Thus the Christian hymns of the middle ages, such as the famous “Dies Iræ,” did not bring in rhyme as quite a novelty, but they used it skilfully and made it common, and it was taken up also by the Troubadours, the masters and teachers of Europe in the poetic art.
The best poetry of our own day is full of quaint fancy and delicate melody, the setting of lovely thought in harmonious language, at once pictures for the imagination and music for the ear. But besides this, it has a curious interest to the student of history, as keeping alive in our midst the ways of thought of the most ancient world. Much of poetic art lies in imitating the expressions of earlier stages of culture, when poetry was the natural utterance of any strong emotion, the natural means to convey any solemn address or ancestral tradition. The modern poet still uses for picturesqueness the metaphors which to the barbarian were real helps to express his sense. This may be seen in analyzing a poem of Shelley’s:—
“How wonderful is Death,
Death and his brother, Sleep!
One, pale as yonder waning moon,
With lips of lurid blue;
The other, rosy as the morn
When throned on ocean’s wave
It blushes o’er the world.”
Here the likeness of death and sleep is expressed by the metaphor of calling them brothers, the moon is brought in to illustrate the notion of paleness, and the dawn of redness; while to convey the idea of the dawn shining over the sea the simile of its sitting on a throne is introduced, and its reddening is compared on the one hand to a rose, and on the other to blushing. Now this is the very way in which early barbaric man, not for poetic affectation, but simply to find the plainest words to convey his thoughts, would talk in metaphors taken from nature. Even our daily prose is full of words, now come down to ordinary use, which show vestiges of this old nature-poetry, and the etymologist may, if he will, set up again the pictures of the old poetic thoughts which made the words.