Oh, the happy hours we lay
Deep in fern on Airly Beacon,
Courting through the summer’s day!
Airly Beacon, Airly Beacon;
Oh, the weary haunt for me,
All alone on Airly Beacon,
With his baby on my knee!
The great test as to whether verse contains real poetry, emotional poetry, is this: Can it be translated into the prose of another language and still make it appear emotional? If it can, then the true poetry is there; if it cannot, then it is not true poetry, but only verse. Now a great deal of famous Western poetry will really bear this test. The little poem that I have just quoted to you will bear it. So will some of the best work of each of our greatest poets. Those of you who study German know something about the wonderful poems of Heine. You know they are very simple in form and musical. Well, the best foreign translation of them is a translation into French prose. Here, of course, the rhyme is gone, the muse is gone, but the real, essential poetry—the power to touch the heart—remains. Do you remember the little poem in which the poet describes the soldier, the sentry on guard at the city-gate? He sees the soldier standing in the light of the evening sun, performing the military exercises all by himself, just to pass the time. He shoulders his gun as if in receiving invisible orders, presents, takes aim. Then, the poet suddenly exclaims,—“I wish he would shoot me dead!”
The whole power of the little composition is in that exclamation; he tells us all that he means, and all that he feels. To a person unhappy, profoundly unhappy, even the most common sights and sounds of life give him thoughts and wishes in relation to death. Now, a little poem like that loses very little, loses scarcely anything by a littler [sic] translation; it is what I have called naked poetry;—it does not depend upon the ornaments of expression, all the decoration of rhyme, in order to produce its effect. Perhaps you will say that this essence of poetry may also be found occasionally in prose. That is true;—there is such a thing as poetry in prose, but it is also true that measure and rhyme greatly intensify the charm of emotional expression.
Suppose we now take something more elaborate for an example—this celebrated little poem written many years ago by an Oxford student, and now known everywhere. I call it more elaborate, only because the workmanship as to form is much more: