TO THE CUCKOO. WILLIAM WORDSWORTH (1770-1850). ["This poem has an exaltation and a glory, joined with an exquisiteness of expression, which place it in the highest rank among the many masterpieces of its illustrious author."-F. T. PALGRAVE.] O blithe new-comer! I have heard, O cuckoo! shall I call thee bird, While I am lying on the grass Though babbling only to the vale Thrice welcome, darling of the spring! Even yet thou art to me No bird-but an invisible thing, A voice, a mystery; The same that in my schoolboy days Which made me look a thousand ways To seek thee did I often rove Through woods and on the green ; And I can listen to thee yet; That golden time again. O blessed bird! the earth we pace An unsubstantial, fairy place, That is fit home for thee! CHARACTERISTICS OF POETIC DICTION. Its F. H. MYERS.-"Wordsworth" in English Men of Letters. Poetry, like all the arts, is essentially a "mystery." charm depends upon qualities which we can neither define accurately, nor reduce to rule, nor create again at pleasure. Mankind, however, are unwilling to admit this; and they endeavor from time to time to persuade themselves that they have discovered the rules which will enable them to produce the desired effect. And so much of the effect can thus be reproduced, that it is often possible to believe for a time that the problem has been solved. Pope, to take the instance which was prominent in Wordsworth's mind, was by general admission a poet. But his success seemed to depend on imitable peculiarities; and Pope's imitators were so like Pope that it was hard to draw a line and say where they ceased to be poets. At last, however, this imitative school began to prove too much. If all the insipid verses which they wrote were poetry, what was the use of writing poetry at all? A reaction succeeded which asserted that poetry depends on emotion, and not on polish; that it consists precisely in those things which frigid imitators lack. Cowper, Burns, and Crabbe (especially in his Sir Eustace Grey) had preceded Wordsworth as leaders of this reaction. But they had acted half unconsciously, or had even at times themselves attempted to copy the very style which they were superseding. Wordsworth, too, began with a tendency to imitate Pope, but only in the school exercises which he wrote as a boy. Poetry soon became to him the expression of his own deep and simple feelings; and then he rebelled against rhetoric and unreality, and found for himself a directer and truer voice. "I have proposed to myself to imitate and, as far as is possible, to adopt the very language of men..... .I have taken as much pains to avoid what is usually called poetic diction as others ordinarily take to produce it." And he erected this practice into a general principle in the following passage:— "I do not doubt that it may be safely affirmed that there neither is, nor can be, any essential difference between the language of prose and metrical composition. We are fond of tracing the resemblance between poetry and painting, and accordingly we call them sisters; but where shall we find bonds of connection sufficiently strict to typify the affinity between metrical and prose composition? If it be affirmed that rhyme and metrical arrangement of themselves constitute a distinction which overturns what I have been saying on the strict affinity of metrical language with that of prose, and paves the way for other artificial distinctions which the mind voluntarily admits; I answer, that the language of such poetry as I am recommending is, as far as possible, a selection of the language really spoken by men; that this selection, wherever it is made with true taste and feeling, will of itself form a distinction far greater than would at first be imagined, and will entirely separate the composition from the vulgarity and meanness of ordinary life; and if metre be superadded thereto, I believe that a dissimilitude will be produced altogether sufficient for the gratification of a rational mind. What other distinction would we have? whence is it to come? and where is it to exist?" There is a definiteness and simplicity about this description of poetry which may well make us wonder why this precious thing (producible, apparently, as easily as Pope's imitators supposed, although by means different from theirs) is not offered to us by more persons, and of better quality. And it will not be hard to show that a good poetical style must possess certain characteristics which, although something like them must exist in a good prose style, are carried in poetry to a pitch so much higher as virtually to need a specific faculty for their successful production. To illustrate the inadequacy of Wordsworth's theory to explain the merits of his own poetry, I select a stanza from one of his simplest and most characteristic poems, The Affliction of Margaret: "Perhaps some dungeon hears thee groan, Maimed, mangled by inhuman men, Or thou upon