Chapter 5

But the new poetry does bother me, because I strive to remember not the mere mood or picture of the poem, but the actual words which created them, and I cannot. I want to compel again, at will, the actual poetic experience, and I cannot, without carrying a library in my pocket. The words hover, sometimes, just beyond the threshold of my brain, like a forgotten name ("If you hadn't asked me, I could have told you"--you know the sensation); but they never come. I have no comfort of them in the still hours of the day when I would be whispering them to myself. Instead, I have to fall back upon the old-fashioned Golden Treasury. I cannot remember a single line that Amy Lowell has written about her Roxbury garden, but I shall never forget what Wordsworth said about that field of gold he passed; I repeat his lines, and then my heart, too, with pleasure fills and dances with his daffodils.

It is an immemorial delight, this pleasure in the lingering line, in the haunting couplet, in the quatrain that will not let you forget. By sacrificing it, the new poetry has sacrificed something precious, something that a common instinct of mankind demands of the minstrel. It will not suffice for the new poets to deny that they are minstrels, to assert that they write for the eye, not speak for the ear, that it is not their mission to emit pretty sounds but so to present their vision of the world that it shall etch itself on men's minds with the bite of reality. Such a creed is admirable, but defective. It is defective because, in the first place, if the new poets did not write for the ear quite as much as the old poets, there would be no excuse even for rhythm. Any reader who is sensitive enough to care to read poetry is sensitive enough to hear it with his inward ear even as he sees it with his outward eye, and his after-pleasure, as it were, his lingering delight, will be in proportion as his ear retains the echo of the song. All poets are minstrels, still. Such a creed is defective, in the second place, because it has always been the mission of genuine poets to impress their vision of the world vividly on mankind, though their vision included more, sometimes, than what the realists choose to consider reality. There is nothing new in such an effort. In slack ages of poetic inspiration, however, the versifiers have no vision of the world, but only of its pale mirrored reflections in visions dead and gone, and some jolt is needed to bring the poets back to first-hand observation. Such a jolt are the new poets. _Spoon River_ is a medicine, a splendid tonic. But the form of _Spoon River_ is not conditioned by eternal needs, only by temporary ones. Its complete absence of loveliness, of lines that linger, will be its greatest handicap to immortality--for poetic immortality to-day as much as ever is not in the pages of a book on a library shelf, but on the lips of men and women. A poem from which nobody ever quotes is a poem forgotten.

Tennyson was something of an Imagist at times, presenting his mood or picture with a Flaubertian precision of epithet that even Amy Lowell could not criticise. Consider, for example, his famous _Fragment_ on the eagle:

He clasps the crag with crooked hands Close to the sun in distant lands, Ringed with the azure world he stands.

Beneath, the wrinkled ocean crawls, He watches from his mountain walls, And like a thunderbolt he falls.

The precision of wording here, the tremendousness of scene evoked with stark economy of means, the triumphant vividness of the adjective "wrinkled," transporting the reader at once to a great height above the plain of the sea, the complete absence of any touch of the "poetic" (surely the beautiful word _azure_ may be admitted in modern company), make this poem a masterpiece without date or time. It is as "new" as the latest Imagist anthology. And, be it noted, I have quoted it correctly, I feel confident, from memory. My copy of Tennyson is in storage, and I have not read the fragment probably in ten or a dozen years. Yet whenever I wish to relive its mood, to see again its incomparable picture, I have only to move my lips, even only to repeat the lines inwardly, in silence, and the poem is mine again.

But I have just been reading the latest Imagist anthology, especially the _Lacquer Prints_ by Amy Lowell, not ten years, but hardly ten minutes ago--and I cannot repeat one of them. I could learn them, of course, by an effort. But that is not the way man desires to remember music and poetry. It must come singing into his head and heart--and remain there without his effort. Here is a "Lacquer Print" called _Sunshine_. It is indeed vivid, though (quite properly, of course) a little garden pool to Tennyson's vast ocean.

