The Poet's Poet Part 19

The light was growing gray, And the rhymes ran so sweet (For I was only a child) That I knelt down to pray.

But our sympathy with this little poet would not be nearly so intense were he twenty years older. When it is said of a mature poetess,

She almost shrank To feel the secret and expanding might Of her own mind, [Footnote: _The Last Hours of a Young Poetess_, Lucy Hooper.]

the reader does not always remain in a sympathetically prayerful mind.

Such reverence paid by the poet to his gift calls to mind the multiple Miss Beauchamp, of psychologic fame, and her comment on the vagaries of her various personalities, "But after all, they are all me!" Too often, when the poet is kneeling in adoration of his Muse, the irreverent reader is likely to suspect that he realizes, only too well, that it is "all me."

However, if the Philistine reader sets up as a critic, he must make good his charges. Have we any real grounds for declaring that the alleged divinity who inspires the poet is merely his own intelligence, or lack of it? Perhaps not. And yet the dabbler in psychology finds a good deal to indicate the poet's impression that the "subconscious" is shaping his verse. Sh.e.l.ley was especially fascinated by the mysterious regions of his mind lying below the threshold of his ordinary thought. In fact, some of his prose speculations are in remarkable sympathy with recent scientific papers on the subject. [Footnote: See _Speculations on Metaphysics_, Works, Vol. VI, p. 282, edited by Buxton Forman.] And in _Mont Blanc_ he expresses his wonder at the phenomenon of thought:

The everlasting universe of things Flows through the mind, and rolls its rapid waves, Now dark--now glittering--now reflecting gloom-- Now lending splendor, where from secret springs The source of human thought its tribute brings Of waters.

Again, in _The Defense of Poetry_ he says,

The mind in creation is a fading coal, which some invisible influence, like an inconstant wind, awakens to transitory brightness; this power arises from within, like the color of a flower which fades and changes as it is developed, and the conscious portions of our nature are unprophetic either of its approach or departure.

Wordsworth, too, thinks of his gift as arising from the depths of his mind, which are not subject to conscious control. He apprises us,

A plastic power Abode with me, a forming hand, at times Rebellious, acting in a devious mood, A local spirit of its own, at war With general tendency, but for the most Subservient strictly to external things With which it communed. An auxiliary light Came from my mind which on the setting sun Bestowed new splendor-- [Footnote: _The Prelude_.]

Occasionally the sudden lift of these submerged ideas to consciousness is expressed by the figure of an earthquake. Aurora Leigh says that upon her first impulse to write, her nature was shaken,

As the earth Plunges in fury, when the internal fires Have reached and p.r.i.c.ked her heart, and throwing flat The marts and temples, the triumphal gates And towers of observation, clears herself To elemental freedom.

We have a grander expression of the idea from Robert Browning, who relates how the vision of _Sordello_ arises to consciousness:

Upthrust, out-staggering on the world, Subsiding into shape, a darkness rears Its outline, kindles at the core--.

Is this to say that the poet's intuitions, apparently so sudden, have really been long germinating in the obscure depths of his mind? Then it is in tune with the idea, so prevalent in English verse, that in sleep a mysterious undercurrent of imaginative power becomes accessible to the poet.

"Ever when slept the poet his dreams were music," [Footnote: _The Poet's Sleep_.] says Richard Gilder, and the line seems trite to us.

There was surely no reason why Keats' t.i.tle, _Sleep and Poetry_, should have appeared ludicrous to his critics, for from the time of Caedmon onward English writers have been sensitive to a connection here.

The stereotyped device of making poetry a dream vision, so popular in the middle ages,--and even the prominence of _Night Thoughts_ in eighteenth century verse--testify that a coupling of poetry and sleep has always seemed natural to poets. Coleridge, [Footnote: See his account of the composition of _Kubla Khan_.] Keats, Sh.e.l.ley, [Footnote: See _Alastor_, and _Prince Athanase_. See also Edmund Gosse, _Swinburne_, p. 29, where Swinburne says he produced the first three stanzas of _A Vision of Spring_ in his sleep.]--it is the romanticists who seem to have depended most upon sleep as bringer of inspiration. And once more, it is Sh.e.l.ley who shows himself most keenly aware that, asleep or waking, the poet feels his afflatus coming in the same manner.

Thus he tells us of the singer in _Prince Athanase:_

And through his sleep, and o'er each waking hour Thoughts after thoughts, unresting mult.i.tudes, Were driven within him by some secret power Which bade them blaze, and live, and roll afar, Like lights and sounds, from haunted tower to tower.

