¬tations may be utterly and avowedly removed from truth, as in the tales of fairy land, and the romances of chivalry, in which case the pleasure is purely ideal; or they may color so lightly as to be taken for truth and reality, and then they inspire belief and intoxicate with hope. Dreams of future bliss, for the individual, or for the race, founded on sanguine feeling and plausible anticipation, exhibit the Ideal at the summit of its power.—Bain.
It has been truly and admirably said that the poetical mood is ever a visionary one. 'A poem is twofold, repre-senting an actuality, and at the same time a tender lucent image thereof, like the reflection of a castle, standing on the edge of a lake, in the calm deep mirror before it: at one view we see the castle and its glistening counterpart. In the best poetry there is vivid picture-making: reality is made more visible by being presented as a beautiful show. It is the power to present the beautiful show which consti¬tutes the poet. To conceive a scene or person with such liveliness and compactness as to be able to transfer the conception to paper with a distinctness and palpitation that
 
DEPARTMENTS OF EXPRESSION — POETRY.	327
shall make the reader behold in it a fresh and buoyant type of the actual — this implies a subtle, creative life in the mind, this is the test of poetic faculty. To stand this test there must be an inward sea of thought and sensi¬bility, dipping into which the poet is enabled to hold up his conception or invention all adrip with sparkling fresh¬ness.'
Such, in effect or in the aggregate, is the doctrine or teaching of the most authoritative definitions of poetry. Milton says of it, as in a parenthesis, which is simple, sensuous, and passionate.' Coleridge calls it a species of composition opposed to science, as having intellectual pleasure for its object, and as attaining its end by the use of language natural to us in a state of excitement.' Wordsworth styles it the breath and fine spirit of all knowledge, the impassioned expression which is in the countenance of all science." Poetry,' says Voltaire, 'is the music of the soul, and, above all, of great and feeling souls.' 'Poetry,' says Hare, 'is the key to the hiero-glyphics of nature.' Says Macaulay: 'The merit of poetry, in its wildest forms, still consists in the truth — truth conveyed to the understanding, not directly by the words, but circuitously by means of imaginative associa-tions, which serve as its conductors." It is not metre, but a metre-making argument, that makes a poem,' says Emerson in his characteristic manner. But of those who have essayed a consideration of the elements of poetry, none, in our opinion, has been so successful in formulating his conception as Mr. Stedman: 'Poetry is rhythmical, imaginative language interpreting nature.' By 'nature' is here meant the world of matter and the world of mind inclusive. With the substitution of 'metrical' for rhyth¬mical,' this would meet the requirements of scientific definition.
I George II. Calvert.
 
328	COMPLETE RHETORIC.
This is the high and catholic standard, the union of nature with art; pure thought, great thought, demon-strated to the senses, expressed in words that are pictures. Much poetry departs from the pure type, from want of solid knowledge, lofty aim, or central design and total effect; from morbid self-consciousness; from undue objec¬tivity; from excessive moralization or didacticism, as Young's Night Thoughts, Pope's Essay on Man, Dar¬win's ZoOnomia. The critics perceive that the mission of art is not to teach in homilies, but through the ministra¬tions of the beautiful.
Species.—In the childhood of poetry, the different kinds of it, as now distinguished, were mingled in the same composition. Naturally, the first type to appear with any distinctness would be the Lyric, the brief, con-centrated form under which the original bards poured forth, with instrumental accompaniment, the exultant strains of victory, the ardor of love, praise of their gods, lamentations over their misfortunes. Music; however, is an auxiliary only, and is commonly dispensed with. Lyri¬cal poems may be broadly divided into Song, Ode, Elegy, and Sonnet. The first may be (1) sacred or (2) secular. The Psalms of David, hymns of the church, the old Greek hymns to the deities, usually sung by the choruses, are instances of the first class. Secular songs may be patri¬otic, convivial, comic, moral, high-sentimental (as Tenny¬son's Break, break, break), or amatory (Suckling, Burns, Moore, and Campbell, among a host of others, afford choice examples of this). The ode was anciently, but is not now, intended to be sung; often simple in structure, at other times most elaborate. It may display quiet thought or intense feeling, ranging from the pleasant and gay to the noble and sublime. Examples are Milton's Hymn on the Nativity, Dryden's Ode to St. Cecilia, Collins' Ode on the Passions, Ode to Evening, Keats' Ode to a Night 
 
