The Worlds Best Poetry, Volume 8 | Page 2

its study may well be the pleasurable reading of some, or of all, of these works, though remembering that such reading is not study, but only the reviewing of records of work done by others, useful mainly as a preparation for the real study which is to follow.
From all these works the student will not be likely to get a definition of poetry which will satisfy him. One may say indeed with truth that poetry is such expression as parallels the real and the ideal by means of some rhythmic form. But this is not a complete definition. Poetry is not to be bounded with a measuring line or sounded with a plummet. The student must feel after its limits as these authors have done, and find for himself its satisfactions. One can feel more of its power than the mind can define; for definitions are prose-forms of mind action, while poetry in its higher manifestations is pure emotion, outpassing prose limits. Yet one can know poetry if he cannot completely define it. The one essential element which distinguishes it from prose is rhythm. In its primal expressions this is mainly a rhythm of stresses and sounds--of accents and measures, of alliterations and rhymes. Poetry began when man, swaying his body, first sang or moaned to give expression to his joy or sorrow. Its earliest forms are the songs which accompany the simplest emotions. When rowers were in a boat the swinging oars became rhythmic, and the oarsman's chant naturally followed. When the savage overcame his enemy, he danced his war dance, and sang his war song around his campfire at night, tone and words and gestures all fitting into harmony with the movement of his body. So came the chants and songs of work and of triumph. For the dead warrior the moan of lamentation fitted itself to the slower moving to and fro of the mourner, and hence came the elegy. In its first expression this was but inarticulate, half action, half music, dumbly voicing the emotion through the senses; its rhythms were all for the ear and it had little meaning beyond the crude representation of some simple human desire and grief.
It became poetry when it put a thrill of exultation in work, of delight in victory, or of grief at loss by death, into some rhythmic form tangible to the senses. There grew up thereafter a body of rhythmic forms--lines, stanzas, accents, rhythms, verbal harmonies. These forms are the outward dress of poetry, and may rightly be the first subject of the student's study. We properly give the name of poetry to verses such as Southey's "Lodore," Poe's "Bells," or Lanier's "Song of the Chattahoochee," which do little more than sing to our ears the harmonies of sound, the ultimate rhythms of nature. Yet it is not merely the brook or the bell or the river, that we hear in the poem, but the echoing of that large harmony of nature of which the sound of the brook or the bell is only the single strain. Through the particular it suggests the universal, as does all poetry, leading through nature up to something greater, far beyond. This rhythm is best studied in poems that were written to be sung or chanted. If one could read Greek, or Anglo-Saxon, or Old High German, or the English of Chaucer's day, he could quickly train his ear to be independent of the hand-books on versification, by reading aloud, or listening as one read aloud, the "Odyssey" or the "Beowulf," or the "Nibelungen Lied" or the "Canterbury Tales." These would be better for this purpose than any modern verses, for the reason that they were intended to be sung or chanted, and so all the rhythms are real to the senses. Since the barrier of language bars out for most of us this older verse, we can read the early ballads, the lyrics of the Elizabethan time, when as yet verses spoke mainly to the ear, or some modern poems of the simpler type, such as "Evangeline" or "Hiawatha."
Such poetry, which is mainly to delight and charm the ear, is really a primal form of verse and we may properly call it the poetry of the Senses. In studying it Lanier's "Science of English Verse" is a delightful companion, and many minor hand-books besides those named above, such as are found in most schools, and some of the shorter accounts of versification such as are found in works on rhetoric, will give assistance.
Yet the pathway to the mastery of the problems of metre is for each student to tread alone. The best plan is 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