A poem is the very image of life
expressed in its eternal truth. There is this difference between a story and a
poem, that a story is a catalogue of detached facts, which have no other
connection than time, place, circumstance, cause and effect; the other is the
creation of actions according to the unchangeable forms of human nature, as
existing in the mind of the Creator, which is itself the image of all other
minds. The one is partial, and applies only to a definite period of time, and a
certain combination of events which can never again recur; the other is
universal, and contains within itself the germ of a relation to whatever
motives or actions have place in the possible varieties of human nature. Time,
which destroys the beauty and the use of the story of particular facts,
stripped of the poetry which should invest them, augments that of poetry, and
forever develops new and wonderful applications of the eternal truth which it
contains. Hence epitomes have been called the moths of just history; they eat
out the poetry of it. A story of particular facts is as a mirror which obscures and
distorts that which should be beautiful; poetry is a mirror which makes
beautiful that which is distorted.
The parts of a composition may be
poetical, without the composition as a whole being a poem. A single sentence
may be considered as a whole, though it may be found in the midst of a series
of unassimilated portions; a single word even may be a spark of
inextinguishable thought. And thus all the great historians … were poets….
A poet is a
nightingale, who sits in darkness and sings to cheer its own solitude with
sweet sounds; his auditors are as men entranced by the melody of an unseen
musician, who feel that they are moved and softened, yet know not whence or
why….
Poetry lifts the veil from the hidden beauty of the world,
and makes familiar objects be as if they were not familiar; it reproduces all
that it represents, and the impersonations clothed in its Elysian light stand
thenceforward in the minds of those who have once contemplated them, as
memorials of that gentle and exalted content which extends itself over all
thoughts and actions with which it coexists….
Poetry is not like reasoning, a power to be exerted
according to the determination of the will. A man cannot say, “I will compose
poetry.” The greatest poet even cannot say it; for the mind in creation is as a
fading coal, which some invisible influence, like an inconstant wind, awakens
to transitory brightness; this power arises from within, like the color of a
flower which fades and changes as it is developed, and the conscious portions
of our natures are unprophetic either of its approach or its departure. Could
this influence be durable in its original purity and force, it is impossible to
predict the greatness of the results; but when composition begins, inspiration
is already on the decline, and the most glorious poetry that has ever been
communicated to the world is probably a feeble shadow of the original
conceptions of the poet….
Poetry is the record of the best
and happiest moments of the happiest and best minds. We are aware of evanescent
visitations of thought and feeling sometimes associated with place or person,
sometimes regarding our own mind alone, and always arising unforeseen and
departing unbidden, but elevating and delightful beyond all expression: so that
even in the desire and the regret they leave, there cannot but be pleasure,
participating as it does in the nature of its object. It is as it were the
interpretation of a diviner nature through our own; but its footsteps are like
those of a wind over the sea, which the coming calm erases, and whose traces
remain only as on the wrinkled sand which paves it. These and corresponding
conditions of being are experienced principally by those of the most delicate
sensibility and the most enlarged imagination; and the state of mind produced
by them is at war with every base desire. The enthusiasm of virtue, love,
patriotism, and friendship is essentially linked with such emotions; and whilst
they last, self appears as what it is, an atom to a universe. Poets are not
only subject to these experiences as spirits of the most refined organization,
but they can color all that they combine with the evanescent hues of this
ethereal world; a word, a trait in the representation of a scene or a passion
will touch the enchanted chord, and reanimate, in those who have ever
experienced these emotions, the sleeping, the cold, the buried image of the
past. Poetry thus makes immortal all that is best and most beautiful in the
world; it arrests the vanishing apparitions which haunt the interlunations of
life, and veiling them, or in language or in form, sends them forth among
mankind, bearing sweet news of kindred joy to those with whom their sisters
abide — abide, because there is no portal of expression from the caverns of the
spirit which they inhabit into the universe of things. Poetry redeems from
decay the visitations of the divinity in man.
Poetry turns all things to
loveliness; it exalts the beauty of that which is most beautiful, and it adds
beauty to that which is most deformed; it marries exultation and horror, grief
and pleasure, eternity and change; it subdues to union under its light yoke all
irreconcilable things. It transmutes all that it touches, and every form moving
within the radiance of its presence is changed by wondrous sympathy to an
incarnation of the spirit which it breathes: its secret alchemy turns to
potable gold the poisonous waters which flow from death through life; it strips
the veil of familiarity from the world, and lays bare the naked and sleeping
beauty, which is the spirit of its forms…..
The most unfailing herald, companion, and follower of the
awakening of a great people to work a beneficial change in opinion or institution,
is poetry. At such periods there is an accumulation of the power of
communicating and receiving intense and impassioned conceptions respecting man
and nature. The person in whom this power resides, may often, as far as regards
many portions of their nature, have little apparent correspondence with that
spirit of good of which they are the ministers. But even whilst they deny and
abjure, they are yet compelled to serve, that power which is seated on the
throne of their own soul. It is impossible to read the compositions of the most
celebrated writers of the present day without being startled with the electric
life which burns within their words. They measure the circumference and sound
the depths of human nature with a comprehensive and all-penetrating spirit, and
they are themselves perhaps the most sincerely astonished at its
manifestations; for it is less their spirit than the spirit of the age. Poets
are the hierophants of an unapprehended inspiration; the mirrors of the
gigantic shadows which futurity casts upon the present; the words which express
what they understand not; the trumpets which sing to battle, and feel not what
they inspire; the influence which is moved not, but moves. Poets are the
unacknowledged legislators of the world.
No comments:
Post a Comment
Join the conversation! What is your reaction to the post?