The pool is edged with blade-like leaves of irises. If I throw a stone into the placid water It suddenly stiffens Into rings and rings Of sharp gold wire.

Here is a vivid picture, here is economy and scrupulous selection of epithet, here is no "poetic" diction of the despised sort. But something is lacking, none the less. It does not haunt you, it does not ingratiate itself with your ear, you do not find yourself repeating it days and months later. Close the book--and the poem perishes, even as those rings subside on the pool.

It would be only too easy to find much more striking examples in the new verse. Take, for instance, the opening stanza of Ezra Pound's poem, _The Return_:

See, they return; ah, see the tentative Movements, and the slow feet, The trouble in the pace and the uncertain Wavering!

It is doubtful if any reader will fail to see the trouble in the pace of these lines! No doubt it was exactly the effect the poet desired, but it will forever effectually prevent the repetition of his poem by anybody without the book. When a woman once boasted that she could repeat anything on a single hearing, Theodore Hook rattled off the immortal nonsense, beginning, "She went into the garden patch to get a cabbage head to make an apple pie, and a great she bear coming up the road thrust her head into the shop and cried 'What, no soap?' and so he died--" and the woman was floored. Such a poem as _The Return_ would have floored her quite as completely. I find, after reading carefully all the twenty pages assigned to Ezra Pound in _The New Poetry Anthology_, edited by Miss Monroe (a greater space, I believe, than was awarded to any other poet), that I can now repeat just one line--or, rather, two lines, such is Mr. Pound's odd way of phrasing his rhythms. Here they are:

Dawn enters with little feet Like a gilded Pavlova.

There is a certain humorous charm of epithet here, and a rhythmic suggestion of metrical beat to follow. That, no doubt, is why the line has stuck in my memory. But the metrical beat did not follow, and the rest of the stanza has gone from me. I am sure even a gilded Pavlova would be at some difficulty to dance to Mr. Pound's rhythms.

But Miss Monroe is catholic in her choice of new poets. She includes, for instance, Walter de la Mare, if in less than two pages. She selects his wonderful poem _The Listeners_, and the quaint, haunting, _Epitaph_. It is a little hard to see just why _The Listeners_ is new poetry, except chronologically. Its odd, apparently simple but really intricate and triumphantly fluid metrical structure, so unified that there is no break from the first syllable to the last; its lyric romanticism of subject; its obvious delight in tune; even its occasional lapses into the ancient "poetic" vocabulary (the traveler "smote" the door, the listeners "hearkened," and so on), are all a part of the nineteenth-century tradition of English verse. It is no more modern than _La Belle Dame Sans Merci_--which, to be sure, is quite modern indeed to some of us. And it has lyric beauty, it has lines of unforgettable musical loveliness, it creeps in through the ear and echoes in the memory. You surely remember the close:

Never the least stir made the listeners, Though every word he spake Fell echoing through the shadowiness of the still house From the one man left awake: Ay, they heard his foot upon the stirrup, And the sound of iron on stone, And how the stillness surged softly backward, When the plunging hoofs were gone.

Is there really any loss of sharpness in the imagery here because of the rhyme and metre? Could any phrase, of any rhythm, however free, render any better and more economically the peculiar noise of a horse turning on a hard drive and starting away in the night, than "the sound of iron on stone"? The last two lines, surely, are close to perfection. A genuine new poet would probably have hunted long for a less hackneyed word than "plunging," but though it would possibly have sharpened his final image, it would, at the same time, in all probability, have robbed it of that very vagueness sought and captured. No, the passage pictorially and emotionally is as near perfection as it is often permitted mortals to approach, and it lingers and echoes in the memory, it will not be forgotten. It has the lilt of music, the chime of tune, the immemorial loveliness of song. If the precise image, the desired emotional effect, the intellectual content can be imparted in fettered verse, and, in addition, the ancient loveliness can be retained, which the new verse lacks, can it be possible that the world will long endure to read _vers libre_ when _vers libre_ has done its work of bringing poets back to first-hand reality for their subjects, relating the minstrels to the spirit of their age? I cannot think so. I cannot but believe that any poetry long to endure must be memorable, in the literal sense, and that is just what the new poetry is not. Already, it seems to me from my acquaintance with under-graduates and the just-graduated, _vers libre_ is a little the cult of the middle-aged, while youth, the future, is swinging back gladly to the fetters of metre and rhyme, and probably forgetful that the public which awaits their effort has been prepared anew for poetry by this revolt from what was stale in tradition. I believe that memorable poetry always has been, and always must be, irradiated by

