An ancient Greek might have written something like that; it has the absolute perfection of some of those emotional little pieces of [the] Greek anthology—two thousand and even three thousand years old. The comparison of stars to eyes is very old. In every Western literature the stars have been called the eyes of the night; and still we call the sun the Eye of the Day, just as the Greeks did. Innumerable as are the stars of the night, they cannot be seen at all when the sun has well risen. They are not able to make light and joy in the world; and when the sun sets, everything becomes dark and colourless. Then the poet says that human love is to human life what the sun is to the world. It is not by reason, but by a feeling that we are made happy. The mind cannot make us happy as the heart can. Yet the mind, like the sky, “has a thousand eyes”—that is to say, a thousand different capacities of knowledge and perception. It does not matter. When the person that we really love is dead the happiness of life ceases for us; emotionally our world becomes dark as the physical world becomes when the sun has set.
Certainly the perfect verse and rhyme help the effect; but they are not at all necessary to the beauty of the thing. Translate that into your own language in prose; and you will see that very little is lost; for the first two lines of the first stanza exactly balance the first two lines of the second stanza; and the second two lines of the first stanza balance the second two lines of the second stanza; therefore even in prose the composition must assume a charming form, no matter what language it is rendered in.
But it does not follow at all that because a short composition in verse contains a great deal of meaning or happens to be very cleverly constructed, you can call it a real poem. Verses that only surprise by cleverness, by tricks of good words, have a very little value. They may be pretty; they give you a kind of pleasure, that is a small graceful object. But if they do not touch the heart as well as the head, I should never call them real poetry. For example, there is a French verse which has been translated into English more than a thousand times—always differently and yet never successfully. The English Journal of Education this year asked for translations of it, and more than five hundred were sent in. None of them were satisfactory, though some of them were very clever.
La vie est vaine:
Un peu d’amour,
Un peu de haine,
Et puis—bonjour!
La vie est brêve: