The Circus, and Other Essays and Fugitive Pieces Part 13

Here is another sonnet ending in a couplet, which I quote for several reasons. In the first place, the poet, while using the couplet, has avoided the dangers of the epigram. In the second place, he comes as close to writing a narrative as the sonneteer may safely do. In the third place he deviates from the strict rules of the sonnet in one important particular, which should be at once apparent to every student of the subject. I do not refer to the false rhyme of "Africa" and "bar"--the deviation which I mean refers only to the sonnet form, and has to do with the arrangement of the thought.

BOOKRA

BY CHARLES DUDLEY WARNER

One night I lay asleep in Africa, In a closed garden by the city gate; A desert horseman, furious and late, Came wildly thundering at the ma.s.sive bar, "Open in Allah's name! Wake, Mustapha!

Slain is the Sultan,--treason, war, and hate Rage from Fez to Tetuan! Open straight."

The watchman heard as thunder from afar:

"Go to! in peace this city lies asleep; To all-knowing Allah 'tis no news you bring"; Then turned in slumber still his watch to keep.

At once a nightingale began to sing, In oriental calm the garden lay,-- Panic and war postponed another day.

The deviation to which I refer is the lack of absolute distinction between the octave and the sestet. If the rules of the sonnet were strictly followed, the line which introduces the watchman would begin the sestet instead of closing the octave.

The best form of the Petrarchan sonnet for the novice in versification to use in practice is the form I first described, that in which the rhyme scheme is _a, b, b, a, a, b, b, a, c, d, c, d, c, d_. But if you find that this at first presents insurmountable difficulty, use three rhymes in the sestet instead of two, as in the two poems following. In these, you will see, the rhyme scheme of the sestet is _c, d, e, c, d, e_. The first is a deeply introspective study by one of the greatest women poets of our generation; the second is more true to the traditional type of sonnet in thought, giving the subject in the octave, and the lesson drawn therefrom in the sestet. It is the work of a young American poet whose name is familiar to every reader of American magazines.

RENOUNCEMENT

BY ALICE MEYNELL

I must not think of thee; and, tired yet strong, I shun the love that lurks in all delight-- The love of thee--and in the blue heaven's height, And in the dearest pa.s.sage of a song.

Oh, just beyond the fairest thoughts that throng This breast, the thought of thee waits hidden yet bright; But it must never, never come in sight; I must stop short of thee the whole day long.

But when sleep comes to close each difficult day, When night gives pause to the long watch I keep, And all my bonds I need must lay apart, Must doff my will as raiment laid away,-- With the first dream that comes with the first sleep I run, I run, I am gathered to thy heart.

CANDLE-LIGHT

BY THOMAS S. JONES, JR.

As in old days of mellow candle-light, A little flame of gold beside the pane Where icy branches blowing in the rain Seem spectre fingers of a ghostly night; Yet on the hearth the fire is warm and bright, The homely kettle steams a soft refrain, And to one's mind old things rush back again, Sweet tender things still young in death's despite.

So, when the winter blasts across life's sea Do beat about my door and shale the walls Until the house must sink upon the sand, Then on some magic wind of memory, Borne swiftly to my heart a whisper falls,-- And on my arm the pressure of your hand!

Here is another famous modern sonnet, in which the three rhymes of the sestet are arranged in the order _c, d, e, e, c, d_.

THE ODYSSEY

BY ANDREW LANG

As one that for a weary s.p.a.ce has lain Lulled by the song of Circe and her wine In gardens near the pale of Proserpine, Where that aeaean isle forgets the main, And only the low lutes of love complain, And only shadows of wan lovers pine,-- As such an one were glad to know the brine Salt on his lips, and the large air again,--

So gladly, from the songs of modern speech Men turn, and see the stars, feel the free Shrill wind beyond the close of heavy flowers, And through the music of the languid hours, They hear like ocean on a western beach The surge and thunder of the Odyssey.

