EXPRESSION IN POETRY.

In the foregoing lecture I ventured an attempt to investigate the constant qualities of the poetical mind; in this I wish to consider what are, speaking generally, the means at the poet’s disposal for conveying his passion and his imaginative vision to his hearers. For of poets, as of the rest of us, it may be said that—

A “mute” Milton would certainly be “inglorious”; he would also be useless: would he be conceivable? Undoubtedly we can distinguish in thought the divine vision from the divine faculty which gives it expression, but is this distinction anything more than logical? May not the truth be that a poet expresses more than the rest of the world because he sees more, and like the rest of the world can express up to the limit of his vision? Our tutors and governors, when we were children, used to receive with well-grounded suspicion our not infrequent excuse for muteness, “I know, but I can’t explain”; and it is equally probable that in poets the vision brings its own interpretative faculty. It is beyond dispute that the poets who have had the finest things to say are those who have said them most finely. If we take those passages which Matthew Arnold once suggested as touchstones of high poetic quality, and attempt to distinguish in them what is form from what is substance, we shall find the task impossible.

Is there here one word not necessary for the picture it presents, one epithet we could obelize as inserted in the interests of mere style? “High” is not enough without “giddy,” because the poet wishes to suggest the incredibleness, from a landsman’s point of view, of sleep under such conditions; “rude” and “imperious” are both required to suggest the power of sleep which can ignore so savage a tyrant, nay, use him for her purposes, for it is the tossing that rocks the boy to sleep. We may then lay it down that, just as when we have reached our maturity and have something to say, the contents of our mind are, as a matter of fact, conveyed into our language with no appreciable loss, so that what we say is a faithful transcription of what we think, and our friends are seldom at a loss for our meaning; so the poet’s mood, by an even surer instinct, chooses for itself language which effectually conveys his passion or imaginative vision. The mystery in the relation of poetical vision to poetical expression is the prime mystery of all human speech; it is a mystery, and we cannot get behind it; but it is not greater in the case of poets than with ordinary men and women. The great difference, from which all else depends, lies behind expression, in the texture of the poet’s thought and feeling. I know that it is the fashion of the moment to make more of the distinction between artist and amateur than of that between poet and poetaster. I am, however, not denying that the poet is an artist. The instinct I speak of is an artistic instinct. Nor would I deny that every poet must serve an apprenticeship to his art, and improve by practice his gift of expression. It is to be hoped that even those of us who talk prose improve by practice. My contention is merely that when the poem is written and before us, it will take rank, supposing it to be a true poem, by the thing said, and that it will be found impossible to distinguish the substance from the form. A very simple consideration will show the truth of this position. Why is it that the Idylls of the King and the In Memoriam contain so many passages that the world will quite willingly let die? If the chief thing in poetry were the style, one part of these poems would be as good as another, for the style is uniform throughout. The answer, in all such cases, is that “soul is form and doth the body make.” What is wanting in the weak places of these great poems is the soul, the poetic vision and enthusiasm, the absence of which no style can compensate.

That being premised, we may go on to consider the most general means which the poet does, as a matter of fact, employ to convey to us his emotion.

1. Poetry is essentially passionate, and its passion requires a heightened mode of expression. In our literature this is supplied by metre. At its lowest, metre is, what Coleridge called it, “a stimulant of the attention.” At the very least, it cuts off what is said from ordinary surroundings and raises it to an ideal plane; so that if what is said in metre be commonplace, its commonplaceness becomes at once more apparent. Hence bad verse is more intolerable than bad prose. But further, metre being not only rhythm but regulated rhythm, it is excellently adapted as a medium for poetry, which is not only emotion but, as Wordsworth said, “recollected emotion”; not wild passion, but passion conceived of as something in itself precious, which the poet wishes to impart to others. The poet desires to rouse not any emotion, but some one emotion in particular. Hence various emotions find their fit expression in appropriate metres. It is not by idle chance or mere caprice that Paradise Lost is written in iambic verse and Shelley’s Ode to a Skylark in trochaics. Even in metres which appear to be least bound by rule, such as the choruses in Samson Agonistes, it will be found on investigation that a reason underlies the apparent vagary. It is with these rhythms as with the wheels in Ezekiel’s vision: “To the place whither the head looked they followed it, for the spirit of a living creature was in them.”

