A Study of Poetry by Bliss Perry

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"I sink in deep mire, where there is no standing: I am come into deep
waters, where the floods overflow me.

"I am weary of my crying: my throat is dried: mine eyes fail while I
wait for my God."

Greek poetry, likewise, is made out of "warm, swift, vibrating" words,
thrilling with bodily sensation. Gilbert Murray
[Footnote: "What English Poetry may Learn from Greek," _Atlantic Monthly_,
November, 1912.]
has described the weaving of these beautiful single words into patterns:

"The whole essence of lyric is rhythm. It is the weaving of words
into a song-pattern, so that the mere arrangement of the syllables
produces a kind of dancing joy.... Greek lyric is derived directly
from the religious dance; that is, not merely the pattering of the
feet, _but the yearning movement of the whole body_, the ultimate
expression of emotion that cannot be pressed into articulate speech,
compact of intense rhythm and intense feeling."

Nor should it be forgotten that Milton, while praising "a graceful and
ornate rhetoric," declares that poetry, compared with this, is "more
simple, sensuous and passionate."
[Footnote: _Tract on Education._ ]
These words "sensuous" and "passionate," dulled as they have become by
repetition, should be interpreted in their full literal sense. While
language is unquestionably a social device for the exchange of ideas and
feelings, it is also true that poetic diction is a revelation of
individual experience, of body-and-mind contacts with reality. Every poet
is still an Adam in the Garden, inventing new names as fast as the new
wonderful Beasts---so terrible, so delightful!--come marching by.

_3. Words as Current Coin_

But the poet's words, stamped and colored as they are by unique individual
experience, must also have a general _transmission value_ which renders
them current coin. If words were merely representations of private
experience, merely our own nicknames for things, they would not pass the
walls of the Garden inhabited by each man's imagination. "Expression"
would be possible, but "communication" would be impossible, and indeed
there would be no recognizable terms of expression except the "bow-wow" or
"pooh-pooh" or "ding-dong" of the individual Adam----and even these
expressive syllables might not be the ones acceptable to Eve!

The truth is that though the impulse to expression is individual, and that
in highly developed languages a single man can give his personal stamp to
words, making them say what he wishes them to say, as Dante puts it,
speech is nevertheless primarily a social function. A word is a social
instrument. "It belongs," says Professor Whitney,
[Footnote: W. D. Whitney, _Language and the Study of Language_, p. 404.]
"not to the individual, but to the member of society.... What we may
severally choose to say is not language until it be accepted and employed
by our fellows. The whole development of speech, though initiated by the
acts of individuals, is wrought out by the community."

... A solitary man would never frame a language. Let a child grow up in
utter seclusion, and, however rich and suggestive might be the nature
around him, however full and appreciative his sense of that which lay
without, and his consciousness of that which went on within him, he would
all his life remain a mute."

What is more, the individual's mastery of language is due solely to his
social effort in employing it. Speech materials are not inherited; they
are painfully acquired. It is well known that an English child brought up
in China and hearing no word of English will speak Chinese without a trace
of his English parentage in form or idiom.
[Footnote: See Baldwin's _Dictionary of Philosophy and Psychology_,
article "Language."]
His own body-and-mind experiences will be communicated in the medium
already established by the body-and-mind experiences of the Chinese race.
In that medium only can the thoughts of this English-born child have any
transmission value. His father and mother spoke a tongue moulded by
Chaucer and Shakspere, but to the boy whom we have imagined all that
age-long labor of perfecting a social instrument of speech is lost
without a trace. As far as language is concerned, he is a Chinaman and
nothing else.

Now take the case of a Chinese boy who has come to an American school and
college. Just before writing this paragraph I have read the blue-book of
such a boy, written in a Harvard examination on Tennyson. It was an
exceptionally well-expressed blue-book, in idiomatic English, and it
revealed an unusual appreciation of Tennyson's delicate and sure
felicities of speech. The Chinese boy, by dint of an intellectual effort
of which most of his American classmates were incapable, had mastered many
of the secrets of an alien tongue, and had taken possession of the rich
treasures of English poetry. If he had been composing verse himself,
instead of writing a college blue-book, it is likely that he would have
preferred to use his own mother-tongue, as the more natural medium for the
expression of his intimate thoughts and feelings. But that expression, no
matter how artistic, would have "communicated" nothing whatever to an
American professor ignorant of the Chinese language. It is clear that the
power of any person to convey his ideas and emotions to others is
conditioned upon the common possession of some medium of exchange.

