A Study of Poetry

by Bliss Perry

"Until that evening I had never thought of forest as clothing itself
in different colors and taking on different forms in the eyes of
different men; but I then discovered that even the most innocent
word may don strange disguises. To Hardy forest suggested the sturdy
oaks to be assaulted by the woodlanders of Wessex; and to Du Maurier
it evoked the trim and tidy avenues of the national domain of France.
To Black the word naturally brought to mind the low scrub of the
so-called deer-forests of Scotland; and to Gosse it summoned up a
view of the green-clad mountains that towered up from the
Scandinavian fiords. To Howells forest recalled the thick woods that
in his youth fringed the rivers of Ohio; and to me there came back
swiftly the memory of the wild growths, bristling unrestrained by
man, in the Chippewa Reservation which I had crossed fourteen years
before in my canoe trip from Lake Superior to the Mississippi. Simple
as the word seemed, it was interpreted by each of us in accord with
his previous personal experience. And these divergent experiences
exchanged that evening brought home to me as never before the
inherent and inevitable inadequacy of the vocabulary of every
language, since there must always be two partners in any communication
by means of words, and the verbal currency passing from one to the other
has no fixed value necessarily the same to both of them."
[Footnote: Brander Matthews, These Many Years. Scribner's, New York,
1917.]

But one need not journey to London town in order to test this matter. Let half a dozen healthy young Americans stop before the window of a shop where sporting goods are exhibited. Here are fishing-rods, tennis racquets, riding-whips, golf-balls, running-shoes, baseball bats, footballs, oars, paddles, snow-shoes, goggles for motorists, Indian clubs and rifles. Each of these physical objects focuses the attention of the observer in more or less exact proportion to his interest in the particular sport suggested by the implement. If he is a passionate tennis player, a thousand motor-tactile memories are stirred by the sight of the racquet. He is already balancing it in his fingers, playing his favorite strokes with it, winning tournaments with it—though he seems to be standing quietly in front of the window. The man next him is already snowshoeing over the frozen hills. But if a man has never played lacrosse, or been on horseback, or mastered a canoe, the lacrosse racquet or riding-whip or paddle mean little to him emotionally, except that they may stir his imaginative curiosity about a sport whose pleasures he has never experienced. His eye is likely to pass them over as indifferently as if he were glancing at the window of a druggist or a grocer. These varying responses of the individual to the visual stimulus of this or that physical object in a heterogeneous collection may serve to illustrate his capacity for feeling. Our chance group before the shop window thus becomes a symbol of all human minds as they confront the actual visible universe. They hunger and thirst for this or that particular thing, while another object leaves them cold.

Now suppose that our half-dozen young men are sitting in the dark, talking—evoking body-and-mind memories by means of words alone. No two can possibly have the same memories, the same series of mental pictures. Not even the most vivid and picturesque word chosen by the best talker of the company has the same meaning for them all. They all understand the word, approximately, but each feels it in a way unexperienced by his friend. The freightage of significance carried by each concrete, sensuous, picture-making word is bound to vary according to the entire physical and mental history of the man who hears it. Even the commonest and most universal words for things and sensations—such as "hand," "foot," "dark," "fear," "fire," "warm," "home"—are suffused with personal emotions, faintly or clearly felt; they have been or are my hand, foot, fear, darkness, warmth, happiness. Now the poet is like a man talking or singing in the dark to a circle of friends. He cannot say to them "See this" or "Feel that" in the literal sense of "see" and "feel"; he can only call up by means of words and tunes what his friends have seen and felt already, and then under the excitement of such memories suggest new combinations, new weavings of the infinitely varied web of human experience, new voyages with fresh sails upon seas untried.

It is true that we may picture the poet as singing or talking to himself in solitude and darkness, obeying primarily the impulse of expression rather than of communication. Hence John Stuart Mill's distinction between the orator and the poet: "Eloquence is heard; poetry is _over_heard. Eloquence supposes an audience. The peculiarity of poetry appears to us to lie in the poet's utter unconsciousness of a listener. Poetry is feeling confessing itself to itself in moments of solitude, and embodying itself in symbols which are the nearest possible representations of the feeling in the exact shape in which it exists in the poet's mind." [Footnote: J. S. Mill, "Thoughts on Poetry," in Dissertations, vol. 1. See also F. N. Scott, "The Most Fundamental Differentia of Poetry and Prose." Published by Modern Language Association, 19, 2.] But whether his primary aim be the relief of his own feelings (for a man swears even when he is alone!) or the communication of his feelings to other persons, it remains true that a poet's language betrays his bodily and mental history. "The poet," said Thoreau, "writes the history of his own body."

For example, a study of Browning's vocabulary made by Professor C. H. Herford [Footnote: Robert Browning, Modern English Writers, pp. 244-66. Blackwood & Sons. 1905.] emphasizes that poet's acute tactual and muscular sensibilities, his quick and eager apprehension of space-relations:

"He gloried in the strong sensory-stimulus of glowing color, of dazzling light; in the more complex motory-stimulus of intricate, abrupt and plastic form…. He delighted in the angular, indented, intertwining, labyrinthine varieties of line and surface which call for the most delicate, and at the same time most agile, adjustments of the eye. He caught at the edges of things…. Spikes and wedges and swords run riot in his work…. He loved the grinding, clashing and rending sibilants and explosives as Tennyson the tender-hefted liquids…. He is the poet of sudden surprises, unforseen transformations…. The simple joy in abrupt changes of sensation which belonged to his riotous energy of nerve lent support to his peremptory way of imagining all change and especially all vital and significant becoming."

The same truth is apparent as we pass from the individual poet to the poetic literature of his race. Here too is the stamp of bodily history. Hebrew poetry, as is well known, is always expressing emotion in terms of bodily sensation.

"Anger," says Renan,
[Footnote: Quoted by J. H. Gardiner, The Bible as Literature, p.
114.]
"is expressed in Hebrew in a throng of ways, each picturesque, and
each borrowed from physiological facts. Now the metaphor is taken
from the rapid and animated breathing which accompanies the passion,
now from heat or from boiling, now from the act of a noisy breaking,
now from shivering. Discouragement and despair are expressed by
the melting of the heart, fear by the loosening of the reins.
Pride is portrayed by the holding high of the head, with the figure
straight and stiff. Patience is a long breathing, impatience
short breathing, desire is thirst or paleness. Pardon is expressed
by a throng of metaphors borrowed from the idea of covering, of
hiding, of coating over the fault. In Job God sews up sins in a
sack, seals it, then throws it behind him: all to signify that he
forgets them….

"My soul longeth, yea, even fainteth for the courts of the Lord; my
heart and my flesh crieth out for the living God.

"Save me, O God; for the waters are come in unto my soul.