A Study of Poetry by Bliss Perry

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"a. A sonnet, like every other work of art, must have its unity. It must
be the expression of one, and only one, thought or feeling.

"b. This thought or mood should be led up to, and opened in the early
lines of the sonnet; strictly, in the first quatrain; in the second
quatrain the hearer should be placed in full possession of it.

"c. After the second quatrain there should be a pause, not full, nor
producing the effect of a break, as of one who had finished what he had
got to say, and not preparing a transition to a new subject, but as of
one who is turning over what has been said in the mind to enforce it
further.

"d. The opening of the second system, strictly the first tercet, should
turn back upon the thought or sentiment, take it up and carry it forward
to the conclusion.

"e. The conclusion should be a resultant, summing the total of the
suggestion in the preceding lines, as a lakelet in the hills gathers
into a still pool the running waters contributed by its narrow area of
gradients.

"f. While the conclusion should leave a sense of finish and
completeness, it is necessary to avoid anything like epigrammatic point.
By this the sonnet is distinguished from the epigram. In the epigram the
conclusion is everything; all that goes before it is only there for the
sake of the surprise of the end, or _denouement_, as in a logical
syllogism the premisses are nothing but as they necessitate the
conclusion. In the sonnet the emphasis is nearly, but not quite, equally
distributed, there being a slight swell, or rise, about its middle. The
sonnet must not advance by progressive climax, or end abruptly; it
should subside, and leave off quietly."

Miss Lockwood, in the Introduction to her admirable collection of English
sonnets,
[Footnote: _Sonnets, English and American_, selected by Laura E. Lockwood.
Houghton Mifflin Company, 1916.]
makes a still briefer summary of the thought-scheme of the regular Italian
sonnet: it "should have a clear and unified theme, stated in the first
quatrain, developed or proved in the second, confirmed or regarded from a
new point of view in the first tercet, and concluded in the second tercet.
It had thus four parts, divided unevenly into two separate systems, eight
lines being devoted to placing the thought before the mind, and six to
deducing the conclusion from that thought."

A surprisingly large number of sonnets are built upon simple formulas like
"As"--for the octave--and "So"--for the sestet--(see Andrew Lang's "The
Odyssey," _Oxford_, No. 841); or "When" and "Then" (see Keats's "When I
have fears that I may cease to be," _Oxford_, No. 635). A situation plus a
thought gives a mood; or a mood plus an event gives a mental resolve, etc.
The possible combinations are infinite, but the law of logical relation
between octave and sestet, premise and conclusion, is immutable.

Let the reader now test these laws of sonnet form and thought by reading
aloud one of the most familiarly known of all English sonnets--Keats's "On
First Looking into Chapman's Homer":

"Much have I travell'd in the realms of gold,
And many goodly states and kingdoms seen;
Round many western islands have I been
Which bards in fealty to Apollo hold.
Oft of one wide expanse had I been told
That deep-brow'd Homer ruled as his demesne;
Yet did I never breathe its pure serene
Till I heard Chapman speak out loud and bold:
Then felt I like some watcher of the skies
When a new planet swims into his ken;
Or like stout Cortez when with eagle eyes
He stared at the Pacific--and all his men
Look'd at each other with a wild surmise--
Silent, upon a peak in Darien."

Read next another strictly Petrarchan sonnet, where the thought divisions
of quatrains and tercets are marked with exceptional clearness, Eugene
Lee-Hamilton's disillusioned "Sea-Shell Murmurs":

"The hollow sea-shell that for years hath stood
On dusty shelves, when held against the ear
Proclaims its stormy parent; and we hear
The faint far murmur of the breaking flood.

"We hear the sea. The sea? It is the blood
In our own veins, impetuous and near,
And pulses keeping pace with hope and fear
And with our feelings' every shifting mood.

"Lo, in my heart I hear, as in a shell,
The murmur of a world beyond the grave,
Distinct, distinct, though faint and far it be.

"Thou fool; this echo is a cheat as well,--
The hum of earthly instincts; and we crave
A world unreal as the shell-heard sea."

And now read aloud one of the best-known of Shakspere's sonnets, where he
follows his favorite device of a threefold statement of his central
thought, using a different image in each quatrain, and closing with a
personal application of the idea:

"That time of year thou mayst in me behold
When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang
Upon those boughs which shake against the cold,
Bare ruin'd choirs, where late the sweet birds sang.
In me thou see'st the twilight of such day
As after sunset fadeth in the west;
Which by and by black night doth take away,
Death's second self, that seals up all in rest.
In me thou see'st the glowing of such fire,
That on the ashes of his youth doth lie,
As the death-bed whereon it must expire,
Consumed with that which it was nourish'd by.
This thou perceivest, which makes thy love more strong,
To love that well which thou must leave ere long."