a desert thrown Inheritest the lion's den; Or hast been summoned to the deep, 66 These lines, supposed to be uttered by a poor widow at Penrith," afford a fair illustration of what Wordsworth calls "the language really spoken by men," with "metre superadded." "What other distinction from prose," he asks, “would we have?" We may answer that we would have what he has actually given us-namely, an appropriate and attractive music, lying both on the rhythm and in the actual sound of the words used a music whose complexity may be indicated here by drawing out some of its elements in detail, at the risk of appearing pedantic and technical. We observe, then, (a) that the general movement of the lines is unusually slow. They contain a very large proportion of strong accents and long vowels, to suit the tone of deep and despairing sorrow. In six places only out of twenty-eight is the accent weak where it might be expected to be strong (in the second syllable—namely, of the iambic foot); and in each of these cases the omission of a possible accent throws greater weight on the next succeeding accent- -on the accents, that is to say, contained in the words "inhuman," "desert," "lion," "summoned," "deep," and "sleep." (6) The first four lines contain subtle alliterations of the letters, d, h, m, and th. In this connection it should be remembered that when consonants are thus repeated at the beginning of syllables, those syllables need not be at the beginning of words; and further, that repetitions scarcely more numerous than chance alone would have occasioned may be so placed by the poet as to produce a strongly-felt effect. If any one doubts the effectiveness of the unobvious alliterations here insisted on, let him read (1) "jungle" for "desert," (2) "maybe" for " perhaps," (3) "tortured" for "mangled," (4) "blown" for "thrown," and he will become sensible of the lack of the metrical support which the existing consonants give one another. The three last lines contain one or two similar alliterations, on which I need not dwell. (c) The words inheritest and summoned are by no means such as "a poor widow," even at Penrith, would employ they are used to intensify the imagined relation which connects the missing man with (1) the wild beasts which surround him, and (2) the invisible Power who leads; so that something mysterious and awful is added to his fate. (d) This impression is heightened by the use of the word incommunicable in an unusual sense, "incapable of being communicated with," instead of "incapable of being communicated;" while (e) the expression "to keep an incommunicable sleep" for "to lie dead," gives dignity to the occasion by carrying the mind back along a train of literary associations of which the well-known phrase of Moschus* may be taken as the type. * A pastoral poet of Syracuse, about B.C. 250. PROSE AND VERSE. DAVID MASSON (b. 1822). (Professor of English Literature in the University of Edinburgh, formerly Professor in University College, London.) By the established custom of all languages, there is a great interval between the mental state accounted proper in prose writing and that allowed and even required in verse. A man, for the most part, would be ashamed of permitting himself in prose the same freedom of intellectual whimsy, the same arbitrariness of combination, the same riot of imagery, the same care for the exquisite in sound and form, perhaps even the same depth and fervor of feeling, that he would exhibit unabashed in verse. There is an idea that, if the matter lying in the mind waiting for expression is of a very select and rare kind, or if the mood is peculiarly fine and elevated, a writer must quit the platform of prose, and ascend into the region of metre. To use a homely figure, the feeling is that in such circumstances one must not remain in the plainly-furnished apartment on the ground floor where ordinary business is transacted, but must step upstairs to the place of elegance and leisure. Take, for example, the following passage from Comus: "Sabrina fair, Listen where thou art sitting, Under the glassy, cool, translucent wave, The loose train of thy amber-dropping hair; Listen for dear honor's sake, Goddess of the silver lake Listen and save."-Comus, 859-866. If any man, having preconceived exactly the tissue of meaning involved in this passage, had tried to express it in prose, he would have had a sense of shame in doing so, and would have run the risk of being regarded as a coxcomb. Only in verse will men consent, in general, to receive such specimens of the intellectually exquisite; but offer them never so tiny a thing of the kind in verse, and they are not only satisfied, but charmed. Nor is it only with regard to the peculiarly exquisite, or the peculiarly luscious in meaning, that this is true; it is true also, to a certain extent, of the peculiarly sublime or the peculiarly magnificent. Thus Samson, soliloquizing on his blindness : |