Poetic Diction; its Laws and its Licences.

Or late years the study of poetry has been very thoroughly incorporated into our educational schemes. Every sort of examination-scholastic, university, or competitive allots a certain value to a critical acquaintance with some one or other of the works of "the poets who have made us heirs" of their immortal lays. The language of poetry is, in general, not only choice, but idiomatic; and its syntax, though more involved, is richer and more instructive than that of prose. In the process of acquiring a knowledge of the ancient languages, great use was necessarily made of poetical works. All the greater minds of antiquity had expressed themselves in highly imaginative or intensely philosophical works. The latter were, from their very nature, unavailable for the ordinary initiatory purposes of instruction, and hence the poets were selected. In young minds the imaginative are far more active than the realistic faculties; so that in many cases the poets had been preferred not only to the grave philosophers, but even to the better class of historians, those, namely, who mingled philosophy with their narrative, and were historians as distinguished from biographers. A very brief course of biography and historic narration gave a command of the vocables and syntax of a language sufficient to make an ordinary mind capable of perusing with some interest and avidity the poetic writers of the olden time. These writers, too, revealed many of the secrets of the languages in which they had composed their immortal works which the prose authors of a similar time could not do; so that on many grounds the perusal and study of the ancient poets became advisable as an educative agency. Strangely enough, in regard to our own tongue the same arguments were not held as valid; and we have been endeavouring vainly to crowd into the minds of the young, strange conglomerates of fact,— historic, scientific, literary, and economic, which have, for the most part, fallen as unimpressive on the mind under educative training as rain on the back of a hippopotamus. We have been recently recalled from our error, and the educative value of imaginative literature has begun to be recognized, not only in the lofty forms of epic and dramatic poems, but even in the less aspiring shape of prose fiction.

It has been suggested to us through several channels, that this educational use of imaginative literature ought to be accompanied by some exposition of the nature of the language of ideality, for which no better name as yet exists in our language than poetic diction.

We intend, in this and a subsequent paper, to present to our readers an explanation-so far as we have been able to think it out

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-of the nature and laws of the reproduction of imaginative thought in speech, the limitations under which it is exerted, and the licences permitted to those who utter " thoughts that breathe

in words that burn.'

The adequate expression of thought is rare; the accurate expression of imagination is rarer still. Ordinary language is representative; the language of the poet ought to be presentative. The words should be quick, living, and organized; the outgrowth of a passionate and vital thought, from the invigorating power of which the form of the utterance takes its rudimental energy,

"For of the soul the form doth body take;

For soul is form, and doth the body make."

Poetry is thought livingly envisaged in language. It is a fictitious concrete, a product of the constructive powers of the mind. It gives embodiment and forthstandingness to ideas. If it is not" of imagination all compact," it is very nearly so. Sense and experience indeed afford the materials; but the imagination selects, polishes, plans, and arranges them into a building fitly framed together. Common experience supplies mankind with daily matter-of-fact. This matter-of-fact, brought under the dialectic power of the intellect, becomes science, either of which, being impregnated by emotion, yields as its product Poetry.

Poetry places before "the mind's eye" thought vitalized. The infinite life of the soul goes out of man in a secondary sort of creative energy, and crowds the universe of thought with other existences than those which the one great Creator has called into being, and on which He has set His divine, indubitable mark-reality. No language, no description, no imaging in man's power can exhaust the significance of the real. Every new thinker finds in it fountains of truth, beauty, and love, whose seals he unstops-he, and no other. Nature is not cold logic; it is warm life. It is the evidence of that mighty invisible One, whose purposes throb through it all, and quicken it into multiform utility, beauty, magnificence, and meaning. To catch into his soul some outgleam of the Maker's glory, and to crystallize it into human language, so that it shall ever thereafter hold the truth of nature in it as purely and pellucidly as the diamond holds its light, and as unmistakably as a lily is investured in beauty, is one of the prerogatives of man, most of all of the man of genius. The grace of a form reveals itself to the sculptor's thought, an idea seen by his mind alone; the imitative necessity of his nature causes him to "hew the marble" with dexterous chisel until the likeness lives upon the chilly stone, and the statuesque image takes upon itself the substance of reality. The splendour of a rich landscape glows before the painter's eye; with skilfully spread pigments delicately mingled and laid on the canvas in accordance with the perspective dwelling in his mind, he reproduces in colours the very "form and pressure of the scene. The sage, gazing on the marvellous evolutions of phenomena, colli

gates these seemingly incongruous appearances into classes, and at last brings them within the scope of one idea, and a new science rises round the term in which it is expressed. The poet is stirred by a thought so passionate and vital, in which the genesis of life works so persistently, that it gathers and aggregates to itself a thousand varying elements, permeates them with its assimilating force, transfuses its organizing animation into them, and at length the inward mystery bursts into externality-thought is transfigured into poetry; -a lyric, an epic, or a drama springs from the teeming brain. Man is a productive agent in the universe. He could not bear his Maker's image if he himself were not also a maker. The poet is pre-eminently one who gives from his own soul an energy to things, who realizes his ideas, and adds them to the general stock of—

"Thoughts whose very sweetness yieldeth proof That they were born for immortality."

The " only begetter" even of a genuine sonnet must have a surcharge and overplus of vital selfhood which every-day thinkers do not show. It is this which so often "o'erinforms the poet's tenement of clay, and devitalizes the man while he vitalizes the world. But that is a digression.

