Part 2

It is impossible not to respond to such assertions, for we know in ourselves what these exquisite differential experiences are. Any one who has ever written love-letters--which are a kind of aboriginal free-verse--knows what they are. And yet I believe it is obvious, if not demonstrable, that most of them are too individual to be communicated even to a lover. Human nature is too various for it to be true that the same hesitations, the same quickenings and slowings of the flow of ideas, flutterings of the breath or pulse, will reproduce themselves in another upon the perception of the same visible symbols. And while this fact may make the art of composition seem a little monotonous, it is better that art should be monotonous than that the world should. And it would be a monotonous world in which different people were so much alike, or we ourselves so much alike at different moments, that these minute filigrees of feeling should be altogether durable and capable of being served round in paper and ink.

There are values of verbal rhythm in a flow of thought and feeling which exist for one individual alone, and for him once only. There are other values less delicate which he can reproduce in himself at will, but can not altogether communicate to other minds whose thoughts and feelings are too much their own. There are other values, still less delicate, which he might communicate by vocal utterance and rhythmic gesture, taking possession as it were of the very pulse and respiration of others. But poetry which is composed for publication ought to occupy itself with those rhythmic values which may be communicated to other rhythmic minds through the printing of words on a page. It ought to do this, at least, if it pretends to an attitude that is even in the most minute degree social.

A mature science of rhythm might be imagined to stride into the room where these poets are discussing the musical values of their verse, seize two or three of the most "free" and subtle among them, lock them into separate sound-proof chambers, and allow them to read one of their favorite passages into the ear of an instrument designed to record in spatial outline the pulsations of vocal accent. It is safe to assert that there would be less identity in the actual pulsations recorded than if the same two were reading a passage of highly wrought English prose.[1] And the reason for this is that free verse imports into English prose a form of punctuation that is exceedingly gross and yet absolutely inconsequential. Its line division has neither a metrical nor a logical significance that exists objectively. It can mean at any time anything that is desirable to the whims, or needful to the difficulties, of the reader or the writer. It is a very sign and instrument of subjectivity. To incorporate in a passage of printed symbols an indeterminate element so marked and so frequent as that, is to say to the reader--"Take the passage and organize it into whatever rhythmical pattern may please yourself." And that is what the reader of free verse usually does, knowing that if he comes into any great difficulty, he can make a full stop at the end of some line, and shift the gears of his rhythm altogether. And since it is possible for one who is rhythmically gifted to organize _any indeterminate series of impressions whatever_ into an acceptable rhythm, he frequently produces a very enjoyable piece of music, which he attributes to the author and, having made it himself, is not unable to admire. Thus a good many poets who could hardly beat a going march on a base drum, are enabled by the gullibility and talent of their readers to come forward in this kind of writing as musicians of special and elaborate skill. The "freedom" that it gives them is not a freedom to build rhythms that are impossible in prose, but a freedom from the necessity to build actual and continuous rhythms. Free verse avails itself of the rhythmic appearance of poetry, and it avoids the extreme rhythmic difficulties of prose, and so it will certainly live as a supremely convenient way to write, among those not too strongly appealed to by the greater convenience of not writing. But as an object of the effort of ambitious artists I can not believe it will widely survive the knowledge that it is merely a convenience, a form of mumble and indetermination in their art.

Walt Whitman, however he may have been deceived about the social and democratic character of his form, was not deceived, as the modern eulogists of free verse are, about its subtlety. He thought that he had gained in volume and directness of communion, but he knew that he was discarding subtlety, discarding in advance all those beautiful and decadent wonders of microscopic and morbid audacity that developed in France among the admirers of Poe. The modern disciples of his form, however, are materially of Poe's persuasion, and like to believe that they have in free verse an instrument expressly fitted for the communication of those wonders, and of the most delicate modulations of that "verbal melody" that Whitman scorned. In this, from the true standpoint of criticism, Whitman has a commanding advantage over them, and what can be said of free-verse in general can not be said of his poems. He did achieve the predominant thing that he aimed to achieve--he made his poetry rough and artless in spite of his fineness and art. He made it like the universe and like the presence of a man. In that triumph it will stand. In that character it will mould and influence the literature of democracy, because it will mould and influence all literature in all lands.

"Who touches this book touches a man."

