Indeed, the whole of Homer is simply a collection of a great number of short poems—lyrics, indeed, they were—sung by many authors for centuries, and finally gathered up and pieced together to form books and volumes. Each one of the Canterbury Tales contains many poems, strung together to form one necklace of jewels.
I ask any one to sit down and read any of these great and wonderful works continuously one day, as he might prose, and comprehend what he is reading. Not even one book of Paradise Lost can be read (in the true sense of that word) at a single sitting. There are too many poems in it, and the consequent demands upon the mind are too great for that. Possibly this very fact had somewhat to do with calling forth the unjust remark from Waller concerning that great epic, “If its length be not considered as a merit it hath no other.”
Since a poem must be brief, naturally, and for the same cause, it should be read judiciously and at intervals, if it is to be appreciated and enjoyed, just as the rose must be smelled only occasionally. We cannot read poetry as we can prose; it won’t let us. By their very natures they demand a different manner of reading. One can read prose continuously, hour after hour, without seriously wearying the mind, for the simple reason that, in prose, thought is not condensed, but is spread through a long series of sentences. Moreover, the thought is not, as a rule, simply suggested, but is fully expressed, leaving the mind in a comparative state of passive receptivity, with but little active labor to perform in order to comprehend the meaning. On the other hand, poetry always expresses thought in condensed form and suggests many fold more than it expresses. Consequently, a single stanza or even a single line may sometimes require as much attention for the full comprehension of its meaning and suggestion, as a whole page of ordinary prose.
We must plant the poem in the heart and give it time to grow, as we plant the flower-seeds in the soil. Finally, as the growing flower bursts into bloom, so must the poem blossom from the heart into its full perfection and beauty.
Fully to appreciate that flower’s beauty, it must not be dissected and analyzed by glass and scalpel. Did Burns go botanizing the daisy? Need we then go botanizing these flowers and blossoms of the soul of man? He who does it tries to force the intellect to do what the emotive nature, the beauty-loving part of man, alone can do. There is an intellectual delight in botanizing and in picking to pieces and analyzing the gathered specimens, but it is not that sweet, soul-inspiring pleasure born of the love of the beautiful that the heart alone can feel. He who botanizes the beautiful can never know in his head the supreme pleasure that he who loves the simple daisy too well to turn it under the sod feels in his heart.
Poetry is indeed immortal and divine. It is the breath of heaven in the nostrils of man, the divinity of the human soul, the heart in full flower and bloom. To an honest, earnest, sincere soul, it is the wonder of the age, as it has ever been the wonder of all ages, that “men endowed with highest gifts, the vision and the faculty divine,” being divinely appointed as poet-priest of the Almighty, should pander to the prurient taste of a so-called practical public;—that they should sell the divinity within them for a strip of royal purple; for a salve to an itching palm;—that they should barter immortality for a glitter-jingle.
But how shall this consummate artist not fall into the corruptions that beset him and his art divine? Here are the driveling jinglers, verse-makers, poetasters all about him, with their rattling, rollicking, banging tin-panery, loudly applauded by a rough-and-ready guffawing public; a “practical” public that loudly clamors for sense, fact,—and then drops another penny into the chapeaux of these venders of cheap jewelry for more of their applauded cheap sentiment and glittering platitudes, and jingling chains and necklaces, and rings, and things, whose brightness wears off in their mental pockets before the wife or sweetheart is gladdened by a glimpse of its “practical” glitter!
The great, true poet, he who alone is interpreter of the immortal in the mortal, the invisible in the visible by means of words, never asks how to avoid these corruptions. He does it. He despises, hates, abhors them. He does it, too, by obeying that Divinity within him. Obedient to that call, he walks majestically through this motley crowd;—aye, through this sometimes maudlin, jeering crowd that throw stones at him and mentally would crucify him!—and sets some stream of Beauty and Glory flowing through the hearts of men, forever to wash away these corruptions and stagnations of the human soul. Aye, truly! he asks not how, but teaches us how. Was it not so with those old Divine Writers, our highest type of poets, whose inspirations make the one Immortal Book? So shall it ever be. ’Tis the Divine Law.