4. _Words an Imperfect Medium_

And it is precisely here that we face one of the fundamental difficulties
of the poet's task; a difficulty that affects, indeed, all human
intercourse. For words are notoriously an imperfect medium of
communication. They "were not invented at first," says Professor Walter
Raleigh in his book on Wordsworth, "and are very imperfectly adapted at
best, for the severer purposes of truth. They bear upon them all the
weaknesses of their origin, and all the maims inflicted by the
prejudices and fanaticisms of generations of their employers. They
perpetuate the memory or prolong the life of many noble forms of human
extravagance, and they are the monuments of many splendid virtues. But
with all their abilities and dignities they are seldom well fitted for the
quiet and accurate statement of the thing that is.... Beasts fight with
horns, and men, when the guns are silent, with words. The changes of
meaning in words from good to bad and from bad to good senses, which are
quite independent of their root meaning, is proof enough, without detailed
illustration, of the incessant nature of the strife. The question is not
what a word means, but what it imputes."
[Footnote: Raleigh's _Wordsworth_. London, 1903.]

Now if the quiet and accurate statement of things as they are is the ideal
language of prose, it is obvious that the characteristic diction of poetry
is unquiet, inaccurate, incurably emotional. Herein lie its dangers and
its glories. No poet can keep for very long to the "neutral style," to the
cool gray wallpaper words, so to speak; he wants more color---passionate
words that will "stick fiery off" against the neutral background of
conventional diction. In vain does Horace warn him against "purple
patches"; for he knows that the tolerant Horace allowed himself to use
purple patches whenever he wished. All employers of language for emotional
effect--orators, novelists, essayists, writers of editorials--utilize in
certain passages these colored, heightened, figured words. It is as if
they ordered their printers to set individual words or whole groups of
words in upper-case type.

And yet these "upper-case words" of heightened emotional value are not
really isolated from their context. Their values are relative and not
absolute. Like the high lights of a picture, their effectiveness depends
upon the tone of the composition as a whole. To insert a big or violent
word for its own potency is like sewing the purple patch upon a faded
garment. The predominant thought and feeling of a passage give the
richest individual words their penetrating power, just as the weight of
the axe-head sinks the blade into the wood. "Futurist" poets like
Marinetti have protested against the bonds of syntax, the necessity of
logical subject and predicate, and have experimented with nouns alone.
"Words delivered from the fetters of punctuation," says Marinetti, "will
flash against one another, will interlace their various forms of
magnetism, and follow the uninterrupted dynamics of force."
[Footnote: There is an interesting discussion of Futurism in Sir Henry
Newbolt's _New Study of English Poetry_. Dutton, 1919.]
But do they? The reader may judge for himself in reading Marinetti's poem
on the siege of a Turkish fort:

"Towers guns virility flights erection telemetre exstacy toumbtoumb 3
seconds toumbtoumb waves smiles laughs plaff poaff glouglouglouglou
hide-and-seek crystals virgins flesh jewels pearls iodine salts
bromide skirts gas liqueurs bubbles 3 seconds toumbtoumb officer
whiteness telemetre cross fire megaphone sight-at-thousand-metres
all-men-to-left enough every-man-to-his post incline-7-degrees
splendour jet pierce immensity azure deflowering onslaught alleys
cries labyrinth mattress sobs ploughing desert bed precision
telemetre monoplane cackling theatre applause monoplane equals
balcony rose wheel drum trepan gad-fly rout arabs oxen blood-colour
shambles wounds refuge oasis."

In these vivid nouns there is certainly some raw material for a poem, just
as a heap of bits of colored glass might make material for a rose-window.
But both poem and window must be built by somebody: the shining fragments
will never fashion themselves into a whole.

5. _Predominant Tone-Feeling_

If each poem is composed in its own "key," as we say of music, with its
own scale of "values," as we say of pictures, it is obvious that the
separate words tend to take on tones and hues from the predominant
tone-feeling of the poem. It is a sort of protective coloration, like
Nature's devices for blending birds and insects into their background; or,
to choose a more prosaic illustration, like dipping a lump of sugar into a
cup of coffee. The white sugar and the yellowish cream and the black
coffee blend into something unlike any of the separate ingredients, yet
the presence of each is felt. It is true that some words refuse to be
absorbed into the texture of the poem: they remain as it were foreign
substances in the stream of imagery, something alien, stubborn, jarring,
although expressive enough in themselves. All the pioneers in poetic
diction assume this risk of using "un-poetic" words in their desire to
employ expressive words. Classic examples are Wordsworth's homely "tubs"
and "porringers," and Walt Whitman's catalogues of everyday implements
used in various trades. _Othello_ was hissed upon its first appearance on
the Paris stage because of that "vulgar" word handkerchief. Thus "fork"
and "spoon" have almost purely utilitarian associations and are
consequently difficult terms for the service of poetry, but "knife" has a
wider range of suggestion. Did not the peaceful Robert Louis Stevenson
confess his romantic longing to "knife a man"?