DEPARTMENTS OF EXPRESSION - POETRY.	329
ingale, Coleridge's Ode to the Departing Year, Words- worth's Intimations of Immortality. The burden of the modern elegy is regret for the dead, or plaintive reflection on mortality in general. Well known examples are Mil¬ton's Lycidas, Gray's Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard, Shelley's Adonais, and Tennyson's In Memoriam. The sonnet has already been illustrated.
The second great division of poetry is the Epic. The name is derived from the Greek er,)c, meaning primarily a word, then a speech, and by an easy movement, a narra¬tion. In contrast to the Lyric, therefore, which is an effusion of warm sentiment, the Epic is a metrical story, a poetical recital of events; possessing, at its best, a plot intelligibly started, a principal personage with subordi¬nate characters and suitable incidents, many alternations and windings conducting to a definite termination, and withal, propriety of sentiment and elevation of style. Subdivisions are (1) the Heroic, or high epic, ievoted to some elevated theme in history, legend;mythology, relig¬ion. The chief examples are Homer's Iliad and his Odyssey, Virgil's _zEneid, Dante's Div ma Commedia, Camoens' Lusiad, Milton's Paradise Lost, Tasso's Jeru¬salem Delivered. To these may be added, though less regular and complete, Pollok's Course of Time, and the Anglo-Saxon Beowulf,—half-natural, half-supernatural, and all wild,— imported from the German forests and revised by an unknown Christian. We may mention also the Paraphrase of the Bible, by Coedinon (who died in 680), a story of the Creation, the Revolt, the Flood, and the Exodus. Unlike the other, it is a native of English soil, and marks, for us, the beginning of true English poetry. 'Others after him,' says Bede, 'tried to make religious poems, but none could vie with him, for he did not learn the art of poetry from men, nor of men, but from God.' The real heroic has a counter 
 
330	COMPLETE RHETORIC.
part or parody in the mock-heroic, which puts in heroic positions, and endows with heroic functions, meaner per-sons and objects, with the design of ridicule. (2) Ro¬mantic, distinguished from the Heroic by either a purely human control or a modified super-human agency, by the larger scope given to the elements of love, and by a lighter cast of metre — prevailingly the iambic tetrame¬ter. Its key-note was given by the metrical romance of the Normans. Chaucer's Romaunt of the Rose, Spen¬ser's Faerie Queene, Butler's Iludibras, Scott's Lady of the Lake, Byron's Don Juan, are examples. (3) Story telling, a still humbler form, a tale with complete story and denotthment, love or humor predominant. Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, Shakespeare's Rape of Lucrece, Byron's Corsair, Crabbe's Tales of the _Hall, Keats' Eve of St. Agnes, Burns' Tam o' Shanter, Longfellow's Evangeline, Tennyson's Enoch Arden, may be cited. (4) Historic, including chiefly the rhyming chronicles; as that of Rob¬ert of Gloucester, if such may be called poetry at all. (5) Mixed, slightly epical or narrative, with a mixture of the sentimental, satirical, and reflective; as Byron's Childe _Harold, or, better, Shelley's Revolt of Islam. (6) Pas¬toral, a depicture of rural life, and hence abounding in description, but correspondingly meagre in action. In Keats' E'ndyntion, a series of descriptive sketches of nature is connected by a mythical story. The connecting thread in Thomson's Seasons is the course of the year. In Wordsworth's Excursion, though succession predomi¬nates, description is prominent. Clearer-marked types are Ramsey's Gentle Shepherd, Beattie's Minstrel, the Cotter's Saturday Night, by Burns, and Tennyson's Idyls of the King. The two great fathers of the pastoral are Theocritus and Virgil; the former the original in his Idylia, the latter the imitator in his Bucolics and _Ec¬logues. (7) The Ballad, devoted, like the romance, to
DEPARTMENTS. OF EXPRESSION - POETRY.	331
war; like the popular song, to conviviality; and, like the tale, to love; but less discursive, being short, simple, and rapid,—originally the song of the dancers.' The chief ballad metres are iambic lines of six and seven feet, and trochaic lines of seven feet, commonly written in two lines, tetrameter and trimeter alternately. Macaulay, Scott, Thackeray, Hood, Bayard Taylor, Saxe, and Holmes are a few of those who have contributed to this depart¬ment. It was during the period of the Norman oppres¬sion that the ballad literature, singing of the outlaw and . the forest, took form. Long stored in the memories of the people, it reaches us only in a late edition of the fifteenth century. Chevy Chase, the Nut-brown Maid, and Robin Hood will live forever.
The Drama is an imitation of human life. It is prose or poetry written to be acted, as the word itself signifies. Like the epic proper, it relates to some important event, has a leading character, with some complication of plot, and, for the most part, appears in the form of blank, or heroic, verse. But what the epic narrates as having been done, the drama brings before our eyes by means of dia¬logue between the actors, aided by stage appliances and directions. Like the oration, it must produce its effect at once, and therefore it must have a higher degree of prob¬ability than the romance and a stronger and simpler interest than the epic or novel. Its great work is imper¬sonation, and its merit lies in the vividness of impression. According as it employs itself upon the grave and affect¬ing or upon the light and gay, it divides itself into Tragedy or Comedy. The former in its severer type, leans to a fatal catastrophe, as in Hamlet, Othello, Mae¬beth,; in its milder, it allows happy conclusions, thus permitting scope for poetic justice, as in Measure for Measure. Comedy proposes for its object neither great suffering nor great crime, but the decorums of behavior,
 
