The Poet's Poet Part 13

White plates and cups, clean gleaming, Ringed with blue lines; and feathery, faery dust; Wet roofs, beneath the lamplight; the strong crust Of friendly bread; and many tasting food; Rainbows, and the blue bitter smoke of wood.

And so on he takes us, apparently at random, through the whole range of his sense impressions. But the main difficulty with having no more than such scattered and promiscuous impressionability is that it is likely to result in poetry that is a mere confusion of color without design, unless the poet is subject to the unifying influence of a great pa.s.sion, which, far from destroying perspective, as was hinted previously, affords a fixed standard by which to gauge the relative values of other impressions. Of course the exceptionally idealistic poet, who is conscious of a religious ideal, can say with Milton, "I am wont day and night to seek the _idea_ of beauty through all the forms and faces of things (for many are the shapes of things divine) and to follow it leading me on with certain a.s.sured traces." [Footnote: _Prose Works_, Vol. I, Letter VII, Symmons ed.] To him there is no need of the unifying influence of romantic love. In his case the mission of a strong pa.s.sion is rather to humanize the ideal, lest it become purely philosophical (as that of G. E. Woodberry is in danger of doing) or purely ethical, as is the case of our New England poets. On the other hand, to the poet who denies the ideal element in life altogether, the unifying influence of love is indispensable. Such deeply tragic poetry as that of James Thomson, B. V., for instance, which a.s.serts Macbeth's conclusion that life is "a tale told by an idiot," is saved from utter chaos sufficiently to keep its poetical character, only because the memory of his dead love gives Thomson a conception of eternal love and beauty by which to gauge his hopeless despair.

In addition, our poets are wont to agree with their father Spenser that the beauty of a beloved person is not to be placed in the same cla.s.s as the beauty of the world of nature. Spenser argues that the spiritual beauty of a lady, rather than her outward appearance, causes her lover's perturbation. He inquires:

Can proportion of the outward part Move such affection in the inward mind That it can rob both sense and reason blind?

Why do not then the blossoms of the field, Which are arrayed with much more orient hue And to the sense most daintie odors yield, Work like impression in the looker's view?

[Footnote: _An Hymne in Honour of Beautie_.]

Modern theorists, who would no doubt despise the quaintly idealistic mode of Spenser's expression, yet express much the same view in a.s.serting that romantic excitement is a stimulus which keys all the senses to a higher pitch, thus dispersing one's amorousness over all creation. The love celebrated in Brooke's _The Great Lover_, they declare, cannot be compared with that of his more conventional love poems, simply because the one love is the cause of the other. Such heightened sensuous impressionability is celebrated in much of our most beautiful love poetry of to-day, notably in Sara Teasdale's.

It may be that this intensity of perception engendered by love is its most poetical effect. Much verse pictures the poet as a flamelike spirit kindled by love to a preternaturally vivid apprehension of life for an instant, before love dies away, leaving him ashes. Again and again the a.n.a.logy is pointed out between Sh.e.l.ley's spirit and the leaping flames that consumed his body. Josephine Preston Peabody's interpretation of Marlowe is of the same sort. In the drama of which Marlowe is the t.i.tle-character, his fellow-dramatist, Lodge, is much worried when he learns of Marlowe's mad pa.s.sion for a woman of the court.

Thou art a glorious madman,

Lodge exclaims,

Born to consume thyself anon in ashes, And rise again to immortality.

Marlowe replies,

Oh, if she cease to smile, as thy looks say, What if? I shall have drained my splendor down To the last flaming drop! Then take me, darkness, And mirk and mire and black oblivion, Despairs that raven where no camp-fire is, Like the wild beasts. I shall be even blest To be so d.a.m.ned.

Most often this conception of love's flamelike lightening of life for the poet is applied to Sappho. Many modern English poets picture her living "with the swift singing strength of fire." [Footnote: See Southey, _Sappho_; Mary Robinson (1758-1800), _Sappho and Phaon_; Philip Moren Freneau, _Monument of Phaon_; James Gates Percival, _Sappho_; Charles Kingsley, _Sappho_; Lord Houghton, _A Dream of Sappho_; Swinburne, _On the Cliffs_, _Anactoria_, _Sapphics_; Cale Young Rice, _Sappho's Death Song_; Sara Teasdale, _Sappho_; Percy Mackaye, _Sappho and Phaon_; Zoe Akins, _Sappho to a Swallow on the Ground_; James B.