This sonnet has been criticized by Professor Brander Matthews, not on account of its rhyme scheme, but because of its lack of what he calls tone-color. I will discuss the subject of tone-color later, but it may be well at this point to explain that this criticism means that the rhymes of this sonnet are not sufficiently varied--that "lain" does not differ sufficiently from "wine," and "free" does not differ sufficiently from "beach" (the first two words being similar in consonantal value, and the second two in vowel value) to warrant their use--the theory being that the rhymes used in a sonnet should contrast strongly with each other--"lain" and "hide," for example, and "free" and "sh.o.r.e," for example, contrasting more strikingly than the words used. This contrast in tone-color, to use that phrase, may be noticed in this strongly-wrought sonnet of William Watson's. How strikingly the sound of "old," in the octave contrasts with that of "ing," and how strikingly in the sestet "ove" contrasts with "ire." The poet uses but two rhymes in the sestet, the arrangement being _c, d, d, c, d, c_.

TO ONE WHO HAD WRITTEN IN DERISION OF THE BELIEF IN IMMORTALITY

BY WILLIAM WATSON

Dismiss not so, with light hard phrase and cold, Ev'n if it be but fond imagining, The hope whereto so pa.s.sionately cling The dreaming generations from of old!

Not thus, to luckless men, are tidings told Of mistress lost, or riches taken wing; And is eternity a slighter thing, To have or lose, than kisses or than gold?

Nay, tenderly, if needs thou must, disprove My loftiest fancy, dash my grand desire To see this curtain lift, these clouds retire, And Truth, a boundless dayspring, blaze above And round me; and to ask of my dead sire His pardon for a word that wronged his love.

Of course you will find exceptions to the rules I have stated, you will find poets who have combined the Shakespearean and Petrarchan sonnet.

The most usual way of doing this is to end the Petrarchan sonnet with the couplet typical of the Shakespearean form, as in Blanco White's "Night." But sometimes we find the octave of the sonnet consisting, as in the Shakespearean form, of two quatrains, and the sestet approaching closely to the Petrarchan idea. Such a sonnet is "Letty's Globe," by Charles Tennyson-Turner, the brother of Alfred Tennyson. In this the octave is Shakespearean--rhyming _a, b, a, b, c, d, c, d_, but the sestet rhymes _e, f, f, g, e, g_.

LETTY'S GLOBE

BY CHARLES TENNYSON-TURNER

When Letty had scarce pa.s.sed her third glad year, And her young, artless words began to flow, One day we gave the child a coloured sphere Of the wide earth, that she might mark and know, By tint and outline, all its sea and land.

She patted all the world; old empires peeped Between her baby fingers; her soft hand Was welcome at all frontiers. How she leaped, And laughed, and prattled in her world-wide bliss; But when we turned her sweet unlearned eye On our own isle, she raised a joyous cry, "Oh! yes, I see it, Letty's home is there!"

And while she hid all England with a kiss, Bright over Europe fell her golden hair.

You will find also exceptions to the rule that the thought of the sonnet shall be sharply differentiated by the pause between the octave and the sestet, that it shall flow in the octave and ebb in the sestet. John Milton, for instance, certainly the author of some of the greatest sonnets in the English tongue, blended the octave of his sonnets with their sestets, letting, as a critic has said, "octave flow into sestet without break of music or thought." Thus, says Watts-Dunton, Milton, in his use of the Petrarchan octave and sestet for the embodiment of intellectual substance incapable of that partial disintegration which Petrarch himself always or mostly sought, invented a species of sonnet which is English in impetus, but Italian, or partly Italian, in structure. But these innovations are for the Miltons of our literature, not for the apprentices of the craft. We must know how to write longhand before we can write shorthand; we must know the axioms before we can propound original geometric theories. Until he has demonstrated his ability to write a poem consisting of fourteen iambic pentameters with the rhyme scheme _a, b, b, a, a, b, b, a, c, d, c, d_, the maker of verses should not experiment with any variations of the established form.

GILBERT K. CHESTERTON AND HIS POETRY

Gilbert K. Chesterton is an essayist, a novelist, a dramatist, a debater and a poet. But many people--his brother, Cecil Chesterton, did for instance--believe that he is first of all a poet. And certainly it is in his poetry that his characteristic style is most easily recognized and defined.