332	COMPLETE RHETORIC.
the follies, the humors, the slighter vices of the day, which may be censured and laughed at through a tissue of intrigues agreeably unwoven at last. But life is not all tears nor all laughter; and the English drama, true to the complexity of human nature, allows the tragic and the comic elements to be mixed in the same piece.
Both forms should have unity of subject and action. All the incidents must be subservient to one governing effect. All under-plots if there be such, ought to be made to tend toward the principal object, and to conspire in unravelling the main design. The Greeks added the two unities of time and place, the first of which requires that the transactions be capable of occurring within the time ordinarily occupied by the performance of a play, though this rule was early enlarged so as to permit the action to comprehend a whole day; the second, that the scene should never be shifted, but that the action of the play should be continuous to the end, in the place where it is supposed to begin. These rules were demanded by the nature of dramatic exhibition on the Greek stage, where the play went uninterruptedly forward, there being no pauses or intervals, and the stage ever occupied by the actors or the chorus until the conclusion of the whole. But the practice of suspending the spectacle totally between the acts (regularly five) gives more latitude to the imagination, and sets modern dramatists free from the ancient strict confinement. While the curtain is down, the conditions of time and locality may be easily changed without shocking the spectators by improbable circum¬stances. If the drama is set to music, the parts being sung instead of spoken, we have the Opera; if some parts are spoken and some sung, the Melodrama. Another variety is the Mask; or romantic adventure, with super-natural personages, fairies, giants, etc., as Milton's Comm. This is now out of fashion. Among the recognized vane 
 
DEPARTMENTS OF EXPRESSION - POETRY.	333
ties of comedy are the Genteel and the Low; the Traves¬ty, a mock-heroic; the Farce, restricted to three acts, and representing scenes that are broadly humorous.
The English drama, like the Greek, began in religion. At a time when sermons were not intelligible if preached, and when none but the clergy could read the stories of the Christian faith, it was introduced by the Church, to instruct the illiterate in saintly or Scriptural history—the only history then known—and to extend her influence by engrossing the sources of popular recreation. Priests were the writers or inventors, and frequently the actors, of the plays, usually written in mixed prose and verse. As mysterious subjects were chosen — the lives and mar¬vels of the saints, the Incarnation, Crucifixion, Resurrec¬tion, Creation, Fall, or Conquests of Hell—these per¬formances acquired the general name of Mysteries. The 'theatre' was a cathedral, a scaffold in the open air, or a movable stage on wheels, drawn from street to street, or from town to town. As the cart stopped at given points, the actors threw open the doors, and proceeded to perform the scenes allotted them. A graduated platform in three divisions, represented Heaven, Earth, and Hell. Above were the Deity and His angels, passive when not actually mingling in the action; in the center moved the human world, the actors standing motionless at one side when they had nothing to say or do; and the yawning throat of an immeasurable dragon, emitting smoke and flames when required, showed the entrance to the bottomless pit, into which, through the expanded jaws, the damned were dragged with shrieks of agony by demons.
The miracle plays were, in the fifteenth century, trans-formed into moral plays by exchanging scriptural and historical characters for abstract, allegorical, or symbolical impersonations,—Pride, Gluttony, Temperance, Faith, Riches, Good Deeds, and the like. To relieve their
 