Kenyon, _Phaon Concerning Sappho_, _Sappho_ (1920); William Alexander Percy, _Sappho in Levkos_ (1920).] Swinburne, in _On the Cliffs_, claims this as the essential attribute of genius, when he cries to her for sympathy,

For all my days as all thy days from birth My heart as thy heart was in me as thee Fire, and not all the fountains of the sea Have waves enough to quench it; nor on earth Is fuel enough to feed, While day sows night, and night sows day for seed.

This intensity of perception is largely the result, or the cause, of the poet's unusually sensitive consciousness of the ephemeralness of love.

The notion of permanence often seems to rob love of all its poetical quality. The dark despair engendered by a sense of its transience is needed as a foil to the fiery splendors of pa.s.sion. Thus Rupert Brooke, in the sonnet, _Mutability_, dismisses the Platonic idea of eternal love and beauty, declaring,

Dear, we know only that we sigh, kiss, smile; Each kiss lasts but the kissing; and grief goes over; Love has no habitation but the heart: Poor straws! on the dark flood we catch awhile, Cling, and are borne into the night apart, The laugh dies with the lips, "Love" with the lover.

Sappho is represented as especially aware of this aspect of her love.

Her frenzies in _Anactoria_, where, if our hypothesis is correct, Swinburne must have been terribly concerned over his natural coldness, arise from rebellion at the brevity of love. Sappho cries,

What had all we done That we should live and loathe the sterile sun, And with the moon wax paler as she wanes, And pulse by pulse feel time grow through our veins?

Poetry, we are to believe, arises from the yearning to render eternal the fleeting moment of pa.s.sion. Sappho's poetry is, as Swinburne says, [Footnote: In _On the Cliffs_.] "life everlasting of eternal fire."

In Mackaye's _Sappho and Phaon_, she exults in her power to immortalize her pa.s.sion, contrasting herself with her mother, the sea:

Her ways are birth, fecundity and death, But mine are beauty and immortal love.

Therefore I will be tyrant of myself-- Mine own law will I be! And I will make Creatures of mind and melody, whose forms Are wrought of loveliness without decay, And wild desire without satiety, And joy and aspiration without death.

And on the wings of these shall I, I, Sappho!

Still soar and sing above these cliffs of Lesbos, Even when ten thousand blooms of men and maidens Are fallen and withered.

To one who craves an absolute aesthetic standard, it is satisfactory to note how nearly unanimous our poets are in their portrayal of Sappho.

[Footnote: No doubt they are influenced by the glimpse of her given in Longinus, _On the Sublime_.] This is the more remarkable, since our enormous ignorance of her life and poetry would give almost free scope to inventive faculty. It is significant that none of our writers have been attracted to the picture Welcker gives of her as the respectable matronly head of a girl's seminary. Instead, she is invariably shown as mad with an insatiable yearning, tortured by the conviction that her love can never be satisfied. Charles Kingsley, describing her temperament,

Night and day A mighty hunger yearned within her heart, And all her veins ran fever, [Footnote: _Sappho_.]

conceives of her much as does Swinburne, who calls her,

Love's priestess, mad with pain and joy of song, Song's priestess, mad with pain and joy of love.

[Footnote: _On the Cliffs_.]

It is in this insatiability that Swinburne finds the secret of her genius, as opposed to the meager desires of ordinary folk. Expressing her conception of G.o.d, he makes Sappho a.s.sert,

But having made me, me he shall not slay: Nor slay nor satiate, like those herds of his, Who laugh and love a little, and their kiss Contents them.

It is, no doubt, an inarticulate conviction that she is "imprisoned in the body as in an oyster sh.e.l.l," [Footnote: Plato, _Phaedrus_, -- 250.]

while the force that is wooing her is outside the boundary of the senses, that accounts for Sappho's agonies of despair. In Sara Teasdale's _Sappho_ she describes herself,

Who would run at dusk Along the surges creeping up the sh.o.r.e When tides come in to ease the hungry beach, And running, running till the night was black, Would fall forspent upon the chilly sand, And quiver with the winds from off the sea.

Ah! quietly the s.h.i.+ngle waits the tides Whose waves are stinging kisses, but to me Love brought no peace, nor darkness any rest.

[Footnote: In the end, Sara Teasdale does show her winning content, in the love of her baby daughter, but it is significant that this destroys her lyric gift. She a.s.sures Aphrodite,

If I sing no more To thee, G.o.d's daughter, powerful as G.o.d, It is that thou hast made my life too sweet To hold the added sweetness of a song.

