Platform Monologues | Page 9

the old author, who thinks that he has a perfect right to choose
between the verse form and the prose form simply according as he can
versify or not, is grievously in the wrong. There is no more justification
for, say, a purely didactic poem or descriptive poem than there is for
the rhyming which begins somebody's treatise on optics with these
egregious words:--
When parallel rays Come opposite ways And fall upon opposite sides.
Everything depends upon the nature of that which a man has to say.
What are the external marks of poetry as distinct from real prose?
These: the choice of words of a special emotional or pictorial force,
combined with musical cadences, rhythm, and sometimes rhyme. And
why are these employed? To tickle the ear? By no means. It is simply
because they are most effective agents in that communication of his
mood and spirit which is the aim of the artist. When a mere fact has to
be stated, there is no defence for verse, unless as an aid to memory, just
as we say--
Thirty days hath September, April, June, and November.
When a thing can be said just as well in prose, there is no excuse for
not putting it in prose. That axiom should kill off half our amateur
poets and rid the world of a nuisance. On the other hand, when a
thought or a feeling is to be communicated from a mind profoundly

stirred, exalted, filled with fervour, or from a mind tingling with
exquisite perceptions, then there can be no true and full communication
to another mind, unless that mind also is stirred, exalted or made to
tingle. Music can so dispose that other mind. So too can language; for,
under the influence of poetry of perfect sound, we find stealing over us,
thanks largely to the sound, a mood which could never result from
prose; and so our minds are polarized to feel the actual thing expressed
exactly as the writer feels it, to see it exactly as he sees it. Verse-poetry,
therefore, is no idle invention. It has its sound philosophical basis; and
where poetry is really demanded by the subject, it is part and parcel of
the supreme literary gift to wed the music of the verse so aptly to the
thought, that the communication from soul to soul is utterly complete.
Is verse a mere conviction? Let us see. Does any one pretend that his
spirit would be just as much moved by the mere sense of this passage
of Tennyson, if it were stripped of its verse form and turned into
prose:--
Tears, idle tears, I know not what they mean. Tears from the depths of
some divine despair Rise in the heart, and gather to the eyes, In looking
on the happy autumn fields, And thinking of the days that are no more.
and--
Dear as remember'd kisses after death, And sweet as those by hopeless
fancy feign'd On lips that are for others; deep as love, Deep as first love,
and wild with all regret; O Death in Life, the days that are no more.
If he does, let us not envy him his powers of perception or sensation.
Would you feel for Coleridge just the same mood of sympathy, if he
told you his sad case in prose, as when he writes:--
A grief without a pang, void, dark and drear, A stifled, drowsy,
unimpassioned grief, Which finds no natural outlet, no relief, In word
or sigh or tear.
Listen once more to this:--

Do ye hear the children weeping, O my brothers, Ere the sorrow comes
with years? They are leaning their young heads against their mothers--
And that cannot stop their tears. The young lambs are bleating in the
meadows; The young birds are chirping in the nest; The young fawns
are playing with the shadows; The young flowers are blowing toward
the west-- But the young, young children, O my brothers, They are
weeping bitterly!-- They are weeping in the playtime of the others, In
the country of the free.
Verily I believe a few of these stanzas of Elizabeth Barrett Browning
have more effect in moving the average human soul than forty prose
sermons and a hundred prose tracts. And why? Because they express,
not mere thoughts, not mere arguments, but a mood, a disposition, a
soul.
Verse-poetry can never die. It is for evermore inseparable from the art
of communicating the spirit in words.
* * * * *
The supreme literary gift then is the power to embody even the most
subtle conception in a communicable shape. And is this a mere knack,
with which brain-power has little or nothing to do? Not so. Observe
what the task implies on the part of the writer, over and