334	COMPLETE RHETORIC.
gravity, under which the audience were liable to yawn and sleep, the Devil was retained, and a more natural buffoon was introduced in the Vice, who acted the part of a broad, rampant jester. These two were the darlings of the multitude. Full of pranks and swaggering fun, a part of Vice's ordinary business was to treat the Devil with ribald familiarity, to crack saucy jokes upon him, to bestride him and beat him till he roared, and in the end to be carried off to Hell on his back.
The next step was the relinquishing of abstract for in-dividual characters, a transition represented by Heywood's Interludes, long before acted in the midst of the morality for the amusement of the people, but now secularized, and made into a kind of farce.
The interlude paved the way for the representation of real life and manners, the first stage of which begins with Udall's Ralph Roister Doister, a comedy, and Sackvill's Gorboduc, a tragedy. It soon passed to a splendid maturity, extending in a single generation over all the provinces of history, imagination, and fancy. From the middle of the reign of Elizabeth to the accession of Anne (1580-1702), and particularly to the great rebellion (1580- 1642), may be reckoned the period of the old English dramatists, among whom Shakespeare stood preeminent. He, with the constellation of kindred spirits about him, raised the romantic or Gothic drama to the highest perfec¬tion it has ever achieved. Its subsequent general tend¬ency has been downward. Sheridan's School for Scandal, Goldsmith's She Stoops to Conquer, Knowles' Viryznius, Bulwer's Richelieu and Lady of Lyons, are nearly the sole dramas, since produced, that have possessed literary merit and, at the same time, the qualities requisite for successful presentation. Scott, Byron, Shelley, Cole¬ridge, Wordsworth, Browning, Tennyson, Swinburne, have adopted the dramatic form, but only to show how rare a
 
DEPARTMENTS OF EXPRESSION - POETRY.	335
gift is popular dramatic art — the art of portraying actual life and passion in interesting situations. Most of the suc¬cessful plays, on the other hand, do not and cannot, rise into the region of literature. They succeed less by vivid language and vigorous thought than by pomp and noise, transferring the stress from the mental to the physical.
Literary compositions run into each other, like colors; easily distinguished in their strong tints, but susceptible of so much variety, and of so many different forms, that we never can say precisely where one species ends and another begins. The shore-marks of poetical division rest, now on style, now on matter, now on purpose, but do not, save in single features, define and subdivide the field. In most poems there is a mixture of all the modes of poetic effect, leaving it doubtful which type is most closely adhered to. Convenient designations for ordinary speech would be epic, like Milton's great poem; dramatic, like Shakespeare's plays; lyric, like the songs in his plays; narrative, like the Lady of the Lake ; descriptive, like the Seasons; allegorical, like the Faerie Queene ; didactic, like Pope's Essay on Criticism ; satirical, intended to vituperate, to lash, or to reform, like the Hudibras.
It remains to indicate some of the uses of poetry. (1) It is the great thesaurus of beauty, embellishment, and illustration. The eminent Brougham has said that the art of happy quotation is second only to that of happy invention. (2) It is an important aid to genuine copious¬ness and flow of language. So practical a man as Dr. Franklin, having recognized it as an important source of his own excellent English, recommended the study of poetry and the writing of verse for this very purpose. (3) It cultivates a love of high thought, and tends to give to our taste for reading the stability of habit. (4) It gives an xsthetic culture and refinement to the mind, and disposes the heart to virtue. It is the province of poetry
 
336	COMPLETE RHETORIC.
to idealize nature and human life, to exhibit the soul in the richness and variety of its sentiments, in the noble¬ness of its aspirations and in the greatness of its possibili¬ties. To it belong elegance, beauty, harmony, and grandeur,—all that can ennoble the fancy and exalt the affections. The end of poetry is refined enjoyment through emotion. In it there is always exultation, a subtle, blooming spirituality. 'What a treat,' exclaims Dr. Arnold, thinking of the resultant self-improve¬ment, 'it would be to teach Shakespeare to a good class of young Greeks in regenerate Athens; to dwell upon him line by line and word by word, and so to get all his pictures and thoughts leisurely into one's mind, till I verily think one would, after a time, almost give out light in the dark, after having been steeped, as it were, in such an atmosphere of brilliance!' To what end is our life, if not to soul culture, perpetual ascension in the scale of being? In this the poets help us by seizing and holding up to view the noblest, cleanest, and best, that there is.
'The finer thoughts, the thrilling sense,
The electric blood with which their arteries run, Their body's self-turned soul with the intense
Feeling of that which is, and fancy of
That which should be.'
enable them, more powerfully than other authors, to awaken in their readers the states of consciousness that exist in themselves. (5) As a corollary, it is the mission of poetry to sweeten existence, to nourish human sympa¬thies; to fill us with faith, strength, and cheer, when in the desert of life we faint and stagger; to reveal to our duller eyes and colder hearts the beauty and gladness of nature; in short, to furnish the finest and deepest-reaching disci-pline of which our spiritual being is capable. In order to receive these benefits, it must be studied, that is, read re¬flectively. To read anything profitably, read it actively.
category:poetry