I taught the world thy music; now alone I sing for her who falls asleep to hear.]

Swinburne characteristically shows her literally tearing the flesh in her quest of the divinity that is reflected there. In _Anactoria_ she tells the object of her infatuation:

I would my love could kill thee: I am satiated With seeing thee alive, and fain would have thee dead.

I would find grievous ways to have thee slain, Intense device and superflux of pain.

And after detailing with gusto the b.l.o.o.d.y ingenuities of her plan of torture, she states that her motive is,

To wring thy very spirit through the flesh.

The myth that Sappho's agony resulted from an offense done to Aphrodite, is several times alluded to. In _Sappho and Phaon_ she a.s.serts her independence of Aphrodite's good will, and in revenge the G.o.ddess turns Phaon's affection away from Sappho, back to Thala.s.sa, the mother of his children. Sappho's infatuation for Phaon, the slave, seems a cruel jest of Aphrodite, who fills Sappho with a wholly blind and unreasoning pa.s.sion. In all three of Swinburne's Lesbian poems, Aphrodite's anger is mentioned. This is the sole theme of _Sapphics_, in which poem the G.o.ddess, displeased by Sappho's preferment of love poetry to the actual delights of love, yet tried to win Sappho back to her:

Called to her, saying "Turn to me, O my Sappho,"

Yet she turned her face from the Loves, she saw not Tears or laughter darken immortal eyelids....

Only saw the beautiful lips and fingers, Full of songs and kisses and little whispers, Full of music; only beheld among them Soar as a bird soars Newly fledged, her visible song, a marvel Made of perfect sound and exceeding pa.s.sion, Sweetly shapen, terrible, full of thunders, Clothed with the wind's wings.

It seems likely that this myth of Aphrodite's anger is an allegory indicating the tragic character of all poetic love, in that, while incarcerated in the body, the singer strives to break through the limits of the flesh and to grasp ideality. The issue is made clear in Mackaye's drama. There Sappho's rival is Thala.s.sa, Phaon's slave-mate, who conceives as love's only culmination the bearing of children. Sappho, in her superiority, points out that mere perpetuation of physical life is a meaningless circle, unless it leads to some higher satisfaction. But in the end the figure of "the eternal mother," as typified by Thala.s.sa, is more powerful than is Sappho, in the struggle for Phaon's love. Thus Aphrodite a.s.serts her unwillingness to have love refined into a merely spiritual conception.

Often the greatest poets, as Sappho herself, are represented as having no more than a blind and instinctive apprehension of the supersensual beauty which is s.h.i.+ning through the flesh, and which is the real object of desire. But thus much ideality must be characteristic of love, it seems obvious, before it can be spiritually creative. Unless there is some sense of a universal force, taking the shape of the individual loved one, there can be nothing suggestive in love. Instead of waking the lover to the beauty in all of life, as we have said, it would, as the non-lover has a.s.serted, blind him to all but the immediate object of his pursuit. Then, the goal being reached, there would be no reason for the poet's not achieving complete satisfaction in love, for there would be nothing in it to suggest any delight that he does not possess.

Therefore, having all his desire, the lover would be lethargic, with no impulse to express himself in song. Probably something of this sort is the meaning of the Tannhauser legend, as versified both by Owen Meredith and Emma Lazarus, showing the poet robbed of his gift when he comes under the power of the Paphian Venus. Such likewise is probably the meaning of Oscar Wilde's sonnet, _Helas_, quoted above.

While we thus lightly dismiss sensual love as unpoetical, we must remember that Burns, in some of his accounts of inspiration, ascribes quite as powerful and as unidealistic an effect to the kisses of the barmaids, as to the liquor they dispense. But this is mere bravado, as much of his other verse shows. Byron's case, also, is a doubtful one.

The element of discontent is all that elevates his amours above the "swinish trough," which Alfred Austin a.s.serts them to be. [Footnote: In _Off Mesolonghi_.] Yet, such as his idealism is, it const.i.tutes the strength and weakness of his poetical gift. Landor well says, [Footnote: In _Lines To a Lady_.]

Although by fits so dense a cloud of smoke Puffs from his sappy and ill-seasoned oak, Yet, as the spirit of the dream draws near, Remembered loves make Byron's self sincere.

The puny heart within him swells to view, The man grows loftier and the poet too.

Ideal love is most likely to become articulate in the sonnet sequence.