The Worlds Best Poetry, Volume 8 | Page 3

to read aloud a considerable
quantity. Then the technical language of the books will lose its terrors
and the simplicity of construction of good poetry will become apparent.
If the student will read so much of this poetry that his senses become
responsive to its music, he will no longer need a hand-book. For this
purpose let him read such poems as can be sung, chanted, or spoken to
the ear; such as Macaulay's "Lays of Ancient Rome," Scott's
"Marmion," Browning's "Pied Piper" and "How They Brought the
Good News," Tennyson's "Charge of the Light Brigade." Let him read
mainly for the senses rather than for the mind, getting the reward in the
quickening of life through the throbbing rhythms; then the metrical
system of poetry will become as real to him as the rhythmic movements
of the planets are to an astronomer. There is no other way to get a
feeling for the pulsations of poetry than through this intimate
acquaintance. Without this, months of reading of amphibrachs and
trochees and dactyls will not avail. It should be read aloud as much as
possible to make the swing of its verses perfectly clear. When it sings
to us as we read, it has begun to teach the message of its rhythms.
Thus far the text-books have been pleasant companions, even when
unable to give as much aid to the student as he could wish; but the fact
will come to him at length that there is something more in poetry than

the hand-books permit him to consider. These books deal with the
forms, and most of them with the forms only. They analyze the
methods, work out the metre, show how the parts are woven together,
explain how the chords produce the harmonies. But just in proportion
as the student becomes learned in these rhythms, and can distinguish
minute or subtle variations of metrical structure, does he realize that
this study teaches not its own use and that there is something beyond
which must be won by his own observation. He finds in his search for
rhythmical perfection that there are poems which make little appeal to
his senses, whose lines do not sing themselves through his day-dreams,
which yet affect his imagination even more powerfully than the musical
strains thrilled his senses. He finds that there is much more in poetry
than its rhymes and jingles, that there is a rhythm greater than that of
the senses. In its more complex forms poetry is rhythm of thought,
leading the mind to find relations which prose may describe, but which
poetry alone can recreate. There is such a thing as a prose thought and
such a thing as a poetic thought. The one gives with exactness the fact
as it exists, clearly, honestly, directly, and for all completed and
tangible things is the natural medium of expression. The other parallels
the actual with a suggestion of an ideal rhythmically consonant with the
motive underlying the fact. Justice, for example, deals in prose fashion
with a crime and awards the punishment which the law allows; poetic
justice suggests such recompense as would come of itself in a
community perfectly organized. The prose of life is honest living, a
worthy endeavor to do the best one can in the world as it is; the poetry
of life is the feeling for, and the striving after, the bringing of this life
into harmony with a nobler living. So we rightly give the name of
poetry to such verse as Goldsmith's "Deserted Village," Johnson's
"London," Gray's "Elegy," Wordsworth's "Excursion," Milton's
"Paradise Lost," Chaucer's "Knight's Tale," Browning's "King and the
Book," Tennyson's "In Memoriam," which do not much stir our senses.
They parallel the real with the ideal, suggesting the eternal rhythms of
infinite mind as the poetry of the senses suggests the eternal rhythms of
omnipotent nature.
This poetry of the Intellect is the second great division of the poetic
realm. Beyond it lies still another; for there are spiritual harmonies
which the mind alone cannot compass, and which the senses alone

cannot interpret. The hand-books know little of spiritual harmonies,
and do not go beyond their academic classifications of lyric and epic,
and their catalogues of pentameters, hexameters, or alexandrines. But
the student can for himself push his observation beyond, and come to
the poetry of the higher imagination, where he can be forgetful of the
mere form and disdainful of the merely logical relations, where his
spirit can as it were see face to face the truth beyond the seeming. This
is the poetry of the spirit, and ought to come as a revelation to the
searcher. He may first find it in some pure lyric such as Shelley's
"Skylark," or in some mystical fantasy such as Moore's "Lallah Rookh"
or Coleridge's "Christabel,"