Lifes Enthusiasms | Page 5

its fragrant story?Blend with the breath that thrills?With hop vines' incense all the pensive glory?That fills the Kentish hills.?And on that grave where English oak and holly?And laurel wreath entwine,?Deem it not all a too presumptuous folly,?This spray of Western pine."
--
"Dark browed she broods with weary lids?Beside her Sphynx and Pyramids,?With her low, never lifted eyes.?If she be dead, respect the dead;?If she be weeping, let her weep;?If she be sleeping, let her sleep;?For lo, this woman named the stars.?She suckled at her tawny dugs?Your Moses, while ye reeked with wars?And prowled the woods, rude, painted thugs."
--
"The tumult and the shouting dies;?The captains and the kings depart;?Still stands thine ancient sacrifice,?The humble and the contrite heart."
--
"Careless seems the Great Avenger,
History's pages but record?One death grapple in the darkness
Twixt old systems and the word.?Truth forever on the scaffold,
Wrong forever on the throne;?But that scaffold sways the future,
And behind the dim Unknown?Standeth God within the shadow.
Keeping watch above his own."
--
"Pledge me round, I bid you declare,?All good fellows whose beards are gray,?Did not the fairest of the fair?Common grow and wearisome, ere?Ever a month had passed away??The reddest lips that ever have kissed,?The brightest eyes that ever have shone?May pray and whisper and we not list?Or look away and never be missed?Ere yet ever a month is gone.?Gillian's dead. God rest her bier!?How I loved her twenty years syne!?Marian's married and I sit here?Alone and merry at forty year,?Dipping my nose in the Gascon wine."
--
"Under the wide and starry sky?Dig my grave and let me lie.?Glad did I live and gladly die?And I lay me down with a will.?This be the verse ye grave for me:
'Here he lies where he longed to be.?Home is the sailor, home from the sea,?And the hunter home from the hill.'"
--
"By the brand upon my shoulders,?By the lash of clinging steel,?By the welts the whips have left me,?By the wounds that never heal,?By the eyes grown dim with staring?At the sun-wash on the brine,?I am paid in full for service,--?Would that service still were mine."
And with these the more familiar verses beginning:
"Break, break, break,?At the foot of thy crags, O Sea."
"Bells of the past whose long-forgotten music."
"Just for a handful of silver he left us."
"Beautiful Evelyn Hope is dead."
"O to be in England, now that April's there."
"The mists are on the Oberland,?The Fungfrau's snows look faint and far."
"The word of the Lord by night?To the watching pilgrims came."
"Fear, a forgotten form;?Death, a dream of the eyes;?We were atoms in God's great storm?That raged through the angry skies!"
And with this you may take many other bits of verse which were hammered out on the anvil of the terrible Civil War.
Perhaps these bits of verse chosen almost at random will not appeal to your taste. Then find some other verse that does. The range of literature is as wide as humanity. It touches every feeling, every hope, every craving of the human heart. Select what you can understand--best, what you can rise on tiptoe to understand. "It was my duty to have loved the highest." It is your duty toward poetry to take the highest you can reach. Then learn it by heart. Learn it when you are young. It will give you a fresh well of thoughts. It will form your style as a writer. That is poetry in which truth is expressed in the fewest possible words, in words which are inevitable, in words which could not be changed without weakening the meaning or throwing discord into the melody. To choose the right word and to discard all others, this is the chief factor in good writing. To learn good poetry by heart is to acquire help toward doing this instinctively, automatically, as other habits are acquired. In the affairs of life there is no form of good manners, no habit of usage more valuable than the habit of good English. And to this end the masters of English, from Chaucer to Tennyson, and in spite of perversities, we may add Emerson, Browning, and Kipling, have written English verse. It is not in verse alone that poetry is written. Sweetness and light and truth can be crystallized into prose, and prose well worthy to be borne in memory.
Take this from Emerson:
"The poet is the true landlord, sea lord, air lord! Wherever snow falls or water flows or birds fly, wherever day and night meet in twilight, wherever the blue heaven is hung by clouds or sown with stars, wherever are forms with transparent boundaries, wherever are outlets into celestial spaces, wherever is danger and awe and love--there's Beauty, plenteous as rain shed for thee and though thou shouldst walk the world over thou shalt not be able to find a condition inopportune or ignoble."
"I took a walk the other day," so Thoreau tells us, "on Spaulding's farm.