Edwin Markham says,
She comes like the hush and beauty of the night.
[Footnote: Poetry.]
And Richard Watson Gilder's mood is the same:
How to the singer comes his song?
How to the summer fields
Come flowers? How yields
Darkness to happy dawn? How doth the night
Bring stars?
[Footnote: How to the Singer Comes His Song?]
Various as are these accounts which poets give of their inspired moments, all have one point in common, since they indicate that in such moments the poet is wholly passive. His thought is literally given to him. Edward Dowden, in a sonnet, Wise Passiveness, says this plainly:
Think you I choose or that or this to sing?
I lie as patient as yon wealthy stream
Dreaming among green fields its summer dream,
Which takes whate'er the gracious hours will bring
Into its quiet bosom.
To the same effect is a somewhat prosaic poem, Accident in Art, by Richard Hovey. He inquires,
What poet has not found his spirit kneeling
A sudden at the sound of such or such
Strange verses staring from his manuscript,
Written, he knows not how, but which will sound
Like trumpets down the years.
Doubtless it is a very natural result of his resignation to this creative force that one of the poet's profoundest sensations during his afflatus should be that of reverence for his gift. Longfellow and Wordsworth sometimes speak as if the composition of their poems were a ceremony comparable to high mass. At times one must admit that verse describing such an attitude has a charm of its own. [Footnote: Compare Browning's characterization of the afflatus of Eglamor in Sordello, Book II.] In The Song-Tree Alfred Noyes describes his first sensation as a conscious poet:
The first note that I heard,
A magical undertone,
Was sweeter than any bird
—Or so it seemed to me—
And my tears ran wild.
This tale, this tale is true.
The light was growing gray,
And the rhymes ran so sweet
(For I was only a child)
That I knelt down to pray.