The light that never was on sea or land,

which is but another way of saying that it must have elevation and the haunting mystery of beauty. The trouble is, of course, to catch this authentic radiation, instead of some pale reflection from Patmore or Rossetti. It was against the sham of second-hand mood and subject, rather than the great truth of music and loveliness, that the new poets broke into unmetrical protest. They have done a brave and needed work,--but they have produced astonishingly little quotable poetry, they have sung their way not far into the hearts of their listeners. The lingering, lovely line is not for them. No, for still,

The soul of Adonais, like a star, Beacons from the abode where the Eternal are.

_The Lies We Learn in Our Youth_

The world for a great many years has accepted the dictum of the poet, that--

Of all sad words of tongue or pen, The saddest are these: It might have been.

Even those people who refused to accept the rhyme have accepted the reason. But the fact is that the reason of this copybook couplet is as bad as the rhyme. It would be much nearer the truth to say that of all sad words of tongue or pen, the saddest are these: He's succeeded again. Here, too, the rhyme may be questioned, but the reason is sound. An entirely successful man is the most pitiful object in the universe. Not only has he nothing to look forward to, but he has nothing to look back upon. Having no regrets, no shadows, in his life, he has no chiaroscuro, no depth, no solidity in his picture. It is painted in the flat. "Regret," says George Moore, to change the figure a little, "is like a mountain top from which we survey our dead life, a mountain top on which we pause and ponder." He has no point of view, then, either. So after all the words, "It might have been," do bear a sadness about them in his case; his life might have been a success if it had only been a failure. "It might have been" thus becomes sad when it reflects back upon itself, when it means there might have been a might have been but there was only a was. So life whirls into paradox!

Let any man in honesty retire into the solitude of his soul and reflect on his joys that might have been and those that were, and let him then answer whether any of his realizations were the equal of his anticipations. Therefore, if he had achieved the anticipated but lost delights which form the burden of his "Might have been," they, too, would have been as ashes in the mouth. The truth is that the essence of delight is in the anticipation, the best of life is the vision, not the reality. It is pathetic not to have entertained the vision, but more pathetic, perhaps, to have attained it. Wasn't it Oscar Wilde who said that there is only one thing more tragic than failure--success?

Did our regretful poet dream at twenty-one of being the perfect lover? In his dreams he was the perfect lover, then. Yet actually what was he? What was she? What was their courtship, their marriage? You, prosy, contented, forty and forgetful, by your prosy hearth or shaking down the furnace fire, while the children are being put to bed, you dare to call "It might have been" the saddest words of tongue or pen? Those now almost forgotten dreams of what might have been are the best you ever were. Remember them as often as you can, as bitterly, as happily, for your soul's salvation. Without them you are the lowest of God's creatures, a mere married man.

Or take the case of Maud Muller herself, and her judge. We learn that the judge--

Wedded a wife of richest dower, Who lived for fashion, as he for power.

Maud, on the other hand,--

Wedded a man unlearned and poor, And many children played round her door.