But although every poem must be written not in rhythm only, but in metre, it is possible while preserving the framework of metre to vary the rhythm by changes in pause and accent. Hood’s Eugene Aram and Rossetti’s Blessed Damosel are written in the same metre, but the differences in rhythm are so great that the one poem never for a moment suggests the other. Similarly Tennyson’s blank verse does not recall Milton’s. And within the same poem a writer will vary his rhythm, partly for the sake of the variety, but also in order to produce special effects. Some such effects are fairly obvious and will be found generalised in ancient and modern treatises, like Horace’s Ars Poetica and Pope’s Essay on Criticism:—

Other effects can only be recognized when the poet’s artistic sense has achieved them. Thus in Tennyson’s Idylls of the King, we have, on the ground-plan of his unrhymed five-accent line, effects as markedly different as the following, in each of which the rhythm helps to express the action described:—

Almost any page of Paradise Lost will supply examples of greater or less subtlety. There is an easy contrast for instance between the description of Satan’s mounting to the roof of Hell, where the rhythm is almost dactylic:—

and the succession of strong accents in the description of his flight down to the earth from heaven:—

while the rhythm follows with even more delicate faithfulness the other motions described.

2. A second great means employed by English poetry to express emotion is rhyme. Rhyme, as much as metre, is a mode of heightening expression, a stimulant to the attention. Attempts have been made from time to time to abandon the use of rhyme altogether, as a relic of barbarism. Campion, who himself used rhyme to delightful effect, wrote a treatise to prove its “unaptness for poesy”; and even Milton in his old age wrote a preface to his epic in which he disparaged it, not only as a “troublesome bondage in heroic poem,” which no doubt it is; and not only as “the invention of a barbarous age to set off wretched matter and lame metre,” as perhaps it was; but as “a thing of itself to all judicious ears trivial, and of no true musical delight.” Thus the author of Paradise Lost turned his back on the author of Lycidas. And yet still later in his life Milton’s true poetic instinct once more vindicated rhyme against this critical judgment by using it to “set off metre,” that was far from lame, in the choruses of Samson.

Is the rhyme in this fine passage otiose and trivial? No one can fail to observe what variety it lends to the chorus by ringing the changes on all the chief vowel sounds, or how it marks sections of the thought; first the text, then the illustration, then the moral. The second section, indeed, runs on into the third quatrain of rhymes; but by that slight irregularity the ode is bound together, and the ear kept on the alert, until the full close, for the chime that is sure to come.

3. These things, then, metre and rhyme, being granted to the poet as two ingredients of his magic cauldron, by means of which he is to conjure up the mood or scene that he desires to set before us, we come to the third, his use of words, and proceed to enquire whether there are any principles governing the use of language peculiar to poetry. Here it must be remembered that all a critic can do is to analyse more or less successfully what methods have actually been employed by this poet and that for the production of their effects. There is no one poetic method, just as there is no separate poetic vocabulary. Every new poet will achieve his new result in a new way, which he will find the easier and also the harder for the enterprise of his predecessors. There are, however, two or three artistic principles of universal application which call for notice. The first is, that the poem must have an atmosphere of its own; or, to change the metaphor, the words must be all in the same key. Now, no mere poetical joinery can achieve such a result as this. Unless the words are generated by “thoughts that breathe,” they will have no life in them, and no natural and inevitable relation to each other. For an example, take a quatrain from Gray’s beautiful sonnet upon his friend West:—

These lines were chosen by Wordsworth in his famous Preface to point the moral that the language of poetry differs in no respect from that of prose when it is well written. The moral they really point is a different one. Their tone is unique; it is unlike that of any other elegy in the language. The poet’s instinct has guided him securely to express his own special emotion, and to avoid any word “of dissonant mood from his complaint.” Whether the words might be classed as prosaic or poetical he has not stopped to enquire. If a poetaster had been writing the sonnet, he would have avoided what would have seemed to him so tame an expression as “the imperfect joys expire.” But how absolutely right it is, in its place and for its purpose. Again, what but genius could have conceived the reticence of the two epithets “other” and “different”? It should be clear, then, that one principle governing the use of words in poetry is that every poem must have an atmosphere of its own; it must be in a definite mode, to which the poet’s emotion will guide him surely. The poet’s passion may be any one of a myriad moods, for the heart of man is infinite, and the special quality of the particular passion will show itself in the quality of the words. We shall feel it in them, even though we are not able to describe it. When people say “this is genuine poetry,” what they often mean is that a passionate mood has succeeded, by the poet’s instinct, in condensing itself into words, and in reading the words they distinguish the passion. Consider, for a second example, a stanza in Wordsworth’s Solitary Reaper:—

If we take these lines to pieces, we may be tempted to say it is the prosiest verse ever written; “old,” “unhappy,” “far-off,” are words of an everyday vocabulary, and “Will no one tell me what she sings?” might almost occur in any drawing-room conversation. But if we are content not to take the passage to pieces, if we are content to receive it and let it make its own impression as a whole, we must acknowledge it to be a perfect rendering of the effect on the poet’s mind of the wild, vague, sad Highland music. A good proof of poetical adequacy is that such lines cannot be paraphrased.

