The second illustration is Tennyson's Break, Break, Break:

"Break, break, break,

On thy cold gray stones, O Sea!

And I would that my tongue could utter

The thoughts that arise in me.

O, well for the fisherman's boy,

That he shouts with his sister at play!
O, well for the sailor lad

That he sings in his boat on the bay!

And the stately ships go on

To their haven under the hill;

But O for the touch of a vanish'd hand,
And the sound of a voice that is still!

Break, break, break,

At the foot of thy crags, O Sea!

But the tender grace of a day that is dead
Will never come back to me."

This poem, written at "five o'clock in the morning between blossoming hedges" far inland, has become, in its perfect blending of imagery, tone color, and restraint, part of our common language of grief. Surely it is a convincing proof that a few words are often more significant than a great many.1

power of words

And, finally, the poet creates feeling through the power Feeling created of words. It is the power of words in themthrough the selves to arouse our imaginations and to create feeling that the poet uses with greatest effect. This is the power of poetic suggestion. Poetic suggestion A majority of the words which we use have a double significance, that is, they have a denotation, or a

1 In contemporary poetry, the lyrics of Sara Teasdale afford some good examples of this point. Let the students look up her work in an anthology such as Jessie Rittenhouse's Little Book of Modern Verse; Louis Untermeyer's Modern American Poetry; Florence Wilkinson's New Voices; or Monroe and Henderson's The New Poetry.

dictionary meaning, and a connotation, or a wealth of suggested meanings. The word home is an obvious example. The dictionary definition of home is "a dwelling place" or "the abode of one's family." But how much more than that does it mean to each of us! To some it means father and mother. To some it means good things to eat and cosy attics on rainy days, or the smell of burning leaves, or

"the velvet imperial crowd

The dahlias that reign by the gardenside."

or the swish of

or

"ladies' skirts across the grass,"

"the unmeaning beat

Of ghostly finger-tips of sleet"

on the window pane. All these memories are flashed to the mind in images of forgotten sights, sounds, and smells by that one word home.

As we have already seen, it is the poet's power of using words so that their connotative meaning arouses our imaginations and our feelings that is his chief gift. Single vivid phrases presenting images tinged with feeling are characteristic of poetry.

Notice the picture-making force of the words in this simile from Chaucer's description of the Friar in the Prologue to the Canterbury Tales:

"His eyen twinkled in his heed aryght

As doon the sterres in the frosty nyght,"

and the effect of haunting memories and reminiscent melancholy in the opening lines of Shakespeare's thirtieth sonnet:

"When to the sessions of sweet silent thought
I summon up remembrance of things past,"

and the successive images of purity, softness, and sweetness in Ben Jonson's:

"Have you seen but a bright lily grow

Before rude hands have touched it?
Have you marked but the fall of the snow
Before the soil hath smutched it?
Have you felt the wool of the beaver,
Or swan's down ever?

Or have smelt o' the bud of the brier?

Or the nard in the fire?

Or have tasted the bag of the bee?

O, so white, O, so soft, O, so sweet, is she!"

The poet may by restraint, suggest other things than sensations and pictures. Often a single phrase will reveal the depth of a human heart. How much is suggested in a few words by Ophelia's simple response to Hamlet's brutal

"I did love you once!"

The only words her heart can utter are,

"I was the more deceiv'd"

and there are no more pathetic lines in all Shakespeare. How much pathos is condensed into one line in Wordsworth's Michael when the poet says that the old father, heartbroken over his son's selfishness and weakness, went forth many a day to work at clearing the land

"And never lifted up a single stone."

The denotation of words in poetry is, of course, important, even though connotation is of more value than exact definition. One has to know that "charlock" is wild mustard in order to get the picture in

"and shone far-off as shines
A field of charlock in the sudden sun
Between two showers,"

and that a "shallop" is a light swift boat in order to appreciate the adaptation of sound to sense in

"The shallop flitteth silken sailed."

It is also well to know that "mews" and "peewits" are shore-birds like our gulls in order to visualize

"The flights of mew and peewits pied

By millions crouched on the old sea wall,"

and one must look up "eygre" to learn that it means a tidal wave in order to feel the force of

"So farre, so fast the eygre drave,
The heart had hardly time to beat,
Before a shallow seething wave
Sobbed in the grasses at our feet;
The feet had hardly time to flee
Before it brake against the knee,
And all the world was in the sea."

It is necessary to understand the denotation of words before we can fully appreciate their connotative value.

Sometimes, however, we lay too much stress upon the denotation of proper names which at times have a connotative value quite disproportionate to their importance as allusions to history. For instance, we frequently spoil the finest figure in Keats's sonnet On First Looking into Chapman's Homer by stressing the anachronism of making Cortez and not Balboa the discoverer of the Pacific. To Keats the name Cortez stood just as effectively as that of Balboa for all the breathless, crowded suggestions of romance and discovery that he felt when he first read Chapman's Homer:

“... like stout Cortez, when with eagle eyes
He star'd at the Pacific-and all his men
Look'd at each other with a wild surmise-
Silent, upon a peak in Darien."

What if historically it was Balboa? Is not Cortez just as valuable for purposes of suggestion? Why ruin that breathless picture by reminding ourselves of the facts of history? We do not need a geography in hand to enjoy the richness of these lines from Keats:

"Manna and dates, in argosy transferr'd

From Fez; and spiced dainties, every one,
From silken Samarcand to cedar'd Lebanon."

As far as poetic suggestion is concerned, the chief value of proper names is their connotative value. Therefore besides knowing their literal meaning, we ought to be sure that words convey to us the suggestion which the poet wishes them to convey.

The chief means, then, by which the poet arouses our imagination and our feelings is through the power of his Summary words. This is called the power of poetic suggestion because it is conveyed through the accumulated suggestive meanings of words more than through their direct denotation. It is through this power that the poet is able to suggest more in a few words than he would ever be able to say directly in many.

HOW THE POET USES FIGURES OF SPEECH

When we were speaking of the different ways in which the poet uses his imagination, we called attention to the The imagina- fact that through his imagination he is often tion and figures of speech able to see resemblances and differences which escape most of us. He can use this sort of imagination to combine or associate ideas, pictures, moods, or sensations in such a way as to make his meaning doubly clear and forceful.

Of course, to a certain extent, we all do this. For instance,