The Worlds Best Poetry, Volume 8 | Page 4

some outburst of exultant grief such as Whitman's "Captain, My Captain," or in some revelation of the unseen potencies close about us, as in Browning's "Saul," or in some vision of the mystery of this our earthly struggle such as "Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came," or in some answer of the spirit to a never stilled question such as Wordsworth's "Ode: Intimations of Immortality." When he thus finds it he has come to poetry in its highest use. In his "Alexander's Feast" Dryden hints at two great functions of poetry in the lines:
"He raised a mortal to the skies, She drew an angel down."
The office of poetry is to parallel the actual with the ideal, to cast upon an earthly landscape something of a heavenly glow, to interpret earthly things in terms of the spirit. The poetry of the Senses lifts a mortal to the skies, thinking the thought of one higher than itself as the poet muses, singing the songs of an angelic choir in harmony with the rhythm of the verse. The poetry of the Spirit brings the message of the angels down to men and makes the harmonies they speak the music of this earthly life.
The highest type of poetry lends itself perfectly to earnest and profound study. In class work it is usually better to study poets as well as poems, and to study thoroughly a few works of a great master. Poetry is essentially a synthetic art; it unites the wandering desires of our hearts and spirits to make one single and enduring impression. Poetry speaks also the mood, the aspiration, and the deepest intent of its author; so that the great poet is the one who brings us most directly to understand its art. For most student classes it is best to take a single poet for interpretation, and to study in succession a small number--say six to ten--of his works, making one, or at least two or three, the subject of the conferences for each week. The choice of author will be dependent on many considerations and cannot here be positively advised, but one will not go astray in choosing Wordsworth, Tennyson, Browning, Longfellow, or Whittier, or three of them, for a season's work. Intelligent direction is of great assistance in making the study definite and progressive. Choose first of all the poems which seem to have influenced men, for to move men is the final test of poetry. If there is no class, and no leader, let the student make his choice by a preliminary examination. Let him read rapidly, and for the single impression, the poems of Wordsworth whose titles seem most familiar to him as he scans them over; such as "Tintern Abbey," "Yarrow Unvisited," "Solitary Reaper," "Lucy," "We are Seven," "The Intimations of Immortality," "She was a Phantom of Delight," and a few of the lyrical ballads; then let him read Tennyson's "Locksley Hall," "Maud," "The Idylls of the King," and a few of the shorter poems; let him read Browning's "Saul," "Abt Vogler," "The Grammarian's Funeral," "Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came," "Pippa Passes," one or two dramas, and a few of the brief poems in the volume "Men and Women." Then let him make his own list for study, taking those poems which have most stirred him, those which he remembers vividly after his reading, those which have become a part of himself. If the student makes his choice frankly and sincerely, he has, in making it, begun his study. Then let him frame for himself or get from his leader, if he has one, a list of the questions which each poem is to answer for him. If the work be really poetry, its study ought to give a help toward the solution of the first great problems: "What is poetry?" and "What is its revelation to the life of our senses, our hearts, and our souls?" We have a right to ask of each poem three questions: "How does it charm our senses?"; "How does it make the meaning of things clearer for us?"; "How does it bring to us a renewal of life?" The first question is better fitted for private study than for class investigation, the senses being delicate organs and shy in company. Let the minute matters of form and structure be gone over at home. Let the student work out the metre, the typical line, and the variations by which the poet gets his effects, the metaphors, the alliterations, the consonant and vowel harmonies. It will aid if this work be made as definite and as exact as an investigation in a scientific laboratory. But all this should be the student's home work. In the class the large divisions of the poem should be sympathetically shown, so that