Where there is beauty such as this, it is an impertinence to insist that
Shakspere has not conformed to the special type of beauty represented in
the Petrarchan sonnet. He chose not to conform. He won with other tactics.
If the reader will analyse the form and thought of the eighty sonnets in
the _Oxford Book_, or the two hundred collected by Miss Lockwood, he will
feel the charm of occasional irregularity in the handling of both the
Petrarchan and the Shaksperean sonnet. But he is more likely, I think, to
become increasingly aware that whatever restraints are involved in
adherence to typical forms are fully compensated by the rich verbal beauty
demanded by the traditional arrangement of rhymes.

For the sonnet, an intricately wrought model of the reflective lyric,
requires a peculiarly intimate union of thinking and singing. It may be,
as it often was in the Elizabethan period, too full of thought to allow
free-winged song, and it may also be too full of uncontrolled, unbalanced
emotion to preserve fit unity of thought. Conversely, there may not be
enough thought and emotion to fill the fourteen lines: the idea not being
of "sonnet size." The difficult question as to whether there is such a
thing as an "average-sized" thought and lyrical reflection upon it has
been touched upon in an earlier chapter. The limit of a sentence, says
Mark Pattison, "is given by the average capacity of human apprehension....
The limit of a sonnet is imposed by the average duration of an
emotional mood.... May we go so far as to say that fourteen lines is the
average number which a thought requires for its adequate embodiment before
attention must collapse?"

The proper distribution of thought and emotion, that is, the balance of
the different parts of a sonnet, is also a very delicate affair. It is
like trimming a sailboat. Wordsworth defended Milton's frequent practice
of letting the thought of the octave overflow somewhat into the sestet,
believing it "to aid in giving that pervading sense of intense unity in
which the excellence of the sonnet has always seemed to me mainly to
consist." Most lovers of the sonnet would differ here with these masters
of the art. Whether the weight of thought and feeling can properly be
shifted to a final couplet is another debatable question, and critics will
always differ as to the artistic value of the "big" line or "big" word
which marks the culmination of emotion in many a sonnet. The strange or
violent or sonorous word, however splendid in itself, may not fit the
curve of the sonnet in which it appears: it may be like a big red apple
crowded into the toe of a Christmas stocking.

Nor must the sonnet lean towards either obscurity--the vice of Elizabethan
sonnets, or obviousness--the vice of Wordsworth's sonnets after 1820. The
obscure sonnet, while it may tempt the reader's intellectual ingenuity,
affords no basis for his emotion, and the obvious sonnet provides no
stimulus for his thought. Conventionality of subject and treatment,
like the endless imitation of Italian and French sonnet-motives and
sonnet-sequences, sins against the law of lyric sincerity. In no lyric
form does mechanism so easily obtrude itself. A sonnet is either, like
Marlowe's raptures, "all air and fire," or else it is a wooden toy.

CHAPTER IX

RACE, EPOCH AND INDIVIDUAL

"Unless there is a concurrence between the contemporary idioms and
rhythms of a period, with the individual idiom of the lyrist, half
the expressional force of his ideas will be lost."
ERNEST RHYS, Foreword to _Lyric Poetry_

We have been considering the typical qualities and forms of lyric poetry.
Let us now attempt a rapid survey of some of the conditions which have
given the lyric, in certain races and periods and in the hands of certain
individuals, its peculiar power.

_1. Questions that are involved_

A whole generation of so-called "scientific" criticism has come and gone
since Taine's brilliant experiments with his formula of "race, period and
environment" as applied to literature. Taine's _English Literature_
remains a monument to the suggestiveness and to the dangers of his method.
Some of his countrymen, notably Brunetiere in the _Evolution de la Poesie
Lyrique en France au XIX Siecle_, and Legouis in the _Defense de la Poesie
Francaise_, have discussed more cautiously and delicately than Taine
himself the racial and historic conditions affecting lyric poetry in
various periods.