Mr. Chesterton and the late Henry James are not very often thought of as intellectual or spiritual brothers. And yet there is a startlingly obvious resemblance between these two writers. Both are stylists; both have thoroughly mastered certain peculiar methods of speech, and both are, it must be confessed, hampered by their undeviating loyalty to these methods.

This is not the place to a.n.a.lyze the style of Mr. James. It is sufficient to recall to the reader's mind the fact that the author of "The Golden Bowl" was not concerned so much with the presentation of extraordinary ideas as with the extraordinary presentation of ordinary ideas. And the extraordinariness of his presentation consisted in its thoroughness; he was not content to suggest the thing or to show one aspect of it; he was able, and seemed to feel a certain moral obligation, to present every aspect of the thing, to give all its dimensions, characteristics, origins and possibilities. His method may roughly be indicated by saying that it is the opposite of impressionism.

Gilbert K. Chesterton's method, which is more readily observed and defined in his poetry than in his prose, also consists chiefly of the extraordinary presentation of ordinary ideas. But he does not attempt to give every aspect and shading of an idea. Rather he attempts to present that aspect of an idea which, while true, is sufficiently unusual to surprise the reader; the theory being that the attention attracted by the unusualness will be held by the truth.

This method is admirably suited to the uses of fiction, as "The Ball and the Cross" and "The Man Who Was Thursday" show. It is effective in debate, and in controversial essays on matters ethical and political, as is shown by the writings of Mr. Chesterton himself and of that school of popular apologetics which he may be said to have founded. In poetry it is sometimes almost magically effective, and sometimes grotesquely inappropriate. The perfect, and most lamentable, example of the use of this method is to be found in a poem called "E. C. B." These initials evidently are those of Chesterton's friend, Edmund Clerihew Bentley, the writer of detective stories.

In this serious and, for the most part, beautiful poem, Mr. Chesterton tells us that because of the virtue of one man he finds something to love in every man. Bentley is a man, he says, therefore, for Bentley's sake no man is to be hated. For the sake of Bentley's humanity, Chesterton says that he loves everyone, the murderer, the hypocrite, even--and this is the great climax--himself.

I should say, this was to be his great climax. But the method seizes him, and keeps him from saying anything so strongly simple as "I love myself." Instead, he says:

I love the man I saw but now Hanging head downwards in the well.

This is, as I said, the Chestertonian method at its worst. Here you find the poet absolutely at the mercy of his method, made to say a simple thing in a complicated manner. But this is, it is only fair to say, an early poem, and not fairly representative of Chesterton as a poet. For it is pleasant to see that, unlike Henry James, Chesterton has been steadily mastering his style, mastering it so thoroughly that he can lay it aside when it is inappropriate. He lays it aside, for instance, in some of the pa.s.sionate and most effective chapters of "The Crimes of England." And he lays it aside in such of his writings as best deserve the name of poetry.

Like every poet however original, Chesterton has "played the sedulous ape to many masters." In his stirring ballads of warfare, such as "The Battle of Gibson" and "Lepanto" I find echoes of the last of the great ballad makers, Macaulay, whom Francis Thompson himself did not disdain to imitate. In his political controversial poems I find strong suggestions of a poet whose point of view Chesterton is far from sharing--Rudyard Kipling. I find also a curious suggestion of Elizabeth Barrett Browning. Mrs. Browning was Evangelical where Chesterton is Catholic in thought, and she had a fatal knack of taking the wrong point of view in political matters--Italian affairs, for example. But she was genuinely a democrat and genuinely religious, and it is strange to see how often she and Chesterton think alike. There is even a similarity of phraseology, as when Chesterton writes:

The Christ Child lay on Mary's lap.

His hair was like a crown.

And all the flowers looked up to Him, And all the stars looked down.

whereas many years before Elizabeth Barrett Browning in her poem "The Doves" had written of a palm tree:

The tropic flowers looked up to it, The tropic stars looked down.