There is, however, another ideal of poetry that Walt Whitman confused with this one, and that he no more exemplified in his form than he exemplified democratic and social communion. And this ideal is predominant too in the minds of his modern followers. It is the ideal of being natural, of being primitive, dismissing "refinements" and the tricks of literary sophistication. He wanted his poetry to sound with nature and the untutored heart of humanity. It was in the radiance of this desire that he spoke of rhythmical prose as a "vast diviner heaven," toward which poetry would move in its future development in America. Prose seemed diviner to him because it seemed more simple, more large with candor and directness. But here again a cool and clear science will show that his nature led him in a contrary direction from its ideal. The music of prose is only dissimilar to that of poetry in its complexity, its subtle and refined _dissimulation_ of the fundamental monotonous meter that exists, either expressed or implied, in the heart of all rhythmical experience. Persons who can read the rhythm of prose can do so because they have in their own breast, or intellect, a subdued or tacit perpetual standard pulse-beat, around which by various instinctive-mathematical tricks of substitution and syncopation they so arrange the accents of the uttered syllables that they fall in with its measure, and become one with it, increasing its momentum and its effect of entrancement upon the nerves and body. There is no rhythm without this metrical basis, no value in rhythm comparable to the trance that its thrilling monotony engenders. Its undulations are akin to the intrinsic character of neural motion, and that is why, almost as though it were a chemical thing--a stimulant and narcotic--it takes possession of our state-of-being and controls it.

Poetry only naively acknowledges this ecstatic monotony that lives in the heart of all rhythm, brings it out into the light, and there openly weaves upon it the patterns of melodic sound. Poetry is thus the more natural, and both historically and psychologically, the more primitive of the two arts. It is the more simple. Meter, and even rhyme, which is but a colored, light drum-beat, accentuating the meter, are not "ornaments" or "refinements" of something else which may be called "rhythmical speech." They are the heart of rhythmical speech expressed and exposed with a perfectly childlike and candid grandeur. Prose is the refinement. Prose is the sophisticated and studio accomplishment--a thing that vast numbers of people have not the fineness of endowment or cultivation either to write or read. Prose is a civilized sublimation of poetry, in which the original healthy intoxicant note of the tom-tom is so laid over with fine traceries of related sound, that it can no longer be identified at all except by the analytical eye of science.

Walt Whitman was not really playful and childlike enough to go back to nature. His poetry was less primitive and savage, than it was superhuman and sublime. His emotions were as though they came to him through a celestial telescope. There is something more properly savage--something at least truly barbarous--in a poem like Poe's "Bells." And in Poe's insistence upon "beauty" as the sole legitimate province of the poem--beauty, which he defines as a special and dispassionate "excitement of the soul"--he is nearer to the mood of the snake dance. Poetry was to him a deliberate perpetration of ecstasy. And one can see in reading his verses how he was attuned to sway and quiver to the mere syllabic singing of a kettledrum, until his naked visions grew more intense and lovely than the passions and real meanings of his life. It is actually primitive, as well as childlike, to play with poetry in this intense and yet unsanctimonious way that Poe did, and Baudelaire too, and Swinburne. Play is nearer to the heart of nature than aspiration. It is healthier perhaps too, and more to the taste of the future, than priesthood. I think the essence of what we call classical in an artist's attitude is his quite frank acknowledgment that--whatever great things may come of it--he is at play. The art of the Athenians was objective and overt about being what it is, because the Athenians were educated, as all free men should be, for play. They were making things, and the eagerness of their hearts flowed freely out like a child's through their eyes upon the things that they made. That pearl of adult degeneration, the self, was very little cultivated in Athens; the "artistic temperament" was unborn; and sin, and the perpetual yearning beyond of Christians, had not been thought of. A little group of isolated and exclusive miracles had not reduced all the true and current glories of life to a status of ignobility, so that every great thing must contain in itself intimations of otherness. The Athenians were radiantly willing, without any cosmical preparation or blare of moral resolve, to let the constellations stay where they are. It was their custom to "loaf and invite their souls," to be "satisfied--see, dance, laugh, sing." They were so maturely naive that they would hardly understand what Walt Whitman, with his declarations of animal independence, was trying to recover from. And so it is by way of their happy and sun-loved city that we can most surely go back to nature.

And when we have arrived at a mood that is really and childly natural--a mood that will play, even with aspiration, and will spontaneously make out of interesting materials "things" to play with, and when in that mood we give our interest to the materials of reality in our own time, then perhaps we shall find that we have arrived also at a poetry that belongs to the people. For people are, in the depths of them and on the average as they are born, still natural, still savage. And there is no doubt that nature never fashioned them to work harder, or be more serious, or filled with self-conscious purports, than was necessary. She meant them to live and flow out upon the world with the bright colors of their interest. And it will seem rather a fever in the light of universal history, this hot subjective meaningfulness of everything we modern occidentals value. The poets and the poet-painters of ancient China knew that all life and nature was so sacred with the miracle of being that only the lucid line and color was needed to command an immortal reverence. They loved perfection devoutly, as it will rarely be loved, but they too, with their gift of delicate freedom in kinship with nature, were at play. And in Japan even today--surviving from that time--there is a form of poetry that is objective and childlike, a making of toys, or of exquisite metrical gems of imaginative realization, and this is the only poetry in the world that is truly popular, and is loved and cultivated by a whole nation.