But it is not necessary to multiply illustrations of this law of
connotation. The true poetic value of a word lies partly in its history,
in its past employments, and partly also in the new vitality which it
receives from each brain which fills the word with its own life. It is
like an old violin, with its subtle overtones, the result of many
vibrations of the past, but yet each new player may coax a new tune from
it. When Wordsworth writes of

"The silence that is in the starry sky,
The sleep that is among the lonely hills,"

he is combining words that are immemorially familiar into a total effect
that is peculiarly "Wordsworthian." Diction is obviously only a part of a
greater whole in which ideas and emotions are also merged. A concordance
of all the words employed by a poet teaches us much about him, and
conversely a knowledge of the poet's personality and of his governing
ideas helps us in the study of his diction. Poets often have favorite
words--like Marlowe's "black," Shelley's "light," Tennyson's "wind,"
Swinburne's "fire." Each of these words becomes suffused with the whole
personality of the poet who employs it. It not only cannot be taken out of
its context in the particular poem in which it appears, but it cannot be
adequately _felt_ without some recognition of the particular sensational
and emotional experience which prompted its use. Many concordance-hunters
thus miss the real game, and fall into the Renaissance error of
word-grubbing for its own sake, as if mere words had a value of their own
independently of the life breathed into them by living men. I recall a
conversation at Bormes with the French poet Angellier. He was complaining
humorously of his friend L., a famous scholar whose big book was "carrying
all the treasures of French literature down to posterity like a
cold-storage transport ship." "But he published a criticism of one of my
poems," Angellier went on, "which proved that he did not understand the
poem at all. He had studied it too hard! The words of a poem are
stepping-stones across a brook. If you linger on one of them too long, you
will get your feet wet! You must cross, _vite_!" If the poets lead us from
one mood to another over a bridge of words, the words themselves are not
the goal of the journey. They are instruments used in the transmission of
emotion.

6. _Specific Tone-Color_

It is obvious, then, that the full poetic value of a word cannot be
ascertained apart from its context. The value is relative and not
absolute. And nevertheless, just as the bit of colored glass may have a
certain interest and beauty of its own, independently of its possible
place in the rose-window, it is true that separate words possess special
qualities of physical and emotional suggestiveness. Dangerous as it is to
characterize the qualities of the sound of a word apart from the sense of
that word, there is undeniably such a thing as "tone-color." A piano and a
violin, striking the same note, are easily differentiated by the quality
of the sound, and of two violins, playing the same series of notes, it is
usually possible to declare which instrument has the richer tone or
timbre. Words, likewise, differ greatly in tone-quality. A great deal of
ingenuity has been devoted to the analysis of "bright" and "dark" vowels,
smooth and harsh consonants, with the aim of showing that each sound has
its special expressive force, its peculiar adaptability to transmit a
certain kind of feeling. Says Professor A. H. Tolman:
[Footnote: "The Symbolic Value of Sounds," in _Hamlet and Other Essays_,
by A. H. Tolman. Boston, 1904.]

"Let us arrange the English vowel sounds in the following scale:

[short i] (little) [long i] (I) [short oo] (wood)
[short e] (met) [long u] (due) [long ow] (cow)
[short a] (mat) [short ah] (what) [long o] (gold)
[long e] (mete) [long ah] (father) [long oo] (gloom)
[ai] (fair) [oi] (boil) [aw] (awe)
[long a] (mate) [short u] (but)

"The sounds at the beginning of this scale are especially fitted to
express uncontrollable joy and delight, gayety, triviality, rapid
movement, brightness, delicacy, and physical littleness; the sounds
at the end are peculiarly adapted to express horror, solemnity, awe,
deep grief, slowness of motion, darkness, and extreme or oppressive
greatness of size. The scale runs, then, from the little to the
large, from the bright to the dark, from ecstatic delight to horror,
and from the trivial to the solemn and awful."

