Then his imagination roves and he attributes to the tree feelings such as human beings have. He writes: A tree whose hungry mouth is prest A tree that looks at God all day, A tree that may in summer wear Upon whose bosom snow has lain; With his imagination still more deeply stirred, he feels an underlying spiritual significance in his imaginative experience with the tree. He is touched with reverence at the thought that God made such beauty for him to see. He concludes his poem with a childlike simplicity that conveys a lesson in humility: "Poems are made by fools like me, But only God can make a tree." 1 The poet, feeling a truth, expresses it through his imaginative insight. He may have beliefs which he cannot prove to be true, but his imagination finds comparisons that help to make clear the reasons for his faith. Thus the poet says: "I never saw a moor, I never saw the sea; Yet know I how the heather looks, And what a wave must be. The poet expresses his ideas imaginatively 1 From Trees and Other Poems by Joyce Kilmer; copyright 1914 by George H. Doran Company, publishers. Reprinted by permission of and arrangement with the publishers. between ideas as expressed in poetry and ideas as ex I never spoke with God, As if the chart were given." 1 Emily Dickinson The difference between poetry and prose here is that poetry expresses its deepest truths through the medium of the The difference imagination whereas prose reasons out its truths through analysis. The propositions of Euclid are intellectual and analytical; they must pressed in prose therefore be expressed in prose. But man's hunger and thirst after righteousness, his burning passion for truth and beauty have their deepest roots in his heart; he must therefore express them in terms of imagination and feeling, which are the language of poetry. "Beauty is truth, truth beauty, that is all Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know;" says the poet, expressing his idea as a passionate conviction. Only through imaginative sympathy with the poet can this difficult idea be grasped; it cannot be coldly reasoned out. That is why many analytical, literal-minded people cannot understand poetry. They are not in the habit of arriving at ideas through the imagination. "The heart has its reasons that reason knows not of," said a wise Frenchman who, though he was a mathematician, was thinking then like a poet. The poet teaches truths largely through suggestion. His preference for suggestion rather than direct statement is one of his chief differences from the prose writer. For instance, suppose he wishes to teach that all things save God's greatness are transient. Instead of a detailed sermon he 1 Copyrighted by Little, Brown and Company. Reprinted with the permission of Little, Brown and Company and of Mrs. Martha Bianchi. writes a suggestive little story containing a symbol for his idea: "A certain pasha, dead five thousand years, And had this sentence on the city's gate So these four words above the city's noise And evermore from the high barbican, Lost is that city's glory. Every gust Lifts, with crisp leaves, the unknown pasha's dust, And all is ruin, save one wrinkled gate Thomas Bailey Aldrich Suppose the poet is impressed not so much with the greatness of God as with the futility of human greed and cruelty, passion and arrogance. Instead of a sermon he gives us a picture that impresses his idea Thought suggested through a picture on us unforgettably. See what Shelley teaches with wonderful restraint in Ozymandias: "I met a traveller from an antique land Who said: 'Two vast and trunkless legs of stone 'My name is Ozymandias, king of kings. 1 Reprinted by permission of and arrangement with Houghton Mifflin Company. Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!' This poem shows that suggestion can teach as much as direct preaching. The poet does not hide his thought. He wishes our imagination to grasp the sugges Thought in poetry not hidden tion of what he has said because to him the imagination is more luminous than reason. Shelley had no desire to mystify us; he wished us to grasp the meaning he saw in that picture; and he thought we should see it in the light of the imagination more clearly than if it were given us by means of a card catalogue. The poet can also tell us directly what he thinks. Many a sermon lingers in our minds because it is cast in rhythmic form. This is true of Carlyle's: The poet may teach directly "So here hath been dawning Think, wilt thou let it Slip useless away. Out of Eternity This new day was born; Into Eternity At night will return. Behold it aforetime No eye ever did; Here hath been dawning Another blue day; Think, wilt thou let it Slip useless away." A poet, then, may express his ideas directly as Carlyle does in this poem, as Bryant does in Thanatopsis; or he may How the teaching of a poem may be ex pressed merely suggest them as Shelley does in Ozymandias; or he may use an image or a symbol following it by direct application of his thought as Ben Jonson does in the poem quoted earlier. He may use allegory, as Tennyson does in the Idylls of the King; or a story as Thomas Bailey Aldrich does in his poem about the gate whereon was graven, 'Only God is great' and as Leigh Hunt does in Abou Ben Adhem; or a symbol as Oliver Wendell Holmes does in The Chambered Nautilus and as Edward Rowland Sill does in Opportunity; or images as Emily Dickinson does in Chartless. Any method that is imaginatively appropriate is effective provided that the poem does not degenerate into mere didacticism. Besides appeal to the imagination poetry also appeals to our minds. It does this through suggestion rather than through direct statement, however, and in this Summary way often conveys profoundly true and beautiful ideas so that we see them in the light of imagination as well as of reason. THE FORMAL ELEMENT IN POETRY Like music, poetry is divided into certain time intervals; that is, in each are a certain number of beats or accents coming at more or less regular intervals of time. In Accents and English poetry there may be a highly irregular time intervals number of syllables coming between the heavily accented beats, but the beats themselves usually come with some regularity. The syllables in a line correspond roughly to the notes, and the beats to the time in music. The technical names for these beats and Terminology for the number syllables are borrowed from the Greek. A of beats line with only one accent is called monometer; for example: "Away!" |