If with this pagan and oriental love for the created thing--the same love that kept a light in Poe's sombre heart--we enter somewhat irreverently into Walt Whitman's volume, seeking our own treasure and not hesitating to remove it from its bed of immortal slag, we do find poems in new forms of exquisite and wonderful definition. Sometimes for the length of one or two or three lines, and occasionally for a stanza, and once for the whole poem--"When I heard at the close of the day"--Walt Whitman seems to love and achieve the carved concentration of image and emotion, the definite and thrilling chime of syllables along a chain that begins and ends and has a native way of uttering itself to all minds that are in tune. He seems, without losing that large grace of freedom from the pose and elegance of words in a book, which was his most original gift to the world, to possess himself of the mood that is truly primitive, and social, and intelligible to the hearts of simple people--the mood that loves with a curious wonder the poised and perfect existence of a thing.

HUSH'D BE THE CAMPS

Hush'd be the camps today; And, soldiers, let us drape our war-worn weapons; And each with musing soul retire, to celebrate, Our dear commander's death.

No more for him life's stormy conflicts; Nor victory, nor defeat--no more time's dark events, Charging like ceaseless clouds across the sky.

RECONCILIATION

Word over all, beautiful as the sky! Beautiful that war, and all its deeds of carnage, must in time be utterly lost; That the hands of the sisters Death and Night, incessantly softly wash again, and ever again, this soil'd world....

These sculptural sentences, with their rhythmic and still clarity of form, if they had been the end and essence of his art, and not only a by-accident of inevitable genius, might have led the way, not perhaps to a great national poetry for America, but beyond that into something international and belonging to the universe of man. The step forward from them would not have been towards a greater sprawling and subjectifying of rhythmic and poetic character, but towards an increasing objective perfection which should still cling to the new and breathless thing, the presence of one who lives and speaks his heart naturally. I chose them, not only because they are among the most musical and imaginative lines that Walt Whitman wrote, but also because in bringing a mood that is calm and a lulling of wind in the world's agonies of hate, they show themselves to be deep. And so it will not be thought that when I say the poet of democracy will be a child who is at play with the making of things, I desire to narrow the range and poignancy of the things he will make. He will be free, and he will move with a knowing and profound mind among all the experiences and the dreams of men. But to whatever heights of rhapsody, or moral aspiration, or now unimaginable truth, he may come, he will come as a child, whose clear eyes and deliberate creative purposes are always appropriate and never to be apologized for, because they are the purposes of nature.

FOOTNOTE:

[1] This statement is borne out by Mr. William Morrison Patterson's account of the records of Amy Lowell's reading of her poems in his laboratory. It constitutes the preface of the second edition of his book, "The Rhythm of Prose"--a book which, upon the true basis of experimentation, analyzes and defines convincingly for the first time the nature of rhythmical experience, and the manner in which it is derived by the reader both from prose and metrical poetry. Until it is amplified or improved by further investigation, this book will surely be the basis of every scientific discussion of the questions involved here.

POEMS

COMING TO PORT

Our motion on the soft still misty river Is like rest; and like the hours of doom That rise and follow one another ever, Ghosts of sleeping battle-cruisers loom And languish quickly in the liquid gloom.

From watching them your eyes in tears are gleaming, And your heart is still; and like a sound In silence is your stillness in the streaming Of light-whispered laughter all around, Where happy passengers are homeward bound.

Their sunny journey is in safety ending, But for you no journey has an end. The tears that to your eyes their light are lending Shine in softness to no waiting friend; Beyond the search of any eye they tend.

There is no nest for the unresting fever Of your passion, yearning, hungry-veined; There is no rest nor blessedness forever That can clasp you, quivering and pained, Whose eyes burn ever to the Unattained.

Like time, and like the river's fateful flowing, Flowing though the ship has come to rest, Your love is passing through the mist and going, Going infinitely from your breast, Surpassing time on its immortal quest.

The ship draws softly to the place of waiting, All flush forward with a joyful aim, And while their hands with happy hands are mating, Lips are laughing out a happy name-- You pause, and pass among them like a flame.

THE LONELY BATHER

Loose-veined and languid as the yellow mist That swoons along the river in the sun, Your flesh of passion pale and amber-kissed With years of heat that through your veins have run,

You lie with aching memories of love Alone and naked by the weeping tree, And indolent with inward longing move Your slim and sallow limbs despondently.

If love came warm and burning to your dream, And filled you all your avid veins require, You would lie sadly still beside the stream, Sobbing in torture of that vivid fire;

The same low sky would weave its fading blue, The river still exhale its misty rain, The willow trail its waving over you, Your longing only quickened into pain.