Robert Louis Stevenson in his _Some Technical Elements of Style in
Literature_, and many other curious searchers into the secrets of words,
have attempted to explain the physiological basis of these varying
"tone-qualities." Some of them are obviously imitative of sounds in
nature; some are merely suggestive of these sounds through more or less
remote analogies; some are frankly imitative of muscular effort or of
muscular relaxation. High-pitched vowels and low-pitched vowels, liquid
consonants and harsh consonants, are unquestionably associated with
muscular memories, that is to say, with individual body-and-mind
experiences. Lines like Tennyson's famous

"The moan of doves in immemorial elms
And murmuring of innumerable bees"

thus represent, in their vowel and consonantal expressiveness, the past
history of countless physical sensations, widely shared by innumerable
individuals, and it is to this fact that the "transmission value" of the
lines is due.

Imitative effects are easily recognized, and need no comment:

"Brushed with the hiss of rustling wings"

"The mellow ouzel fluting in the elm"

"The wind that'll wail like a child
and the sea that'll moan like a man."

Suggestive effects are more subtle. Sometimes they are due primarily to
those rhythmical arrangements of words which we shall discuss in the next
chapter, but poetry often employs the sound of single words to awaken dim
or bright associations. Robert Bridges's catalogue of the Greek nymphs in
"Eros and Psyche" is an extreme example of risking the total effect of a
stanza upon the mere beautiful sounds of proper names.

"Swift to her wish came swimming on the waves
His lovely ocean nymphs, her guides to be,
The Nereids all, who live among the caves
And valleys of the deep, Cymodoce,
Agave, blue-eyed Hallia and Nesaea,
Speio, and Thoe, Glauce and Actaea,
Iaira, Melite and Amphinome,
Apseudes and Nemertes, Callianassa,
Cymothoe, Thaleia, Limnorrhea,
Clymene, Ianeira and Ianassa,
Doris and Panope and Galatea,
Dynamene, Dexamene and Maira,
Ferusa, Doto, Proto, Callianeira,
Amphithoe, Oreithuia and Amathea."

Names of objects like "bobolink" and "raven" may affect us emotionally by
the quality of their tone. Through association with the sounds of the
human voice, heard under stress of various emotions, we attribute joyous
or foreboding qualities to the bird's tone, and then transfer these
associations to the bare name of the bird.

Names of places are notoriously rich in their evocation of emotion.

"He caught a chill in the lagoons of Venice,
And died in Padua."

Here the fact of illness and death may be prosaic enough, but the very
names of "Venice" and "Padua" are poetry--like "Rome," "Ireland,"
"Arabia," "California."

"Where the great Vision of the guarded mount
Looks toward Namancos and Bayona's hold."

Who knows precisely where that "guarded mount" is upon the map? And who
cares? "The sailor's heart," confesses Lincoln Colcord,
[Footnote: _The New Republic_, September 16, 1916.]
"refutes the prose of knowledge, and still believes in delectable and
sounding names. He dreams of capes and islands whose appellations are
music and a song.... The first big land sighted on the outward passage is
Java Head; beside it stands Cape Sangian Sira, with its name like a
battle-cry. We are in the Straits of Sunda: name charged with the heady
languor of the Orient, bringing to mind pictures of palm-fringed shores
and native villages, of the dark-skinned men of Java clad in bright
sarongs, clamoring from their black-painted dugouts, selling fruit and
brilliant birds. These waters are rich in names that stir the blood, like
Krakatoa, Gunong Delam, or Lambuan; or finer, more sounding than all the
rest, Telok Betong and Rajah Bassa, a town and a mountain--Telok Betong at
the head of Lampong Bay and Rajah Bassa, grand old bulwark on the Sumatra
shore, the cradle of fierce and sudden squalls."