The tendency at present, among critics of poetry, is to distrust formulas
and to keep closely to ascertainable facts, and this tendency is surely
more scientific than the most captivating theorizing. For one thing, while
recognizing, as the World War has freshly compelled us to recognize, the
actuality of racial differences, we have grown sceptical of the old
endeavors to classify races in simple terms, as Madame de Stael attempted
to do, for instance, in her famous book on Germany. We endeavor to
distinguish, more accurately than of old, between ethnic, linguistic and
political divisions of men. We try to look behind the name at the thing
itself: we remember that "Spanish" architecture is Arabian, and a good
deal of "Gothic" is Northern French. We confess that we are only at the
beginning of a true science of ethnology. "It is only in their degree of
physical and mental evolution that the races of men are different,"
says Professor W. Z. Ripley, author of _Races in Europe_. The late
Professor Josiah Royce admitted: "I am baffled to discover just what the
results of science are regarding the true psychological and moral meaning
of race differences.... All men in prehistoric times are surprisingly
alike in their minds, their morals and their arts.... We do not
scientifically know what the true racial varieties of mental type really
are."
[Footnote: See Royce's _Race-Questions_. New York, 1908.]

I have often thought of these utterances of my colleagues, as I have
attempted to teach something about lyric poetry in Harvard classrooms
where Chinese, Japanese, Jewish, Irish, French, German, Negro, Russian,
Italian and Armenian students appear in bewildering and stimulating
confusion. Precisely what is their racial reaction to a lyric of Sappho?
To an Anglo-Saxon war-song of the tenth century? To a Scotch ballad? To
one of Shakspere's songs? Some specific racial reaction there must be,
one imagines, but such capacity for self-expression as the student
commands is rarely capable of giving more than a hint of it.

And what real response is there, among the majority of contemporary
lovers of poetry, to the delicate shades of feeling which color the
verse of specific periods in the various national literatures? We all use
catch-words, and I shall use them myself later in this chapter, in the
attempt to indicate the changes in lyric atmosphere as we pass, for
instance, from the Elizabethan to the Jacobean age, or from the "Augustan"
to the Romantic epoch in English literature. Is this sensitiveness to the
temper of various historic periods merely the possession of a few hundred
professional scholars, who have trained themselves, like Walter Pater, to
live in some well-chosen moment of the past and to find in their
hyper-sensitized responsiveness to its voices a sort of consolation prize
for their isolation from the present? Race-mindedness is common, no doubt,
but difficult to express in words: historic-mindedness, though more
capable of expression, is necessarily confined to a few. Is the response
to the poetry of past epochs, then, chiefly a response of the individual
reader to an individual poet, and do we cross the frontiers of race and
language and historic periods with the main purpose of finding a man after
our own heart? Or is the secret of our pleasure in the poetry of alien
races and far-off times simply this: that nothing human is really alien,
and that poetry through its generalizing, universalizing power, reveals to
us the essential oneness of mankind?

_2. Graphic Arts and the Lyric_

A specific illustration may suggest an answer. An American collector of
Japanese prints recognizes in these specimens of Oriental craftsmanship
that mastery of line and composition which are a part of the universal
language of the graphic arts. Any human being, in fact, who has developed
a sensitiveness to artistic beauty will receive a measure of delight from
the work of Japanese masters. A few strokes of the brush upon silk, a bit
of lacquer work, the decoration of a sword-hilt, are enough to set his eye
dancing. But the expert collector soon passes beyond this general
enthusiasm into a quite particular interest in the handicraft of special
artists,--a Motonobu, let us say, or a Sesshiu. The collector finds his
pleasure in their individual handling of artistic problems, their unique
faculties of eye and hand. He responds, in a word, both to the
cosmopolitan language employed by every practitioner of the fine arts, and
to the local idiom, the personal accent, of, let us say, a certain
Japanese draughtsman of the eighteenth century.

And now take, by way of confirmation and also of contrast, the attitude of
an American lover of poetry toward those specimens of Japanese and Chinese
lyrics which have recently been presented to us in English translations.
The American's ignorance of the riental languages cuts him off from any
appreciation of the individual handling of diction and metre. A Lafcadio
Hearn may write delightfully about that special seventeen syllable form of
Japanese verse known as the _hokku_. Here is a _hokku_ by Basho, one of
the most skilled composers in that form. Hearn prints it with the
translation,
[Footnote: _Kwaidan_, p. 188. Houghton Mifflin Company, 1904.]
and explains that the verses are intended to suggest the joyous feeling of
spring-time:

"Oki, oki yo!
Waga tomo ni sen
Neru--kocho!"

(Wake up! Wake up!--I will make thee my comrade, thou sleeping butterfly.)
An Occidental reader may recognize, through the translation, the charm of
the poetic image, and he may be interested in a technical lyric form
hitherto new to him, but beyond this, in his ignorance of Japanese, he
cannot go. Here is a lyric by Wang Ch'ang-Ling, a Chinese poet of the
eighth century:

_Tears in the Spring_
[Footnote: These Chinese lyrics are quoted from _The Lute of Jade_,
London, 1909. The translations are by L. Cranmer-Byng.]