It is an interesting experience to take up a Shakespeare and remark how the speeches, apart from their merely grammatical sense, are all pitched in a certain key, and make on us the impression of a definite mood. Take, for an instance, the familiar lines of Demetrius in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, after the troubles and misunderstandings of the night are over and he is looking back upon them:—

The mere grammatical sense, if the words were paraphrased, would not be striking, but the words themselves convey—who can tell how?—the wondering reverie of a man still only half awake⁠[3]⁠. It is even more interesting to study with the same view the pictures of landscape in the works of the great masters. Landscape, of course, is far from being a fixed quantity. The poet, indeed, paints what he sees; but that means he paints what he sees; and in painting he paints his own mood, even though he does not necessarily mean to do so. How definite is the mood of the concluding passage of Keats’ Ode to Autumn:—

The tone of the words is of a somewhat meagre joy. All the verbs contain the vowel i, the thinnest of vowels. The poet seems to say: “The glory of the year is departing, but it is not yet gone, let us make the best of what remains.” He does not say that; he gives but a hint of it in the gathering of the swallows, and for the rest sings the best Jubilate he can. But the mood is unmistakable. Contrast with it as celebrated a picture of Autumn, that by Crabbe, at the end of Delay has Danger:—

There is only one epithet there which very definitely fixes the key of the passage, the epithet “sickly”; and I am not sure that it does not a little force the note, and spoil the harmony. Apart from that there is nothing; and yet the mood is unmistakable. It is a mood of deep dejection. You can hear it in every line, even in such a line as

which contains no epithet, and yet makes you shiver. I need not, perhaps, further illustrate this first principle, that given a mood of emotion, it can and will find means of expressing itself unmistakably.

It may, however, be well to illustrate the fact that the poet’s instinct may not always secure the most adequate expression at the first attempt. In Trinity College, Cambridge, there is preserved a manuscript of certain of Milton’s minor poems which shows that he achieved some of his most consummate results by a series of experiments, each bringing him nearer to his goal. One of the most marvellous lines in the Comus comes in a passage where the Lady lost in the dark wood falls a prey to vague midnight fancies, and says:—

For the line in italics Milton had originally written “And airy tongues that lure night-wanderers”; but how vastly better did his second thoughts convey his sense. “Syllable” is a word exquisitely fitted for his purpose. Being pure sound, it suggests the idea of words being uttered that are mere sounds, words said by “airy tongues” with no intelligence behind them, words said clearly and carefully as by a child who does not know the meaning of what he is saying. The manuscripts of Shelley and Coleridge tell a like tale. And even where manuscripts are not to be had, it is often possible, by comparing the several editions of a poem, to see how, by a slight touch here and there, the poet has succeeded in conveying his meaning to us more perfectly. Let me give two examples from Tennyson. In the first edition of the Princess, the first line of that exquisite song, “Home they brought her warrior dead,” appeared as “Home they brought him, slain with spears.” Clearly the poet perceived that he had been trying to convey too much: the kind of battle in which the warrior fell was really unimportant for his purpose; the important fact was the fact of death. So he moved the word dead to the most emphatic place in the line, and implied the death in battle by the word warrior. The other example I would adduce is the first line of Tithonus, which, when it first appeared in the Cornhill Magazine, ran:—

This was subsequently altered into its present form,

a much better line under the circumstances; because the repetition of the clause “the woods decay” creates a pause before the words “and fall,” which are the words of most emphasis, and are thus thrown into greater prominence. Tithonus, too, had decayed, like the leaves; unlike them, he could not come altogether to an end. It is interesting also to notice that while some poets are thus able to recollect their emotion and improve by revision the expression of it, others totally lack this power. A striking instance was William Morris.

A second great artistic principle in the poetical use of language is the axiom laid down by Coleridge that a poet should “paint to the imagination”; by which is meant that the poet should never, in describing objects, labour to accumulate detail, but find some way of summoning up his picture before our eyes at a stroke. This principle, coming from a poet, reminds one, to compare great things with small, of the explanations given by conjurors of their tricks. “That,” they say, “is how it’s done.” How to do it is a different matter. But that it is really done so, we may convince ourselves by taking examples. Matthew Arnold among the touchstones of poetry, to which I have already referred, included those lines of Milton about the Rape of Proserpine,

Who but a poet of the first rank would have dared that simple touch, “all that pain”; how effective it is upon the mind of the instructed reader, for whom alone Milton wrote; what accumulation of epithet could produce a tenth part of the effect? Whatever we have read in old poets at once leaps to memory.

