"There has fallen a splendid tear
From the passion-flower at the gate:
She is coming, my dove, my dear;
She is coming, my life, my fate;
The red rose cries, 'She is near, she is near';
And the white rose weeps, 'She is late'…"
"There has fallen a splendid tear
From the passion-flower at the gate:
She is coming, my dove, my dear;
She is coming, my life, my fate;
The red rose cries, 'She is near, she is near';
And the white rose weeps, 'She is late'…"
The poetry is unchallengeable, but the information by scientific standards of truth is demonstrably false, and even absurd. On the other hand (see Coleridge's Biographia Literaria, c. xiv.), the famous lines—
"Thirty days hath September, April, June, and November,…"
"Thirty days hath September, April, June, and November,…"
Though packed with trustworthy information, are quite as demonstrably unpoetical. The famous senior wrangler who returned a borrowed volume of Paradise Lost with the remark that he did not see what it proved, was right—so far as he went. And conversely (as he would have said) no sensible man would think to improve Newton's Principia and Darwin's Origin of Species by casting them into blank verse; or Euclid's Elements by writing them out in ballad metre—
The king sits in Dunfermline town,
Drinking the blude-red wine;
'O wha will rear me an equilateral triangle
Upon a given straight line?'
The king sits in Dunfermline town,
Drinking the blude-red wine;
'O wha will rear me an equilateral triangle
Upon a given straight line?'
We may be sure that Poetry does not aim to do what Science, with other methods, can do much better. What craving, then, does it answer? And if the craving be for knowledge of a kind, then of what kind?
The question is serious. We agree—at least I assume this—that men have souls as well as intellects; that above and beyond the life we know and can describe and reduce to laws and formulas there exists a spiritual life of which our intellect is unable to render account. We have (it is believed) affinity with this spiritual world, and we hold it by virtue of something spiritual within us, which we call the soul. You may disbelieve in this spiritual region and remain, I dare say, an estimable citizen; but I cannot see what business you have with Poetry, or what satisfaction you draw from it. Nay, Poetry demands that you believe something further; which is, that in this spiritual region resides and is laid up that eternal scheme of things, that universal order, of which the phenomena of this world are but fragments, if indeed they are not mere shadows.