Probably in both cases this was for the best. Only the wildest sentimentalist could in seriousness urge that Maud would have made a good wife for the judge. Being a man who "lived for power," the probable unpresentableness of Maud in a town house would have been a constant thorn in his flesh. She could not appear barefooted at his receptions, and the feet that have gone bare through an agricultural girlhood do not readily adapt themselves to the size of shoe which urban fashion dictates. Moreover, the vague yearnings of a young girl for an alliance with a handsome stranger above her station, do not fit her to speak the speech and think the thoughts and meet the social demands of that station. No, Maud would have been a constant thorn in the judge's side. Summer sunshine, the smell of hay, a drink of cold water, a pretty, barefoot girl--the mood is compounded. An uneducated farmer's daughter for a wife--the reality is accomplished.

And as for Maud, who will say for certain that she would not eventually have eloped with the coachman because he praised her pies instead of criticising her grammar?

So to each of them--barefoot girl and bald-headed judge (he probably was bald-headed, though the poem omits to say so) did what was best, and the school children for several generations have been taught to waste unnecessary sympathy over their fate, have been inculcated with a false view of the whole matter. Both of them found far more happiness in dreaming of what might have been than ever they could have found in the realization; for each of them this dream brought undoubted sadness, but the sadness which is really pleasure, the sadness, that is, which comes over all of us when "we realize that though we have missed certain ideals in our lives we are still able to recall those ideals, we are still not like all the dead, forgetful clods around us, our wives and husbands and neighbors and friends. We live with these people as one of them, of course, but we might have been so much better than they! Such reflections as these are a great comfort. They bring a sadness which makes us mournfully happy. They reconcile us with the scheme of things. They are the outcroppings of that secret vanity which the best and the worst of us nourish, and of which is born our self-respect, our happiness, our heroism."

Once upon a time, long, long ago, there was a town called Abdera. The good people of the town were so much upset at seeing a performance of the _Andromeda_ of Euripides that they caught a sort of tragic fever. This began with bleeding and perspiration and was followed in about a week's time, according to the course of the disease, by an uncontrollable desire to recite. The effect upon Abdera was surprising. The people walked about in the streets day and night reciting pages of Euripides until the epidemic was cured by a return of the cold weather. Well, Tolstoy would have us believe that the European and English-speaking world to-day is about in this condition regarding Shakespeare, and that there is little hope of a cold spell. A second-rate fellow, this Bard of Avon, according to Tolstoy, whom by a gigantic process of hypnotic suggestion we have been taught to think great, till we go about quoting him as the law and the prophet, while he fills some hundred and seventeen pages of Bartlett.

There is undoubtedly something in this view of the matter. Without holding a brief either for the alleged immortal William or the author of _What Is Art?_, it may safely be hazarded that at least fifty per cent of the "familiar quotations" we children laboriously copied into ruled blank books in our school days and have ever since regarded as nuggets of truth and gems of poetry are neither true nor, beyond the fact of rhyme, poetic. Something as a wave of suggestion passed over Europe and sent thousands of little ones down to their deaths in the Children's Crusades, thousands of youngsters in our schools to-day are hypnotized into a lasting belief in the poetic value of numberless couplets of second-rate verse, and never come to know real poetry at all. Having been forced to swallow rhymed platitudes in the belief that they are poetry, a permanent and perfectly natural repulsion for the very name of poetry is too often the children's only acquisition. In fact, it is a pretty question if the decline of poetic appreciation cannot be directly traced to the rise of the memory-gem book.

How well I remember my own sense of weariness and repulsion when I was compelled at the tender age of ten to copy out the whole of _The Psalm of Life_, unconsciously committing it to memory as I did so.