Probably our jargon of the subconscious would not much impress poets, even those whom we have just quoted. Is this the only cause we can give, Sh.e.l.ley might ask, why the poet should not reverence his gift as something apart from himself and truly divine? If, after the fas.h.i.+on of modern psychology, we denote by the subconscious mind only the welter of myriad forgotten details of our daily life, what is there here to account for poesy? The remote, inaccessible chambers of our mind may, to be sure, be more replete with curious lumber than those continually swept and garnished for everyday use, yet, even so, there is nothing in any memory, as such, to account for the fact that poetry reveals things to us above and beyond any of our actual experiences in this world.

Alchemist Memory turned his past to gold, [Footnote: _A Life Drama._]

says Alexander Smith of his poet, and as an account of inspiration, the line sounds singularly flat. There is nothing here to distinguish the poet from any octogenarian dozing in his armchair.

Is Memory indeed the only Muse? Not unless she is a far grander figure than we ordinarily suppose. Of course she has been exalted by certain artists. There is Richard Wagner, with his definition of art as memory of one's past youth, or--to stay closer home--Wordsworth, with his theory of poetry as emotion recollected in tranquillity,--such artists have a high regard for memory. Still, Oliver Wendell Holmes is tolerably representative of the nineteenth century att.i.tude when he points memory to a second place. It is only the aged poet, conscious that his powers are decaying, to whom Holmes offers the consolation,

Live in the past; await no more The rush of heaven-sent wings; Earth still has music left in store While memory sighs and sings.

[Footnote: _Invita Minerva_.]

But, though he would discourage us from our attempt to chain his genius, like a ghost, to his past life in this world, the poet is inclined to admit that Mnemosyne, in her true grandeur, has a fair claim to her t.i.tle as mother of the muses. The memories of prosaic men may be, as we have described them, short and sordid, concerned only with their existence here and now, but the recollection of poets is a divine thing, reaching back to the days when their spirits were untrammeled by the body, and they gazed upon ideal beauty, when, as Plato says, they saw a vision and were initiated into the most blessed mysteries ... beholding apparitions innocent and simple and calm and happy as in a mystery; s.h.i.+ning in pure light, pure themselves and not yet enshrined in the living tomb which we carry about, now that we are imprisoned in the body, as in an oyster sh.e.l.l. [Footnote: _Phaedrus_, 250.]

For the poet is apt to transfer Plato's praise of the philosopher to himself, declaring that "he alone has wings, and this is just, for he is always, according to the measure of his abilities, clinging in recollection to those things in which G.o.d abides, and in beholding which He is what He is." [Footnote: _Ibid_., 249.]

If the poet exalts memory to this station, he may indeed claim that he is not furtively adoring his own petty powers, when he reverences the visions which Mnemosyne vouchsafes to him. And indeed Plato's account of memory is congenial to many poets. Sh.e.l.ley is probably the most serious of the nineteenth century singers in claiming an ideal life for the soul, before its birth into this world. [Footnote: See _Prince Athanase_. For Matthew Arnold's views, see _Self Deception_.]

Wordsworth's adherence to this view is as widely known as the _Ode on Immortality_. As an explanation for inspiration, the theory recurs in verse of other poets. One writer inquires,

Are these wild thoughts, thus fettered in my rhymes, Indeed the product of my heart and brain?

[Footnote: Henry Timrod, _Sonnet_.]

and decides that the only way to account for the occasional gleams of insight in his verse is by a.s.suming a prenatal life for the soul.

Another maintains of poetry,

Her touch is a vibration and a light From worlds before and after.

[Footnote: Edwin Markham, _Poetry_. Another recent poem on prenatal inspiration is _The Dream I Dreamed Before I Was Born_ (1919), by Dorothea Laurence Mann.]

Perhaps Alice Meynell's _A Song of Derivations_ is the most natural and unforced of these verses. She muses:

... Mixed with memories not my own The sweet streams throng into my breast.

Before this life began to be The happy songs that wake in me Woke long ago, and far apart.

Heavily on this little heart Presses this immortality.

This poem, however, is not so consistent as the others with the Platonic theory of reminiscence. It is a previous existence in this world, rather than in ideal realms, which Alice Meynell a.s.sumes for her inspirations.

She continues,

I come from nothing, but from where Come the undying thoughts I bear?

Down through long links of death and birth, From the past poets of the earth, My immortality is there.

Certain singers who seem not to have been affected by the philosophical argument for reminiscence have concurred in Alice Meynell's last statement, and have felt that the mysterious power which is impressing itself in their verse is the genius of dead poets, mysteriously finding expression in their disciple's song. A characteristic example of this att.i.tude is Alfred Noyes' account of Chapman's sensations, when he attempted to complete Marlowe's _Hero and Leander_. Chapman tells his brother poets:

I have thought, sometimes, when I have tried To work his will, the hand that moved my pen Was mine and yet--not mine. The bodily mask Is mine, and sometimes dull as clay it sleeps With old Musaeus. Then strange flashes come, Oracular glories, visionary gleams, And the mask moves, not of itself, and sings.

