In the dead of winter The Vision of Sir Launfal carries us back to June when

and

"The cowslip startles in meadows green,"

"The buttercup catches the sun in its chalice."

There is no wonderland to which poetry cannot take us through the imagination, whether it be deep under the sea in

"Sandstrewn caverns, cool and deep,
Where the winds are all asleep,

Where the spent lights quiver and gleam;
Where the salt weed sways in the stream"

or in that ideal land of

“Charm'd magic casements, opening on the foam
Of perilous seas, in faery lands forlorn."

Poetry takes us back into the Middle Ages with Keats in
The Eve of St. Agnes or leaves us

"Alone, alone, all, all, alone,

Alone on a wide, wide sea"

with the Ancient Mariner. It transports us to a snowbound New England homestead,

"Content to let the north wind roar

In baffled rage at pane and door"

with Whittier, or brings us once more to the time when

"A boy's will is the wind's will

And the thoughts of youth are long, long thoughts."

Small wonder, then, that poetry is universally read. Through its appeal to the imagination it offers us the surest escape from the stern reality of facts.

Poetry also gives us pleasure by expressing what we cannot ourselves express. There is scarcely a feeling of which man is capable that does not find expression Poetry gives pleasure by in some great poem. Thus the poet recreates expressing for us not only a picture or a sensation or not ourselves an experience, but also the feeling that goes express with it. His power of expressing in words these things gives keen pleasure.

what we can

to understand

Finally, poetry gives pleasure by helping us to understand and sympathize. The poet is keenly sensitive not only to the claims of beauty, but also to the claims Poetry helps us of human sympathies. Through sympathy life he has gained understanding. Through his love of the beautiful he is able to express beautifully this understanding.

Because poetry appeals to our imagination and to our sense of beauty, because it expresses what we feel and cannot ourselves express, and because it helps us to Summary understand and sympathize with life, it makes our lives richer. If you wish to test this statement, read again any great poem with which you have been familiar since childhood, noticing how much unconscious pleasure, appreciation, and understanding have been added to your life because of it. Any simple lyric like Sweet and Low or Crossing the Bar or even something like A Child's Garden of Verses will afford you convenient proof. These poems are in themselves answers to the question, "Why read poetry?"

SOME CHARACTERISTICS OF POETRY

It is difficult to put into exact words the difference between poetry and prose. The dividing line is often shadowy because much so-called prose has poetic qualities and much so-called poetry prosaic qualities. A good deal of what we commonly regard as prose is, in essence, poetry, and a good deal

more of what we commonly regard as poetry is, in essence,

prose.

We are likely to classify any writing in rhyme and meter as poetry, and any writing not in rhyme and meter as prose. The two examples given below seem to refute this theory. The one in rhyme and meter has not a spark of poetic fire; in the one without rhyme and meter the poetic fire is unquenchable. A recent critic1 has pointed out that David's lament over Jonathan:

Difficulties of distinguishing between poetry and prose

"Thy love to me was wonderful, passing the love of women," is instinct with the breath of poetry, whereas Pope's metrical paraphrase of it,

"Thy love was wondrous, soothing all my care
Passing the fond affection of the fair."

is not much more than artificial affectation. The same critic suggests that the hopeless pathos of Isaiah's,

"The sun shall be no more thy light by day; neither
for brightness shall the moon give light unto thee,"

is shattered forever in Pope's rhymed version,

"No more the rising Sun shall gild the morn
Nor ev'ning Cynthia fill her silver horn."

It is clearly evident that many of the beautiful passages in the King James version of the Bible, though they are not in metrical form, are more eloquently poetical than all the rhymed couplets in existence. These verses from the twelfth chapter of Ecclesiastes you have only to read aloud to feel the power of their rhythm:

"Remember now thy Creator in the days of thy Youth, while the evil days come not, nor the years draw nigh, when thou shalt say, 'I have no pleasure in them';

1

1 Lowes, J. L.: Convention and Revolt in Poetry.

While the sun, or the light, or the moon, or the stars, be not darkened, nor the clouds return after the rain:

In the day when the keepers of the house shall tremble, and the strong men shall bow themselves . . . and those that look out of the windows be darkened,

And the doors shall be shut in the streets, . . . and he shall rise up at the voice of the bird, and all the daughters of music shall be brought low;

Also when they shall be afraid of that which is high, and fears shall be in the way, and the almond tree shall flourish, and the grasshopper shall be a burden, and desire shall fail: because man goeth to his long home, and the mourners go about the streets; Or ever the silver cord be loosed, or the golden bowl be broken or the wheel broken at the cistern

Then shall the dust return to the earth as it was; and the spirit shall return unto God who gave it."

There is hardly an element of all that we usually regard as poetry which is not found in this passage. Here are pictures, symbols, images, phrases haunted with the accumulated connotations of man's centuries of experience with life and death. Nor is the Bible alone in possessing this poetic quality. It is found in a good deal of the best English prose, from the glowing pulsations of the finest paragraphs of Ruskin and Carlyle to the elusive lilt in the dialogue of the Irish plays of Yeats and Synge. Such passages illustrate the difficulty of distinguishing between poetry and prose. There are, however, three general characteristics of poetry, one specific, the others necessarily vague.

metrical pattern as a character

The most tangible characteristic of poetry is rhythm secured by regularity of metrical pattern. Much Regularity of prose has every element of poetry except this of metrical pattern. But all poetry, even istic of poetry free verse, has some pattern of recurrent rhythm or rhyme, or both.

The second characteristic of poetry is that the poet uses

The poet's use of words

words with imaginative insight to suggest more than they may be defined to mean. In general, the main function of words in prose is to make statements, to present ideas and facts clearly; in poetry the main function of words is to arouse moving suggestions. This use of suggestive words stirs our feelings and imaginations. We have all experienced the baffled sensation of lacking appropriate words with which to express our feelings or thoughts; and most of us have found these feelings and thoughts expressed definitively in a passage from one of the great poets. The essence of a thousand love stories, for instance, is suggested-not stated-in a single stanza by Robert Burns:

"Had we never loved sae kindly,
Had we never loved sae blindly,
Never met or never parted,

We had ne'er been broken-hearted."

The staggering conception of eternal damnation has been summed up in a few words in Dante's Inferno. Over the gates of Hell, Dante says, are these words:

"All hope abandon, ye who enter here."

The thundering significance of these few words has caught and held the imagination of generations. Such passages as these are remarkable for what they suggest rather than for what they directly state.

in prose

Many prose writers also use words which arouse our feelings and our imagination by the power of suggestion. Poetic language For instance, Hawthorne's choice of figurative language to suggest his meaning is often instinctively poetic. When he says that Phoebe was as "pleasant about the house as a gleam of sunshine falling on the floor through a shadow of twinkling leaves"; when he