As the earth
Plunges in fury, when the internal fires
Have reached and pricked her heart, and throwing flat
The marts and temples, the triumphal gates
And towers of observation, clears herself
To elemental freedom.
We have a grander expression of the idea from Robert Browning, who relates how the vision of Sordello arises to consciousness:
Upthrust, out-staggering on the world,
Subsiding into shape, a darkness rears
Its outline, kindles at the core—.
Is this to say that the poet's intuitions, apparently so sudden, have really been long germinating in the obscure depths of his mind? Then it is in tune with the idea, so prevalent in English verse, that in sleep a mysterious undercurrent of imaginative power becomes accessible to the poet.
"Ever when slept the poet his dreams were music," [Footnote: The Poet's Sleep.] says Richard Gilder, and the line seems trite to us. There was surely no reason why Keats' title, Sleep and Poetry, should have appeared ludicrous to his critics, for from the time of Caedmon onward English writers have been sensitive to a connection here. The stereotyped device of making poetry a dream vision, so popular in the middle ages,—and even the prominence of Night Thoughts in eighteenth century verse—testify that a coupling of poetry and sleep has always seemed natural to poets. Coleridge, [Footnote: See his account of the composition of Kubla Khan.] Keats, Shelley, [Footnote: See Alastor, and Prince Athanase. See also Edmund Gosse, Swinburne, p. 29, where Swinburne says he produced the first three stanzas of A Vision of Spring in his sleep.]—it is the romanticists who seem to have depended most upon sleep as bringer of inspiration. And once more, it is Shelley who shows himself most keenly aware that, asleep or waking, the poet feels his afflatus coming in the same manner. Thus he tells us of the singer in Prince Athanase:
And through his sleep, and o'er each waking hour
Thoughts after thoughts, unresting multitudes,
Were driven within him by some secret power
Which bade them blaze, and live, and roll afar,
Like lights and sounds, from haunted tower to tower.
Probably our jargon of the subconscious would not much impress poets, even those whom we have just quoted. Is this the only cause we can give, Shelley might ask, why the poet should not reverence his gift as something apart from himself and truly divine? If, after the fashion of modern psychology, we denote by the subconscious mind only the welter of myriad forgotten details of our daily life, what is there here to account for poesy? The remote, inaccessible chambers of our mind may, to be sure, be more replete with curious lumber than those continually swept and garnished for everyday use, yet, even so, there is nothing in any memory, as such, to account for the fact that poetry reveals things to us above and beyond any of our actual experiences in this world.
Alchemist Memory turned his past to gold,
[Footnote: A Life Drama.]
says Alexander Smith of his poet, and as an account of inspiration, the line sounds singularly flat. There is nothing here to distinguish the poet from any octogenarian dozing in his armchair.
Is Memory indeed the only Muse? Not unless she is a far grander figure than we ordinarily suppose. Of course she has been exalted by certain artists. There is Richard Wagner, with his definition of art as memory of one's past youth, or—to stay closer home—Wordsworth, with his theory of poetry as emotion recollected in tranquillity,—such artists have a high regard for memory. Still, Oliver Wendell Holmes is tolerably representative of the nineteenth century attitude when he points memory to a second place. It is only the aged poet, conscious that his powers are decaying, to whom Holmes offers the consolation,