"Clad in blue silk and bright embroidery
At the first call of Spring the fair young bride,
On whom as yet Sorrow has laid no scar,
Climbs the Kingfisher's Tower. Suddenly
She sees the bloom of willows far and wide,
And grieves for him she lent to fame and war."

And here is another spring lyric by Po Chue-I (A.D. 772-846), as clear and
simple as anything in the Greek Anthology:

_The Grass_
[Footnote: These Chinese lyrics are quoted from _The Lute of Jade_,
London, 1909. The translations are by L. Cranmer-Byng.]

"How beautiful and fresh the grass returns!
When golden days decline, the meadow burns;
Yet autumn suns no hidden root have slain,
The spring winds blow, and there is grass again.

"Green rioting on olden ways it falls:
The blue sky storms the ruined city walls;
Yet since Wang Sun departed long ago,
When the grass blooms both joy and fear I know."

The Western reader, although wholly at the mercy of the translator,
recognizes the pathos and beauty of the scene and thought expressed by the
Chinese poet. But all that is specifically Chinese in lyric form is lost
to him.

I have purposely chosen these Oriental types of lyric because they
represent so clearly the difference between the universal language of the
graphic arts and the more specialized language of poetry. The latter is
still able to convey, even through translation, a suggestion of the
emotions common to all men; and this is true of the verse which lies
wholly outside the line of that Hebrew-Greek-Roman tradition which has
affected so profoundly the development of modern European literature. Yet
to express "_ce que tout le monde pense_"--which was Boileau's version of
Horace's "_propria communia dicere_"--is only part of the function of
lyric poetry. To give the body of the time the form and pressure of
individual feeling, of individual artistic mastery of the language of
one's race and epoch;--this, no less than the other, is the task and the
opportunity of the lyric poet.

_3. Decay and Survival_

To appreciate the triumph of whatever lyrics have survived, even when
sheltered by the protection of common racial or cultural traditions, one
must remember that the overwhelming majority of lyrics, like the majority
of artistic products of all ages and races and stages of civilization, are
irretrievably lost. Weak-winged is song! A book like Gummere's _Beginnings
of Poetry_, glancing as it does at the origins of so many national
literatures and at the rudimentary poetic efforts of various races that
have never emerged from barbarism, gives one a poignant sense of the
prodigality of the song-impulse compared with the slenderness of the
actual survivals. Autumn leaves are not more fugitive. Even when preserved
by sacred ritual, like the Vedas and the Hebrew Psalter, what we possess
is only an infinitesimal fraction of what has perished. The Sibyl tears
leaf after leaf from her precious volume and scatters them to the winds.
How many glorious Hebrew war-songs of the type presented in the "Song of
Deborah" were chanted only to be forgotten! We have but a handful of the
lyrics of Sappho and of the odes of Pindar, while the fragments of lyric
verse gathered up in the _Greek Anthology_ tantalize us with their
reminder of what has been lost beyond recall.

Yet if we keep to the line of Hebrew-Greek-Roman tradition, we are equally
impressed with the enduring influence of the few lyrics that have
survived. The Hebrew lyric, in its diction, its rhythmical patterns, and
above all in its flaming intensity of spirit, bears the marks of racial
purity, of mental vigor and moral elevation. It became something even more
significant, however, than the spiritual expression of a chosen race. The
East met the West when these ancient songs of the Hebrew Psalter were
adopted and sung by the Christian Church. They were translated, in the
fourth century, into the Latin of the Vulgate. Many an Anglo-Saxon gleeman
knew that Latin version. It moulded century after century the liturgy of
the European world. It influenced Tyndale's English version of the Psalms,
and this has in turn affected the whole vocabulary and style of the modern
English lyric. There is scarcely a page of the _Oxford Book of English
Verse_ which does not betray in word or phrase the influence of the
Hebrew Psalter.

Or take that other marvelous example of the expression of emotion in terms
of bodily sensation, the lyric of the Greeks. Its clarity and unity, its
dislike of vagueness and excess, its finely artistic restraint, are
characteristic of the race. The simpler Greek lyrical measures were taken
over by Catullus, Horace and Ovid, and though there were subtle qualities
of the Greek models which escaped the Roman imitators, the Greco-Roman or
"classic" restraint of over-turbulent emotions became a European heritage.
It is doubtless true, as Dr. Henry Osborn Taylor has pointed out,
[Footnote: See his _Classical Heritage of the Middle Ages_, chap. 9, and
particularly the passage quoted in the "Notes and Illustrations" to chap.
v of this volume.]
that the Greek and Roman classical metres became in time inadequate to
express the new Christian spirit "which knew neither clarity nor measure."
"The antique sense of form and proportion, the antique observance of the
mean and avoidance of extravagance and excess, the antique dislike for the
unlimited or the monstrous, the antique feeling for literary unity, and
abstention from irrelevancy, the frank love for all that is beautiful or
charming, for the beauty of the body and for everything connected with the
joy of mortal life, the antique reticence as to hopes or fears of what was
beyond the grave,--these qualities cease in medieval Latin poetry."

