Essays, Second Series | Page 8

a poem. Every new relation is a
new word. Also we use defects and deformities to a sacred purpose, so
expressing our sense that the evils of the world are such only to the evil
eye. In the old mythology, mythologists observe, defects are ascribed to

divine natures, as lameness to Vulcan, blindness to Cupid, and the like,
--to signify exuberances.
For as it is dislocation and detachment from the life of God that makes
things ugly, the poet, who re-attaches things to nature and the Whole,--
re-attaching even artificial things and violations of nature, to nature, by
a deeper insight,--disposes very easily of the most disagreeable facts.
Readers of poetry see the factory-village and the railway, and fancy
that the poetry of the landscape is broken up by these; for these works
of art are not yet consecrated in their reading; but the poet sees them
fall within the great Order not less than the beehive or the spider's
geometrical web. Nature adopts them very fast into her vital circles,
and the gliding train of cars she loves like her own. Besides, in a
centred mind, it signifies nothing how many mechanical inventions you
exhibit. Though you add millions, and never so surprising, the fact of
mechanics has not gained a grain's weight. The spiritual fact remains
unalterable, by many or by few particulars; as no mountain is of any
appreciable height to break the curve of the sphere. A shrewd
country-boy goes to the city for the first time, and the complacent
citizen is not satisfied with his little wonder. It is not that he does not
see all the fine houses and know that he never saw such before, but he
disposes of them as easily as the poet finds place for the railway. The
chief value of the new fact is to enhance the great and constant fact of
Life, which can dwarf any and every circumstance, and to which the
belt of wampum and the commerce of America are alike.
The world being thus put under the mind for verb and noun, the poet is
he who can articulate it. For though life is great, and fascinates, and
absorbs; and though all men are intelligent of the symbols through
which it is named; yet they cannot originally use them. We are symbols
and inhabit symbols; workmen, work, and tools, words and things, birth
and death, all are emblems; but we sympathize with the symbols, and
being infatuated with the economical uses of things, we do not know
that they are thoughts. The poet, by an ulterior intellectual perception,
gives them a power which makes their old use forgotten, and puts eyes
and a tongue into every dumb and inanimate object. He perceives the
independence of the thought on the symbol, the stability of the thought,
the accidency and fugacity of the symbol. As the eyes of Lyncaeus
were said to see through the earth, so the poet turns the world to glass,

and shows us all things in their right series and procession. For through
that better perception he stands one step nearer to things, and sees the
flowing or metamorphosis; perceives that thought is multiform; that
within the form of every creature is a force impelling it to ascend into a
higher form; and following with his eyes the life, uses the forms which
express that life, and so his speech flows with the flowing of nature. All
the facts of the animal economy, sex, nutriment, gestation, birth,
growth, are symbols of the passage of the world into the soul of man, to
suffer there a change and reappear a new and higher fact. He uses
forms according to the life, and not according to the form. This is true
science. The poet alone knows astronomy, chemistry, vegetation and
animation, for he does not stop at these facts, but employs them as
signs. He knows why the plain or meadow of space was strewn with
these flowers we call suns and moons and stars; why the great deep is
adorned with animals, with men, and gods; for in every word he speaks
he rides on them as the horses of thought.
By virtue of this science the poet is the Namer or Language-maker,
naming things sometimes after their appearance, sometimes after their
essence, and giving to every one its own name and not another's,
thereby rejoicing the intellect, which delights in detachment or
boundary. The poets made all the words, and therefore language is the
archives of history, and, if we must say it, a sort of tomb of the muses.
For though the origin of most of our words is forgotten, each word was
at first a stroke of genius, and obtained currency because for the
moment it symbolized the world to the first speaker