Bed your desire among the pressing grasses; Lonely lie, and let your thirsting breasts Lie on you, lonely, till the fever passes, Till the undulation of your longing rests.

IN MY ROOM

In this high room, my room of quiet space, Sun-yellow softened for my happiness, I learn of you, Wang Wei, and of your loves; Your rhythmic fisher sweet with solitude Beneath a willow by the river stream; Your aged plum tree bearing lonely bloom Beside the torrent's thunder; misty buds Among your saplings; delicate-leaved bamboo. My room is sweet because of you, Wang Wei, Your tranquil and creative-fingered love So many mounds of mournful years ago In that cool valley where the colors lived. My ceiling slopes a little like far mountains. Your delicate-leaved bamboo can flourish here.

* * * * *

Wang Wei was a great Chinese painter and poet, of the 8th century.

HOURS

Hours when I love you, are like tranquil pools, The liquid jewels of the forest, where The hunted runner dips his hand, and cools His fevered ankles, and the ferny air Comes blowing softly on his heaving breast, Hinting the sacred mystery of rest.

FIRE AND WATER

Flame-Heart, take back your love. Swift, sure And poignant as the dagger to the mark, Your will is burning ever; it is pure. Mine is vague water welling through the dark, Holding all substances--except the spark.

Picture the pleasure of the meadow stream When some clear striding naked-footed girl Cuts swift and straightly as a gleam Across its bosom ambling and aswirl With mooning eddies and soft lips acurl;

Such was our meeting--fatefully so brief. I have no purpose and no power to clutch. Gleam onward, maiden, to your goal of grief; And I more sadly flow, remembering much, Yet doomed to take the form of all I touch.

YOU MAKE NO ANSWER

You make no answer. You have stolen away Deliberately in that twilight sorrow Where the dark flame that is your being shines So well. Mysterious and deeply tender In your motion you have softly left me, And the little path along the house is still. And I, a child forsaken of its mother, I, a pilgrim leaning for a friend, Grow faint, and tell myself in terror that My love reborn and burning shall yet bring you-- More than friend and slender-bodied mother-- O sweet-passioned spirit, shining home!

OUT OF A DARK NIGHT

Death is more tranquil than the life of love, More calm, more sure, and more unanguished. O the path among the trees is far more tranquil to the dead Than to these anxious hearts, uptroubled from their beds, Who pace in pallid darkness on the leaves, For no good reason--for no reason But because their limbs will not lie still upon the sheet. Their limbs will not lie still. O how I pity them. Sad hearts--their marrow is a-quiver, And they can not lie them down in tranquil sadness like the dead.

A MORNING

Again this morning the bold autumn, Spreading through the woods her sacred fire, Brings the rich color of your presence Warmly luminous to my desire--

Brings to my heart the dear wild worship, High and wayward as the windy air, And to my pulse the hot sweet passion Burning crimson like a poison there.

ANNIVERSARY

The flowers we planted in the tender spring, And through the summer watched their blossoming, Died with our love in autumn's thoughtful weather, Died and dropped downward altogether.

Today in April in the vivid grass They flash again their laughter, pink and yellow, They wake before the frosty sunbeams pass, Gay bold to leave their chilly pillow.

But love sleeps longer in his wintry bed, He sleeps as though the lifting light were dead, And spring poured not her colors on the meadow, He sleeps in his cold sober shadow.

AUTUMN LIGHT

So bright and soft is the sweet air of morning, And so tenderly the light descends, And blesses with its gentle-falling fingers All the leaves unto the valley's ends--

It brings them all to being when it touches With its paleness every glowing vein; The wild and flaming hollows of the forest Kindle all their crimson in its rain;

And every curve receives its share of morning, Every little shadow softly grows, And motion finds a melody more tender That like a phantom through the branches goes--

So bright and soft and tranquil-rendering, And quiet in its giving, as though love, The morning dream of life, were born of longing, And really poured its being from above.

A MODERN MESSIAH

Scarred with sensuality and pain And weary labor in a mind not hard Enough to think, a heart too always tender, Sits the Christ of failure with his lovers. They are wiser than his parables, But he more potent, for he has the gift Of hopelessness, and want of faith, and love.

IN A RED CROSS HOSPITAL

Today I saw a face--it was a beak, That peered, with pale round yellow vapid eyes, Above the bloody muck that had been lips And teeth and chin. A plodding doctor poured Some water through a rubber down a hole He made in that black bag of horny blood. The beak revived, it smiled--as chickens smile. The doctor hopes he'll find the man a tongue To tell with, what he used to be.

A VISIT

You came with your small tapering flame of passion Thinly burning like a nun's desire, Your eyes in slim and half-expectant fashion Faintly painting what your veins require With little pallid pyramids of fire.