What does it avail me that at banquets my health is pledged in the choicest wines and drunk from golden goblets, when I, myself, severed from all that makes life
pleasant may only wet my lips with an insipid emotion? What does it avail me that enthusiastic youths and maidens crown my marble bust with laurel wreaths, if meanwhile the shriveled fingers of an aged nurse press a blister of Spanish flies behind the ears of my actual body. What does it avail me that all the roses of Shiraz so tenderly glow and bloom for me? Alas! Shiraz is two thousand miles away from the Rue d'Amsterdam, where, in the dreary solitude of my sick-room, I have nothing to smell, unless it be the perfume of warmed napkins.
When you read Hardy's Return of the Native and reach the part where Yeobright reproaches his wife Eustacia for causing the death of his mother by closing the door on her so as not to be detected with a lover, you are in the midst of poetry.
Call her to mind—think of her—what goodness there was in her: it showed in every line of her face! . . . O! couldn't you see what was best for you, but you must bring a curse upon me, and agony and death upon her, by doing that cruel deed! . . . Eustacia, didn't any tender thought of your own mother lead you to think of being gentle to mine at such a time of weariness? Did not one grain of pity enter your heart as she turned away?
If you are awakened by the beauty and profundity of the following passage from Lafcadio Hearn's "Of Moon-Desire," from the volume Exotics and Retrospectives, you delight in poetry.
And meantime those old savage sympathies with savage nature that spring from the deepest sources of our being . . . would seem destined to sublime at last into forms of cosmical emotion expanding and responding to infinitude.
Have you never thought about those immemorial feelings? Have you never, when looking at some great burning,
found yourself exulting without remorse in the triumph and glory of fire?—never unconsciously coveted the crumbling, splitting, iron-wrenching, granite-cracking force of its imponderable touch?—never delighted in the furious and terrible splendor of its phantasmagories,—the ravening and bickering of its dragons,—the monstrosity of its archings,—the ghostly soaring and flapping of its spires? Have you never, with a hill-wind pealing in your ears, longed to ride that wind like a ghost,—to scream around the peaks with it,—to sweep the face of the world with it? Or, watching the lifting, the gathering, the muttering rush and thunder-burst of breakers, have you felt no impulse kindered to the giant motion,—no longing to leap with that wild tossing, and to join in that mighty shout?
I should like to go on quoting passages from other books to show the reader that if he likes them he is emphatically a lover of poetry. I might have given one of the great prose poems in Nietzsche's Thus Spake Zarathustra or a grand descriptive passage from Flaubert's novel Salammbo. I might have presented for the edification of the "hater" of poetry the renowned description of the Mona Lisa by Pater in his essay on Leonardo da Vinci in The Renaissance. I could have added Carlyle's reflections of Teufelsdroch in his tower, from Sartor Resartus, Heine's portrayal of Paginini at the violin in The Florentine Nights, George Brandes's apostrophe to Hamlet as a symbol of ourselves in his book on Shakespeare, Dickens' description of the tower in Chimes, or Balzac's eulogy on the scientist as a poet in the Wild Ass's Skin.
That is poetry whether in verse or prose, where any profound idea is ecstatically or passionately stated. That is poetry where man gives utterance to any sorrow or desolation, or where he shouts out his gladness because he finds life good and nature beautiful; when he talks of