There are open hours
When the God's will sallies free,
And the dull idiot might see
The flowing fortunes of a thousand years;—
Sudden, at unawares,
Self-moved, fly to the doors,
Nor sword of angels could reveal
What they conceal.
[Footnote: Merlin.]
What is the poet, thus shut out of Paradise, to do? He can only make a frenzied effort to record his vision before its very memory has faded from him. Benvenuto Cellini has told us of his tantrums while he was finishing his bronze statue of Perseus. He worked with such fury, he declares, that his workmen believed him to be no man, but a devil. But the poet, no less than the molder of bronze, is under the necessity of casting his work into shape before the metal cools. And his success is never complete. Shelley writes, "When composition begins, inspiration is already on the decline, and the most glorious poetry that has ever been communicated to the world is probably a feeble shadow of the original conceptions of the poet." [Footnote: The Defense of Poetry.]
Hence may arise the pet theory of certain modern poets, that a long poem is an impossibility. Short swallow flights of song only can be wholly sincere, they say, for their ideal is a poem as literally spontaneous as Sordello's song of Elys. In proportion as work is labored, it is felt to be dead.
There is no lack of verse suggesting that extemporaneous composition is most poetical, [Footnote: See Scott's accounts of his minstrels' composition. See also, Bayard Taylor, Ad Amicos, and Proem Dedicatory; Edward Dowden, The Singer's Plea; Richard Gilder, How to the Singer Comes the Song; Joaquin Miller, Because the Skies are Blue; Emerson, The Poet; Longfellow, Envoi; Robert Bridges, A Song of My Heart.] but is there nothing to be said on the other side? Let us reread Browning's judgment on the matter:
Touch him ne'er so lightly, into song he broke.
Soil so quick receptive,—not one feather-seed,
Not one flower-dust fell but straight its fall awoke
Vitalizing virtue: song would song succeed
Sudden as spontaneous—prove a poet soul!
Indeed?
Rock's the song soil rather, surface hard and bare:
Sun and dew their mildness, storm and frost their rage
Vainly both expend,—few flowers awaken there:
Quiet in its cleft broods—what the after-age
Knows and names a pine, a nation's heritage.
[Footnote: Epilogue to the Dramatic Idyls. The same thought is in
the sonnet, "I ask not for those thoughts that sudden leap," by James
Russell Lowell, and Overnight, a Rose, by Caroline Giltiman.]
Is it possible that the one epic poem which is a man's life work may be as truly inspired as is the lyric that leaps to his lips with a sudden gush of emotion? Or is it true, as Shelley seems to aver that such a poem is never an ideal unity, but a collection of inspired lines and phrases connected "by the intertexture of conventional phrases?" [Footnote: The Defense of Poetry.]
It may be that the latter view seems truer to us only because we misunderstand the manner in which inspiration is limited. Possibly poets bewail the incompleteness of the flash which is revealed to them, not because they failed to see all the glories of heaven and earth, but because it was a vision merely, and the key to its expression in words was not given them. "Passion and expression are beauty itself," says William Blake, and the passion, so far from making expression inevitable and spontaneous, may by its intensity be an actual handicap, putting the poet into the state "of some fierce thing replete with too much rage."
Surely we have no right to condemn the poet because a perfect expression of his thought is not immediately forthcoming. Like any other artist, he works with tools, and is handicapped by their inadequacy. According to Plato, language affords the poet a more flexible implement than any other artist possesses, [Footnote: See The Republic, IX, 588 D.] yet, at times, it appears to the maker stubborn enough. To quote Francis Thompson,
Our untempered speech descends—poor heirs!
Grimy and rough-cast still from Babel's brick-layers;
Curse on the brutish jargon we inherit,
Strong but to damn, not memorize a spirit!
[Footnote: Her Portrait.]
Walt Whitman voices the same complaint: