"Perhaps the self-same song hath found a path
Through the sad heart of Ruth, when, sick for home,
She stood in tears amid the alien corn;
The same that oft-times hath
Charm'd magic casements, opening on the foam
Of perilous seas in faery lands forlorn—"
"Perhaps the self-same song hath found a path
Through the sad heart of Ruth, when, sick for home,
She stood in tears amid the alien corn;
The same that oft-times hath
Charm'd magic casements, opening on the foam
Of perilous seas in faery lands forlorn—"
Reaches beyond technical perfection to the very root of all tears and joy. Such verse links poetry to Love itself—
"Half angel and half bird,
And all a wonder and a wild desire."
"Half angel and half bird,
And all a wonder and a wild desire."
The 'Ode on a Grecian Urn' does not perhaps quite reach this divine thrill: but its second and third stanzas have a rapture that comes very near to it (I will speak anon of the fourth stanza): and I should not quarrel with one who preferred these two stanzas even to the close of 'Psyche.'
Now it seems to me that the mere touching of this poetic height—the mere feat of causing this most exquisite vibration in the human nerves—gives a poem a quality and a rank apart; a quality and a rank not secured to 'Autumn' by all its excellence of expression. I grant, of course, that it takes two to produce this thrill—the reader as well as the poet. And if any man object to me that he, for his part, feels a thrill as poignant when he reads stanza 2 of 'Autumn' as when he reads stanza 7 of the 'Nightingale,' then I confess that I shall have some difficulty in answering him. But I believe very few, if any, will assert this of themselves. And perhaps we may get at the truth of men's feelings on this point in another way. Suppose that of these four poems, 'Autumn,' 'Nightingale,' 'Psyche,' and 'Grecian Urn,' one were doomed to perish, and fate allowed us to choose which one should be abandoned. Sorrowful as the choice must be, I believe that lovers of poetry would find themselves least loth to part with 'Autumn'; that the loss of either of the others would be foreseen as a sharper wrench.
For the others lie close to human emotion; are indeed interpenetrated with emotion; whereas 'Autumn' makes but an objective appeal, chiefly to the visual sense. It is, as I have said, a decorative picture; and even so it hardly beats the pictures in stanza 4 of the 'Grecian Urn'—
"What little town by river or sea-shore,
Or mountain, built with peaceful citadel,
Is emptied of its folk, this pious morn?"
"What little town by river or sea-shore,
Or mountain, built with peaceful citadel,
Is emptied of its folk, this pious morn?"