Science is perception, poetry is conception. Science analyzes tɔ gain an explanation, to subdue the universe of the outward (phenomena) to the comprehension of the intellect. Poetry is synthetic, reconstructive, life-giving; it aims at bringing all phenomena into new aspects in the imagination. The universe" glasses itself" in science; in poetry it is transformed, transfigured, and replenished with a soul's thought. Out of "the secret bridal chambers of the heart" the child Poetry issues after the nuptials of nature and passion. The language of the intellect is prose, that of the imagination is verse.* Intellect should enrich and invigorate itself by partaking of the fruits of imagination; and Imagination ought to control her activities by the laws of the intellect. Neither, in fact, is sufficient in and of itself: for the mind is one, though its manifestations are various; and although it suits the critical expositor to specialize differences, yet the soul in its activities revolts against the subtleties of the metaphysicians, and works its processes by many, not by single powers. One faculty must be chief, according to the intent of the mind, but each is made to act as helpmate to the rest; and these,— "When the main fibres are entwined

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Through Nature's skill,

May even by contraries be joined
More closely still."

We may therefore have prose-poetry when the intellect joins hand in hand with imagination, as we may have prosy poetry when Imagination resigns too much of her initial power to intellect. The dis

* See the principles upon which this statement is based expounded and illustrated in the writer's "Elements of Rhetoric," chap. xiii. He does not desire to weary his readers by vain repetitions. See also British Controversialist, Jan., 1853.

tinction, as a distinction, is, however, really valid, that prose is the natural utterance of the understanding, and verse of "the shaping spirit of imagination." Language is an every-day instrument with every-day uses; verse is the language of reality turned from its common and ordinary service to fulfil the purposes of ideality.

"What can we reason but from what we know ?" Knowledge gives us the words of common life, and "the vision and the faculty divine of the poet turns them to beauty and to nobleness" in his verses; and then

"Fit soil it ever finds, it roots, it grows

Rough crops of actions, arts, and schemes of life,
Harvests in time with garners in the heavens !"

Literally, plain prose is scarcely now ever possible to man. Language has become a concrete of well-polished figures of speech. Each smoother seems than each, and each than each seems smoother." We can scarcely perceive the fine suggestive poetry of the phrase, "The might that slumbers in a peasant's arm," we have become so habituated to the idea of the rest and leisure implied in the metaphor. It has been appropriated by the intellect from the storehouse of imagination. The familiarity of the phrases which imagination has taken from the treasury of intellect, in the following extract, gives vividness to the idea, and enables the mind to realize the whole landscape of the sky :

"We wandered underneath the young grey dawn,
And multitudes of dense white fleecy clouds

Were wandering in thick flocks along the mountains,
Shepherded by the slow, unwilling wind."

More ordinary collocations of words than these involve a latent exercise of the imagination; e. g., the wind whistles, the sunshine dances on the brook, the sky was mirrored in the sea, the gladness of summer, a shield from the storm, take the lesson home to your hearts, &c.

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Many of the proverbs of all countries are full of poetic significancy; but they have been so thoroughly appropriated by the intellect to serve its purposes, that the imaginative element in them is almost lost sight of; e. g., "Truth," says the Spaniard, "is always green.' "Towers," a Chinaman assures us, are measured by their shadows, and great men by their calumniators." A Turk says, "There are no fans in hell." An Italian asserts that " Time is an inaudible file." "Praise a fair day at night" is an Englishman's way of saying, "Call no man happy till he is dead;" while the constant providence of God is expressed in these words, "There is more in the garden than was ever sowed." These and many other similar sayings are snatches of early poetry uttered on some occasion when imagination was active, taste was quick, and intellect was excited, and they all united their efforts to produce something living and lasting.

These illustrations have been used to disabuse the mind of the reader that the chief virtue of poetry resides in the melodious expressions it supplies, and the carefully graduated rhymes and rhythm with which it is uttered.

Verse is not inversion of phrase, or perversion of syntactic arrangement. It is the natural music of the thought, or it is nothing. The cadences of versification originate in the ideas which are evolved in the measured language of the "serene creator of immortal things" whom we call a poet. Emotions are all either persistent or recurrent. Hence they take a mode of spontaneous onflow, or onflow and recoil, out of which, or in accordance with which, the melody of poetry moves, is swayed, and turns. That verse occasionally shows inversion of phrase it would be vain to deny, and that the unexpectedness of the kind of utterance chosen occasionally aids in charming the soul we do not care to dispute. It would be easy to quote scores of passages from the poets in which the artistic inversion of a phrase adds to its impressiveness; e. g.,

"Cold, oh! cold indeed

Were her fair limbs, and like a common weed

The sea-swell took her hair."—Keats.

"Truths that the theorist could never reach,

And observation taught me, I would teach."-Cowper.
"At noonday here

"Tis twilight, and at sunset blackest night."-Shelley.

But it is easier to show that the choicest verses of the best poets hold to syntax with a strictness greater even than many prose writers, and give the words forth in the clearest and simplest forms that sentences can take; e.g., thus Barry Cornwall says of happiness,— "It is the gay to-morrow of the mind That never comes."

Campbell employs phraseology almost as emphatic:-
"Ah! in the visions of romantic youth

What years of endless bliss are yet to flow!
But, mortal Pleasure, what art thou in truth?
The torrent's smoothness ere it dash below!"

Rogers speaks of St. Helena as

"A rock so small

Amid the countless multitude of waves,

That ships have gone and sought it, and returned
Saying it was not."

In all these cases it is quite noticeable that the straightforward syntax of plain English is followed, and that no torturing of phrase or twisting of vocables has been employed. The essence of verse, therefore, does not lie in its peculiar style of phraseology, or in the special arrangement of the words of which it consists. This may be made very plain to the most ordinary eye by the following four lines which we quote from Gray's magnificent ode, "The Bard." In