This principle of calling in the reader’s imagination to fill out the poet’s outline helps us to understand why poets are so ready to compare one thing with another. The process is a kind of hypnotism; the poet makes a suggestion and the reader at once sees the picture⁠[4]⁠. A simple and very effective instance is Tennyson’s comparison of the pallor of the wounded King’s face to the fading moon—

The painting of landscape in the poetry of this century owes a great deal to this illustrative method. It is plain that the most painful and literal accuracy could not give the picture of autumn leaves driven before the wind so fully and effectively as Shelley’s fine image—

or the picture of the sudden thrusting and thronging of spring buds in hedgerows and garden beds so well as another image in the same poem—

In still higher poetry we may see the principle at work in such a piece as Shakespeare’s seventy-third sonnet:—

The root-thought in this sonnet is that the coming on of age makes the friend’s love stronger, because the time is short. The picture of age is brought before us, however, not directly, but by three pictorial comparisons: first, to the dying of the year, then to the dying of each day, then to the dying down of a fire; each supplying some vivid detail which applies with special poignancy to the lover’s case—and the first especially reminding us by reference to the “ruined choirs” that the aged lover is also the poet.

In conclusion, it may be noted that there are certain qualities of individual words of which poets, above all other writers, are careful to take advantage. The poet is alive to the associations of words. In the line quoted above from Gray,

it is plain that the word require is used with a reminiscence of such a Virgilian line as

and brings with it the wistfulness of the Latin. Milton and Tennyson are especially happy in such learned use of words. Further, the poet can, and constantly does, take advantage of the actual sound of the words themselves. The device of alliteration has passed in English from being part of the mechanism of all poetry, an initial rhyme, into a means of producing special effects; effects as various as the quality of the several letters. It needs no enforcing that in such a phrase as Milton’s

the repeated effort to form the labial helps the imagination to an impression of bigness, while in another line of his—

or “wallowing unwieldy,” the open effect of the three w’s helps the all-abroadness of the idea. So liquids minister to a verse of their liquidity, and sibilants can soothe a verse to sleep as well as a child. What goes commonly by the name of onomatopœia is a step beyond this. Here actual sounds in nature are more or less suggested. Some words, such as murmuring, are themselves onomatopœic in origin; others have come to be so by chance, or are compelled into such service by the poet. Examples are drizzling, trickling, tumbling, noise, cry, all of which are to be found in the stanza of the Faerie Queene describing the cave of Morpheus.

Beyond onomatopœia, again, we have in certain poets, but by no means all, the power of suggesting by words not sound only but motion. Keats succeeds occasionally in this sort of cinematographic effect, e.g., in his description of a gust of wind coming and going.

Much of the effect of this passage is due to the emphatic monosyllable “comes,” which gives the impression of suddenness. Keats puts it to much the same service in his description of the moon breaking from a cloud. And much of the effect of Tennyson’s Crossing the Bar, one of his most admirable pictures of motion, depends upon the monosyllabic verbs.

I will conclude with a passage, written by one who was himself a master of the poetic craft, analysing the suggestiveness of the sound effects in a couplet of Coleridge’s Christabel:—

“Here the cold vowels a, i, o are the only ones which are openly sounded, and of these a is repeated five times, and i three times, the e in the short the preceding, as it does, the long syllable brand is scarcely heard; the ear is wholly occupied with the eight cold vowels which occur in the long syllables of the eight feet that constitute these lines. The only effect of warmth is a very slight one, produced by the rapid succession of the consonants b, r and n, d in the word brand. Again, there is an effect of weight conveyed by the word brand, and to this effect we are invited to attend, by the repetition of it, and by the first juxtaposition and contrast of this word with other words conveying the notion of softness and lightness; finally the two ideas of lightness and weight are united, and the effect completed by the word amid, in which the sound passing through the soft m and its indistinct vowels, concludes in a heavy d; and completes to a delicate ear and a prepared mind, the entire picture of the weighty and smouldering brands, sunken through the light mass of ashes which remains after their undisturbed combustion⁠[5]⁠.”

CAMBRIDGE: PRINTED BY J. AND C. F. CLAY, AT THE UNIVERSITY PRESS.

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