It may be urged, of course, that in lines of true poetry the sense carries
the sound with it, and that nothing is gained by trying to analyse the
sounds apart from the sense. Professor C. M. Lewis
[Footnote: _Principles of English Verse_. New York, 1906.]
asserts bluntly: "When you say Titan you mean something big, and when you
say tittle you mean something small; but it is not the sound of either
word that means either bigness or littleness, it is the sense. If you put
together a great many similar consonants in one sentence, they will
attract special attention to the words in which they occur, and the
significance of those words, whatever it may be, is thereby intensified;
but whether the words are 'a team of little atomies' or 'a triumphant
terrible Titan,' it is not the sound of the consonants that makes the
significance. When Tennyson speaks of the shrill-edged shriek of
a mother, his words suggest with peculiar vividness the idea of a shriek;
but when you speak of stars that shyly shimmer, the same sounds only
intensify the idea of shy shimmering." This is refreshing, and yet it is
to be noted that "Titan" and "tittle" and "shrill-edged shriek" and "shyly
shimmer" are by no means identical in sound: they have merely certain
consonants in common. A fairer test of tone-color may be found if we turn
to frank nonsense-verse, where the formal elements of poetry surely exist
without any control of meaning or "sense":

"The Jabberwock, with eyes of flame,
Came whiffling through the tulgey wood,
And burbled as it came!

"'T was brillig, and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe;
All mimsy were the borogoves,
And the mome raths outgrabe."

"It seems rather pretty," commented the wise Alice, "but it's rather
hard to understand! Somehow it seems to fill my head with ideas--only
I don't exactly know what they are!"

This is precisely what one feels when one listens to a poem recited in a
language of which one happens to be ignorant. The wonderful colored words
are there, and they seem somehow to fill our heads with ideas, only we do
not know what they are. Many readers who know a little Italian or German
will confess that their enjoyment of a lyric in those languages suffers
only a slight, if any, impairment through their ignorance of the precise
meaning of all the words in the poem: if they know enough to feel the
predominant mood--as when we listen to a song sung in a language of which
we are wholly ignorant--we can sacrifice the succession of exact ideas.
For words bare of meaning to the intellect may be covered with veils of
emotional association due to the sound alone. Garrick ridiculed--and
doubtless at the same time envied--George Whitefield's power to make women
weep by the rich overtones with which he pronounced "that blessed word
Mesopotamia."

The capacities and the limitations of tone-quality in itself may be seen
no less clearly in parodies. Swinburne, a master technician in words and
rhythm, occasionally delighted, as in "Nephelidia,"
[Footnote: Quoted in Carolyn Wells, _A Parody Anthology_. New York, 1904.]
to make fun of himself as well as of his poetic contemporaries:

"Surely no spirit or sense of a soul that was soft
to the spirit and soul of our senses
Sweetens the stress of surprising suspicion that
sobs in the semblance and sound of a sigh;
Only this oracle opens Olympian, in mystical
moods and triangular tenses,--
'Life is the lust of a lamp for the light that is
dark till the dawn of the day when we die.'"

Or, take Calverley's parody of Robert Browning:

"You see this pebble-stone? It's a thing I bought
Of a bit of a chit of a boy i' the mid o' the day.
I like to dock the smaller parts o' speech,
As we curtail the already cur-tail'd cur--"

The characteristic tone-quality of the vocabulary of each of these
poets--whether it be

"A soul that was soft to the spirit and soul of our senses"

or

"A bit of a chit of a boy i' the mid o' the day"--

is as perfectly conveyed by the parodist as if the lines had been written
in dead earnest. Poe's "Ulalume" is a masterly display of tone-color
technique, but exactly what it means, or whether it means anything at all,
is a matter upon which critics have never been able to agree. It is
certain, however, that a poet's words possess a kind of physical
suggestiveness, more or less closely related to their mental significance.
In nonsense-verse and parodies we have a glimpse, as it were, at the body
of poetry stripped of its soul.

7. _"Figures of Speech"_

To understand why poets habitually use figurative language, we must recall
what has been said in Chapter III about verbal images. Under the heat and
pressure of emotion, things alter their shape and size and quality, ideas
are transformed into concrete images, diction becomes impassioned, plain
speech tends to become metaphorical. The language of any excited person,
whether he is uttering himself in prose or verse, is marked by "tropes";
i.e. "turnings"--images which express one thing in the terms of another
thing. The language of feeling is characteristically "tropical," and
indeed every man who uses metaphors is for the moment talking like a
poet--unless, as too often happens both in prose and verse, the metaphor
has become conventionalized and therefore lifeless. The born poet
thinks in "figures," in "pictured" language, or, as it has been called, in
"re-presentative" language,
[Footnote: G. L. Raymond, _Poetry as a Representative Art_, chap. 19.]
since he represents, both to his own mind and to those with whom he is
communicating, the objects of poetic emotion under new forms. If he wishes
to describe an eagle, he need not say: "A rapacious bird of the falcon
family, remarkable for its strength, size, graceful figure, and
extraordinary flight." He represents these facts by making a picture:

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