[Footnote: _At the Sign of the Golden Shoe_.]

The best-known instance of such a belief is, of course, Browning's appeal at the beginning of _The Ring and the Book_, that his dead wife shall inspire his poetry.

One is tempted to surmise that many of our young poets, especially have nourished a secret conviction that their genius has such an origin as this. Let there be a deification of some poet who has aroused their special enthusiasm,--a mysterious resemblance to his style in the works which arise in their minds spontaneously, in moments of ecstasy,--what is a more natural result than the a.s.sumption that their genius is, in some strange manner, a continuation of his? [Footnote: Keats wrote to Haydn that he took encouragement in the notion of some good genius--probably Shakespeare--presiding over him. Swinburne was often called Sh.e.l.ley reborn.] The tone of certain Sh.e.l.ley wors.h.i.+pers suggests such a hypothesis as an account for their poems. Bayard Taylor seems to be an exception when, after pleading that Sh.e.l.ley infuse his spirit into his disciple's verses, he recalls himself, and concludes:

I do but rave, for it is better thus; Were once thy starry nature given to mine, In the one life which would encircle us My voice would melt, my voice be lost in thine; Better to bear the far sublimer pain Of thought that has not ripened into speech.

To hear in silence Truth and Beauty sing Divinely to the brain; For thus the poet at the last shall reach His own soul's voice, nor crave a brother's string.

[Footnote: _Ode to Sh.e.l.ly._]

In the theory that the genius of a past poet may be reincarnated, there is, indeed, a danger that keeps it from appealing to all poets. It tallies too well with the charge of imitativeness, if not downright plagiarism, often brought against a new singer. [Footnote: See Margaret Steele Anderson, _Other People's Wreaths,_ and John Drinkwater, _My Songs._] If the poet feels that his genius comes from a power outside himself, he yet paradoxically insists that it must be peculiarly his own. Therefore Mrs. Browning, through Aurora Leigh, shrinks from the suspicion that her gift may be a heritage from singers before her. She wistfully inquires:

My own best poets, am I one with you?

. . . When my joy and pain, My thought and aspiration, like the stops Of pipe or flute, are absolutely dumb Unless melodious, do you play on me, My pipers, and if, sooth, you did not play, Would no sound come? Or is the music mine; As a man's voice or breath is called his own, Inbreathed by the life-breather?

Are we exaggerating our modern poet's conviction that a spirit not his own is inspiring him? Does he not rather feel self-sufficient as compared with the earlier singers, who expressed such nave dependence upon the Muse? We have been using the name Muse in this essay merely as a figure of speech, and is this not the poet's usage when he addresses her? The casual reader is inclined to say, yes, that a belief in the Muse is indeed dead. It would be absurd on the face of it, he might say, to expect a belief in this pagan figure to persist after all the rest of the Greek theogony has become a mere literary device to us. This may not be a reliable supposition, since as a matter of fact Milton and Dante impress us as being quite as deeply sincere as Homer, when they call upon the Muse to aid them in their song. But at any rate everyone is conscious that such a belief has degenerated before the eighteenth century. The complacent turner of couplets felt no genuine need for any Muse but his own keen intelligence; accordingly, though the machinery of invocation persists in his poetry, it is as purely an introductory flourish as is the ornamented initial letter of a poem. Indeed, as the century progresses, not even the pose of serious prayer is always kept up. John Hughes is perhaps the most persistent and sober intreater of the Muse whom we find during this period, yet when he compliments the Muse upon her appearance "at Lucinda's tea-table," [Footnote: See _On Lucinda's Tea-table_.] one feels that all awe of her has vanished. It is no wonder that James Thomson, writing verses _On the Death of His Mother_, should disclaim the artificial aid of the muses, saying that his own deep feeling was enough to inspire him. As the romantic movement progressed, it would be easy to show that distaste for the eighteenth century mannerism resulted in more and more flippant treatment of the G.o.ddesses. Beattie refers to a contemporary's "reptile Muse, swollen from the sty." [Footnote: See _On a Report of a Monument to a Late Author_.] Burns alludes to his own Muse as a "tapitless ramfeezled hizzie," [Footnote: See the _Epistle to Lapraik_.] and sets the fas.h.i.+on for succeeding writers, who so multiply the original nine that each poet has an individual muse, a sorry sort of guardian-angel, whom he is fond of berating for her lack of ability. One never finds a writer nowadays, with courage to refer to his muse otherwise than apologetically. The usual tone is that of Andrew Lang, when he confesses, apropos of the departure of his poetic gift:

'Twas not much at any time She could hitch into a rhyme, Never was the muse sublime Who has fled.

[Footnote: _A Poet's Apology_.]