But the old, inescapable contradiction in aesthetic philosophy crops up here. The poet is concerned only with ideal beauty, yet the way to it, for him, must be through sensuous beauty. So, as opposed to the picture of the singer blind to his surroundings, we have the opposite picture—that of a singer with every sense visibly alert. At the very beginning of a narrative and descriptive poem, the reader can generally distinguish between the idealistic and the sensuous singer. The more spiritually minded poet is usually characterized as blond. The natural tendency to couple a pure complexion and immaculate thoughts is surely aided, here, by portraits of Shelley, and of Milton in his youth. The brunette poet, on the other hand, is perforce a member of the fleshly school. The two types are clearly differentiated in Bulwer Lytton's Dispute of the Poets. The spiritual one
Lifted the azure light of earnest eyes,
but his brother,
The one with brighter hues and darker curls
Clustering and purple as the fruit of the vine,
Seemed like that Summer-Idol of rich life
Whom sensuous Greece, inebriate with delight
From orient myth and symbol-worship wrought.
The decadents favor swarthy poets, and, in describing their features, seize upon the most expressive symbols of sensuality. Thus the hero of John Davidson's Ballad in Blank Verse on the Making of a Poet is
A youth whose sultry eyes
Bold brow and wanton mouth were not all lust.
But even the idealistic poet, if he be not one-sided, must have sensuous features, as Browning conceives him. We are told of Sordello,
Yourselves shall trace
(The delicate nostril swerving wide and fine,
A sharp and restless lip, so well combine
With that calm brow) a soul fit to receive
Delight at every sense; you can believe
Sordello foremost in the regal class
Nature has broadly severed from her mass
Of men, and framed for pleasure…
* * * * *
You recognize at once the finer dress
Of flesh that amply lets in loveliness
At eye and ear.
Perhaps it is with the idea that the flesh may be shuffled off the more easily that poets are given "barely enough body to imprison the soul," as Mrs. Browning's biographer says of her. [Footnote: Mrs. Anna B. Jameson. George Stillman Milliard says of Mrs. Browning, "I have never seen a human frame which seemed so nearly a transparent veil for a celestial and immortal spirit." Shelley, Keats, Clough and Swinburne undoubtedly helped to strengthen the tradition.] The imaginary bard is so inevitably slender that allusion to "the poet's frame" needs no further description. Yet, once more, the poet may seem to be deliberately blinding himself to the facts. What of the father of English song, who, in the Canterbury Tales, is described by the burly host,
He in the waast is shape as wel as I;
This were a popet in an arm tenbrace
For any woman, smal and fair of face?
[Footnote: Prologue to Sir Thopas.]