Life is real, life is earnest, And the grave is not its goal; Dust thou art, to dust returnest, Was not spoken of the soul.--

My infant lips muttered the meaningless words while my poor little brain and imagination tried to find some joy, some picture, some tangible delight, some inspiration in the mournful, oppressive poem. If I had then been assigned intelligible verses to copy, an Elizabethan lyric, a song that sang because it had to, a bit of imagery, my childish fancy would have been fired, and I should not have had to wait till I was eighteen years old before I read a single poem voluntarily. And I should not have detested _The Psalm of Life_ all the rest of my days--at least I don't think I should. Longfellow when I was a child was a particularly prolific mine of memory gems, running as high as three thousand quotations to the ton. I never had a teacher who didn't know her Longfellow with an intimacy almost as great as her ignorance of Keats, Shelley, Herrick, Lovelace, Suckling, Herbert, Campion, Coleridge, Burns and the rest of the kings who lived before Agamemnon. Longfellow was a lovely soul, and, within his limits, a very true poet. But I was fed on his platitudes. I was daily informed that--

The heights by great men reached and kept Were not attained by sudden flight.--

Just as if I cared, at ten, whether they were or not. I was told in tripping measures of the village chestnut tree, to the total exclusion of the linden and ilex; and as for the land where the citrons bloom, and golden oranges are in the gloom, and the long silences of laurel rise--"Kennst du das Land?" Not I! The spreading chestnut tree alone cast its oppressive shadow across my childish fancy.

Another memory gem that I remember with a lasting grudge was--

Kind hearts are more than coronets, And simple faith than Norman blood.

This I knew was false, and to be forced glibly to chatter the words before the class shamed and angered me. Had not a maiden aunt of mine, after many trips to the library of the New England Genealogical Society, traced back our line to William the Conqueror? Was there another boy or girl in the school who had descended from William the Conqueror? No, sir! Several of them had kind hearts, and doubtless simple faith--whatever that was--but side of my Norman blood this counted for nothing. It is a vastly superior thing to have Norman blood, and as for coronets--well, it may be that the new age will wipe them literally out in a surge of Democracy--some of us hope so--but to the romantic heart of childhood they are a symbol not of caste and oppression but of dignity and beauty and the heroic. Certainly they are not to be eliminated by throwing at the child's head such adult platitudes in rhyme as these, and telling him it is poetry. Alas! he believes you, and that is why he hates the very word poetry all the rest of his days.

My memory-gem book lies before me as I write, saved I know not how out of the wreck of boyhood. I have searched it in vain for a single quotation of lyric song, a single scrap of verse that paints the world in rosy colors and lets moral platitudes go hang, a single strain of "Celtic magic." Instead, I learn that as a boy I was taught that--

We are living, we are dwelling In a grand and awful time.

I find that at eleven years of age--

I held it truth with him who sings To one clear harp of divers tones, That men may rise on stepping-stones Of their dead selves to higher things.

Indeed, I must have been a very remarkable child, how remarkable I had not hitherto suspected! Evidently, too, I displayed an early tendency to melancholia, for I find I was admonished in the following words, with their incontestable statement of fact:

Be still, sad heart, and cease repining, Behind the clouds is the sun still shining.

Whether my sadness was caused by too much reflection on the fact that life is real, life is earnest, and the grave is not its goal, or on the fact that Bill Carter's air-gun cost more than mine, I cannot now recall. Either cause would have been sufficient. At any rate I apparently braced up and smiled once more, for the next page is blank. That means I went fishing!

Poor kiddies! Shall we grown-ups never learn that their minds don't work as ours do, and what may be poetry for some of us is cod-liver oil for them? Why must we be forever nagging them at home with "Don't do this" and "Don't do that," and forever preaching at them in school with ponderous prose platitudes cut up into lengths? How much wiser than we they are, who know that life is free and pleasant and full of melody and beautiful things, and dreams more real than reality, and reality born of the dream! Yet we try our best to convince them that they are wrong. We see to it that Longfellow lies about them in their infancy.

But perhaps all this is changed since my day, and the nightmare this battered memory-gem book recalls to my mind is no longer a load on the children of the present. I profoundly hope so. Can it be that the present revival of poetry is due to the passing of the memory-gem book? At least, no teacher would have the courage to set her class the task of copying Amy Lowell or _The Spoon River Anthology_!

_The Bad Manners of Polite People_