describes the garden as a 'green-play-place of flickering light and shade," and the humming bird as "a thumb's bigness of burnished plumage," he is using words much as a poet does, to suggest moods and pictures. But as his words. have no metrical pattern, they are not poetry. Moreover, poetical prose, however beautiful, does not usually linger in the memory as does poetry. It is the poet rather than the prose writer who uses words primarily for purposes of suggestion instead of primarily for purposes of direct statement. To the poet, words in themselves are beautiful. A poet's statement of this feeling for words may be found in Anna Hempstead Branch's "Her Words" from Songs for My Mother: "My mother has the prettiest tricks She shapes her speech all silver fine And her own eyes begin to shine And if she goes to make a call Or out to take a walk We leave our work when she returns We had not dreamed these things were so Her speech is as a thousand eyes God wove a web of loveliness, The poet's They shine around our simple earth And every common thing they touch There's nothing poor and nothing small That touch the garment's hem. They are as fair as bloom or air, And I am rich who learned from her The fundamental characteristic of poetry, however, lies in the poet's way of looking at things. His sensibilities are keener than those of other men. His imaginaattitude toward tion is more quickly aroused. Others, looking out of their windows, feel vaguely the beauty of spring; the poet translates that feeling into an imaginative picture of the world about him "Daffodils That come before the swallow dares, and take The poet's senses are keener: odor, sound, touch, and taste make an immediate appeal to him. He sees and hears with finer sensibilities than other men, and writes of “The coming musk rose full of dewy wine The murmurous haunt of flies on summer eves." Then, too, his emotions are more deeply stirred. Most of his writing is done under stimulus of the strong feelings created in him by his imagination. Life to him is, first of all, an imaginative experience. To him 1 Reprinted by permission of and arrangement with Houghton Mifflin Company. "The meanest flower that blows can give For him Nature is rarely disassociated from feeling. He observes that "The Rainbow comes and goes, And lovely is the rose; The moon doth with delight Look round her when the heavens are bare; Waters on a starry night Are beautiful and fair;" The poet and and this beautiful picture creates in him a feeling which causes him to add, "But yet I know, where'er I go, That there hath pass'd a glory from the earth.” Sometimes his imagination carries him further than this, and he associates himself with Nature till he becomes one with her, as Shelley does in his invocation to the West Wind: "Make me thy lyre, even as the forest is: Sweet though in sadness. Be thou, spirit fierce, My spirit! Be thou me, impetuous one!" In his attitude toward man, also, the poet is moved primarily by his imagination. Perhaps because of this, he sees into the heart of man and interprets truly what he sees there. Tennyson, for instance, The poet's atti tude toward man in his shorter lyrics of purely personal emotion has given almost perfect expression to the feeling of grief for "what has been And never more will be" He which is common to us all. In this ability to speak for all mankind the poet is the representative of the race. feels for all the world when he cries: "Rough wind, that moanest loud Grief, too sad for song; Wild wind, when sullen cloud Sad storm, whose tears are vain, Bare woods, whose branches strain, Wail, for the world's wrong!" This sympathy and this ability to express what we all feel but cannot all say are the supreme gifts of the poet to us-consolation in hours of despair, loneliness and pain; sympathy and understanding in moments of joy. It is from him, too, that we get our truest sympathy for those about us, through him that we hear "The still sad music of humanity, Nor harsh nor grating, though of ample power To chasten and subdue." All this is only another way of saying that the poet's imagination is more sensitive to all that touches it than Summary other men's. Through it, his very senses are made more keen; he sees and hears and feels in the world about him subtle beauty or ugliness which quite escape us. Through it, also, he is able to interpret what he feels so that there is nothing that his imagination touches "But doth suffer a sea-change Into something rich and strange." Here, then, are ample reasons why an appreciation of poetry makes one's knowledge of life more keen and his understanding of it more sympathetic. The language of poetry is the truest language of the human heart. THREE ELEMENTS TO BE CONSIDERED IN STUDYING POETRY There are three elements to be found in any poem. These are: (1) The imagination. As we have seen, one of the chief differences between prose and poetry lies in the greater sensitiveness of the poet's imagination. It is through his imagination alone that the poet makes his appeal to our senses, our feelings, and even our intellects. (2) The thought of the poem. Many poems present through the medium of imagination ideas which are well worth the reader's serious study, though these ideas are more often suggested than directly stated because the poet finds it more natural and more effective to express himself through suggestion than through direct statement. Some of the deepest and most enduring thoughts that have come to man have been expressed through the medium of poetry. (3) The form. Form is the technical means by which the poet expresses his feelings or his ideas, through sound, images, pattern, and other mechanical devices. This is the most tangible, as well as the most technical, part of the study of poetry. HOW THE POET USES THE IMAGINATION TO CREATE FEELING One of the chief functions of the imagination in poetry lies in its power to create feeling. One may read prose in the pursuit of information or ideas or just to get a good story, but if a man likes poetry at all he likes it because it appeals to some sort of emotion that he has himself felt or can understand. The chief standard by which we judge the emotional appeal of a poem is its universality. Almost Universality without exception all great works of art of appeal have dealt with the eternal passions, aspirations, and re-. |