_4. Lyrics of Western Europe_

The racial characteristics of the peoples of Western Europe began to show
themselves even in their Latin poetry, but it is naturally in the rise of
the vernacular literatures, during the Middle Ages, that we trace the
signs of thnic differentiation. Teuton and Frank and Norseman, Spaniard or
Italian, betray their blood as soon as they begin to sing in their own
tongue. The scanty remains of Anglo-Saxon lyrical verse are colored with
the love of battle and of the sea, with the desolateness of lonely wolds,
with the passion of loyalty to a leader. Read "Deor's Lament," "Widsith,"
"The Wanderer," "The Sea-farer," or the battle-songs of Brunanburh and
Maldon in the Anglo-Saxon _Chronicle_.
[Footnote: See Cook and Tinker, _Select Translations from Old English
Poetry_ (Boston, 1902), and Pancoast and Spaeth, _Early English Poems_
(New York, 1911).]
The last strophe of "Deor's Lament," our oldest English lyric, ends with
the line:

_"Thaes ofereode, thisses swa maeg"_
_"That he surmounted, so this may I!"_

The wandering Ulysses says something like this, it is true, in a line of
the _Odyssey_, but to feel its English racial quality one has only to read
after it Masefield's "To-morrow":

"Oh yesterday our little troop was ridden through and through,
Our swaying, tattered pennons fled, a broken beaten few,
And all a summer afternoon they hunted us and slew;
_But to-morrow,
By the living God, we 'II try the game again_!"

When Taillefer, knight and minstrel, rode in front of the Norman line at
the battle of Hastings, "singing of Charlemagne and of Roland and of
Oliver and the vassals who fell at Roncevaux," he typified the coming
triumphs of French song in England.
[Footnote: See E. B. Reed, _English Lyrical Poetry_, chap. 2. 1912.]
French lyrical fashions would have won their way, no doubt, had there been
no battle of Hastings. The banners of William the Conqueror had been
blessed by Rome. They represented Europe, and the inevitable flooding of
the island outpost of "Germania" by the tide of European civilization.
_Chanson_ and _carole_, dance-songs, troubadour lyrics, the _ballade_,
_rondel_ and _Noel_, amorous songs of French courtiers, pious hymns of
French monks, began to sing themselves in England. The new grace and
delicacy is upon every page of Chaucer. What was first Provencal and then
French, became English when Chaucer touched it. From the shadow and
grimness and elegiac pathos of Old English poetry we come suddenly into
the light and color and gayety of Southern France.
[Footnote: See the passage from Legouis quoted in the "Notes and
Illustrations" for this chapter.]
In place of Caedmon's terrible picture of Hell--"ever fire or frost"--or
Dunbar's "Lament for the Makers" (_Oxford_, No. 21) with its refrain:

"_Timor Mortis conturbat me,_"

or the haunting burden of the "Lyke-Wake Dirge" (_Oxford_, No. 381),

"This ae nighte, this ae nighte,
_--Every nighte and alle,_
Fire and sleet and candle-lighte,
_And Christe receive thy saule_,"

we now find English poets echoing _Aucassin and Nicolette_:

"In Paradise what have I to win? Therein I seek not to enter, but only
to have Nicolette, my sweet lady that I love so well. For into Paradise
go none but such folk as I shall tell thee now: Thither go these same
old priests, and halt old men and maimed, who all day and night cower
continually before the altars and in the crypts; and such folk as wear
old amices and old clouted frocks, and naked folk and shoeless, and
covered with sores, perishing of hunger and thirst and of cold, and of
little ease. These be they that go into Paradise; with them I have
naught to make. But into Hell would I fain go; for into Hell fare the
goodly clerks, and goodly knights that fall in tourneys and great wars,
and stout men at arms, and all men noble. With these would I liefly go.
And thither pass the sweet ladies and courteous that have two lovers or
three, and their lords also thereto. Thither goes the gold and the
silver, the cloth of vair and cloth of gris, and harpers and makers, and
the prince of this world. With these I would gladly go, let me but have
with me Nicolette, my sweetest lady."

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